Scott talks to Danny Sjursen about Lebanon, which has been in the news recently after a disastrous, and apparently accidental, explosion left hundreds dead there. Today Sjursen discusses Lebanon’s past, a history that has seen it become a battleground for many proxy wars throughout the Middle East. He deflates some of the most common myths about the country, including the idea that Hezbollah is a transnational terrorist group controlled by Iran. In reality, he explains, Hezbollah is a...

Jordan Smith discusses her research into the “BlueLeaks” archive of the leaked personal data of hundreds of thousands of cops and their cases. Smith was looking for evidence of unscientific techniques that the police use to elicit confessions and get convictions—and she found them in abundance. It turns out that the use of coercive interrogation techniques, discredited pseudoscience and phony forensic methods has become common practice in America’s law enforcement agencies for decades. Smith...

Scott talks to Branko Marcetic about Kamala Harris’ dismal foreign policy. Although she’s frequently portrayed as a progressive leftist, when it comes to foreign policy, says Marcetic, her foreign policy is right in line with the Clinton-Bush-Obama establishment policies we’ve come to know over the last few decades. Part of the reason for this is that Harris has connections to the usual big think tanks, which are tied to former presidential administrations and to the arms industry. There’s big...

Grant Smith joins the show for another look at the Virginia Israel Advisory Board, a government entity associated with the state of Virginia that allocates taxpayer money to Israeli companies starting operations in the U.S. The projects, Smith explains, aren’t viable on their own, or else they wouldn’t need the massive subsidies from the public sector—but after getting the money, they can often put local competitors out of business because of their unnatural advantage. When these projects do...

Scott talks to Dan McAdams about the precarious situation in Belarus, where some western agitators are seeking to use the country’s recent presidential elections as an excuse to foment and support a revolution. McAdams reminds us that although Belarus’ president, Alexander Lukashenko, might not be a great guy, it doesn’t justify regime change—most of the time, in fact, when America gets involved in these kinds of conflicts, the people that take over after the revolution end up being much worse...

Max Blumenthal discusses the case of Kong Tsung-gan, an “expert source” on the ground in Hong Kong, who has been quoted by many American media outlets in recent months as an authority on the separatist movement there. The problem? Kong is actually an American named Brian Kern masquerading on the internet as a native. The mainstream media, explains Blumenthal, has been happy to go along unquestioningly with Kern’s story because his narrative suits theirs: China is an oppressive and violent...

Dan McKnight discusses recent efforts by his organization, BringOurTroopsHome.US, to get Republicans in congress to distance themselves from Liz Cheney. Cheney wields enormous influence in congress, both because of her last name and because she supports the reelection campaigns of a whole slew of congressmen. But her brand is utterly toxic, McKnight explains, and continued association with the Cheney name, he thinks, is likely to move the Republican party in a bad direction. It’s time that...

Scott talks to Michael Klare about the incentives behind America’s involvement in wars in the Middle East. One common narrative says that Bush invaded Iraq simply because America needed the oil—the truth, says Klare, is somewhat more complicated. He explains that American war planners see a combined strategic interest in U.S. involvement in the Middle East that includes military positioning and the economic interest of exerting control over the oil trade. For one thing, America has essentially...

Brett Wilkins discusses the story about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that everyone learned in school: the U.S. was forced to drop the atomic bombs, because the alternative would have meant a ground invasion of Japan that would have cost a million American lives. In reality, Japan was already making moves toward negotiating a surrender, especially after the USSR declared war on Japan earlier that summer. What’s more, seven out of eight U.S. generals at the time, including Eisenhower and MacArthur,...

Kingston Reif talks about the imminent lapse of the New START treaty, one of the last remaining nuclear safeguard agreements between the U.S. and Russia. Russia has made some moves to renegotiate the treaty, but the Trump administration has refused to do so, ostensibly in the name of making it much more restrictive, and of including China in the negotiations. These efforts would be admirable, Reif notes, except that there is little reason to believe they are legitimate. Reif suspects that the...

Scott interviews Tom Woods about his new eBook, which provides a libertarian perspective on some of the national questions being raised these days about the future of policing. Scott and Woods focus in on the war on drugs in particular, which has been the culprit behind so many of the police abuses of the last few decades. They review the reasons why this policy has been completely ineffective, a staggering waste of resource and has led to vastly disproportionate outcomes between white and...

Scott talks to Stephen Zunes about Susan Rice, one of the leading candidates for Joe Biden’s VP pick. Rice fits Biden’s criteria in that she’s a black woman with political experience, but Zunes raises serious concerns about her track record. In particular, Rice turned out to be one of the most hawkish Democrats during her time in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and she played a role in pushing for America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Zunes points out that if “a black woman” is Biden’s...

Australian journalist Mark Willacy talks to Scott about his investigations into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces units in Afghanistan. Willacy has worked closely with former SAS operative Braden Chapman, the leading figure in blowing the whistle on what has become a spate of such allegations. The incidents include the killing of unarmed, compliant civilians and the fabrication of evidence to cover up wrongdoing. There is currently an investigation underway in Australia into...

Ray McGovern joins the show to talk about Colin Powell and Mike Pompeo: two credentialed, respected members of the foreign policy establishment that have both been hugely damaging to American interests. McGovern first responds to the claim that Powell unwaveringly and heroically stood against the Bush administration’s desire to invade Iraq, succumbing only at the last minute due to new, more persuasive intelligence and the pressures of being overwhelmingly outnumbered. In reality, says...

Branko Marcetic discusses a recent move by the Trump administration that will grant unprecedented powers to the CIA to conduct cyber attacks against foreign countries. This highlights a persistent trend throughout Trump’s precedency that has seen him become perhaps the most hawkish president toward Russia since the end of the Cold War. Scott and Marcetic talk about the stubborn persistence of the “Russiagate” narrative, which has lingered long after its underlying premises have been dispelled....