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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.
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All right, you guys, he's the author of Patriotic Dissent and before that Ghost Riders of Baghdad, and he writes for us regularly at antiwar.com, and he was an army officer in Iraq War II and Afghanistan in both surges.
Welcome back to the show.
Danny Sherson.
Good to talk to you, buddy.
Hey, thanks for having me again.
All right, man.
So you wrote this thing about the horrible Jake Sullivan, it's on antiwar.com right now.
It was published originally at the Shear Post, I think is where I first read it, and it's called Biden's Young Hawk, the Case Against Jake Sullivan.
So go ahead and tell us the bad news, Danny.
The bad news is that, I mean, Sullivan is a disturbing guy, and okay, so are a whole bunch of the Biden bros and sisses, right?
I mean, there's nothing too surprising.
I've been asked a few times since writing this, well, why Jake Sullivan, why'd you focus on him?
Okay, admittedly, I get blind spots for people.
I get manic and sort of obsessed, but this guy's disturbing, but because he is sort of like a sophisticated and he says the right things, and he's not a Trump guy, right?
I think he's going to get a pass.
He's also someone who works behind the scenes.
He's a mind melder.
He's somebody who gets very close to the crown and makes himself indispensable to the people he works for.
And then of course, kind of the perfect storm is, and we can get into the details about this guy's record and personality, but as national security advisor in the constitutionally wildly unbalanced system of today, not only has the executive branch taken over most war making and foreign policy making, but specifically more than state and defense, as you know, the National Security Council, the White House has taken this over.
So now you've got a mind melding guy who is going to be the war whisperer at the side of a, an extremely and historically malleable gut player like Joe Biden.
And that's why I picked Sullivan because I think that, you know, like I said, he's my dark horse candidate for like the key Hawk, but he's also my door, dark horse candidate for maybe the most influential guy in this White House.
None of which bodes well.
Yeah.
I think that's kind of the common thread through this article is all these different people talking about how competent this guy is.
It's really terrifying.
Well, yeah.
And it depends, you know, who's saying it, right.
Who's saying that he's so competent.
I mean, you got Hillary Clinton bragging about, you know, joking with her husband about, oh, you know, he went to Yale and he's super smart.
And Bill's like, well, if he learns to play the saxophone, watch out.
Like as if it's not a bunch of war criminals, like joking vaguely about falling in love with one another.
Right.
You know, and so on CNN, that's, that's fine.
Right.
Everyone's cool with that.
But I hear it and I'm saying, well, wait a second.
This, yeah, he gets rave reviews, but he gets rave reviews from mostly horrible people.
Right.
Who've done horrible things and have driven this country just completely away from any lingering sense of being a Republic with a small R.
So, yeah, I mean, that's what scares me about him.
It sounds like what they're saying is he can run an office really well.
And that is scary, you know.
Right.
Not that he makes wise decisions.
Just that he can actually, once he makes a bad decision, he can carry it out in short order.
He is a company man's company man, except it appears that there's two other real big problems with him.
Number one, his reflex truly is to hawkishness.
He appears to be at least on some level, a believer in sort of this indispensable nation, American exceptionalist.
Now we could describe, discuss why that is.
Is it because he likes it in the sense that it creates jobs for wonks like him and his ambition?
But we can table that for a moment.
And the second thing is, I, you know, you can't prove the measure of a man necessarily just from reading everything that's written by or about him.
But I have a distinct sense.
And like, I would really put a lot of money on this.
Like I would trust my gut.
I'd probably wager one of my two kids.
I'm not sure which one I love more.
I'll get back to you on the fact that Sullivan does not care about people.
I do not think he has any real sense of empathy for costs and victims and outgrowths.
That's just something I get from listening to everything that he said in interviews and reading his stuff.
There's some funny little lack there.
So those two things combined with the fact that he's like, you know, this technocrat's technocrat, company man's company man.
I mean, that's that's disturbing enough.
But yeah, he's a middle manager, except he's a really dangerous one because of what he appears to believe and what he appears to not care about, which is people.
You know, I get that same impression, too.
And where I get it is all these statements where he talks about, you know, part of making these policies is sometimes you get it wrong and things go wrong and there are gray areas.
And it's very important now that you always remember that no matter how sure you are that there's, you know, some area where you always can learn more.
And this and essentially he's reducing all of this pain to just learning experiences for young technocrats that, you know, but also kind of like a permission slip.
You know, as long as you pray that, you know, don't let me trespass on anybody in the next seven days, then it's actually OK to trespass on people for the next seven days.
You know, that same sort of, you know, self-absolvement that, you know, sometimes when you back Al Qaeda in a war, you wish you hadn't later or you wish you'd maybe given them more weapons sooner or something like that, you know?
Well, yeah, his statements are very interesting because he can't help but sort of out himself as smart as he is.
And I've seen this before as intelligent as the guy is, at least on the surface.
You know, he's smart guy.
He knows the right things to say, but he cannot help himself.
You know, people are going to let you know who they are one way or the other and their language will do it.
So he's constantly hedging and he's constantly pivoting.
So for example, he'll say in this one part in 2015, he said to the Minnesota Post or whatever he said, well, of course, it's the right thing to do to be a good person and care about your neighbor, colleagues and people less fortunate.
But OK, first of all, I don't like a but there, but fine.
But I've also found that if you want to advance your career and make an impact, you need people who are going to be your champion.
And then he pivots back to the good stuff and says, and that means showing them that you're not just in it for yourself.
Wait a second.
So is he saying you're really not just in it for yourself or you need to show them that you're not just in it for yourself so you can get the champion like.
Yeah.
And are you talking about that is weird.
Yeah.
And are you talking about you need to pose like you care about powerless people to impress people with more power or you need to make sure that people with power know that you care about them?
Yeah, it's a really weird phrasing and he does it a lot.
And as you mentioned, when it comes to like Syria and Al Qaeda supporting Al Qaeda or being on the same side as Al Qaeda and Libya and Yemen, he's really not apologetic.
At all, like every time he's asked about it, he pretty much either defends the motivations for getting in for Obama getting in or he'll say, well, actually, I still think it was a good idea.
I mean, one or the other, he never says it was just awful and there was no reason and we completely were wrong.
He's never said that about any of those policies.
He either says, no, I'm pretty much still with it.
I still think it was good.
Or he says it didn't turn out so well, but we meant well and we had good reason for thinking it.
Or he says, actually, I'm not sure yet.
I'll let you know, which is what he says about Libya.
He says, I'm still not sure if that was the right thing to do or not.
But, you know, I'll get back.
Of course, by then he'll be running America's war policy at age 43 because he's the new best and brightest, you know, whiz kid like the guys who followed McNamara into office.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the other thing is that I learned reading your article, which I already knew this about him, but I did not understand, you know, really the background and the extent of it.
And I learned this from your piece.
And then also in the pieces that you link to here that this is Hillary Clinton's man big time.
Yeah, they I mean.
He he reviewed the chapters in her book.
I mean, he was the ultimate aid to Hillary Clinton.
And of course, the Vox profile said that he was the man behind Hillary's hawkish foreign policy.
Now, he certainly is hawkish in his own right.
I mean, if you read everything he writes for Foreign Affairs, he makes that pretty clear.
It's hard to say whether he's the man behind it or he's just someone who aligned with her.
Right.
But either way, you know, he's with her on every level.
I mean, one Obama aide said that Jake did everything for Secretary Clinton.
He was at her side in like 100 countries.
And, you know, she's she said that he was discreet, earnest and brilliant in the book that he proofread for her.
So I guess it makes sense.
She had to say something nice.
He was going to be the reviewer of it.
Right.
He was going to review the chapters.
But I think the interesting thing there is earnest and brilliant.
OK, that's fine.
But discreet, that's an interesting term.
That's a Clinton-esque term, isn't it?
You know, for somebody like her, right?
For someone who's kind of discreet.
It's not very discreet of her to use that term to describe him.
Right.
He's a guy who is very trustworthy with my secrets, my deep, dark secrets about where all my bodies are buried.
I mean, right.
That's a weird word to use, discreet.
These people out themselves, man.
But yeah, he's a Hillary guy.
You know, he jumped ship to the Obama team to help him with the debates and stuff after he'd been prepping Hillary's debates.
But he pretty quickly jumped back into the Hillary camp.
And Ben Rhodes said of him that he was pretty much always in line with Hillary.
He said Jake's in line with Hillary.
And on the spectrum of people in the Obama administration, he tended to favor more assertive U.S. engagement on issues and, quote, responses that would incorporate some military elements.
So, you know, that's our new National Security Advisor, America.
Congratulations.
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You know, I had no idea this anecdote about how exactly Richard Holbrook died.
I knew it was a heart attack and I knew that he wanted to negotiate with the Taliban.
But I really learned something here and I can just picture it way too well, far too easily, what the scene must have been like.
But can you tell the people for us, please?
Yeah, so this is interesting because, well, you know, you know Afghanistan better than anybody.
And this is, you know, big news even today, right?
The discussion of what's going to happen with Afghanistan with Biden.
But, you know, Jake was in the Clinton camp.
He went everywhere with her.
He was at her side.
In fact, if you look at photos, if you ever just Google Jake Sullivan and like go to the images on Google, he's like always in the background of these like Oval Office pictures and stuff.
He's just like the guy leering back there and taking notes, you know.
Anyway, I think he's playing hangman.
But anyway, he's in the room.
He's I believe he's 34 when he takes over.
He's like 35 years old, OK?
He's sitting in on a meeting with Richard Holbrook is there.
Hillary is there.
And Holbrook is arguing that, listen, you know, the Obama administration's position at the time was that the Taliban agreeing to, you know, not support al-Qaeda any longer or not harbor al-Qaeda was a precondition to even begin talks.
And Holbrook was saying, like, we got to start just getting the ball rolling, talking to these guys.
So, yes, that should be the precondition for a full agreement.
But let's just start talking.
And of course, Hillary was like wildly opposed to this.
Even Obama, at least as an administration, as a position, they were against it.
And Jake was way in line with Hillary.
And Holbrook is like fired up about it.
And he's making I mean, he's literally pleaing with them in the room, like, listen to me, like, I know of what I speak, you know, you need to you need to start talking to these guys, blah, blah, blah.
And his heart bursts like they're in the room.
And so Sullivan is there for it.
And I just feel like, you know, anecdotes, sure, they're interesting human interests, but sometimes they really are, you know, instructive.
And I think that is one because that's who, you know, Jake Sullivan is is coming into this Biden administration now that's going to make some sort of call on Afghanistan pretty soon, theoretically.
And I don't know, it just doesn't particularly bode well.
I think it's an interesting story.
Man, I'm afraid that that's how I'm going to die 30 years from now.
I won't be talking to anybody with power, but I'll be sitting there arguing why we got to get out of Afghanistan and drop dead of a goddamn heart attack.
Maybe I'll be a guest on the show or sitting in the room with you.
I think there's a good chance I'll be older than Jake Sullivan.
We got to withdraw the troops, I tell you.
Right.
Could happen.
Could happen.
All right.
So, yeah, I mean, and can't you just see that whole brick going?
And because he was such a personality, that's why everybody hated him so much.
Goddamn it.
Listen to me.
You got to do it like he must have been going off.
Damn it, Jake, you're being unreasonable.
Ah, and then fell down dead on the ground.
Yeah, I almost wish that there was.
I mean, I guess it'd be kind of a car, but I almost wish there was footage of it.
You know, I would like to or at least the transcript I'd like to hear is what he was saying.
I want to know what Holbrook was saying and how he was phrasing it, you know?
Yeah.
Man.
All right.
Now, so we got to talk about this because it's just the best thing in the whole world.
I think there's so much to it.
AQ is on our side in Syria.
Danny?
Yeah, so that's, you know, pretty a pretty famous Jake Sullivan email from the Podesta, the Podesta emails and Wikileaks and everything.
So Max Blumenthal in the book, which I thought was really good, The Management of Savagery, I believe he's got it as like a, you know, an epigraph to the book.
You know, he kind of has that as one of the quotes.
And so it's February 2012.
And, you know, Sullivan types what's now kind of an infamous email to Clinton.
And what he says is, and it's so offhanded, you know, because I've read the emails before, after I read the full thing.
And he says on Syria, he says, Al Qaeda is on our side.
Other than that, everything is as expected.
That's the second part that I didn't put in this version, but I've typed it before.
He says Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.
Like basically dot, dot, dot.
Other than that, everything's going about as expected.
And that's it.
And I read almost all of Sullivan's emails to Clinton of any substance.
And most of them are garbage and just sycophant, like just terrible, just fawning over her.
But, you know, that's interesting because he was a big proponent, like Clinton was, of early on of intervention against Assad, of getting involved in Syria on some level, you know, including up to and including military force, right?
So no fly zones, maybe actual military intervention on the ground.
And, you know, he was almost cheering this, that Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria, which to me says that he really is willing to kind of go whichever way the wind blows to get his preferred policy or to please his boss or both.
It doesn't seem to have bothered him at all.
Yeah.
No, it's just like a cute little sort of irony, right?
That like, isn't this funny?
It doesn't, he doesn't say, jeez, you know, boss, in this article, Ayman al-Zawahiri is saying that he wants all good Muslims to go and overthrow Assad.
And I think that maybe we should call a meeting and reexamine our policy, which really could be helping our enemy in a way that maybe we hadn't anticipated thus far.
Instead, he's just saying, tee hee, isn't it ironic and funny that Zawahiri is endorsing the same thing we're doing?
Well, yeah, I think that he enjoys this kind of insider access and he enjoys the, the kind of flip nature of the comment that he got to give.
And, you know, he also, it's hard to know sometimes chicken or egg with Jake, you know, is it that he's a huge proponent of the policy in say Syria or Libya himself, or is it that he knows that his prime patron Hillary is, and so he wants to show her that he's like more holier than the Hillary, you know, like, you know, more Catholic than the Pope on these things.
So for example, and he really does do everything possible to just blow smoke up the butt of his bosses.
So he writes this very long memo about what he thinks the State Department's public relations sort of policy or, or position should be on Hillary reference Libya.
And so I believe this is also in 2012 or maybe early 13.
And what he says is he brags, basically, he says that, you know, Hillary's been the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya, and we should highlight this and that she was instrumental in quote, tightening the noose around Gaddafi and his regime.
You know, it's like, he's just so flip about it.
And he's like, this is a good thing.
This is a good thing.
Right.
And then even now, you know, you go back and he looking retrospectively now seven years after that in 2019, we know what's happened with Libya.
We know about the refugees.
We know about the people drowning, trying to get across the Mediterranean and the, the arms and the, you know, the, the fighters that went across into the whole Sahel, you know, and just the disaster within Libya.
And he says, well, I've struggled with the question of if we had to do it over again, this is all, this is a quote, would we have participated in it?
And I don't have a definitive answer on that yet.
I mean, it's just lifeless language.
It's like the way he speaks is the verbal equivalent of like dead shark eyes.
Do you know what I mean?
That's what I get from his quotes.
And what he means is, yeah, I'm guilty as hell.
Yeah.
We got a lot of people killed.
It's an absolute catastrophe.
But what can I say?
I can't say that it's great, but I can't say that.
Yeah.
I deserve to be buried under the supermax in Florence, Colorado for it either.
So how about I'll just say that it's too soon to tell.
That's a good one.
Give me a break.
Too soon to tell.
50,000 people at least are dead.
Probably more than that.
Yeah.
We don't even know.
And of course, it reminds me of that Bush era stuff.
Well, history will judge.
You know, history is going to vindicate us.
You know, it's that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Nope.
Your pirate radio host is judging you right now.
That was how he answered that then.
Same thing today.
All right.
Now, and by the way, I got to mention this too, because it's important about that Sullivan email about Al-Qaeda in Syria is that just about two weeks later, after that email on February the 28th, Hillary was interviewed on CBS.
And this used to be the clip in the intro of Hillary saying, are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
And what happened was the CBS reporter is asking her, why aren't we doing more to overthrow Assad?
And we all know that she was a hawk all through 2011.
And she spent the rest of 2012 urging Obama to do more and more all the time, which he did.
But anyway, at that moment, she was, as Secretary of State, being forced to defend Obama's policy of not carpet bombing Damascus.
And so she refers to Jake Sullivan's email and which had that Reuters story attached about Zawahiri supporting the revolution.
So she invokes that and she says, well, you know, we know that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda has endorsed the revolution in Syria.
Are we backing Al-Qaeda in Syria?
And so, you know, we know that she saw that email and very strong evidence there that she saw that.
And she referred to it a week or two later from our point of view, that that's actually not so cute and funny.
And that actually, if we're overthrowing Assad, we're doing the bidding of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
And that can't be right, right?
And she actually goes on to say.
And so when we look at like a good, steady, secular, moderate opposition that's fit to take the place of the current government of Syria, she says, we don't see that and we don't have anyone to take the place there.
So we have to be very careful about this.
And the fact that she refused to listen to her own answer there and continue to take the hawkish side that, oh, no, there's got to be a militia somewhere that we could build up to be powerful enough to take on all jihadists on this side.
I won't say left or right, but all the jihadists on the Sunni bin Laden side and the Assad government, Iran, Hezbollah and their Russian backers and everybody else and create some moderate new democracy for Syria.
That's completely crazy.
A total fantasy, as Obama himself called it.
And yet they went on with it anyway.
So I bring that up just to show that just how self-aware these people are when it comes to this treason.
They know what they're doing and they know better and then they do it anyway.
Well, yeah, I mean, the fact that Hillary was willing to pivot on that and use the email to make a completely different point than Sullivan was trying to make and a completely different point than I think she was supporting.
Right.
Because she did have to become the mouthpiece and play at least a little bit nice with the Obama position.
It does show you how calculating these folks are, you know, and they're really good insider players and they are fully cognizant of what they're doing, which I think is even more of an indictment and why they probably all should be in Florence.
You know, like you said earlier on in our chat, you were talking about how Sullivan is always mentioning how, you know, it's like bad things happen and, you know, it's tough stuff when you're making policy.
But, you know, this whole thing about Syria and then also Libya and also Yemen, it reminds me of that.
I mean, this again, this lifeless language that people like Hillary use and that people like Jake use.
I mean, he's talking in a New Yorker interview again about, this is last year, about the overall like shortfalls of the Obama administration.
Right.
And specifically the question was about like Libya and Syria and Yemen.
Right.
And he said, quote, others have said more eloquently than me that hypocrisy and inconsistency are the necessary byproducts of a foreign policy that both has to look out for our interest and try as best as it can to advance that.
I mean, that's a dangerous 20 words to string together right there, you know.
And if words could take human form, that would be like Sullivan's sentence and also Hillary's in some way.
Like it's an apology for legit war crimes.
You know, if you add up all of these instances of policy that Sullivan was very complicit in, in those three or four places I just mentioned, you know, hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands more.
Yeah.
Children.
And you know, when it comes to Libya, there's three or four different stories that describe the meetings in the Oval Office.
I guess they were all kind of tattletailing on each other.
But where you had all the hawks on one side and all the doves on the other arguing about Libya and, you know, to be a fly on the wall, I think would just be maddening.
To read about it is bad enough that essentially some guy like this and a few others, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power and whoever, sitting around on a couple of couches, they get to decide whether to start a war or not.
Well, I don't know.
I kind of think we should.
Well, Susan agrees with me.
Well, I don't think so.
What about you, Samantha?
No.
Well, I agree with Tom and Tom and Bob.
They think that maybe we should wait a little while.
Well, you know, whatever, blah, blah.
And so what do you think, Barack?
Go ahead and start it.
And then that's the war is just these people.
You could take, I don't know, any 10 people out of a restaurant somewhere and say, OK, you guys are in charge of making up this stuff.
Why should anyone have the power to do this?
To kill thousands and thousands of people.
I mean, I don't even think the Congress should have the power to declare war.
But for God's sake, just a bunch of self-important blowhards like Jake Sullivan and Samantha Power who are thinking of themselves first and how this is like Joe Biden, how this is going to look on their record that they were hawkish and muscular and tough and not wimpy so that they can have more power someday.
You know, it's just crazy.
It's like an episode of the Twilight Zone or something, except we're living in it.
So we don't realize how kind of backwards it is, you know?
When I read this stuff and as I've studied it over the years more and more, you know, I'm increasingly convinced that there aren't any adults minding the store.
And what you're describing, it really it feels like the interoffice dynamics in that 90s cult classic movie The Office Space, you know, except instead of fixing the software for Y2K, they're running the war machine.
You know, their product is death.
But otherwise, it feels like that.
I mean, it's just that kind of internal dynamics.
And you look at someone like Sullivan and all the other, you know, Samantha Power and all these people, and I mean, it's amazing that they I mean, it's amazing that any human being gets to make those decisions.
But these people making those calls so just flippantly and just offhandedly and for all the wrong motives.
And there's probably a little bit of a mean girls aspect to it.
Who's mad at who?
You know, who didn't answer whose email fast enough?
I mean, that's what it feels like.
And it's it's not even a joke when I'm saying that, right?
I'm not even being that sarcastic because it's pretty close to how this goes.
Yeah, absolutely.
And seriously, you know, there are three or four or five.
I don't remember all the footnotes now.
I know one of them was Josh Rogan, but there were three or four or five that all told the same story from a different point of view about this was the argument in the Oval Office when we decided to do the Libya war or not, or the last big meeting we had before Obama decided by himself a couple of days later while he was in Brazil to go ahead and announce the start of the war.
But it was told and it really is.
It's just like reading the Bob Woodward books.
I mean, they're full of ridiculous propaganda in a way, but they are based on the primary sources of interviews with these people.
And so you can sort of take their word for it about their relationships with each other.
And you're right.
It's exactly like just some office full of some people.
And the fact that they call themselves experts and make the decisions about war and peace and all of that is completely you could change it out.
They're the same group of people making decisions for the paper company on that Steve Carell show or whatever it is.
They're just some schmucks just like everybody else is the point only with essentially unlimited power at their fingertips.
Yeah.
And the person in charge, the decider matters to some extent, but it's very rarely the right person or it's very rarely the right personality type.
So you have Obama in charge of that crew and Obama is like the ultimate hedger.
He's a political insider, right?
He's always figuring out like, OK, what do I need to do in order to maintain the right amount of support and have Congress behind me on what I really care about?
And so he's he's not going to take firm stands most of the time.
Right.
And then now we have Biden and, you know, he's he's problematic in a whole set of other ways.
Some of them are similar to that, but he's not an intellectually curious guy.
Right.
And so the influence of those people is heightened in the case when you have a chief executive who is like Obama or is like Biden.
And, you know, there is no adult mining the store even at the very top in that sense.
And so these these insiders can have that influence.
And, you know, there's just something about the type of human being that rises to the positions of Jake Sullivan.
I mean, not just anybody can become Jake Sullivan, even not just any Yale guy can become Jake Sullivan.
Right.
It's a it's a certain personality type that is just exceedingly ambitious above all and just knows how to like knife fight intellectually.
And in terms of like office politics, it's it's a dangerous, dangerous man.
And and I'm reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's quip, you know, you know, true terror is to wake up one morning and realize that your high school class is running the country.
And when I look at Sullivan, I feel that way, except he's worse than anyone I went to high school with.
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War two during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right hand margin at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school but should have.
Follow through from the link in the margin at Scott Horton dot org for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
Hey, man, what's macro advisory partners?
Oh, macro.
OK, so that's his favorite consultancy.
I mean, everyone in the Biden crew follows the same archetype as we've talked about.
They go to an Ivy League school.
They apprentice for a congressperson.
Right.
Then they work in Obama's administration at the mid level.
And then while they're in their kind of like holding pattern of the Trump years, they they do two things.
They work at a think tank and then they also are consultants somewhere.
Now, most of them are with West Exec Advisors, which was the Flournoy Blinken co-founded one, but not Jake.
Jake actually works for Macro Advisory Partners, which has got a London and a New York office, I believe.
And it's led by two former British spy chiefs.
They make a whole lot of money.
And what he did specifically for them was that he consulted for Uber.
OK, he almost can't make that up.
Right.
And they they first of all, put Sullivan like a top their public relations material, you know, because they they really liked his insider influence, you know.
So they said that, you know, they boasted that he provides trusted counsel in a turbulent world, you know, because he he's got this insider knowledge.
But he basically was working for Uber to try to like labor negotiations, trying to, you know, deny benefits to contractors, whatever one thinks of that doesn't even really matter.
But he also was involved in kind of consulting different corporate entities to he was providing, quote, forecasting services to have them kind of jump into the newly opened Iranian economy after the nuclear deal, which he had was one of his better moves, I guess.
But after he had helped to negotiate that.
So that's what he did for macro advisory, a source that's pretty familiar with the group said that, quote, this is a step up from the military industrial complex macro.
That is, it's the information industrial complex, you know.
And yeah, so that that's who he worked for.
By the way, even when he was significantly involved with work for macro advisory as early as early 2020.
So we're talking seven, eight months ago.
It never seemed to get into his bio line whenever he wrote an article or whenever, you know, he's got 30 or 40 different bios up on the Internet, you know, at all the different places he's like affiliated with.
And he pretty much never mentioned macro advisory.
I don't think that was an oversight.
Yeah, well, yeah.
Screams conflict of interest.
But then I don't know why he would think that anybody would care more than they hold it against anybody else, which they don't seem to.
I mean, we do, but nobody with any influence seems to care because they're all in on it, too, man.
Well, yeah, I mean, there's some limited critical reporting in the mainstream media about these guys and gals.
I mean, it's more like they'll say, like, if you look at the New York Times or one of those places, what they write about these Biden people is, well, you know, there are some people who are critical and they're critical because of this.
You know what I mean?
It's more like they'll say, you know, some people are critical of them for their influence and their conflicts of interest and stuff.
But why in the world am I, of all people, the person who wrote, I mean, let's be honest, right?
I mean, I'm not tooting my own horn.
The most comprehensive and I think the best analysis of Jake Sullivan that exists is the longest.
It's the it's the most intense.
I did the most research.
Why am I doing it?
I mean, really, why am I doing it?
Why am I doing for Shearer Post?
I love Bob Shearer.
I love Shearer Post.
Why is this not in the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books or other or some other long form, you know, journal in the mainstream?
Well, there's a reason it's not.
And it's what you said, that they're not taking a truly critical eye at these people because they're part of the same tribe and they like the Jake Sullivan's of the world.
They want the Jake Sullivan's of the world running business as usual because business as usual benefits them.
And oh, by the way, they drink at the same cocktail parties on cheat on each other's wives with each other.
I mean, I mean, I'm being a little flip here, but that's who they are.
Let's be clear.
You know, the funny thing about all this, too, Danny, is that, you know, people wanted to finally get rid of the sort of, you know, centrist extremist kind of consensus of the Obama McCain years, you know, and for that matter, the Clinton Bush years before that and to have a return to normalcy, right?
The peace dividend and all of that great stuff we were supposed to get at the end of the Cold War that we never got because of all of Clinton's expansion and then the terror wars and everything.
We wanted the return to normalcy.
So the people unelected the Bush Clinton consensus, but they got Donald Trump, who is a total blowhard idiot and is not really an antiwar guy in any kind of real sense, except like the most kind of crude cartoon of Buchananite America first ism, but never really followed through with any of it and didn't give us a return to normalcy and instead is such a bombastic kind of freak ass weird guy that this is now what counts as the return to normalcy is we go back to the completely bonkers, bananas, treasonous consensus of the Bush Obama, John McCain years as though this is how it's all supposed to be.
This is what we're supposed to be breathing a sigh of relief to is that now we're instead of having, you know, crazy Trump and and hawk Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and all these terrible guys.
Now we're going back to the state and steady, you know, Bush and Obama, especially more like Obama times, which if anyone remembers Obama times compared to actual normalcy and peace, it was a time of war and crisis and emergency.
But the narrative here is that this is the sigh of relief.
This is why everything is going to be OK, because we're right back with the guys who supported Al Qaeda in Syria.
And normalcy, as it's defined, as you're describing, it's kind of inconvenient to mention it often results in more death, American soldiers, but mainly foreigners than.
Even the Trump years, and I'm not omitting the fact that, you know, Trump's support for a number of different kind of proxies and his bombing increases in certain areas, it resulted in enormous amounts of death.
But pound for pound, I mean, the Obama obscenity was at least actually worse.
Right.
In many cases, you know, when you when you throw the fact that he started Yemen, right, or that he green lighted and then supported Yemen and he started the support for that.
So what it's just what kind of country, what kind of society kind of pines, right?
Pines like it's an old high school first love.
They pine for this normalcy, which is grotesque, right?
What kind of society wants the kind of normalcy that results in a hyper expeditionary interventionism that results in mass murder?
I just I never got a memo about that.
I don't remember learning about it in civics class, but that's where we're at today.
Yeah, well, and you can speak for the American people at large, too.
I mean, the average conservative will tell you that we're not supposed to be the policemen of the world.
Of course, we've got to kick butt to protect ourselves against bad guys when bad guys come at us.
But not everything in the world is supposed to be America's business.
And most liberals and leftists and progressives, even if they don't prioritize it, are, you know, by default, essentially descendants of the Vietnam era new left who oppose this kind of thing.
That's just the bottom of their agenda.
And everybody with actual power and influence, they're all in on with the vested interest.
They're the ones who care.
You know, there's essentially there's foreign policy and there's antiwar dot com, right?
At foreign policy dot com, it's all by people who are in on it for people who are in on it.
And then at antiwar dot com, it's, oh, my God, would you look at these people?
And then that's it.
Nobody else is even interested at all.
Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it.
And accurate, I think, is like you've got the.
You know, the critics like us who for our sins care about this so much and and all the people in our lives or, you know, I can speak for myself.
All the people in my life were like, Danny, just give it a rest.
You know, like I mean, even like women I've been married to where it's like, why do you care so much, care less, care more about, you know, whatever this like day to day stuff.
So there's us, right, who are just insufferable about it.
And then it's the insider class.
And that's really it.
And you're right.
Most people in the middle, it's not particularly high on their agenda for a number of reasons.
And we don't get the audience that would be necessary generally to make massive change.
And so what happens is that we sort of as a society, we just defer to the experts, to the cult of qualification, as I've started to call it.
I'm so sick of hearing that Michelle Flournoy and Jake Sullivan and Avril Haines.
Oh, well, you know, at least they're qualified.
I mean, the good thing about the Biden crew is, I mean, they really are qualified.
What what does qualified mean?
Like, yes, they are qualified if you accept the rules of the cult, if you accept the rules of what makes you qualified.
But I reject that, like that because they they've been complicit in mass murder before they're qualified to continue in the future.
I mean, that's what they're really saying.
Right.
I just reject the idea that there aren't better people available because that's just not true.
You know, we circumscribe the number of people that we get to choose from.
And then we say, OK, you can have a ham sandwich or you can have a ham and cheese sandwich.
And that's it.
Which would you like?
Yep.
Yeah.
And, you know, it could have been Buttigieg or Klobuchar or any horrible Democratic senator from somewhere, something like that.
It have to be Biden, who's just, you know, another one of Bill Clinton's mistresses, basically no different than Bush or Obama or this entire not just not just a carbon copy of them, but they're all along co-conspirator with them this whole time in getting us into every bit of this in the Clinton years, the Bush years and the Obama years.
You know, it's crazy that it's like this, man.
No, and of course, Klobuchar is who Jake worked for first.
Oh, really?
He's from Minnesota.
You know, I said that the archetypal Biden bro starts his life out after the Ivy League as like a staffer for a usually a pretty prominent congressperson.
And so in his case, being from Minnesota, he works for Klobuchar and Klobuchar tells a new secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, I've got this great guy.
He's really awesome.
And the rest is history.
You can't make it up.
You can't make up how incestuous it is.
And the only reason I picked her, however bad she is, she was not George W. Bush's handmaiden in getting us into Iraq or to like Biden was.
She didn't pass the crime bill that Biden passed just because she wasn't there.
I'm not trying to give her any credit.
I just.
Oh, no, no.
That's all.
I just want to be clear about that, that people understand that.
All I mean by that is it really has to be this particular guy co-conspirator with Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Obama on everything.
This is the guy that it has to be.
OK, fine.
You know, it doesn't feel like we're already a year into the Biden administration and it's only worth four days into December.
You won't even be sworn in for a month and a half still.
I don't know that I can handle just the interpersonal interactions that are required by all this.
I mean, if I have to hear another and I'm look, I'm not PC.
I'm not afraid to say it.
Like if I have to hear it, because it usually just depending on just because of the circles I run in and the nature of my life, if I have to hear another white woman, vague liberal talk to me about like, oh, at least it's not Trump or like or at least George W. Bush, like loved his family and was a good father.
And like, at least we've got qualified people.
If I have to hear that again, like there's going to be an intellectual murder, suicide like that's just the thing like I that's the problem with the Biden years is like I can already see it like this is I'm just going to have to keep listening to that.
And they make you feel like you're crazy.
For you know what, though?
I mean, I don't know, man.
I was going to say, you know, the the left coalition, the Democrat coalition, which I pretty much divide in half is like the liberals you just described, the NPR types and the Democratic Party.
And then there's the people to the left of them, the real progressives and socialists and communists and anarchists and stuff who are the real leftists.
And I think Obama's kind of personality and blackness and stuff really won over a lot of the left in a way that I think Biden won't be able to do that.
He's a lot of leftists were good on Obama, too.
I don't mean to say that.
A lot of them stayed good on the wars all the way through and stuff.
But Joe Biden is certainly does not bring the charisma to bear that Obama did as far as winning over the left, their acquiescence or silence, ignoring the wars and that kind of thing.
And and the good leftist journalists are out for blood on Biden and have been and are hard after him.
You know, all the Code Pink people and Max Blumenthal and the Grayzone Project people and, you know, Consortium News dot com and all that.
They're not impressed by somebody being a Democrat.
You know, they're still our strongest allies and will stay our strongest allies.
So there's some hope there that, yeah, because he really is so much more like John McCain in in temperament and and identification than Obama was that, you know, hopefully the left will, you know, feel good about treating him like Lyndon Johnson, really, you know, not one of them and somebody to be attacked and diminished by them.
I agree with you.
I do think that that's the silver lining of getting, you know, you're saying like, oh, my God, like we had to get Biden and I couldn't agree more.
Like, it just blows my mind that like we're still in a place in the year 2020 where like Biden is what we're fed, you know, as the best option.
But if there is a silver lining, it's that Biden's not going to fool those people on.
But, you know, they're going to say to, yeah, is let them eat wokeism, you know, forget economics, forget imperialism, forget bank bailouts and real corruption.
Let's talk about how everybody has mean feelings in their heart and and government has to solve that somehow or God knows what red herring they have for us next.
You know, you know, I mean, I've I definitely stole his line that he used in our moderate rebels interview with Max Blumenthal said that, you know, Biden's going to appoint all the woke warmongers.
And it's just a great line, not just because the alliteration.
But I mean, it's true, though.
I mean, that's the thing, like, you know, you can't you can't have real debate on serious issues like economics, whatever side you're on.
And you can't have real debate about empire.
But you can have diversity in your war making.
You know, you could have diversity among the war makers, you know, no hide behind it, too.
I can't believe you're criticizing the secretary of defense.
You sexist.
Well, it's like that, Mickey, the young young or whatever that I've just been just going off on on Twitter.
I mean, she's the one who said that, you know, it makes her just totally like just a passive aggressive tweet.
Like it makes her really uncomfortable when like white males are criticizing the uber qualified Michelle Flournoy.
And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait.
So I'm to believe that because someone is a woman or a woman of color, because she's talking about women of color, too, then like that means she's going to be what, like more humane and decent and strategic.
Like, did you ever read a history book like the women who the first women to be in charge of various countries?
Are we like Indira Gandhi was massacring Sikhs?
But like, well, she was a woman of color like like that's ridiculous.
It's belied by all history.
It's just ludicrous.
Well, of course, I mean, and I'm sure that at Georgetown they have an official, you know, name for this or whatever, where Democrats and especially women act extra tough so that you don't call them a Democratic woman.
So, you know, look at my muscular foreign policy.
I've already started three wars and where this is how they build their credibility.
And Hillary Clinton, even though she lost to Obama because of how bad she was on Iraq War two, she didn't take that lesson to heart at all.
The first thing she did as secretary of state was figure out where she can escalate the worst.
We got a triple in Afghanistan.
We got to go to Libya.
We got to do Syria and all of these things to prove what a muscular foreign policy she because she was going to run on that in 2016.
And of course, by 2016, it was like, what foreign policy?
I wasn't secretary of state.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Libya never heard of it.
But in 2011, the lesson of 2008 was completely lost on her.
You know what I need?
A muscular foreign policy.
So then everyone will think I'm a tough guy.
That's what they like.
Tough guys, even though she just lost because that exact same thinking.
Absolutely again.
And it's it's not polite to to to mention what you're describing, but it's true that there is a tendency and it's been demonstrated historically over and over again, especially early on the first women.
So many times take these positions or take over these roles.
They do feel it appears what you're describing this need to be tough.
And it's not unlike that what I've called the Democrats dilemma all the time, which is, you know, this idea that, well, if the Republicans are being tough on something, then then then I've got to show how tough I am, you know, and it's like.
But it doesn't it it doesn't work, because in other words, if the you know, and by the way, the Republicans aren't always more hawkish than the Democrats either historically.
But in the cases where they are, like in the Bush years, you know, Kerry's like, well, I I have to be tough on these things.
Otherwise, they're going to swiftboat me.
And it's like, well, they're going to swiftboat you anyway, buddy.
You know what I mean?
So just why don't you just say what you really believe to the extent that you believe anything?
It's but this is definitely what happens.
Yeah, exactly.
I'll prove how tough I am by rolling right over to these tougher men than me.
Yeah.
OK, same thing Obama did.
Same thing Donald Trump did.
You know, the generals are going to call you weak.
Oh, well, we can't have that.
Well, I don't know.
How about you take the general in front of the camera and then slap him with your open hand and tell him, I wear the pants, you work for me.
You know, and everyone will say, wow, what a tough guy.
He ended that war over that general's dead body.
See, I love that idea.
That's what I would do.
Yeah, that's why we need you.
That's why we need you in the oval, you know, but I'm serious.
I mean, generals don't get fired enough.
That's a controversial opinion.
That shouldn't be controversial.
In World War II, George Marshall, on behalf of FDR, fired, oh, I don't remember the number, but it's a lot.
We're talking like over a dozen division level and above commanders, just because, like for incompetence, just, oh, I don't like the way you're doing X, you're fired.
And like no one batted an eye.
Whereas like now, when McKiernan was fired in Afghanistan, it was the first time a theater had been, commander had been fired like in forever.
And it was like this story.
Like these guys serve at your pleasure.
I don't like I wouldn't be afraid of that in that sense.
Like, oh, OK, well, I don't really you're not supporting my policy or you're sort of working behind the scenes to, you know, to work, you know, working against it.
You're trying to scuttle it like you're gone.
That's it.
No big deal.
And we do know, by the way, like this isn't just an accusation.
We know from very solid reporting in the case of Obama and Trump both, and especially on the issue of Afghanistan, that this was exactly what was at stake.
If you don't do this, they're going to call you weak.
So do the tough guy thing and roll over and escalate the war because escalating wars are tough.
And both of them gave into that logic when all they had to do was be tough by winning the fight against the generals.
In fact, quite unlike Obama, Trump was reported to have screamed in the general's faces that you guys suck and you haven't won a war since 1945.
And I spit on your mama's grave.
And how do you like that?
But then did what they wanted anyway, just insulted them when what he should have been doing was praising them to high heaven as he ended the war.
Something like that.
Slap him if he has to.
But instead he berated them and insulted them and turned them all against him, but then went along with what they wanted anyway.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, there really hasn't been a case where a president has stood up to his generals in both rhetoric and action.
There hasn't been that since, well, since the Second World War.
Not really.
I mean, I guess you could say Truman and MacArthur, but even that, you know, that didn't really work out for a number of reasons.
But I mean, it was the right call.
But, you know, MacArthur ended up calling home a hero and there were all the issues with Truman himself.
Oh, by the way, Truman, that's who Jake Sullivan listed as his political hero, political inspiration of all the human beings from Cleopatra to Clinton.
Right.
That's how vague the question was.
Yeah, because he proves that Democrats aren't all a bunch of sissies.
Tough guy, Truman.
That alone, like honestly, that was his 40 under 40 profile for Time magazine.
Sullivan's that answer alone to me, just that he's not qualified like that, like right there.
I'm like, we need somebody different for nationals.
If that's all I knew about him, that he said that that was his hero.
I'm like, all right, let's go to the next person.
Like speed dating.
Give me a new national security advisor, you know?
Right.
Unless he said, listen, no, I'm totally against everything he did in World War Two and Korea and the atom bombs and all of that.
I just like that he desegregated the armed forces.
That's all.
Or something like that.
OK, I'll listen to the rest of the sentence, but that's not what he meant.
It was the firebombing that he approved of.
Decisive.
Yeah, right.
You know, even if you wanted to be woke or you or you wanted to, you know, virtue signal in some way, like you couldn't have just picked a cliche like Martin Luther King or something like like it had to be.
It had to be Truman.
Like you couldn't.
There's just so many options.
But it does.
Well, it does go to show the like, what's he going to say?
Bill Clinton.
I mean, how many?
It's not like he's got really a lot.
Hey, Walter Mondale was a towering figure of leadership on our part.
You know, he's got to go back to find somebody who just because time has washed away the truth of things that he can invoke as somebody who is worth respecting, you know?
Well, it's like I think what Sullivan really meant to answer to that question, like Truman was just the name he picked.
But the real answer he would have given is, oh, my political hero is whoever is the polar opposite of Mike Dukakis in that picture wearing the helmet.
And so, right.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's what his real answer was, is like, my political hero is not that whatever is not that, but still a Democrat.
That's who I'm for.
Yep.
But that's the story.
Yeah.
Well, and you got to admit, I mean, that calculation seems to work for them over and over again.
Because liberals just cannot be made.
It's not just the people in D.C.
I mean, I was giving them too much credit before.
The leftists are good, but the liberals, they have that same thing about, oh, look at me.
I support a muscular foreign policy because, you know, in other ways, I'm a socialist, but I don't want you to think I'm not a patriot.
So I'll be a warmonger.
And then that'll, you know, secure my bona fides as a real American.
That's right.
So they keep tacking to these liberal hawks.
And yeah, by the way, Source, I'm an Austinite.
That's how I know that.
Right, right.
Yeah, I mean, and, you know, Truman is, Truman's considered the archetypal liberal hawk.
I mean, they sort of largely coined the phrase around him, and this is who they go to.
This, it can win elections, I guess.
It can have political benefits.
Political benefits, but the republic doesn't benefit from tacking in that direction.
The world doesn't, right, certainly by any measure.
But, you know, I don't think Jake Sullivan really cares about that.
I really do not think, because I'm telling you, man, he doesn't care about people.
Okay, now here's the thing, though.
We're out of countries to attack that can't hit us back, right?
I mean, what's he going to do?
They're not going to start a war with Iran.
They're terrified of starting a war with Iran.
The services don't want, you know, the chiefs, they don't want a war with Iran.
China is fun to pretend and have a cold war against, but they could also destroy every major city in America in one day, and so that's not good.
So what are they going to do?
Pick a fight with India?
They got nukes.
I guess they could pick a fight with Brazil, except Brazil is closely allied to the United States right now.
Right.
So maybe that'll keep the peace, is that Bush and Obama have already just exhausted the list?
Yeah, no, I think what we'll see is, like, the low intensity, kind of diversionary wars, low intensity for us, high intensity for the people dying.
I do think that we'll see, like, a continuation of that.
I would keep an eye on Africa.
Yeah.
Obviously, that's where I think of, like, the 25 to 30 countries where the U.S. is, like, actively advising a war zone or a conflict.
I want to say the plurality is now in Africa.
I would keep an eye out there.
You'll see kind of that low level continuation, I think.
And hopefully not Eastern Europe.
Oh, God.
Right.
But yeah, well, anyway, Scott, sorry if you have to edit this, but I got to run.
I have a radio here in a minute.
Right on, man.
Okay.
Well, thanks.
I appreciate it again, Danny.
Yeah.
And I'll be in touch more about your book.
And thanks a lot for having me.
Hell yeah.
Okay, guys, that is Danny Sherson.
And his latest is Biden's young hawk, the case against Jake Sullivan.
And he's right.
It really is the best, worst thing written about the guy so far.
So check it out at SheerPost and at AntiWar.com.
APSradio.com, AntiWar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
