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 scotthorton show.
Oh man, on the line, I got Peter Van Buren.
I know this is going to be a good one today.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Peter?
We're just going to talk about Rush and the KISS 2020 tour, Goodbye.
That's all I'm really available for.
Oh man.
Well, I'm not sure if you're talking about Limbaugh about to die, or if you're talking about Neil Peart died last year, one of the saddest things to happen last year.
Absolutely.
You know, I grew up in Cleveland, and we were Rush fans there practically before the Canadians.
Oh yeah, see, I know that story, man.
I guess everybody does, right?
The documentary on Netflix told this story.
Did you see that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, it's like, I had this charmed childhood, because when I was in high school, Springsteen was essentially a local band in Cleveland, and Rush, and you could see them, you know, in smaller clubs, and you know, practically, it's like, hey, dude, Jaws is out.
Do you want to see that?
Or we got to go see Springsteen again?
I don't know.
Let's just get high.
You know, and it was a charmed period of time, which has nothing to do with politics or anything we're talking about, so I'll stop.
Yeah, no, that's awesome, man.
And you know, for people who didn't see the Netflix story, I guess there's one DJ on the Big FM there in Cleveland, who just loved Rush, and went, oh man, these songs are so long, I can take a bathroom break, and was just, you know, so made a thing out of Rush.
You know, that was their first real big break in America, apparently.
And you were there for it.
Just to do the old guy thing, I mean, that was when we had independent stations who would play music that was interesting, whether or not it was popular at that moment.
Sometimes it became popular, sometimes it didn't.
You know, here's a test for some of your older listeners.
When I lived in London, I was in a baby club.
We all had those bunch of people with children all the same age.
And there was an old dude there, married to like this 22-year-old woman.
And so I said, hey, old dude, and it turned out he was one of the members of King Crimson.
Long pause.
Sorry, my mic was off.
Yeah, prog rock band from the 70s.
And he was astounded that an American had any idea who King Crimson was, and it's because of that local FM radio that would play these more obscure bands.
Yeah, that's cool.
Well, you know what?
I can't tell you any songs by them, but I've heard the name of the band.
I'm sure I've heard them before.
Yeah, some of their members morphed into Genesis, who got a lot more airtime and stuff.
But anyway, hey, great story.
Thanks for dropping by.
We'll have more after weather and sports.
Yeah, and then another one by Aerosmith.
Yeah.
You can tell I just hate FM radio now so much.
It's always sweet emotion.
Every time I turn the thing on, I just, I don't want to hear it anymore, man.
Those guys must have put out, what, 25 albums or something?
I got to hear sweet emotion again, please, just.
Anyway, you know what?
Let's talk about other things, too.
Free bird.
Hey, I should have mentioned, you were a State Department guy there for a long time, Foreign Service officer, wrote a book called We Meant Well about your time in Iraq War II.
And also, Tom Joe, The Ghost of Tom Joe, the story of the 99%, some interesting economical type talk to stuff in there.
And about the crash of 08 and 09 and the American people.
And then Hooper's War, a novel of World War II Japan, but it's really about you and me right now.
And everybody should read all those things.
And then also, We Meant Well is the name of the blog where you write stuff, too.
But also, The American Conservative Magazine is the name of the thing where you write stuff.
And this one, I really like, Hunter Biden's Guilty Laptop.
So we got to talk about that.
But I think probably now that we're talking business, I ought to let you go ahead and have your comment about what took place at the Capitol on Wednesday.
My comment is basically, meh.
I'm sorry that people got killed.
I'm sorry that there was violence.
But essentially, when we get past the hyperbole, this was a mob that got out of control.
They accomplished nothing.
They never were going to accomplish anything.
They had no plan.
And their sum total for the day, other than the tragic loss of life, was that they delayed the proceedings on Joe Biden for a couple of hours.
The rest of it is all just hyperbole.
There was no coup, no insurrection, no sedition, none of those things.
They didn't even do a proper job of vandalism.
Very little damage was done.
In fact, there's these wonderful images of the protesters staying between the velvet ropes as they pass through the hall of statuary.
It will amount to nothing in the long run of things, a little blip.
The media so badly wanted this to be a capstone event for what they claimed was happening over the last four years, fascism, authoritarianism, white supremacy, but it wasn't.
And though we don't want to play that wonderful game of whataboutism, I could, in fact, answer the rest of your questions by quoting articles about Black Lives Matter out of context.
Just property damage compared to rights.
Righteous anger has to find a way to express itself.
These were disenfranchised people who had no voice, and the streets were their only outlet, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You know what we're talking about here.
But at the end of the day, the charge of the rednecks amounted to very, very little and will be soon forgotten.
And that's it.
Also forgotten will be the fact that a police officer shot an unarmed woman who was no threat to him or anything else.
And we're not real worried about that because she was a white conservative, alleged QAnon supporter.
And, you know, Washington moves ahead, life goes on, and we're all proud that the city is occupied by the military now.
We didn't want that this summer, but now we're very happy that there's National Guard from three states that have set up camp and will remain in Washington for the next two weeks.
So the flexibility, almost the amnesia of people remains astonishing to me, but I guess I've come to expect it at this point.
A line that I used in my book about Iraq, if bullshit was water, we'd all have drowned by now, seems as applicable here.
Maybe we could change it to hypocrisy.
It's a sad event made sadder by the attempts of the media to blow it into something, to empower it in some way beyond its actual realities.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, this is the thing about it too, though, right?
Because CNN and MSNBC and even Fox News, you know, it was amazing.
I saw on Fox News, this is just like the Iran hostage crisis.
You know, this is, and they're just, whatever, hyperbole.
It's sedition, it's treason, it's terrorism, it's all these things.
When, as you said, it's a completely unorganized mob, and in fact, like the counterfactual is right here in your hand, right?
Like you could imagine a situation where you had 35 militia guys with rifles who knew what they were doing, who went here, here, here, took positions, shot people, took prisoners, did some shit.
Nothing like that happened, right?
And there were guys who were dressed like that.
In fact, I saw one guy in there had some pretty heavy duty zip ties, and they, you know, somebody told me that they said that they were looking for pants, not that they got anywhere near him.
This guy was dressed like a soldier, you know, or like a paramilitary type.
He was up to real no good there.
But as you're saying, most of these guys are, you know, the lady that they killed had a Trump cape on, right?
And that cop clearly could have just punched her in the nose, right?
Like, how much can this cop bench press?
He has to shoot her with his Glock and not just hit her with a left.
And she's coming through, she's all squatting, coming through the window, and he could have just pushed her back, for God's sake.
Well, there were SWAT team members coming up the stairs behind her.
If you look at the full videotape, they're coming up the stairs behind her, and they're dropping turds in their trousers because rounds are coming their way from the guards inside.
In other words, if they just waited a second to kill her, the SWAT team coming behind her would have pulled her back down.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
And there was no reason to kill her because no life or limb was being threatened.
By the way, those people you've cited here are referred to in the media, if we're talking about a BLM protest, by the way, as a few bad apples.
Yeah, it was mostly peaceful.
That's the technical term, mostly peaceful.
But now, here's the thing, though.
I don't know, man.
The right and the left being hypocrites never impresses me because, of course, they are on everything.
But we got to have our eye on the ball for no matter what it is.
And to me, it is meaningful, as you said, that these are the rednecks.
These are the rabble.
This is not a Brooks Brothers riot set up by Roger Stone with a bunch of millionaire sons trying to stop the vote count down in Florida or something like this.
And these people, I think, are just completely lost.
But they believe that the election was stolen from their guy.
And they're trying to save the day and do the right thing.
They're patriotic Americans.
They're regular people.
They're locked down victims and economic victims in lots of other ways, too.
They got plenty to complain about.
And they are regular people.
So here's my thing.
And I really miss this kind of point myself, I think, just because I like seeing the sanctity of their little temple that the state has built to themselves up there violated.
You know, screw them.
Little black spray paint never hurt nobody.
You know, I like that kind of thing.
The Capitol building was built by slaves.
Yeah, that's true.
But symbols change over time.
That's true.
But here's the thing of it that is really meaningful and really bad to me, is that the sitting president of the United States, who lost an election, refuses to accept that fact and sent those people over there.
And he didn't say, do anything wrong, right?
But at the same time, he didn't say, now, look, you know, I mean, peaceful protest as hell, but like, don't do anything stupid or like, there's nothing like that.
Rudy Giuliani said the Democrats must face a trial by combat or something like this.
And I'm not saying they violated the Brandenburg line in the sand or whatever.
That's the Supreme Court case, everybody, on free speech incitement thing there.
But I'm just saying, is that not the most shameful goddamn thing you've ever seen from the president of the United States, other than, you know, the four years straight that he spent committing genocide in Yemen?
Is this not just kind of unbelievable that, and he's got to know, his lawyers told him the Congress can't overturn the election, Mr. President, right?
I mean, come on.
It's bizarre.
It's embarrassing.
It's shameful.
What it's becoming, what the media has changed it into, however, is Trump as a martyr and Trump now as more of a symbolic element.
If the media had said, it's sad that a guy has ended up this way, and let's just kind of push him off to the side and hope these two weeks go by pretty quickly.
Instead, the threats of impeachment and prosecution and sedition and coup and 25th Amendment and all this has done nothing but make Trump into a symbol and a martyr.
And he will, he has gained power over people in this.
He will leave the office.
Instead of being characterized as kind of a sad loser, he'll leave office as a martyr to his cause with the threat of impeachment or 25th Amendment hanging over.
And now Mike Pence is suddenly the new darling of the progressives.
It's a bad play, as they like to say.
The media and the Democrats don't seem to understand their job here, which is to just bring this all to a conclusion and bring down the hype at this point.
They won.
All right?
That's it.
It's over.
If you keep doing what you're doing and whipping America into a fear frenzy that, you know, the charger of the rednecks is going to turn us into Weimar once again.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny, man, like on the 25th Amendment thing, I mean, I've always been my position since I was a kid that every president should only do one term as we move toward abolishing the presidency entirely.
You know, screw all of these guys.
I hate them.
I hate the fact that the 25th Amendment can be abused to remove presidents all the time for not good enough reasons.
That's fine by me.
I really only got poisoned against that concept because it was only brought up in the context of this horrible, hateful Russiagate hoax, this plot by the FBI counterintelligence division and the CIA to run this COINTELPRO op and falsely accuse the elected president of treason, which makes them the traitors, but poison me against the whole idea of, God, a cabinet overthrowing a president like this and all that.
But then again, I'm like, yeah, actually, no.
I kind of like that.
If a president's own guys say that he's not fit to sit in that chair another day, I'll buy that.
And you know what, and if it's because he appointed a bunch of devils who are actually really bad guys, well, then that's his fault too, right?
So at the same time, our bizarro system, it isn't a parliamentary system.
You go to Britain, and they get angry at the prime minister, and they give him a vote of no confidence.
And then a couple of weeks later, they have an election and a new guy, and it's a smooth little process.
We don't have that equivalent.
We have this elaborate presidential campaign and electoral process with all these little steampunk additions like the Electoral College.
And so we can't just swap these guys out casually, because we don't have the infrastructure to replace them painlessly.
And the 25th Amendment is unique in that it's modern legislation.
This is not something that goes back to where we're supposed to try to figure out what the founding fathers really had in mind, those slave-owning bastards, where we have to kind of interpret things or the Supreme Court has to get involved.
The 25th Amendment was passed during our lifetimes after Kennedy was killed, and it was never ever intended.
You can read through the discussion and the debate.
It was never intended as a political tool or a way to change out a president, a, quote, bad president.
It was there to cover emergencies and medical situations, practical things.
The people who wrote it never envisioned it being used the way it's been pretended to be these last four years, where we just don't like the president anymore, and so we want to get a new one in there.
That's not what it was all about, and it's not what our system is set up to do.
And it's set a dangerous precedent that you've convinced a lot of Americans that this, in fact, is a viable tool, that we can just decide collectively Biden is too senile to continue anymore, and so let's get rid of him.
It's a bad precedent that has been set.
Yeah.
And in fact, because any situation like that, and I think we all know that there's a possibility, if not a likelihood, that this could be a thing within the next four years even.
But we know that friends of Biden would convince him to step down if that was really a problem.
He wouldn't have to be forcibly removed.
His wife would say, Joe, it's time to pack it in.
You did a heroic job stopping Trump, but now it's time to turn it over to the new guys, and he'd go along.
More importantly, everybody who voted for Biden, most everybody who voted for Biden is well aware of his age, his senility, and the fact that his term is four difficult years.
So to suddenly wake up 12 months from now and be surprised that he's drooling on himself at a press conference, no, don't be surprised.
That's going to be so funny.
It would be hilarious, right?
It would be.
It will be.
Yeah, there was a great cartoon, Doonesbury, if you remember that during the Reagan years when Ronald Reagan was actually physically falling asleep during cabinet meetings.
There was a cartoon where he fell asleep.
And when they pulled his head up, they said, look, look, look, his watch made an impression on his cheek.
That's really cool.
Look at that.
And we'll see that with Biden.
But don't be surprised because you knew that.
You knew he's a Civil War veteran before he got in here.
You know, I read a thing.
I'm pretty sure it was Bronco March Teach's book, Yesterday's Man, where when Joe Biden first joined the Senate, one of the first things he did was oppose Nixon's hasty, precipitous withdrawal from Vietnam.
Yeah, I mean, Biden has been there forever.
And I'll take this opportunity to point out what a wonderful friend of the military industrial complex and war in general he has been.
He's voted for every war since practically the Spanish-American conquest, and he's vice presided over our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He's a real friend of the empire.
And I'm sure we'll see him showing off that love without too much delay somewhere in the world is where they're waiting for American leadership to fall from the sky.
Oh, man, poor guys.
I don't know, though.
I mean, the counterfactual there, to me, kind of counterpoint sort of thing is just I think we're running out of countries to bomb that can't fight back.
I mean, I think there's unexplored territory all over Africa, places that Americans don't even know exist.
I mean, we can sort of remind them of that, you know, these countries, these are these things are countries.
The Caribbean is, I think, unexploited in many ways.
What about Trinidad?
Haven't isn't there something evil going on there?
It seems like a nice place, but it's right next to Venezuela.
That alone should should be enough justification.
Right.
I think with those those people in the Pentagon, Scott, I don't think you give them enough credit for their their fiction writing abilities.
I think we'll find something.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right.
And you know what?
I mean, believe me, I'm no Obama bought on the issue whatsoever.
But I do kind of got to think that in a way, the fact that he's so old has to translate in some ways to also doesn't give a damn.
So like in a way where Obama is just curls up in a little ball and lets David Petraeus tell him his marching orders, I think Joe Biden's the kind of guy who might tell a general, eh, actually, I disagree with that and and maybe stand by it rather than give in to them.
And and after all, he did.
And he knows this now.
And people somebody asked me about this.
But does he know?
Because yes, he does.
Because it's in Joseph Hickman's book, The Burn Pits.
He gave a whole chapter to Beau Biden.
And then I don't know how I know this anymore.
I read it somewhere that when that came out, when the book came out, that got Joe's attention.
And he knows now that he was the one who killed his good son.
And and in fact, there's that clip of the two veterans saying, hey, you sent my buddy to Afghanistan and me to Iraq.
We don't appreciate it.
What do you got to say for yourself?
Or maybe it's both to Iraq.
And he goes, well, my son died.
And they go, well, so we didn't say anything about your son.
He goes, well, you better not.
Which is ridiculous, right?
Because he's the one who brought him up.
But the point being, though, that that was his knee jerk was that his son died in the war.
Not exactly like a combat death.
But yeah, he died of brain cancer from the burn pit from being stationed at the Mosul Dam or right at that base there.
And I'm pretty sure that's what it was, where he was.
And and, you know, Joe Biden is just horrible.
And I've always hated him.
But he's not quite as inhuman as Dick Cheney or some of these people, right?
Like, I don't know.
I'm hoping for not not wisdom, but just here's a guy who's been burnt to a crisp by experience by now.
Right.
So I hope I hope I hope you're right.
I'm a little less optimistic, not about Joe, but about the fact that he is old, that he's going to be delegating a lot of stuff.
And the people he surrounded himself, particularly foreign policy and national security, are the greatest hits of the Obama years replayed.
Victoria Nuland is back.
Brent McGurk is back.
Wendy Sherman is back.
These are the people who brought you the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, double plus, never mind the fresh starts of wars in Syria and Yemen and Libya.
These are the very people who literally have that blood on their hands, who are now back right where they left off four years ago.
Susan Rice is in the administration, the conqueror of Libya, peace be upon her.
These are the same folks.
And I'm concerned that an elderly Joe Biden is going to be largely in a ceremonial role, in many cases, bulldozed by the bureaucracy and the soap and the deep state, because the people, you have to understand why people like Victoria Nuland and her teammates there are so dangerous compared to, say, the Trump people.
They bring whole teams with them.
When Donald Trump appointed Mike Pompeo or Rex Tillerson to the State Department, neither of those guys knew anyone in that whole building, right?
They probably didn't have a single friend in that entire building, or even someone they knew by name other than their security detail.
Wendy Sherman was on the phone seconds after her appointment to all of her ex-staffers who were in think tank jobs and academic holding positions.
She's going to walk in with, same with Susan Rice and the rest of these warmongers from the Obama years.
They're going to walk in with a whole team of deputies.
They're going to fill in the mid ranks.
They're going to take control of the bureaucracy, and they're going to literally go to work from day one.
That will not be good news.
One of the things that kept the Trump people from being damaging, really, in any real sense, is their inability to get things done.
Almost everything Trump accomplished, and put quote marks around it if you want to, was executive order, can be undone on day one if Biden signs enough papers.
These folks are bureaucratic warriors.
They know how the system works, and they're very, very dangerous because they're very, very effective about moving policy forward and causing action to take place.
Hold on.
You know what?
I'm telling you, Sullivan is the one I'm most worried about, because I think Blinken is loyal enough to Biden that he's going to believe whatever Biden wants him to believe.
But I think this guy Sullivan, you know, Danny Sherson wrote this thing, and I went and followed all the links to all the research and read everything I could about this guy.
Famously, he was the guy that said, hey, look, AQ is on our side in Syria, as though this is just funny and cute, not a reason to maybe stop committing treason.
And he's going to be, and he was just Hillary's right hand man for four years.
He was her number one right hand servant guy, and just hawkish as hell on everything.
And Danny had highlighted all these quotes where they ask him about like, yeah, what about the genocide in Yemen?
Maybe we should knock that off.
And he's like, well, you know, this particular set of issues brings a criteria of a thing, which thing I think we should step up our security cooperation and the thing.
I'm just, oh my God.
You know?
Yeah.
That's the worst.
He's the most dangerous one.
And he's the advisor to the president for national security affairs.
There you go.
Hillary's worst guy.
Might as well be Hillary herself.
Oh, she'll be there.
I mean, she'll be on the phone to Biden on a regular basis talking about what needs to be done.
And Joe will listen because he is a party guy and he is a lifelong syncopate of the democratic system.
And he's benefited mightily from it.
He went from senator from MasterCard to vice president only because they wanted an old white guy in the Obama White House.
And once again, when the Democrats calculated that they were going to run a referendum against Trump and it literally did not matter who their candidate was, they picked, you know, crash test dummy Joe Biden.
And he's done well by doing not much other than agreeing with what anyone tells him to agree with.
Yeah.
I remember Anthony was saying that, you look, it's a Hegelian dialectic, right?
Joe Biden is the synthesis of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, you know, that's compromise.
OK, we're good.
Yeah.
Everything's set.
Now we can finally all get along and unite this country together.
You see?
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All right.
So now, oh, I know I wanted to say that, doesn't this kind of seem like, uh, uh, did you ever see the remake of red dawn, the terror, most terrible movie where it's North Korea takes over?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Yeah.
Right.
They were, it was, by the way, it was going to be China takes over, which is like at least within the universe of possibility or something.
Right.
But then the Chinese were bankrolling the movie, so they had to change it to the North Koreans.
And so now the movie just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
But anyway, at the end they're all in the concentration camp and there's a big sign that says you deserve this.
And I thought, you know, like, okay, fine.
There's actually one part of the movie where there's like a little bit of something to it right there finally at the very end.
And it seems to me like that's how I read the whole Trump.
And for that matter, the Biden administration, I feel terrible for all the innocent individuals whose fault it's not.
And all the poor foreigners who are going to get exploded to death and everything like that.
But just all other things being equal, you know, this is kind of all a big practical joke on the American people because this is who our society is.
Donald Trump was the only one of all 300 million of us who could have stopped Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in one year.
And the American people wanted him to do it and used him for that purpose.
And it was magnificent.
But then look who it was.
It was Donald freaking Trump.
And he did not, for one moment, rise to the occasion of being the leader either in any case.
I don't think.
Okay.
Except appointing Khalilzad to make peace in Afghanistan, I'd give him that.
But otherwise, I mean, and so this is why we've got Biden is, you know, we might as well have just seen Hillary Clinton elected and the American people have repudiated their repudiation of the establishment because the guy that they used to repudiate the establishment was so horrible and repudiable repudiated himself that.
So now we're back, just like you said, with the entire cast of characters from the Obama years who are the ones who were so terrible that we got Trump in the first place.
I just want to offer a shout out to the Wolverines who are listening.
It's almost time, guys.
Yeah.
You know what?
I think they're getting ready or whatever the hell.
All right.
So now one of the hugest news stories of the year was the complete blackout of the Republicans October surprise.
They had Hunter Biden's laptop that had stuff on it.
And well, you described, first of all, please, if you could, sir, characterize however you would and give the examples of just what TV and Silicon Valley did to erase this story.
And then please get to the part because we still got about half an hour where you got your hands on a copy of that hard drive and did your own investigation.
We don't need the Wall Street Journal to tell us what's on there.
After all, we got Peter Van Buren, too.
So first of all, this blackout, your impression of it, the importance, anything like that.
And then tell us everything you learned on that thing.
There's a lot of surveys that suggest that had Hunter Biden's laptop, we using that as a short term, an abbreviation here for all the information and what it was talking about.
If that information had been widely known, it probably would have changed the results of the election.
Predicting the future and alternate histories and things are difficult to get right.
But there's really an awful lot of reasonable polling to suggest that it would have affected the election.
It would have changed the results and quite possibly could have Donald Trump squeak out a victory.
We'll never know because there was a whole of society effort to throw that information down the memory hole, the memory hole, of course, the famous Orwellian term from 1984, where information that was inconvenient to the ruling authority was literally incinerated.
This was back in the day when information was on paper and the paper was literally torn out of books and cut out of old newspapers and thrown down a incinerator shaft.
And that's what happened.
Social media jumped to the task.
The New York Post was banned by Twitter from its own Twitter account, talking about its own published stories.
Facebook and everyone else got along with that.
And then the mainstream media agreed as a single voice to simply not talk about the Hunter laptop.
The intelligence community picked up its cue and a large number of former intelligence agents claimed that the information on the laptop must be Russian disinformation based on no facts, of course, they just said that.
And then that gave the media the ability to talk about the story without talking about the story.
So they didn't really need to talk about the content of the laptop.
They simply needed to cite these former officials and of course, the usual anonymous sources claiming it's all Russian disinformation.
Both people in the short period of time before the election were thrown off the trail, never got a chance to know what was on that laptop and decide for themselves, you know, democracy, whether that information would affect their vote or not.
It was a shameful example of the partisanship and the power of the media, the democratic establishment and the intelligence community.
They've seen them play at it over the four years of Trump.
You cited Russiagate earlier in our interview, but this time they got it right.
They accomplished what they wanted to do, which was get this information to disappear until after the election.
Through my editors at the American conservative, I was given a copy of the information on Hunter Biden's laptop.
I do not know the source, the editors do, and they assure me that the people who gave them the information had direct access to Hunter's original laptop.
So there's a bit of a cutout here so that everyone knows the chain is valid.
There was nothing that I found on the laptop that would have me believe it was disinformation.
There were no sort of funny English, you know, comrade, be sure to emphasize this part here.
Natasha, here is your place.
You know, nothing on there that seemed fake or phony.
There was a lot of primary documents from bank transfers and things having initiated a number of international bank transfers.
They looked real and things like that.
And most importantly, no one on the Biden side has questioned the validity of the documents.
No one has said these aren't real, these are fake, these are made up.
And so we can dismiss any thoughts of disinformation at this point.
There's simply no evidence to suggest that whatsoever.
And there's considerable evidence to suggest that the information is true and valid.
That leads us to turn to what's there.
Now, wait a minute, stop for a second and let's talk about this media blackout thing more.
Isn't that amazing?
They're able to turn off the New York Post of all things?
As I know, as I learned from my public enemy history, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton.
Yep.
It was New York's first, quote, American newspaper.
And it has a long history.
They have a tabloid side and they have a proper journalism side to them.
And the fact that occasionally they print pictures of pretty girls or have dramatic headlines does not take away from the fact that they do have real journalists who work there and who do real journalism.
In this case, from what I understand, being one of the few main publications that was willing to publish these stories.
The Wall Street Journal turned down the Hunter Laptop story, Washington Post, New York Times.
They all said simply, we don't want to talk about this.
It was the Post who agreed to be the canary in the coal mine had stick its head up and say, you know, here's information that appears germane to your vote.
Maybe you should take a look at it.
Yeah.
And, you know, as you just said, there was nothing, nothing to suggest that this came from the Russians.
I mean, what they they forged this whole laptop like the Israelis setting up the Iranians and turned it over to this pawn shop guy or whatever.
You know, the local Apple repairman.
And it was funny because I saw, you know, don't ever look at Reddit, but I was looking at Reddit where they're going, oh, yeah, right.
Like Hunter Biden's just going to drop his laptop off in Delaware when everybody knows he lives in L.A.
Like, yeah, no.
What connection could he possibly have to the state of Delaware?
And whoever heard of a crackhead forgetting where he left his laptop, you know, you know, no, that's impossible.
It's far more likely that was Vladimir Putin and the SVR and the Compromat and the SRB and the FSB and the GRU that they were the ones.
And then they had to have known New York Times, Washington Post, every editor, every major paper in this country, all of the producers of all the cable networks.
They knew that this didn't come from Russia.
They knew that that was an absolutely outrageous claim.
And anyone claiming that had the burden of proof on them.
When the story of the chain of custody here makes perfect sense and the guy's got a signed receipt and there's nobody named Yuri anywhere for 100 miles from here.
This whole thing is completely ridiculous.
They were all lying at Twitter and Facebook on their, you know, at their executive department meetings, too.
They all knew that they were pretending to believe that Russia had anything to do with this story so that they could bury it.
And then they buried it.
I mean, both of those things and then multiplied by each other.
Other than a lot of other stuff.
That's the biggest news story of the year right there.
Yep.
And it's something we've agreed to not talk about.
Going back to the laptop.
Yeah, man.
And let us not forget to talk about why it matters, because that's another disinformation campaign that the media has waged saying, well, even if it shows Hunter did all these terrible things, so what?
He wasn't running for president.
We can't leave that question unanswered here.
But very simply, the laptop is a electronic record of Hunter Biden's sleazy personal life, which we won't get into.
But if you want to see a guy having three-way sex with some of the scaggiest prostitutes available in Delaware, I've seen those pictures and it's not a pretty thing.
Nonetheless, what really matters on the laptop are the documentation of Hunter's business.
He ran a consulting firm that benefited hugely from Chinese and Ukrainian money.
Massive amounts of money.
We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars in fees was paid to Hunter Biden by Chinese companies and by Ukrainian companies for doing nothing that I can find on the laptop.
Not just Burisma there?
Stick to Ukraine for a second.
Different Ukrainian companies as well?
I'm sorry.
If I use the plural there, it was a mistake.
The only Ukrainian company I saw was Burisma.
My apologies.
Okay, go ahead.
On the Chinese side, there were several companies that may or may not be interlinked.
It's very, very difficult to pry them apart.
But there were multiple companies on the Chinese side, and only Burisma.
But Burisma paid up nicely in the double-figure millions.
And Hunter didn't do anything for them.
There was no record of what his consulting was, and the same on the Chinese side.
That of course raises questions.
In fact, it raised questions, including an email from Hunter's own CPA, who was cautioning him on how he was presenting his income on his taxes, who said, what does our company do?
And his own CPA did not know what Hunter's company did.
Now on the Burisma side, it appears that what they did was provide access to Joe Biden.
However shallow that access was, it appears to be some grip and grins and some photo ops and things like that.
Whether there was more going on behind the scenes, whether Hunter and Joe had conversations, we don't know.
But it's an important question to ask, given the importance of Joe Biden's job as vice president then and president now.
On the Chinese side, it's much more- Wait, wait.
Slow down, guy.
Dang it.
I'm trying to have trouble keeping up.
So I talked to Taibbi, and he went and did his own investigation.
And he said that Burisma was under investigation, and that I forgot who he said, which reporter had used this term first, but the word went out that these investigations were dormant.
And then as Taibbi says, they bolt this term dormant onto every news story about the possibility that there was any obstruction going on here when the senior Biden here was pushing for this prosecutor to get fired.
But also Taibbi confirmed to me that the entire reason, and the whole bottom line of the story of why they hired Hunter in the first place, was because Burisma was close with the government that Joe Biden had just overthrown.
And so they were worried that the new regime was going to be unfriendly to them since they were loyal to the last one.
So they were trying to cozy up to the new guys, or at least buy themselves some immunity by hiring the vice president's son to say, see, we're in good with the Americans.
So you should treat us as friends instead of as enemies from the last regime.
And look, here's a photo of me and Vice President Biden.
That's not just a photo op, right?
That's huge when it comes to the corruption going on here.
And by the way, you mentioned Victoria Nuland.
That's how we know that Joe Biden overthrew the government of Ukraine is because she was caught red-handed plotting the coup and referring to Joe Biden's role.
Now the other guy who sat on Burisma's board was Kofor Black, who we know as a top CIA official.
And he shows up in some of the money transfers between Burisma and Hunter Biden, setting up shell companies in the Caribbean to receive some of this money.
It was all routed through a bank in Cyprus.
And Hunter at one point was soliciting advice, not from Kofor, but from others about whether or not his company could purchase a small bank in Ireland or Lithuania so they could move the money even more securely that way.
But I want to go back to the Chinese because here, what Hunter was doing was a lot more obvious and what he was doing was twofold.
One, he was selling influence, of course, access to his dad or the appearance of access to his dad.
Now let's be very careful on this because there are implications, as you've just outlined, that Joe was actively doing things in the Ukraine.
We don't see that on the China side, but keep in mind how this works.
You don't have, when you're trying to manipulate people at a certain level, for example, attract investors to an American investment venture, those photos of you shaking hands with Joe Biden, your ability to produce Hunter Biden at a meeting, create the impression of high level access.
You can fool people and that's very, very effective.
If you've got a group of Chinese investors who are hesitant to give you their money and you produce Hunter Biden at a meeting and Hunter just sits there like a dumb foreigner and grins, that can be enough to manipulate those investors into believing you when you say you have access into the White House.
That's what Hunter was selling, his smile, the pictures that he arranged with Joe.
When Hunter flew to Beijing on Air Force Two with his father and got off the plane at the same time as his father, everybody was paying attention at the next meeting that Hunter showed up soliciting investors.
And given the way that Chinese people believe corruption is fully endemic, they certainly, I think, were pretty easy marks for that.
The other thing that Hunter was doing other than selling influence, or at least the appearance of influence, was he was probably laundering money for these Chinese investors.
There are massive amounts, hundreds of millions of dollars that were transferred as payments to Hunter as some kind of consultant that went from China to Hunter's accounts in America, and then from Hunter's accounts in America to the Chinese company's accounts in America as transfers without explanation.
The point is the Chinese were able to legitimately move the money across the Pacific from their hands back into their own hands using Hunter as a cutout and avoid government scrutiny on both sides of the ocean.
And there are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of money that moved that way.
How many hundreds of millions?
I didn't add it up, and I can't promise you that what I saw on the laptop was even complete.
Hunter was not a tidy man.
His laptop was a mess.
You know how your mom stores all the files on her main screen?
She's got like 300 Word documents on the main screen.
Hunter's laptop was messy, and it was a challenge to get through it all.
In addition, there was one folder of emails that I was unable to read fully.
So there's missing pieces here, but there's nothing to suggest those missing pieces are exonerable.
There's an awful lot to suggest that between the $100 million that was transferred in January and the $100 million that was transferred in June, there might have been a couple more in there because there's an awful lot of money.
At one point, they were transferring money to Hunter through a Visa debit card.
A Visa debit card was loaded with $100,000 in Hong Kong, and Hunter and his uncle, Jim, were given the card to go out on a spending spree, which they did.
And that money, of course, should have been taxable income to Hunter.
I'm going to guess it's not on his tax returns.
We'll hope someone takes a look.
So Hunter is a slimy business person who took advantage of his good name, his father's good name, to prostitute himself out to enemies of the United States, by which I mean criminals in the Ukraine and China.
For their purposes, as a human being, he fails completely.
He was a crack addict.
There's videos of him having sex with prostitutes, emails and chats where he's asking prostitutes to show up to have sex with him.
But could you bring along some of the good stuff so I can get high at the same time?
He is not a nice person.
That part is irrelevant, unless you're chasing him on Tinder.
What's relevant here is the fact that his father will be president of the United States in two weeks.
And everyone says, well, look, yeah, Hunter's a scumbag, no argument, but he didn't run for president, Joe Biden did.
And Biden says he knows nothing about any of this.
Well, that's where we draw a line.
Hunter was laundering not only money for the Chinese, but he was laundering the Chinese money through his uncle, Jim Biden, hiring him as a consultant with no defined duties and moving millions of dollars through Jim's shell business in Pennsylvania.
Jim was supported largely by friendly loans from Joe Biden's own political supporters.
This is all in the files.
And if you go to the American Conservative website, you can read this all in detail.
We don't have time to go through it page by page.
The idea that Joe Biden knew nothing about all this is completely false.
First of all, the State Department warned Joe as vice president that his son's actions were creating the appearance of impropriety.
Joe, as vice president, certainly had access to information and intelligence along these lines.
This much money moving around the world certainly attracts the attention of the intelligence community who pays attention to these types of things.
Joe couldn't fail to notice that Hunter was driving a Porsche with no apparent job and was living a rockstar lifestyle with no apparent job.
Joe couldn't notice Hunter was on his Air Force Two flight out to China.
So the idea that Joe knew nothing about any of this and didn't even know enough to ask a question or two is really false.
And that's why this matters.
And that's why it should have mattered to voters because they should have asked themselves, if as vice president of the United States, Joe Biden cared so little about the appearance of impropriety, if not actual impropriety, then what happens when his power gets turned up to 11 as president of the United States?
Is this the kind of operator that he is?
That he turns a blind eye to things that benefit his family, maybe him directly.
He lets his brother run a shell company to launder money.
He lets his son run a shell company to launder money.
If that's the kind of guy that he is and the kind of vice president that he was, I think that information was a value to voters, should have been available to voters prior to the election.
Let them look at it.
Let them read it.
Let them make their own judgment.
But instead, that information was denied to the majority of Americans.
And Joe Biden was elected president.
Hunter Biden, still at large.
And that's why this all mattered.
Yeah.
Well, that's a hell of a lot of money as you're talking about here.
And then, but as also as you're saying that, you know, the appearance of impropriety, this is a guy who knew he still wanted to run for president.
It's the same thing with Hillary Clinton doing the Goldman Sachs speeches.
And, you know, the Clinton Foundation stuff.
Like, look, I get it.
You're greedy and you like money, but you like power more and you're going to run for president later.
And people might use the word China or Clinton Foundation against you later.
And so isn't that a bad investment to just, can't you make your hundreds of millions of dollars in a few years from now, after you're out of office, something like that.
But talk about shooting yourself in the foot when you're right at the brass ring.
But that's not what happened, Scott.
Oh yeah, he got elected anyway.
So it's fine.
Hillary got away with all of it.
She got very, very close to being elected president of the United States.
Joe Biden got elected president of the United States.
They did these things.
They did them fairly openly and brazenly.
Oh, I mean her brazen corruption, just the fact of the Goldman Sachs speeches, nevermind what was in them, just the fact that she wouldn't release them, was just made her seem so corrupt and horrible.
That's a few points off the top right there.
You know, that was a real scandal.
What is she saying in secret to these bankers anyway, you know?
But you're talking like a person like you.
The majority of Americans were fed a very different story by the mainstream media that this was all misogyny.
And hey, there's nothing illegal about making a speech and so forth.
And the majority of Americans were told that Hillary's speeches were no big deal, that the Clinton Foundation was legitimate, it had a triple A plus rating from some place, that Joe Biden and the laptop were Russian disinformation and it doesn't matter anyway.
The majority of American people were given a very different version of this.
And it was the normalization of this level of corruption.
The difference between you, me, Hillary, and Joe is they understand they can get away with this stuff while we still are shocked by it.
And that's why we're little people and they're big people.
Yeah.
Well, and here's one of the best parts of the cover up of last October and this whole last year.
Donald Trump was impeached a year ago for asking the government of Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden for his corruption with the Burisma thing.
All the while the Department of Justice was investigating Hunter Biden based on this laptop.
I guess I haven't read all about it, but from what I know, at least on the China stuff and maybe even on some of the Ukraine stuff, no?
Yes, the FBI had the laptop.
And they kept that secret.
Boy, do they keep that secret in DOJ.
You think about all the leaks about Trump's treason that came out of the DOJ with the whole Russia hoax.
But boy, did they bury that secret down in the basement safe level, huh?
This is why we talk about, we use the term deep state.
It's a shorthand, but it's described something very, very real.
There are extraordinary levers of power that are exercised all the time behind the scenes by people the rest of us don't know, either because they're extremely important people or because they don't appear to be very important people.
But the vast majority of things that happen happen quite for a reason.
And that reason doesn't benefit us.
It benefits a certain level of people.
It's the old George Carlin line.
There's a club of very important people who make all the decisions and you're not in it.
And that's what we see here over and over again.
Trump stuff gets leaked practically in real time.
Stuff that would help Hillary or Joe Biden hide their corruption, that stuff gets buried.
It never gets looked at.
There's never been a real investigation of the Clintons and the money they made leaving office.
And there never will be.
In extreme cases, you end up buried next to Jeffrey Epstein, but that's really less and less important when the whole of the media is willing to bury an important story for you.
It's simply astounding how open and obvious this all is while people continue to insist.
I got into some discussion on social media with someone who was explaining that basically all of Trump's corruption negates Biden's corruption.
Trump was like the Jesus of corruption.
His sins absolve all others.
And this was an intelligent person, a former State Department colleague, if you will, who was making, this wasn't an uneducated person.
This wasn't some silly bonehead.
But these people have been trained to believe these things as has the American people as a whole, that whataboutism is a good way to end an argument or dismiss a crime, that leaking is okay when it helps your side, but not the other side.
And so Julian Assange went from hero to zero practically overnight because he dared challenge the narrative even in a tiny, tiny way over Hillary Clinton.
Those enemies cannot be allowed to stand.
The system works very, very well and it works much both more subtly and more obviously than it ever has in the past.
The days when you need to shoot somebody in Dealey Plaza are so over.
There's so many better ways to get rid of somebody now, effectively get rid of them.
It's only when you've really settling an old score and I think the Epstein case is a good example.
There were just too many people that were gonna go down in that to take a chance on ruining him in some other way.
But that's kind of a special one.
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By the way, Russia, if you're listening, there's still 30,000 missing emails that Hillary Clinton deleted and lied and pretended were personal when that could not possibly be true.
And we know because her examples were, she emails back and forth with her husband all the time when he's on the record saying he's only emailed twice in his life.
That's right.
And so there, she's a guilty perjurer and there's still 30,000 missing emails and I bet they're all about her, you know, rigging the game, getting money directly deposited into the Clinton Foundation.
So she, and then delivering foreign policies, pro-Saudi foreign policies, for example, in return and things like that.
It's as obvious as hell.
But like you say, never see the light of day even though you know those emails exist somewhere.
Well, I know where they are.
I mean, sort of.
They're in the Russian's hands or the Chinese hands and they are far more valuable to the Russians as secret as blackmail material than they are publicly to actually make a case or embarrass those people.
That's very powerful stuff.
If you've got those kind of information on someone, you're holding a chip that you'll choose the time and the place to cash in and you will have a wonderful return on your investment.
If you publish those things, you know, they're gone.
Then everybody has them.
Yeah.
So here's the thing, man.
Let's get all existential and stuff here for a minute.
It seems like it's a real problem where we're at a real critical mess now where the government and the media have lied about so many important things in a row for so long that people will believe anything else.
And, you know, it's not altogether marginal, right?
You got like 40% of people who think that the Democrats got away with stealing five states, which, come on, they just didn't.
But people like, hey, but that's what I heard.
In fact, to quote President Trump.
Yeah, but that's what I heard.
And so, and you know who said it wasn't true?
The same people who said that Donald Trump was a secret agent of Vladimir Putin, which was a lie, a damn lie.
And those are, in fact, the same people who said we had to attack Iraq in a preemptive strike to prevent them from attacking us first because they were going to lie with Osama bin Laden and attack us with weapons of mass destruction if we didn't get them before it was too late.
And, you know, people's kids died in that.
The economy is destroyed in that.
And they lied us into, you know, as you know, four or five wars, seven wars since then too.
And, you know, the economy is a wreck and all these things.
And you wonder why people believe that the earth is flat.
Frankly, the same people who told them it was round were the same people who told them a lot of things that just were not true at all.
In fact, I think that crazy guy that shot the congresswoman out there a few years ago, where he had written, and he was clearly like going schizophrenic and psychotic of some kind or whatever.
But he was writing, but when words don't mean things, and when the leaders, things, when there's things they say aren't true, then I'm confused and I'm upset.
And like, you know, and then you gotta hand it to him.
He was going crazy, but they were lying right to his face and he could tell.
And so he didn't know, we were all brought up to trust our leaders to, this is how we learn what's true.
We turn on the news and they tell us what's true.
And this is how we come to our decisions where now everybody is just kind of floating in space and they're not grounded because they don't know where to begin.
You know, they don't have a good first premise.
They don't have a source they can trust.
The disbelief has become so large that people have kind of gone full circle and they simply now choose to believe things based on their preexisting prejudices and beliefs.
There's no sense anymore.
When I talk to young people, you know, they have this, I'm a big fan of history and they aren't.
A lot of college age people think that history is just one version of bullshit.
And that, and of course some of it is, but that there's no ground truth that exists on any particular topic.
They take a look at something like Oliver Stone's untold history of the United States, which if people haven't seen it, it runs on Netflix every once in a while, where he's gone back and looked at significant events in modern history and raised questions about the accepted narrative.
And people just look at that and say, well, that can't be true because people wouldn't lie or everyone lies or it just, there is no truth.
It's just your version of it.
What about ism?
Well, Trump did this and it's left to the point where I think people are overwhelmed and have, instead of working harder to try to think for themselves, have just given up.
I think that they stretched it too far and they're not taught the tools of thinking for themselves.
And it's just hard work.
It's just a lot easier to pick one, CNN or Fox, whichever channel, whatever, and just go with it.
Where that leads us to as a nation is a bad, bad place, whether it's the conservative version of bad or the progressive version of bad, does it really matter?
It's going to be a bad place.
It's very difficult to be optimistic, even this early in the new year.
Yeah.
Well, again, back to Trump and his stupid personality, because if it wasn't for just how cartoonish he is, then somebody in DC might've got the idea that people really kind of disliked them because of things that they had done at all.
And it seems like he just, he's such a easy way for them to ignore the possibility that that's true.
He's just a cult leader who brainwashes these idiots into believing in him so much.
And somehow it was enough in conspiracy with Russia to make him president for a little while or something.
But it's in no way a reflection on the post-Cold War consensus in that town.
And that's doubly proved now by the fact that we brought them back.
And so, yeah, I don't know.
And then like you're saying, yeah, both of us are saying, you don't have anything like an agreed upon set of facts to even disagree about.
The facts themselves are completely in the air.
And so, yeah, I don't know.
2021 is going to be pretty exciting, man.
Indeed.
Well, I ought to let you go because we're out of hour.
This is a lot of fun.
All right, my friend.
We have more to come and more to discuss.
Perhaps at some point, I've got an article in preparation to run around the time of the inauguration where I'm going to try to kind of sum up the last four years.
And it may be worth talking about.
The missed opportunities with diplomacy, with North Korea, the failure of all of the media predictions about the wars that never started, the authoritarianism that never happened.
There's a lot to talk about.
And writing history as it happens is never easy.
But I think more than anything, we will fail to understand what really happened these four years.
And it might be a good place to start.
We'll keep that in mind as a topic.
You take care of yourself.
Happy New Year.
You too, man.
Thanks again.
Keep spinning that Aerosmith.
We'll be back.
All right, you guys.
That is Peter Van Buren.
WeMentWell.com.
That's his website.
And find this one over at the American Conservative Magazine.
This is a good piece, man.
You're going to want to look at this.
Hunter Biden's guilty laptop.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APSradio.com.
Antiwar.com.
ScottHorton.org.
And LibertarianInstitute.org.
