Welcome to Caribbean Rhythms, episode 87. On special show today I have Sam Finley, the writer of Breakfast with the Dirt Cult, which is a novel about soldier adventures in Afghanistan, and also a tale of our time about the perfidy of women. But he has based this novel on his own personal adventures as a combat soldier in Afghanistan. And I have to emphasize combat soldier, because he is not, like, Biden or Biden's son, whatever, or John Kerry pretend he was on a boat, he was fishing for carp in Mekong River. I don't know. But then there is David French, who was, I believe it is called the JAG-OFF. It's called the JAG-OFF division of the military, where he sit in office as a lawyer and he persecute American soldiers.

Sam Finley was a real soldier, a real warrior, and I'm very happy to have him on this show. He also had—well, I'll get to this in a second—but he had some rather esoteric encounter in Afghanistan with lost race of Greek refugees. But that's for one moment. Welcome to show Sam. Hello, Vap. Thank you for having me on. It's an honor to be here with you. Yes. Sam, I have long loved your book, Breakfast with Diert Kolt. When did you write this? Oh, good Lord. I started writing it shortly after I enlisted back in 2000. I started taking notes because I was pissed off at all the drill sergeants and how the army wasn't what I thought it was supposed to be. I felt like I'd been had. So I just started taking notes. And then after I was wounded and was in the hospital,

I started writing those notes into a novel and then spent time trying to get it published until 2012, finally self-published. Yes, Sam, now your book, before we get to the meat of your adventure at Afghanistan and meat of the book, it's been reviewed in quite a few places already in Daily Caller And recently, by our friend Benjamin Bredock in magazine IM 1776. I don't know if I am missing any other reviews you want to tell people where they can get condensation of your book, but I think it's just criminally underappreciated. Your book should be a major cultural phenomenon in the United States. It should have been made into a movie. Any normal society would have made your book into a well-known Hollywood movie by now,

but we discussed it on the show, but where are some reviews people can read of your book? Oh, well, as a matter of fact, there's one that's going to be coming out soon, from what I understand, from Michael Anton. I've admired his work, like a lot of people, since the Flight 93 stuff that he wrote and been following him since then. And on a lark, I asked if he'd be interested in taking a look at it. He was kind enough to, and he's going to be writing something, from what I understand, for the Claremont Review of Books. So I'm obliged to Michael Anton for the upcoming one, yeah. Yes, the upcoming one. But up to now, the IM 1776 is the most recent review, yes? Yeah, that's where Ben Braddock had published his. And Mark Granza over there runs a great outfit, and they've been very generous.

Yes. Mike Anton is very interesting. He will do this review, from what I understand, of your book. He did the review of my book. I think he is a very brave man. He is to be commended because really what he's doing, a kind of cultural reporting that nobody else wants to do, although they claim they want to do it, just to give audience of a brief sketch of what American so-called intelligentsia cultural scene is like. Since 2015 or 2016, when this sphere or undercurrent in American society first came to their view, and first they tried to call it alt-right. By the way, Sam is not alt-right, he's not a frog or anything like this. He wrote his book quite a bit before 2015. But I am perhaps part of that sphere, and they were asking since 2015-16, when this

became well-known during Trump election, they were asking, where is an alt-right book? We want to see what these people are saying and what they really believe. We want to see some type of intellectual exposition of all of their positions and so forth. And of course, my book came out in 2018. By that time they had been asking for years, we want to see a book, we want to see a book, and so forth. Well, after my book came out, the mainstream media predictably completely ignored it. That's fine. I did not write it for them. But it's odd that they would ask for it and then completely ignore something that actually was selling very well and was spreading, and many people had read it, and it spread outside

any so-called right-wing sphere, as I keep saying, gamers were reading my book and expatriate communities were reading my book and so forth, is completely ignored, even until Mike Anton reviewed it and he explained in his review why it had already solved well by that time, and he was essentially doing cultural reporting, trying to show what so-called frogs were saying saying, what this new sphere was writing about. And I think he do very well to show this samizdat. What I've called samizdat is—everyone know what this means. It's Soviet era illicit literature, often self-published, like my book, your book, Delicious Tacos. Also, he self-published his novel Zeposia and so forth. He also precedes 2015-16 phenomenon and so forth, because this had been boiling up under

the surface for a long time. But your book, Sam, is, again, a wonderful example of Samizdat, something that, you know, these people say they love counterculture or this, but your book is real counterculture, is the voice of a soldier of his adventures. It is, you could say, an anti-war book, but it is the real anti-war, not the establishment regime supported anti-war, the fake anti-war we can talk about that later. It is also a story of the female-male relation breakdown in our time and many such things. In other words, it tells the story of our time in a fun, fresh way. It's very entertaining to read, so forth. It's cinematic. I reread first chapter before this interview, and I had remembered almost every scene from what you wrote.

And I had read the book some year ago, but I remembered every scene, because you write so cinematic and so forth. But so, again, it's something that the media claims they want. They want to see counterculture and statements from—you know, I don't even want to call it fraud, but it's really a burgeoning youth counterculture movement. They say they want to, but they completely ignore it. This was my long aside to explain, yes, Mike Anton is doing good, essentially, cultural reporting work by showing normies, people who don't go online and so forth, maybe an older audience of conservatives, showing them what this Samizdat sphere is about. What do you think about this, Sam? Oh, good lord. Well, first off, I'm obliged to you for that glowing endorsement, Bap. That means a great deal.

And as far as Anton goes, he can drink from my canteen any day. That's a man who's got something to lose. And he's willing to kind of mix it up with some people like us. And that says something. Because it's easy to kind of paint people like us as the boogeyman, which we really, I don't know. I feel almost bad to kind of make a defense of this, but like, you remember the manosphere. And I started coming into a lot of this stuff back in 2009, roundabout. And there were things I was, I went back to school to get my master's degree, and there was stuff that I was being taught in like international relations theory that was just wrong. And the whole college stuff was wrong on so many levels. And I was suddenly, here's this oasis where there are people like Matt Forney

used to run a blog called Imalafine. He had all these links to all these different things. And it felt like there was this ferment that was going on of people who were learning things about women, but also I think either you or guys like Roosh or something like that would have said like, they're lying to me about women and gender relations and all that. What else are they lying to me about? And you start pulling that thread and there's all these gaps that permeate this orthodoxy that we have to live in. And here are all these guys who are just kind of falling through the cracks and we're all putting the pieces together. And I would not have the words that I was able to use in the book had it not been for them. So I'm standing on the shoulders of all of those guys from back then.

Yes, Sam, I think you point to great truths, which is they come up with all kind of word. Frog, okay, we use that one for ourselves, but they come up with hard right or alt right or these stupid, alt right is a stupid word. It was invented, I believe. My friend Thomas Severn said the word outright was invented by Richard Spencer and a leftist journalist in a gay bar, you know, like the alternative right, you know what I mean? But it's a dumb word, because it doesn't really have to do with right wing. I think it has to do with the truth. I know that's a big claim. But this regime, establishment, call it what you will, their educational system is so destroyed not since last four or five years with so-called critical race theory.

No, no, critical race theory was already there in many so-called progressive high school in the late 1990s, in the early 2000s. And the suppression of, and even before that, and the suppression of biological truth. You can read Camille Paglia from early 1990s, and she explained how far the truth about human nature was suppressed in academia and the humanities, social sciences, so forth. And so I don't really like to call it even a right-wing or political movement. What this whole counterculture is about that you were just pointing it to is we bring up timeless truths that this regime cannot abide and that it tries to censor and to suppress and so forth. And so, finally, around 2015, 2016, because Trump got elected, they finally noticed that

a large number of young people—and not even all of them right-wing, by the way, there are many on the left also—but a large number of young people had basically had it with the schoolmarm with the spursed face and so forth that is censoring all knowledge, again, in educational system, in movies, in academia, so forth. So I see your book as filling part of that hole of knowledge left by the general culture. Again, in a normal time, it would have been made into a movie, and in a normal time maybe You would say 1960s, 70s. I don't know. The culture was controlled even back then. But you say I praise your book. I will give you one more praise for the book. And I want to tell the audience, we will not discuss passages or read from book because

it's not good for radio, this type of thing, to read from a book or do literary exegesis on the air. But my friend Scott Laughlin, who is also great, you could say, subculture, counterculture writer, now he has stopped writing. He has a technology blog, Scott Laughlin at WordPress. But he used to write articles for Tucky Mag and some other publication. And in my opinion, Scott is maybe the best humorist of the last 20 or 30 years. His articles are hilarious. He's one of the best writers I know. It's a tragedy he stopped writing. But OK, I understand he doesn't want the attention that come with that and so forth. He has other priorities, too, whatever. But the point is, Scott is an amazing writer, and he's a close friend of mine, and he's very ordinary, Sam. He's extremely ordinary.

And he has extreme high standards. So many time I would send him something I wrote, he'd say, no, it's crap, you need to change it, and so forth. When I sent him my book, he liked it, I knew it was good book. He say, your book, when I brought it up recently, he say, your book is one of the best things he's read recently, okay? And by recently he meant in last few years. So I just want to tell audience I am not exaggerating about Sam Finley book. It's a genuinely fun, good novel. You should get Breakfast with the Dirt Cult is the title. I will stop praising your book, Sam. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to flatter you. But so anyway, yes, when you first go Afghanistan, which most of your book is about Afghanistan,

and I know you serve in Bosnia also, but when you first go to Afghanistan, because Afghanistan and very much on people's mind now. Yeah, I served with the 10th Mountain Division and we were about the third rotation in, as I recall. Our unit made it in country back in August of 03. And we came in from Tangikistan on some C-130s and the second we stopped at the runway in Kandahar Airfield, it was like being in a whole nother world. And I've never seen anything quite like it. And we all stand up, and it's darker than 10 foot up a coal miner's ass in the C-130. And all of a sudden, the back ramp starts opening up real slow, and you see this just blinding white light, like we're all being nuked, or something like that.

And it's just completely demoralizing, because all this heat starts coming in at you, and it's like 120 degrees in the shade. We all stand up and we have to get our rucks on and go walk out of that, just to go over to the tent to start doing our paperwork. Because of course we had to do pay for work and by the time we got there, you'd have thought somebody whooped our ass. The heat was just completely otherworldly and it was just this dark, baked clay architecture and things had been shot up and it was just, it was surreal. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie or something like that. And God, the first couple of weeks we were just jumping out of our ass trying to get our gear squared away, recite our sights on our weapons, and make sure all our gear was dressed right dress.

And then we had to deal with the fact that the heat was so intense, it would dry out our mucous membranes, where you get nosebleeds, and so you'd just start snorting water just to keep your nose wet. So for the first- It was dry? There was no humidity? Yeah. Yeah. It was completely otherworldly. And so for the first couple of weeks, that was our life of just juggling boredom and and then just a bunch of crazy tasks until we got outside the wire. And we were like two or three weeks in country where we got our first mission. And that was a whole nother experience. And your first mission was to find a remnant of Alexander as a great Greek army that had joined Buddhist monk in Himalaya, they wear green robe, is this correct? Well, the official story was different,

but I do think that there was an element of that because those elements, you know, they talk about like the green robed people and stuff like that out of the Zebul province, I think it was out of Deshopan. So there was some activity with some special forces people, but there were rumors that some of the people were in fact remnants of, you know, Alexander, you know, Buddhist crossover. So it was there. Yes, yes. No, no, of course, I kid, of course Sam, but no, there is no such thing. There's no such thing, but so you found this alien landscape, Afghanistan, tell the audience some more, what experience they're like, were you in a firefight? People want to know? Yeah, in fact, that was our first mission, which that in itself was kind of wild in that you get outside the wire and it's,

you'd see these villages and it was like, I grew up in church and you'd imagine biblical scenes in your head and it looked something like that, only there'd be these surreal little modern impositions of things like cell phones or AK-47s that might pepper it. But you'd see these people living in these low baked clay houses and it would smell like shit and animal and hay and just the musk and sweat of human bodies just kind of living like that. And you'd feel these, an impulse to pity, kind of like what you had talked about in your last episode, and you'd feel these impulses of compassion towards them, but you also knew that you were in the middle of a war, and you might have to gather all the men and separate them from the women, and then search their houses, and that was just,

I couldn't tell you how many times I've done that, and I've hated it every time, but that's your job. But later on, we did get into a firefight, and it was weird, too, how it happened. It was, I think it was like a two or three-man observation post, it was a part of a larger element. Because they would use conventional forces to just bird dog Taliban Al Qaeda forces, where we would just chase people and they would run from us and then they'd have the secret squirrel special forces types who'd set ambushes. So we were always chasing people and very rarely did we ever catch them. But that time we did. Yes, as time went on, Sam, the boredom set in. I know many soldiers complained this. Oh yeah, it was ever present.

It was all the time, because especially when you'd go outside the wire, you weren't allowed to have headphones or books or anything because you needed to pay attention. And so most of the time you're walking and you're in your mind or paying attention, which in some ways is kind of neat because it's like you hone old instincts and you forget what all you're aware of and what all you're picking up on. Whereas we spend so much time in screens here in the West, if you get out in the woods and away from that stuff for a while it's like you can feel the way things are around you in a way that like you couldn't before but back in there whenever we're back inside the wire there was a ton of boredom and that's to say nothing of just being in a normal garrison you know not not even

in Afghanistan or Bosnia or wherever just being back at like Fort Drum it was it was ridiculous all these yes go ahead no no you go ahead you you've mentioned this to be in our talks before or the feeling of ineffectiveness or futility of missions there, you know? Yeah, there was some things that you'd see in their culture that was just so strange where you'd feel like this whole thing is just crazy. Like for instance, we would do these things called vehicle checkpoints, and for those that don't know, you'd take about four guys and you'd have one guy controlled traffic on, say, like a four-lane highway, two going one way, two going the other, and you'd shut down one of the sides. And you'd get cones and you'd get it down to one lane, and you'd have one guy control that.

You'd have another guy actually search the people, another guy cover people by just getting ready to shoot people if they had to with an M249 squad automatic weapon. And you'd have another guy actually conduct the search with a mirror that's got a pole and wheels, and you'd look at the bottom of the car. To do a proper vehicle search, it would take, it takes a long time because you're looking for bombs or anything suspicious and that takes a while, especially with these like ramshackle vehicles. You can't tell what's car and what's not, but you, you would do that. And meanwhile, you've got all these cars backing up out of like Kandahar, which is like the second biggest city and they're just lining up. Then it gets worse because they would, uh, some people in the back would eventually get

the bright idea to try to drive around. And so then you'd stop there and the next thing you know, you've got like a half dozen And and it didn't make sense until you got outside You do hearts and minds tours where you go into some village and you'd have the you know the doc give medical aid to those who needed it and we would give care packages of might be like pencils or dental floss or whatever and and you would tell the people to get in line through the interpreter or the turp as we called them and they would look at you like you fell out of a dog's ass and You would have to physically put them one behind the other because you'd realize later they didn't have this, to use the egg head term, social technology of standing in line. Which is, I'd heard a professor who had spent time

in Sierra Leone say that that was a thing and it's tough to wrap your mind around until you actually see it. And you try to get stuff done where it's like, you know, on a highway or just in a village, you have an entire people whose culture has no place for standing in line. And that's huge. Yes. Sam, sorry to interrupt you. I just... Go ahead. You bring up the attitude of the villagers and so forth. I mentioned on previous show another veteran friend of mine, he talked about they would go on these patrols. This is later than when you were in Afghanistan. But they would go on these patrols and the head man would come out and apologize that he had led the Taliban into the village. But it's a difficult situation the villagers are in, right?

It's just between a rock and a hard place, so-called, right? You'd go into these places and you wouldn't know even really who is your enemy and who is your friend. Because it might be an issue where you just have some normal Afghan villager, he's being told he has to provide hospitality or he's going to get killed. Or they may be true believers who genuinely want you gone, and you don't know. Yes. How do you solve that problem, especially when you know you're there only for a brief time and the second you leave, they'll return, you know, the Taliban or Al Qaeda or whoever, or just bandits. How do you solve that problem? Because you can't be everywhere. Yes, American military makes this mistake for a very long time, I think, in so-called counterinsurgency warfare.

It did the same thing in Vietnam, where it claimed that it ruled villages. For example, under Diem claimed that, oh, we have control of all these villages in South Vietnam. But actually at night they did not. At night the communists came into the villages and the villagers were afraid of reprisal. So they were not on your side, and all the hearts and minds winning so-called meant nothing. And American control was limited only to the capital. Well, we can talk more of this futility of the mission on the next segment, but, I mean, if you want to say something about it now, that's fine. But I wanted to ask you in closing also about the physiognomy of the people. You were based, I understand, in Kandahar.

But did you ever see Noristanis, the white Afghans, and I understand actually many Pashtuns are also a white or a blondish. Yeah, we actually saw a few who were like that. I have a red beard and you'd sometimes see ones who'd be like that, who look very similar to people like us in that respect. You'd also see among women, I noticed, they would dye their hair a shade of like, it's like a purple red, some color that God does not make. And it was bizarre to see, but yeah. That's really, you know, in Argentina, All the old women have this kind of hair you just described, like a red-purple dye. I don't know why. I don't think it's connected to the Pashtuns. Maybe they think it's rocker style. I don't know about that. Maybe. I don't know. Yes. Sam, why don't we take short cigarette break?

What do you think? And we come back to talk more about the broader problem with American strategy and misadventure in Afghanistan. What do you think? That'd be outstanding. Thanks, Pat. Very good. We will be right back. Yes. Welcome back to Show Caribbean Rhythms. I am here with Sam Finley, author of Breakfast with the Dirt Coat, maybe as the best Afghan war tale, mostly based on his own personal times. You could say it's a war memoir, but actually it's very entertaining novel, fun novel. You should get it. And, Sam, you mentioned on last segment the thing you note when you get to Afghanistan is the horrid weather in summer, the dry heat. I was just, the last few months in Spain, I don't reveal my current location.

Maybe I'm still in Spain hidden, but I don't, you know, they will never know where I'm hiding. But I can say for the last few months I was in Spain, and Castile, the central province, very hot and dry in the summer, Madrid—I didn't really leave Madrid. Madrid gets so hot that it get—there's a mass exodus for August. Everything almost shut down in August. The city empties out as people go to north or south coast or they go to places that are cooler or near the ocean, because it gets to be somewhat 90 to over 100 degrees every day and maybe 10 to 15 percent humidity, which I think that can be easier to take than some time high humidity. But I basically spent the whole day sleeping, and I would go out for night walks. It would be completely empty streets.

I can't imagine what it would have been like to go on long marches with armor and a weapon and so forth in that kind of heat or worse. Maybe you would like to tell audience some more experiences you had there and war anecdote. Everyone loved war anecdote. But before you do, I need to make complaint. And this is not an attack on my European friends, because Spain, a wonderful country. Madrid is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Franco kept Spain out of the war. And so many buildings, perfect condition, it was not shelled. The boulevards are maybe more impressive than Paris. They're big, nice boulevards with beautiful buildings and so forth. It has very nice atmosphere at night. However, the European popular culture is somewhat much worse than American popular culture.

And Europeans like to look down at the so-called Yankee barbarian and this and the television and so forth. But the television in Spain, and not only in Spain, in France also, is much stupider than popular TV in United States. And so, for example, during these hot summers they would have just hours and hours only of reporting weather, as if they had never experienced a hot summer before. There would be literally four to five� I would keep television sometime on in the background for noise. It would be four to five hour reporting, oh, there's a heat wave, there's a heat. What will we do? Oh, the electricity costs went up by whatever, 20 cent or this, hours of panel discussions and this, or very minor fires that inevitably start in hot summers, would be, again, turning to day-long stories.

This is just my way of complaining about so-called European popular culture. If you go to—if you drive in Europe, you go to rest stops, they have their own shitty fast food that is actually much worse than McDonald's, in my opinion, and so forth. So, please, Europeans need to stop this snottery when it comes to American popular culture. But I actually mentioned that because everyone's a pussy now, Sam. And so you can see these people, the Spanish, conquered half the world some centuries ago, but now their television is just complaining about some hot weather nonstop. And so very different experience to your wartime adventures, which included these incredible hardships. And of course there are many movies that deal with this contrast.

What is that one with the guy who defused bomb and he come back? There was a decent movie recently, I think Jeremy Renner is the main protagonist in that movie. He come back and, you know, he sees the final scene is he is in the supermarket and he sees all this selection of cereal. And he say, what is this, you know, the contrast between that and his exciting life of hardship and adventure during wartime. I don't know if you had any thoughts on that. But basically I am curious about more of your adventure in Afghanistan. And I think people must hear this. Oh, well, I appreciate that, Bap. You got me thinking about that time downrange and what it all meant and what happened. And I tell you, there's things I regret, but one of those now is that if I had to do all

over again, I would have loved to have been on a road march and just kind of got in my own little world and just said, my name's Jamal, my name's Jamal, my name is Stead. I wish we would have had that then. I would have loved to have been up on a mountain and just been like, Manu, Jamal, Manu, Sergeant Finley, you okay? Yes, this is good. Well, they might have put you straight jackets, but they could go down the mall. They might go down the mall. Sergeant Finley just chimped out on the march. Yes. But I guess, think about what we were talking about just a moment ago in this, you know, of Haji being caught between a rock and a hard place, but also just the complexity of the us and them and what all they have going on in their own societies.

I remember hearing about, I think it was Rory Stewart, who, he was like one of these like Brit guys who goes everywhere and does everything. I think he walked across Afghanistan at one point. And they, I say they, I think it might've been Oxford or Harvard or one of these places, They get him to come out, and they wanted to have him talk about Afghanistan, and they're all hopped up off of West Wing and all the stuff that they pick up in college, and they're all undergrads and whatnot, and they're going to go out and save the world, and they're going to terraform Afghanistan and make it a nice little liberal democracy. You just know what's going on in their head. They're going to go off and be foreign service officers, and they're going to fix it all.

He comes out and he starts talking about tribal politics and the realities of things, and they don't know whether to shit up their back, because it's so complex and it's such a mess that it defies our way of looking at things. And to kind of give you an idea of it, no shit, there I was, Afghanistan. We go into this village one time, and we'd been informed that an NGO had been killed. They'd been, I think it was a woman and maybe her pilot, maybe another person, they'd gone out to this village out in rural Afghanistan. What is NGO? Is it non-governmental? Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Okay. Yeah, there was an NGO that was wanting to go build a school. And it's, you know, again, you go into these places and your initial impulse is, at least

for me, it's pity or at least compassion that, you know, these people are living in a really tough situation, whether fighting the environment or dealing with their own sort of local tribal realities. And then us, going through their stuff or whatever. And that's got to be tough to be them, and you want to help them. And so this NGO, presumably, she's this nice lady, she wants to go out and build a school, and we're going to change Afghanistan and help it out, and everybody's going to prosper. And they'd gotten killed. So I was tasked with walking point into the village, and we get off the trucks, get in our formation, and I'm walking in, and you look over yonder, and at 12 o'clock there's this small helicopter, and it's been shot up all to hell.

There's blood on little sparse grass, that kind of thing, and we go, some of the people secure the perimeter, and then we secure the foothold entrance, and then we begin conducting a search. And I remember thinking that we're never going to find these people, because we get sort of used to this, in the Western way of looking at military, and everybody's got uniforms and flags and everything is, you know who the combatants are and who isn't. And this ain't like that at all. It could have been Taliban or Al Qaeda who killed these NGOs. It could have been just some warlord, you know, local chieftains, bandits or whatever. Or it could have been the villagers themselves who knew damn good and well what these people were going to be doing.

And they were going to be bringing in Western ideas, trying to, you know, basically ultimately destroy that village in the name of saving it. And that's a tough thing to wrap your mind around, because like in the West, especially amongst eggheads, which you probably know this better than I do, just judging from like the literature and everything, how they despise colonialism, and they don't want to impose their will on the poor developing peoples of the world who've been disprivileged and all that, and that's all well and good, but they still want to do that, though. They still want to impose their will on them and make them into their image. But they can't stand to actually do that, so they have to do all this with what people have called

choice architecture, where they want to confront the villagers with a series of choices and options that are sort of pre-arranged, like We want you to do what we want you to do. It's passive-aggressive colonialism. Exactly. Yeah, it's like armed kindergarten teachers. We want you to do what we want you to do, but we want it to make you feel like it's your idea. And there's something so insidious about that, I think. I would have more respect for somebody who just openly says, like, you do this or I'm going to kill you, rather than this constant screwing with your mind. But Haji, you know, broke and illiterate and smelly and all that. They knew that intuitively, and they reacted by killing these people. And we never found them. We never found the people that did it.

And so it brought to mind, like we were talking about the other day, of George Orwell's essay, Shooting an Elephant, and how he's, you know, I guess, working in Burma at the time, and he came to hate the empire. But then he came to hate the locals, too, because they made his job impossible. So he's sort of stuck between these two worlds where he's trying to do the right thing But on the other hand, he's got these crazy policies from above But then he's got these people who are resentful below and is and you come to see how this compassion Can get completely twisted into a kind of selfishness or tyranny like one of the boys a civil wise I think is his name He did that great book on Kerouac. Yes, I think is in our circles

and he he brought out a phrase that I came across with Buddhists called a idiot compassion and And if I understand that right, somebody seeks to do something about the suffering in the world, but they do so in an unskillful way that just causes more suffering. And I think the way we do this, it's completely indicative of this. Like you kind of go on a bit of a tangent. David French I saw recently was getting all up on his hind legs about R2P, which for those that don't know, it's the right to protect. Apparently, a bunch of eggheads after Rwanda got together and decided, you know, never again. We're going to keep this sort of stuff from happening. Yeah, all regimes, you know, the U.S. built or in the West have a special responsibility

to ensure that these sort of actions never happen again. Yeah, that harpy Samantha Power, very big on it, the responsibility to protect, right? She go up to Russia, Russia foreign minister scream at him during a bongo years. Yeah. Yeah. I swear, God almighty, these people, Bap, it's like you can't throw a rock at a bush without hitting three of these hectoring shitbirds trying to put their pompous bullshit on you. Like all this high-minded stuff sounds really nice in theory. And nobody likes to see the suffering of this stuff. But I guarantee you, once you start putting boots on the ground, you're going to have a butcher's bill. There are going to be children who get J-Dams dropped on them. There's going to be people who get gut shot and go die in the middle of the dirt.

And by the end of it, it's gonna look like just another war. And so again, it's fine to wanna do something about this suffering, but once you start getting involved, it's gonna take on a whole life of its own. Because there's an old infantry saying that the best laid plan goes to shit once the first boot hits the ground. And that's the truth. So these David French types, they completely abuse charity when they get on their soapbox about how we need to do this and that. It's like, pal, the world is filled with suffering, and sometimes it's so much you can barely handle your own, let alone the world's. Yes, yes, no, and to add to what you're saying, there can be no greater contrast, maybe, between the mindset of someone like Samantha Power,

who is, I think she is married to Cass Sunstein, right, or am I, no, no, sorry, that's Martha Nussbaum. I have these, they're interchangeable, But it's the same part of a bureaucrat mediocrity class. And if people want to read, I think it's Michael Ames, Ames, who has an essay about the power couple Nussbaum and Sunstein and, you know, how pathetic, essentially, is the so-called ruling class, who I call an occupational class. But there can be no greater contrast between the mind of someone like that filled with the platitudes of people like Ignatieff or the human rights regime ideology. And Haji, as the Afghan who still lives somewhat maybe not Bronze Age mindset, maybe he lives Iron Age mindset. I don't know. You got to see firsthand the mind of Haji and how different it is from our own.

A bit, because in some ways it's you would just look at these people sometimes and you You could tell their mind was running on a completely different path. Another time, we were in our tents being bored, and suddenly the door flies open, platoon sergeant, get your shit, we gotta go. So we go, and we go, where are we going, Sarge? What's going on? Shut the fuck up, get on the truck, we'll let you know when you get there. And so eventually we get to this place, and it's way out in the middle of nowhere. And squad leaders go off, they do their huddle, and they come back. leader says, he's like, there's some fucked up shit went down here. There's some pilot bitch flying an A-10 and she opened up on some Taliban Al Qaeda operative on a motorcycle and she missed.

And she killed like, I think it was seven boys, a little girl, a teenager, and a grown man. And so this is a small rural village, so she just took out probably a good chunk of an entire generation of children, or at least of little boys. And so he said, I don't want to hear any sniveling or crying. I want you to reach down, grab your nuts, be a man and do your fucking job." And he told me, you know, Finley, you got point. And so I had to go walk point into this village where all these kids had just gotten killed. And so I get my boys behind me and we go walk in and BAP, I've never experienced the silence like that. You could have heard a pin drop and you would, the place there, one of the things that struck

me is everything, it's like Tatooine on Star Wars, you know, everything's like khaki and like light brown. But the clothing or the rugs or the blankets themselves are really bright, vivid colors, kind of like in defiance of it. And out near the gate of the compound, you would see these bulges. You see all these blankets and they'd be having these little bulges. And you knew that they had went out and fetched the remains of their children and covered them up with those blankets. And one of the things that struck me is the difference between them and us in that if If this was, if it was us, there would be people chimping out and shrieking and crying and making a display of themselves and just lost in their own mourning, which is understandable, which if there's a time

to break down and cry, that's it, I would imagine. But Haji didn't, not even the women. There wasn't a, every eye was dry. There was, they were completely impassive. And almost a dozen people had been killed, and children at that. And they would just stand there and they would just look at us and watch us and here we are, you know This you know an entire we I think we had an entire platoon of us a second platoon had gone out there Um, you know, we're all you know full battle rattle. We've got night vision all this other type of stuff and Yet they're in passiveness in the face of that. It's just such a tremendous strength I thought that you're dealing with people who are running on a different level than you are and like and you can't help but respect that

And so we go on to have to search their houses and stuff like that and we did find some things Like one guy had a cardboard cutout of Osama bin Laden. I thought it was kind of funny and but so we go conduct our search and One of the one of my guys who had been pulling security at the time while we had been searching He said that a general had come out And he he got down on his knees in front of like us like the elders or whatever and he broke down and cried. And I remember being kind of embarrassed by that. Again, not because it's not appropriate to cry, but under those circumstances, it just seemed like a display of weakness. Whereas if I was Haji, and I'm keeping my shit together in the face of my dead children, and the person in charge of the people who did it

wants to come out and make a martyr of themselves, like they need my contrition, I'd be resentful of that. Like, you don't get to act like you're the person who's hurting. But the way that Haji would... It was as if... And again, I don't know what was going on in their head, because the people who could do that is... That's sterner stuff, Bap, and that their sorrow belonged to them alone and for their village. It wasn't for us. We'd done enough. Yes. It's strange. America had a chance both in Iraq in a different way and in Afghanistan, most of all, to come face to face with, you could say, anthropological fact of great significance, that not everyone thinks like you, people have different priorities, people have a completely different emotional

universe, but none of this gets filtered back to American—forget popular culture, it's It's not filtered back to academia, certainly, but as far as I know it's not filtered back to reports that military get, that intelligence community gets. So basically they just continue on their assumptions that everyone everywhere is the same, and they send you into this horrible scene like you just see now on a completely stupid mission, right? We were talking before about the rule of engagement there, the idiocy, how you are completely paralyzed often or something like this. Do you have stories about that? Yeah. And to your point, this failure to be able to grapple with these differences in people and this sort of Samantha Powers prioritization of empathy and understanding and all that

kind of stuff, witness my bleeding heart. This winds up inviting aggression, and that's a thing that's difficult for a lot of Westerners, I think, to come to grips with. By you not being assertive and aggressive and doing what you have to, this makes you look weak, and people will be resentful of that because nobody wants to submit to somebody they see as weak. We were doing a vehicle checkpoint, which, again, this was a ridiculous thing because vehicle checkpoints are sort of like TSA but for cars. And I couldn't tell you how many times I searched cars or individuals, and I will tell you, this is just security theater. And was it Chertoff or whatever, who was like the first person in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, he like had shares or whatever

in the companies that do the TSA stuff. So that's a whole nother rabbit hole. I probably shouldn't go down. But so we were doing this vehicle checkpoint out in the middle of nowhere. And it was just absurd that we were even there. But anyways, one of the things that we'll do is we have to secure a perimeter of 360 degrees around whatever we're at, because that's our first priority is to protect our, you know, we're contesting space. You know, we're struggling for space, as you would say. And so we have to, that's our first priority. And our rules of engagement, at least at the time, were if you're in the midst of a threat, you know, you would shout, you would show your weapon, you would shove, shoot a warning shot, and that sort of thing.

there's like an escalation that you would try to follow. And the trouble is there's an entire gradation of things that you can do to display dominance. And Haji would do it. Because we have our perimeter, we have some people in charge who are going to be doing the search, but everybody else might be pulling security. Haji would be like these, a lot of times kids are young people. They would try to get inside the perimeter. And so these are kids, and so you wouldn't want to hurt them. And so like they would get close and you'd tell them through the interpreter to get back or whatever and they might get back or they would act like they didn't know. And so then you had to physically push them back and this would just continue on and they would just constantly be testing you like that

to where it became kind of a game and they knew they could get over. And I remember wanting to just like grab a hold of them and zip cuff them just to just make an example out of them. Yes, I remember from when I was small boy and I had to deal with gypsies in this way. And you know, you have to just beat the Gypsy when they try to play their thing, but gosh, no, it's true. I grew up, you know, anyway, sorry, go on. No, I done told you once, Gypo, sit your ass down. But yeah, in fact, I remember telling one of our boys, like, you have a tough time imagining them doing this with the Russians. like we go there and we're just going to be kind of soft and and the kids make a game of it and and then on top of that like we would have to search everybody who came through the perimeter

even it'd be like a kid on a bicycle and so the kid again makes a game app at it or he's going to drive through and we get to search them again for like the 20th time that day or uh it got to where they would try to get you know at our MREs you know or in our rucksacks just to take something um and again there's that sort of bleeding heart mindset well you should to just give it to them or whatever, but that kills their dignity, and that's maybe a whole other kind of discussion, but Haji would try to get through, and eventually, meanwhile, all the old-timers, the Greybeards, are kind of sitting in the shade watching us, and you just know that they look like, you're thinking like, these are the people who have invaded our country, these weak people.

But eventually, the Terp just got a gut full of it, and he just started picking up rocks and throwing them, Because he was embarrassed at saying it's this impotent. With all of our firearms and all of our training in the end, Haji has no problem contesting us for space. Yes. So you couldn't fire on them until you were fired upon this famous rule of engagement. I wanted to ask you in this connection, if you had any shit bag officers, you know, many war stories have officer villains and so forth. My friend who I mentioned to you before, he was an officer and actually I think the reason he went into war was bad, he just told me before he was doing it that he was doing it for career reasons and he wanted it on his resume and so forth.

I think that's generally a bad reason to join the military. But he did not, you know, he was not like David French. He did not become paper pusher. He chose combat thing. And he was, as far as I know, a good officer. He protected his men. And he would tell me stories such as, you know, Hadji would test you, because they knew when the new officer came in. And so they would test you by taking pot shot at patrol and to see how you would react. And so he told me he told friends, he told soldier to use heavy machine gun fire to respond to any such threat, to show them he meant business. But regarding the rules of engagement, he told me that basically he would excuse his men and stand by them for whatever they did when it came to a threat.

So he told me something like, you know, if you feel you're in any danger, you should react and I will take the heat and so forth. So that's probably sign of good officer. I don't know. You tell me. But did you see shitbird officers either in field or bureaucrats who made your life hard or this? As far as the Afghanistan deployment and Bosnia before that, all of our officers that we had, at least at the platoon level, you know, these LT's. They were all good dudes. The one in Afghanistan, for instance, he was out of West Point, I think he might've played on their football team, and he was a hard charger. And we were lucky to have him. He was a good dude. And we had another officer who did some really bad-ass stuff which I might get into maybe here in a bit,

but so we had good officers there, but it's kind of a running joke with us that everybody above the rank of captain has a lobotomy Because it's, past a certain point, they're politicians. And they go to, for them to get to advance in their careers, the brass has to go to academia. And they have to get their advanced degrees and they wind up getting inculcated in all the sort of the global homo. And they know if they want to get promoted, they have to play the game. And that's where I think we start having problems. But, and there's also with a lot of the younger officers, They might be younger or they might not be willing to listen to their platoon sergeants or they may get run over by them. The whole officer-enlisted distinction, it's a delicate thing and it can be weird, just

flat out weird at times, but I was enlisted and I wound up becoming an NCO, so my world was fortunately a little different and removed from them. Yes. He told me, you know, he was lieutenant, he told me, you may be lieutenant, but the sergeant major, is that what it's called, or the sergeant, you know, if the sergeant says something, you do it. It doesn't matter that you're the lieutenant, you know. But on a slight different topic, I wanted to ask you, because you begin your book, it starts in a strip club in Montreal, I believe, and which the protagonist believes to be a brothel. Then he finds out it's not a brothel. But, you know, soldiers use brothels. I think it is inhuman not to provide American soldier with prostitute ready in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I wanted to ask you, I guess there were no brothels. By the way, I have, if people are interested, a friend recently told me, because I recommend certain prostitutes to him, and he tell me he had wonderful experience, he say, Bep, you know the best prostitutes. You know? No, he told me, Sam, it's true. He said, you know, he had one of the best experiences ever, he said, and it's true. And I would be glad to introduce you and your friend to various prostitutes around the world. But no, I will be an international pimp. No, no. Look, Sam, people don't understand something. I say this at the end of my book and they say, oh, he's joking or this, he says right-wing pornography. No, it's not right-wing pornography.

The Japanese Dark Ocean Society ran a network of brothels all around East Asia, from Southeast Asia into China, and they trained prostitutes to collect information. And this is basically James O'Keefe. I think I—sorry if I repeat myself, I say this on previous show. This is his business model, so to speak, where—how does James O'Keefe get the videos? Because he put woman prosti or sometimes he uses boy prosti, you know, male, not boy, male prosti, because so many of these media types are homo. So, you know, men, they go on date with somebody, their mouth will run, they will blab everything to impress someone. So he has the prosti, records them. I hope I'm not giving trade secrets, but I think it's well known this is how he does it. And I think it's a good idea.

I would like to resurrect this model of dark ocean society, so-called, to collect information. But that's not what I'm doing. Actually, I enjoy the company of prosthesis myself, and I have been able to recommend good ones to friends. But I wanted to ask you, did you have access to a brothel or anything like this in Afghanistan or so forth, if this is not a personal question? Oh, no. In fact, what you said brought back a lot of memories. In Afghanistan, no. There was none of that. The girls wear burkas and you don't want to start an international incident, and so maybe the special forces got some special treatment. It wouldn't surprise me, those people. I think they even had beer. We were always pissed off about that. They lived well. We didn't.

But you mentioned, you know, like the Dark Ocean Society and these sort of like underground things and the stuff that you talked about in your book. It reminded, and in my own, starting out with a strip club and why I thought it was a brothel, in the, because you're an infantry soldier, you feel like, again, with your concept of own space, you know that like you're enclosed and every aspect of your life is completely managed by other people and it's so like stifling And it's tough for you to imagine being a man in a relationship because of that. You've always got some other authority looking over your shoulder who can come in at any point in your life and make demands of you. And so it seems like the only room you have is for disposable intimacy. As pathetic as that may sound,

it's like you'd almost rather just like, go to a strip club or whatever and pay a girl for a lap dance just to sit and have a conversation like a normal human being. Which sounds, again, that sounds pathetic. But like our entire world was men. And if we're either in the field or we're about to go to the field and your interactions with women are very limited. And so as a soldier, you kind of get used to that. But also in Budapest, I remember, we'd gone to Bosnia and then we got a couple of days for leave, everybody got to go on leave in Budapest. And I went and I tried to do the whole culture thing and like go to nice places. And I remember just being kind of looked down upon by like expat type people and just talked down to. And there was a deal that the army had made

with a local mob boss where there were certain prostitute or there are certain whore houses that were like way out in the suburbs. And it was like, you know, my friend, you're looking for a good time kind of a thing. And you'd get in this van with some stranger and a bunch of other military people. And they would drive you out into the suburbs. And it would be someone's house with like a stripper pole in the living room. And there'd be like all this like plastic patio furniture and you would just get drunker than who shit the shower. And then just, you would just be able to relax and just have conversations with girls and just have fun. And it was, I know, I never partake, partook, partaken. I didn't partake of any of that, but I did. I remember one time having a bit of a crush

on one of the girls to my Shane and paying her to just sit and talk with me. Well, it's not, you know, fine. You don't, if you want to keep this friendly, friendly, you don't, you know, if you want, you know. Well, just, I don't know. Cause I was, I was still trying to, you know, I'm from the Bible belt and I was trying to like, I didn't want to go all the, there were certain lines I didn't want to cross. And so, but then I'm getting ready to go on my second deployment and I was a corporal at the time and which means I was going to be walking point. And, you know, there's a good chance someone's going to die and it would be someone my rank because we're always going to be upfront. And I was thinking, you know what? It's time I just had myself some fun.

And so we had this squad leader, Sergeant Sandlin, I think I used his name in the book. He said he was like the toucan Sam of hookers. Like he just knew where they were and he could find them. And Canada was like the promised land for whorehouses. And so he knew where they were. And there was this place, probably not there, but it was like in Kingston. and it was over on one of these streets. It was like- Wait, Kingston, Jamaica or Canada? Canada, yeah, Kingston, Canada. Yes. And he's like, you need to go up there and here's this address. And it's like this nondescript building with this door on this normal city street and you gotta buzz up and everything like that. And there's girls in their underwear or whatever. Anyways, that's the sort of scene that he's painting for me.

And so there was this club And it's a club super sex. That's what it was in real life. And it was like, I was gonna go to this, well, that sounds like a whorehouse. And so I go to this place, thing is gonna be a whorehouse. And it was just a strip club. And like, at the time it was a disappointment that I figured I'd try to make good of it. But it's... Well, you know, yeah. Oh, no, go ahead. No, I just mean that what you were saying earlier, I don't think it's pathetic at all because actually using prosti can be very alpha, but it can also be very omega. So in other words, prostitute use is alpha male and omega male. Beta males do not use. It's a step too far from them, which is why in, let's say, tech communities, they are

afraid to do that, to use prostitute, which is why all these kinds of dysfunction and and so forth, including, you see, Reddit, subreddits that talk about female dating strategy and other such thing come from tech community that just most of them are, let's say, beta. They refuse to use Prosti. There is also now, there is new thing. Sigma male is not new, by the way. It's been used for many years. But there's something called screenblower, there's something called screenblower male. I don't know what this means. But basically, no, I think prostitution is understandable for soldiers, and I think it's cruel of America. Fine, you do not use the local Afghan women, but America should be importing Filipino or whatever to Afghanistan and Iraq.

And I really think feminism is the only reason it doesn't do this. I don't know. But by the way, in Budapest you were lucky to, I guess American military has an arrangement there with friendlies, because this is something all my listeners should know. Do not do this in Budapest. Do not go to Frosty House or strip club. No, no, it's very dangerous, because if you will go, let's say, to downtown Budapest, Okay? And you have sometimes stories, frequent stories, of beautiful women. They invite, let's say, Japanese businessmen or tourists or whatever on business. They invite him to a bar. He goes through his beautiful, oh, beautiful woman loves me. I go to a bar. Then they have a drink there, and the bill come, and the drink is 3,000 euro. Okay? $3,000. Whatever.

And it's perfectly legal to charge them that. And then a big guerrilla-like man will accompany the Japanese businessmen to ATM to withdraw the money. It is legalized theft, but Budapest is well known for this trick. So you know, you were lucky you had arrangement, but I just want to warn people about that city. Oh, you mentioned that. And that's maybe a tangent we can go down here in a second, but that happened to me on two separate occasions in China. It's amazing. go to jail. But before we get into that maybe, we were talking about the morality or the shame or whatever surrounding that. And I wound up having dealings later after the business went bad with that girl. But there was something about with strip clubs or even with prostitutes

and the like, it was that I wound up having a kind of begrudging respect for their honesty. is you knew what you were getting in for with them. You knew that there was a game that was getting played and y'all could have fun, but they weren't there to just, they were there to have fun and it was sort of like, there's a book from here to eternity that was made in that movie with Burt Lancaster and all that. I read the book and one of the things that struck me was how the girl that I think Montgomery Cliff gets with, she talks about, because she's like a drinky girl or whatever, and he's kind of wondering at that and she's like, well, you know, I basically enlisted. Like you soldiers think you're the only ones to,

Because it was, for her, that was a life where she could drink and have fun and get paid. Which it sounds weird, but this is the differences between men and women, I think. And there's certain sort of like gender specific arenas where it's like, there's power here, you know, I can learn this skill or I can do this thing, and like there's just something magnetic about it. And I think for men, that's like war, and with women it's like sex, or something like that. Yes. Yes, no. Well, I think prostitute is superior to normal woman, but okay, whatever. Look, I'm not asking you to agree with me. Yeah, well, I mean, there was a... You go to some of these clubs, and this was years ago, so I don't know how much has changed since then.

But you would go to these bars, and it would be these girls who would just... They were just scheming and manipulative for attention, and just run through dudes, trying to get them to buy drinks for them and or just being completely crazy and it and if you did wind up having any kind of a connection you might get to the point where it's like I just don't know what I want right now and you know all this other kind of stuff where it's like a girl who's a pro they know what they're in for you know they know what they're doing and like in there yes it's there's an honesty there where it's at least you you all kind of know what why you're there and maybe if there's some sort of connection, that happens because you know all that, if that makes any kind of sense.

You know, it makes a lot of sense. And my friend Scott Laughlin just told me, he used your book to try to red pill a friend of his or twice divorcee and so forth and who just refuses to be educated on the true nature of women and so forth. But we can bring up the woman question later. This is a quite long segment, but before we leave this segment, I just want to ask you about a problem of corruption that you've witnessed, perhaps, in Afghanistan. I hear this from all Afghanistan veterans. They complain to me many of the things you complain. They get sent to middle of nowhere in some mountain village. They do a patrol. The patrol is meaningless because what is really the purpose of the mission to provide

support to the Afghan government, will the Afghan government, our opium dealer, and the local villager has no respect for them and are stuck between them and the American military and the Taliban. And so there is no solution to any of such problem. And they end up just noticing much corruption from NGO, from the I don't know if you have stories of shitty journalists who you might have met there or any such thing, the massive theft of American wealth that got transferred there and so forth. Yeah, well, and thinking about that, there's a book I've read called, by Steven Pressfield, the guy who did that book, Gates of Fire, about the Battle of Thermopylae, and I really like that. But he had this book called The Profession that takes place like 10 years from now about

a PMC, a private military contractor firm that's ran by this Marine Corps general. He winds up becoming kind of like an Alcibiades Caesar. And in the book, a great deal of it takes place in the Middle East. And he's got this great line that I'd like to quote that says, What Westerners call corruption is just life in 75% of the world. Americans still don't understand this. We think the rest of the planet is like us, or would be if it had the same advantages. We live in a bubble here in the States. We make decisions and establish policy based on dream conceptions of the wider universe. We think everyone is the same as we are. We think they want the same things we want. They don't. They're not like us at all.

And that's a really tough thing to say, and it just completely rubs against how we think. And the trouble is, that's true. I mentioned the vehicle checkpoint. There was an incident where, I think it was that same one, where you're getting all these different vehicles, people coming in for various reasons. One of them was your Toyota Hilux with a bunch of Hodgies in it. They had weapons. So they go roll in and they've got a certain amount of RPGs and AK-47s or whatever. So we stopped them, and already your Agent Orange starts acting up because, okay, I got a Toyota full of Hodgies with a bunch of ammo and guns and shit. could get out of hand real quick. And so you ask them for ID, and they give you ID, and the ID consists of basically a

business card, looking-sized piece of paper with a bunch of Pashtun on it, or Pashto, and it's laminated. That's it. There's no picture, there's nothing. It's just a bunch of scribbles that are laminated. And you're thinking like, this is absolutely worthless. How in the hell are you supposed to have any sort of like, how are you supposed to be certain that like this person is who they say they are, let alone that they're with this group. They could say they're with the AMF, or they could be with some other militia or some warlord, or they could actually be in those groups, but then they could change next week. And because for them, it's not like how we are in it, you know, I'm in the military now, and this is, you know, we're this whole separate group that does this.

For them, it's all mixed up. And it's their tribe, and if their tribe wants to get, you know, ally with the AMF, they will if they want to ally with the ANA they will and and it just depends who's you know who they feel like and and we wouldn't we encountered one time at this place called the Citadel there was a it was there was an AMF outpost and supposedly one of the guys there was running guns to Taliban al-qaeda and it was just we have these neat little conceptual buckets of you know the friends you know who's our friendlies who's our allies and who's with this group and that group and it's just it's so fluid and that it just doesn't work that way and it's like it's not even corruption at that point it's it's something else and yeah and then I whenever I I left the army I went to go

I wanted to find some way to serve and I would get maybe even the State Department or something like that but I was that was my naivete so uh you know we it's kind of it's cute to look back on it in retrospect but yeah I was wrong But anyways, I did a research practicum once where I wound up working for an NGO for the summer And so you just immerse yourself in a lot of this development literature and with especially with like counterinsurgency. There's this notion that these these these places are failed states because you know the poverty and all that and what we can do is stimulate the economy by We could bring in building supplies and then we could pay the Hodges to build stuff and it's like and that looks great

You know, we're gonna help everybody a rising tide lists all boats and they get the materials there and shortly thereafter There'd be stuff come missing. Yes, and and so then You come to find out the people who are who are in charge with the building We're taking some of these materials and selling them on the side Yes, so you wind up with the situation where you're trying to help these people but on the other hand they're also taking full advantage of it because they think you're made out of money and it's it's their do and it's there for the taking and so you're getting screwed all sorts of ways and in the meantime you still got this corruption that's completely endemic to the society yes I don't know describing Afghanistan construction project or if you're

describing Boston big dig where they did a construction project in Boston and basically all the ethnic mafias or whatever they want to call them they were all taking on the side you're describing soprano also you know we had a job over on South Fifth, and it was a wicked hard. Yes. I mean, I think this very long segment already, Sam, and maybe good time to take break, because when we come back, we will talk about what this means, including for domestic politics in America, I think this good time to stop, because you just described, yes, Afghan corruption Graft, so much got wasted, so much money thrown into coffers of local potentates who stole. But same thing happened in United States with any construction project.

Now they try this infrastructure, which is basically the same thing you're describing, but legalized, you know. Yeah. I think. So what do you say we take a short break and come back? I know you want to talk about effect of this on American domestic politic. Sure. Yeah. That'd be great. Yes. We take Sigurillo's break. Very good. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the show, Sam. We are here to talk Afghanistan, many related matters. I am very concerned with the problem of the so-called bacha bazi, who are boy performers, I guess. The Afghans are digging into homo-sex, pederasty. It reminds me, for some reason, the word bacha bazi reminds me of Anthony Wiener, you know. Because if you see him dance on New York gay parades, he does this little dance with rainbow

flag and, you know, he's married, whom I actually look like normal woman. But many of these people and many of my detractors on Internet are married to transsexual, so they're kind of bacha-buzzy, America-style. But did you see this? Many people, I asked them, what would you like me to ask Sam Finlay? They asked, did he see Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan? And if you saw it, how could you not shoot, you know, not the Bacha Bazi, but, you know, the people running them and so forth. Yeah. What is Bacha Bazi? Did you see this? No. Thankfully, I never had to mess with that. That's one of those things where you'd hear about it sometimes, but fortunately I didn't have to deal with it. I didn't have to see it. So I'm happy about that.

There were some weird stuff that went on, though, that you'd see a lot of hand-holding between men, which that's a little weird to me, but I remember getting in this briefing before our first mission where the LT is telling us some of the cultural ethnography that they get. They were talking about how for men to be able to marry a woman, they have to raise a bunch of money, and this takes a while. In the meantime, they'll make do with each other. My squad leader, he broke in and he was just this salty dude from Virginia who was just like, he's a whole nother story all by himself, but he broke into me and he's like, y'all just remember all you motherfuckers drink that Haji tea. Y'all remember every cup of tea you drink was made by a man who fucked another man in his ass.

That was our lesson on Afghanistan, gender issues with weird men. Yes. I think the second one, the one who says this about the tea, I think he correct. And the first one, maybe he tried to clean it up a bit, because what I hear is not that it's Fort DeMille. I don't think that—I think they actually maybe prefer company of boys. And I saw an article where they had British special forces in their huts, and they tried to paint their toenail, and this is—anything like that happen to you? No, no, thank goodness. No, that's just weird. Having Haji paint your toenails, that's mighty. But, you know, on the other hand, for, I mean, you are real America to me. You are, to me, you are, no, no, no. I'm not saying this joke. To me, you are real heritage America. But to have the American regime,

people like Samantha Power, we talked earlier, or Chuckie Schumer in a skirt, or this, To have these people call Haji gay is a bit strange, you know, because it's like Putin if he was going to call Americans alcoholics, right? I mean, Putin is actually okay, but I think, you know, you know what I'm saying? Like, if the Russians were going to call Americans alcoholic, I can't think of a gayer things than American regime, State Department, and so forth. So, you know, they shouldn't be the ones attacking Bacha Bazi, right? yeah they got their own problems yes and what about this did you see other idiocy like right now is making rounds video of stupid white American woman who teach modern art to Afghan women they go there to teach so-called modern art did you

see this huh anything like this no no I I haven't seen anything like that and it It was, whenever I was in, it was still, again, we were like the third rotation, so it was still a little fresh. They were starting to try, like with the NGO I mentioned, but they hadn't gone full crazy like they had yet, just handing over to cat ladies. Yeah, no, they, yeah, that's exactly what they did, they handed over to cat lady, then I guess this is what we were going to talk about on this segment, Sam, then the cat lady empowered by her experience of sharing, you know, a toilet as modern art to an Afghan woman. She come back home. So this, now that the Afghan project has ended, how do you think this affect America domestic at home? What do you think effect of this Afghan debacle on America at home is?

I think it's an instance, an incident of being all dressed up and no place to go. These people can't impose their will on the world like they'd like, and so they want to, I think, try to do it at home. And there's a long tradition of that. We were talking earlier about the manosphere and how there's these little kind of countercultural pockets of people who are having to confront problems that you're not supposed to confront in the mainstream. And that's been happening for a very long time, since before mass media. You have these people who push these policies, and they cause a lot of problems. And since, for as long as I've been alive, I'm a Gen-Xer, I'm at the tail end, a lot of this gets wrapped up into the umbrella of right-wing extremism.

Any sort of criticisms of this post-World War II managerial consensus gets labeled into right-wing conspiracy or whatever. In which just kind of as a shout-out to there's there's some guys who run a podcast called good old boys And they have a they have a formula that they like to say is that politics is patronage And I think once you you get out of this sort of egg-headed theory That's you know The international relations type of being poly size stuff and you look at it just in terms of brass tacks and patronage networks stuff starts looking a lot different and it becomes apparent that like for a very long time since before any of us were born that people who actually make policy don't really think in terms of countries. They're globalist. They look in terms of creating institutions

and systems of global governance. And the U.S. is seen as a mechanism for that. And you and I could probably spend an hour just throwing examples of this back and forth, but it's enough to say, I think, that it's institutionalized. And if people doubt that, they can just look at university curriculum for political science or international relations or whatever. And it's apparent that like nobody actually thinks in terms of countries. And to the extent they do, it's that the U.S. needs to embark upon this sort of project of managed decline and to facilitate the rise of the rest of the world. And there, whenever I was a kid, there was, you had things like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and we were talking about rules of engagement earlier. And I don't know of anyone who would shoot

a woman holding a baby in my unit, But they did that at Ruby Ridge with, and I, and so like, and that happened, and there were, the entire 90s were marked by this under the Clinton era of Pat Con. I think it was Patriot conspiracy. You know, that there was this evil right-wing militia movement that was opposed to, you know, the glories of the post-Cold War policies that were coming down that were gonna make all life better and they were just gonna take over the government at any time through armed force. And this is, a lot of it was a farce, and it was a lot of feds trying to get people to chimp out and all this other kind of stuff. The fact is that you had a lot of policies that were getting pushed from NAFTA and free trade to mass immigration to this increase of a surveillance state

or people getting plundered through taxes and trade policies and just this constant regime of social engineering from cradle to grave. And we never get to dissent from that. And we never get to say no. And we're never consulted in this. It's just sort of accepted that we need to do this. And they, you know, under Pat Conn and all these other sort of federal sort of policy towards dissent that deviates from sort of left liberal globalism, it gets branded as a potential terrorist extremist threat. And this came back again, I guess it was during the Obama administration, in 2009. The Department of Homeland Security issued a report called Right-Wing Extremism, Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgent and Radicalization in Recruitment.

And they even opened by saying that they don't have any evidence of any potential right-wing terror or violence or anything like that. But if it did happen, this is why they would do it. And they mentioned things like New World Order and all this stuff, which, again, all these people are globalists, and they have been since World War II, because they were straw man. Well, it's very strange. They call people traitor and so forth, but you have a Supreme Court, or I call them extreme court, that were citing opinion from Zimbabwe and this, that in any normal society some decades ago would be called some form of treason when you abandoned the principles of your own founding documents and, you know, you violate your own borders with mass immigration and so forth. Why isn't that treason?

I mean, you were telling me some story about Petraeus. He gives some speech, right? Yeah. It might have been down in Mexico, but he was giving a talk on after America, and the idea was that eventually the future of what would happen with America would be assimilated into this North American union between Mexico and Canada, and that was the big plan. And there's nothing new about that. That goes back to like Carol Quigley and all these other people with like continental trading blocks. But this guy was a former head of the CIA, he was a former general, and that's the kind of policies that he pushes. And you can't say anything about that. You can't say anything about like who he is or where the money comes from or anything. So far, I don't know anyone almost on our side.

I mean, sure, there are crazy people on the corner of the Internet or, you know, me. I am Bronze Age pervert. I have a comedy show. I say crazy things. But I'm not a head of CIA and head of NATO, and I don't give public speeches calling for the overthrow of the American government, which that's what he was doing in that speech, right? He was calling for the overthrow of the American regime, which is the Constitution. And then they turn around and call other people traitor, who, you know, they doubt the election because they saw a nice lady who passes hundreds of ballots in the middle of the night, the same ballot hundreds of times into a voting machine. So if you notice that they took suitcases out in the middle of the night, suitcases of fake votes, you're called traitor, right?

But if you don't undertake a vaccine, that's not approved, you are a traitor, right? But the head of CIA calling for overthrow of the government, that is not a traitor. Yeah. And there's nothing special about him. You had Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote a book back in 1970 about, was it, between two eras, America and its role in the technotronic era, or something like that, where he's talking about this dissolution of the nation state in favor of this global technocratic system that's the latest in behavior modification and all this other kind of just weird dystopian stuff. And that guy was a former national security advisor under Carter, just a low-level kind of a thing. There was something I saw from a guy named Robert Kaplan who wrote a book about why leadership

demands a pagan ethos, which I don't want to draw heat with our pagan friends. But he wrote, for American power to endure, it will need to be impelled by a more primitive level of altruism than that of the universal society it seeks to encourage. American patriotism, honoring the flag, Fourth of July celebrations, and so on, must survive long enough to provide the military armature for an emerging global civilization that may make such patriotism obsolete." Now, Kaplan, if I understand right, he taught at Harvard. He teaches, or he taught military officers in brass. He's a journalist or whatever, and he goes to sleep at night not having to worry about getting doxxed. He doesn't have to worry about being labeled a conspiracy theorist.

He's literally talking about using the military as an armature for establishing global governance. I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. What the hell does that even mean? When everybody on the other side of that oath, from the people who are charged from developing policies, to officially creating laws, to adjudicating those laws in, you know, the Supreme Court, or the people who teach those people. None of those people actually believe in the substance of that oath, or that the U.S. should be a sovereign country, or that the Constitution should, you know, describes power as working the way that it does. This is just sort of like kabuki theater. And they all kind of feel that way.

And so at this point, you know, to your point, what even is treason anymore, when the people who are in charge of running things don't even believe in in the country, God well how does that even work with treason? Like where that horse is out of the barn, like that doesn't, that concept shouldn't even exist anymore. Yes, well I mean there are many such quotes from so-called potentates, there's Kissinger, I believe he say something like military men are dumb animal who are to be used as pawns by men like him and so forth. I don't know, how's that make you feel? I don't know. I got that one. I remember I just got back from Afghanistan. I was at Walter Reed whenever I came across that quote. That pissed me off.

That got me hot. In fact, that whole time was an awakening. You remember how there was all this animus against George Bush and how he was the symbol of all that was wrong, all Well, the evil imperialism of Iraq is all his fault, and they start expanding the scope to it. It's actually, it's not just him, it's the people who voted for him. It's these red staters. And there was a, there was, you know how you go to any major American city and you're going to have, you go into a restaurant and they're going to be like those, those circulars by the door? So just to clarify, just to clarify it for, for audience, this is not what you believe, But this is what basically media establishment academia say, it's Bush and it's the people who voted for him. I mean, I remember the debates from the 2000s.

And by the way, neither of us is a fan of Bush, who is a mentally retarded person. We'll talk about him in a moment. But yeah, they were saying this. Yeah. Yeah. John Stewart made an entire career. Yeah, I think he is. Yeah. John Stewart made an entire career out of making fun of basically my people. Because they established this association with George Bush, but there was these circulars that you'll get in any restaurant or bar or whatever. By the door, there'll be these little magazine periodicals, and a lot of local businesses taking out ads. But the editorials will always be these hick libs who are giving you just the straight rotgut dope of what leftists think at that time. And there was one by the Seattle Stranger that I remember reading during that time that

really got me, because it was pure BAP and their sort of disdain for us. But there was a line where he said, to red state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and the souling, sprawling excerpts, we say, fuck off. And they're going to say, it's time for the Democratic Party to stop pandering to bovine non-urban America. You don't apologize for being right, especially when you're at war. Now, this is some hick lib writing for whatever, but this is how they think. And for them, this was war. And it was war against us. And that's why Bush's recent comments. David Reboy had said something that when he's talking about these domestic extremists or whatever, he's not talking about ANIFAs. He's talking about you. He's talking about us.

Because we disagree with this whole globalist project. Yes. Yeah, so Trump was very moderate man, and someday these people are going to be sorry for how they treated him, I think, because he really was someone willing to forgive their past crimes and to offer them a kind of compromise. You can keep your ill-gotten wealth, but something needs to be done for the American people as as well, whereas what he apparently should have done and what the next Trump will no doubt do, will say, you know, we need to have Iraq, tribunals over the inception of the Iraq War, and so forth, and so—which he sort of hinted, at least at this attitude during the South Carolina primary debate, where he crushed George Bush's brother Jeb. But I think they never forgave him for that.

And, of course, George Bush is full of the same kind of hatred and desire to punish the Americans who humiliated his family, right, by voting in Trump. That's normal. But this—I wanted to ask you something related to what you just say with the crazy attitude of the Hicklands and these people who attack. On the one hand, they attack Middle America and the Bush voters as retrograde and, you know, as they try to blame colonial wars on them and so forth. On the other hand, they carry out all of these wars abroad. On one hand, they are for, oh, we want for global governance and peace, by which of course they explicitly do not mean that America should militarily conquer the world. They mean the opposite. They mean some kind of one-world pacifism and same as League of Nations and so forth.

Yet on the other hand, they do start all of these wars. And I wanted to ask you, because your book, okay, should be cultural phenomenon in America, but instead they promote this other book, The Things They Carry, which is piece of shit, And it was pushed on me and many other people in high school. It's a Vietnam War tale. It is bullshit tale, complete full of lies, very pedestrian storytelling, but beloved by the regime, again, pushed on schools. The guy gets a lot of accolades from mainstream media and so forth. I am not saying this just to say. Your book is many times better, your book is fun to read, and your book is the kind of anti-war that they don't want people to know about. So it gets the silent treatment, it's been reviewed in a few places, it will be reviewed

by Anton Su, it should be made into a movie, so forth. But your story is the real voice of what probably most soldiers think, the real experiences and so forth. It gets submerged, it gets silent treatment. Instead they promote this crap, the thing they carried. But it brought me to mind how actually the ruling ideology of the establishment is antiwar. That cannot be denied. If you go to any university department, they are all far-leftoids, and they are all going to tell you about how much they hate American wars, how it's what you just said right now. It's the red stator. The people they used to attack as Bush voters, who are the engine of American imperialist colonial war on behalf of capital and so forth. You hear this in any university.

You look at any Hollywood movie, Sam, it is antiwar, quote-unquote. Antiwar is the message also of this crap book, the garbage, the things they carried. It's an antiwar book, supposedly. So on one hand, the anti-war is the dominant ideology of regime, in the same way as anti-establishment is the dominant ideology of the establishment, but they also start many wars, as you see, to the extent that Trump was the only president in a decade not to start one. So I don't know—I mean, I guess you were just talking about this in a different way now, but what do you make of this kind of schizophrenia or what you want to call it? ideology is anti-war, but they start war. Yeah, I don't fully understand that myself.

It's like they can't grasp with human nature, or that you may have to engage in violence, or that that's where this goes. Like I heard someone say, who'd been attached to some various high-level muckety-mucks, But Christiane Amanpour, you know, the reporter or whatever, like, she was instrumental in getting U.S. intervention into Somalia. And I don't know how much of that's true or, you know, who's a spook, who's not, I don't know, or if that's just an interesting story that people like to tell, but supposedly that helped influence the U.S. intervention in Somalia. And these people love doing that. They love, like, getting up in front of everybody and just letting their heart bleed, and we've got to do something. It's like, okay, you're going to have to confront

some ugly people who are willing to do some bad things, and that's going to mean killing people. And not everybody who gets killed is gonna be the bad ones. And they can't grasp that, because they're not the sort of people who have to worry about that. I mean, it's like, Biden recently had a speech, this is just to kind of chase a rabbit, about COVID and how he's like, our patience is wearing thin with the whole unvaccinated. And I'm thinking like, who wrote that? is you know it was like some sassy girl boss you know who, she never been in a fist fight let alone had to swear an oath that cost her blood and she's wanting to use him as like her little puppet about their patience is wearing thin good lord, Bap where do you even begin, like what about our patience of how it's

wearing thin, we have a government that like has lied to us about every war that has come down the pipe It's spies on us, it's plundered us, it subjects us to all this social engineering and the country is basically a chop shop and like, there are very real consequences of this and they can never address it and I think that they just have a fundamental problem with human nature. You were... Go ahead. No, no, well it's just a kind of, yes, they are operating under delusion but very dangerous delusion. The cynical way of trying to square what I said and what you were saying, a cynical way of trying to seal this is that basically they are communists or even the unwitting inheritors of communism to the extent that, you know, for them Vietnam is an evil war because it

was waged against brown communists, you see. So then it was obviously, oh, no, no, no, that's an evil war. So that allows them to say, we are against war because all war is by definition the white man, it's the man oppressing, you know, the United Fruit Company, oppressing Guatemalans. It's always carried on behalf of capital to oppress brown people who want to be communists. And so you see on Twitter, too, a lot of leftoids who pretend to be edgy or this, but really They are repeating all the platitudes of Noam Chomsky or whatever you hear, university college department about American imperialism that destroys brown communists because of this. And then you turn around, but you see the same people call for the removal of Assad

as a war criminal and support the white helmets and all of this. And so a cynical way I'm saying of interpreting that is they're just using antiwar words in an opportunistic way. They mean they don't want war against brown commies, but they would very much like, you know, a war against elements they see as retrograde, like Assad, because Assad protects Christians or whatever, or they want war on behalf of human rights, they think that is just. And so that's a cynical way. And I guess to that you can add an asterisk that maybe they are not knowingly being cynical, that they think these—for example, a war carried out on behalf of human rights is not really war. So as Christiane Amanpour can say, oh, we should send food to Somalia. So that's an intervention. That's not war.

We are sending them food, and we are stopping the war. Well, but she doesn't think through that you need soldiers to protect the supply lines and so forth, and doesn't care if they get killed, because, after all, they end up being people from foothills of Tennessee and so forth, so she doesn't care. I don't know. Is this—and then, of course, they do what you're saying now, is they turn that internally, too, to where you have George Retard Bush saying—essentially calling for civil war, extremely reckless, but they don't see it as civil war. They think if they say we're fighting domestic extremism, it's not war, it's something else. I don't know, is that the way to square it? They're cynical or stupid or things. Yeah, all of the above. This reminds me of something.

You were talking earlier about political correctness. And there was something the other day, I saw Amanda Milias, which I didn't know who her dad was. I didn't know that was John Milias' daughter. I was going to ask you about Big Wednesday, but we might table that. I wasn't sure if you've seen it or what your thoughts are on it. I have not seen it yet. I think it's probably John Millace's. I would say it's one of his best, but that's a whole other discussion. But she tweeted, she posted a tweet about whenever she was coming up, this woke shit that was actually political correctness. This is nothing new. And that made me think about Jonathan Bowden. And I love to hear that guy cut promos on stuff, like that guy could talk.

And he had this great line where he said, political correctness is a grammar of self-intolerance. And I thought that was great. Because when you think of that in terms of what we're talking about, the military and war, and you think about the brass and how they're in these leadership positions but But to get there they have to go through college and learn to say and think the right things. So they take on this sort of political correctness mentality. And what does that even look like when things get operational? Because what are we even fighting for? We're not fighting for a people because that's racist or that's xenophobic. We're not fighting for a place because that's nativistic. We're not fighting for a way of life because that's chauvinistic. So what's the point of this map?

Why are we fighting and killing and dying? Yes. Yes. No, it's very strange. And of course the asterisk to that is they want to also reform military to be feminist or trans or this, right? I mean, I remember I was in classroom one time and there were people openly saying that, Oh, we don't want alpha male in military, and we find problematic that this military advertisement call for men who like explosions or men who like action is very strange. They believe, you know, if they see Russian commercial for military now, I think somebody made this viral tweet recently with contrast between Russian or Chinese military advertisements for recruitment versus American, and the American was about, I don't know, trans pregnancies or this.

And I know you have some opinions about that, the macho culture of American militaries. Yeah. There's a problem for this. Yeah. Well, those very words, there's an article in the Small Wars Journal that I've encouraged everybody to check out, and it's called Changing the Macho Culture of the US Military. And here's this, and the guy's on a non, so that says something, that this guy feels like he can't post under his real name. Here's this anonymous author who writes this article about how he's talking with people who are in the Pentagon about how this—or, you know, dealing with Rangers School and how there's going to be women who are going to be combat soldiers and you just need to get over it. And at the root of it is this sort of political correctness culture of how all of the people

who are leading the military are men, because they go through these schools and they have preference because of, you know, combat arms, because they're all male units, and men have all this advantage. And therefore, you know, in order to promote equality, we have to cut through that male advantage and make it to where, you know, it no longer becomes possible for men to behave the way they have. And this is insanity, Bap. But that's coming from the Pentagon. Yes. Well, Sam, this segment, already I think I feel the need for another tobacco stimulation. But I just want to ask you, in closing this segment, because I see on one hand these people are mired in this severe delusion of wokeness or political correctness or self-enforced weakness, whatever you want to call it.

On the other hand, they are also extremely full of hatred, and they love this word to throw it against others, but I see them as full of resentment against historical America. And when you look at the rhetoric of the left, I've called it the Interahamwe left, because it is openly genocidal, vicious rhetoric. So I think some bad times are coming for America in the 2020s, not because of what I say, but because essentially an ex-president to why the claim just declared his wish for civil war in his own country. On the other hand, if they actually implement their wishes in reforming military, you will have, you know, the opponents of historical America, Sam, will be peopleówell, let me give you this analogy. The South African military, right, it got taken over by you-know-who after apartheid

ended. And people can do these searches, mainstream articles about how the new admiral of the South African navy ran submarines into the sea floor. And these such things happen frequently in South African military now. And so there is this old joke, I don't know if you agree, that the new woke American military, after their reforms, you know, they will turn the missiles on themselves, just like their hero John McCain, right, he blew up his own. I mean, that's the kind of opponent historical America will probably have to face in whatever, I don't know what you think about that. If it's too hard to touch, don't say anything. If we have to have enemies like that, I would just assume them being competent. So I'm okay with it. Yes. Yes. Well, Sam, we need tobacco break.

Let's come back for a quick we should have a closing statement on various methods of the path forward and some favorite books. That sounds great. Thanks, Matt. Yes, very good. Be right back. As welcome back to show, I am here with Sam Finlay. We are now drinking rum and whiskey. Sam, welcome back to show. I was thinking what we were talking before, this maybe schizophrenia of American ruling class or occupational class where on one hand they present themselves as pacifists, as people who are against colonialism, against imperialism, against war. On the other hand, they very much, as you know from your experiences in Afghanistan, they end up being colonialists, just incompetent ones. And I think on one hand this is older problem.

When you look, I was watching recently with friend this movie Quiet American. I encourage all to watch it with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. It's made after Graham Green's book, The Quiet American, about the inception of American involvement in Vietnam, where America is shown to have the same attitude, oh, we are not colonialists like you Europeans, we are not like the English or the French, we're not coming here to tell the Vietnamese what to do. No, no, we want the Vietnamese to have their own way of society, which means actually we We want them to be like us and to copy us in all essential respects. So we are going to actually do colonialism times two, but not call it that and not think it is that and not realize that it leads to war nonetheless, and that, you know, because

you're not doing it explicitly and forthrightly, you end up losing. In other words, you just end up being an incompetent colonialist. And then, of course, when this gets transferred to domestic to United States, because their ambitions abroad come crashing one after another, everything they turn touch to shit, whether it's Syria or Yemen or Egypt or Afghanistan. It all turned to shit. So now they will try to focus, perhaps, their energies domestically. Where they are confronted with the same problem, they believe the red-state Americans are their own Afghans, their own Taliban, that they need to reform or oppress into becoming something entirely different, where they represent this retrograde force that needs to be defeated.

But on the other hand, they need the red-state Americans to mend their military and so forth. And as you point out, the quotation used from Robert Kaplan is this, some of them realize this and, I mean, realize it consciously, and so it allows them to be cynical. But what I'm trying to say is that someone like Robert Kaplan or Kissinger, they actually have high IQ. In other words, you need high IQ to be cynical, whereas most of the left are perhaps true believers. And this makes me think that the long-term prospects for historical America are very good, because the enemy actually is stupid. But I didn't mean at the end of the last segment to minimize the threat posed by the left. I think although they are stupid, they will cause incredible suffering and damage in the 2020s in America.

But on the other hand, I don't agree with the people who say that this is a situation like 1970 in Russia, where you are faced with, you know, something like Russian Revolution and Trotsky and this, because, you know, the Russian Revolution had Trotsky leading a Red Army, and he captured, I believe he captured families of Russian Army soldier and told the Russian Army officer, you have to train the Red Army or I'm going to kill your families. Well, the left now does not have Leon Trotsky. Their ideologues are people like Ibram Kendi and other low-IQ and retired and so forth. So you know, the Russian Red Army, they didn't have doctrine about how they needed to lessen the macho culture of the Red Army, is what I'm saying.

So I think they will lose, but they will cause incredible damage in the short run. I don't know if you want to comment on that. You don't need to. But I know you have some thoughts about the path forward in present conditions of chaos and with this crazed and stupid regime now focusing its energies inward. What do you think? Yeah. I think you've summed that up very succinctly, and I agree with that. What gets me is who would want to participate in that whole leftist project? It just seems so ugly and just so eaten up with resentment. What sort of positive vision of the future or how we should live, it just seems so deformed. I have a tough time wrapping my mind around that. And that's why I think that there's all sorts of possibilities and there's room for hope.

And I would encourage people against giving into despair. I think, who was it? Napoleon had said, like, one of the most important things in war is the spiritual. It's the morale. And you and Soso had talked about that. In thinking about all this, there's a quote from Ernest Younger in his Forest Passage that I quite liked, and it said, the true ruler reigns by giving life rather than taking it. You think about how you've encouraged people to take on healthier, you know, health regimes, to try to make themselves stronger and better. I mean, how many people have sent you pictures of their progress? I mean, there have been a lot, and by reminding people that you can be better than you are, and you have it in it to be better than you are, and you don't need to wallow in something

ugly or to accept something that's less than what you could be, and with just a little bit of imagination and will, you can make changes. You can repent, and you can turn around and make things better. That is so life-affirming, and a little bit of that goes a long way. As far as a path forward, I think you've gave some really good advice in terms of things like just having a few friends that you'd be willing to trust with your life. That's huge. I think also, just on top of that and with some self-improvement, but this is some low-hanging fruit that I think is just at the individual level is really important. in terms of the sort of near-term political objectives, which I think we absolutely have to have. And there's this business with COVID, and this regime is pushing for,

this is like 100% compliance by like October or whatever. That's great. That gives us an opportunity to show that they can fail. Yes. And I think you've called for rallies and demonstrations and stuff. And I tell you, there was a time I would have disagreed with that because of the whole NRX critique of how you don't control the media, therefore it's kind of a lost cause. But I saw something here in Oklahoma where a church group had reached out to the local GOP to have a freedom rally. And they got 5,000 people to come out in Oklahoma in the middle of August on a Sunday. And if they can get 5,000 people, they can get millions across the country. And if the right people start, if we're not even the right people, if everybody listening were to reach out

to their gun clubs or their girlfriend's knitting circles or their gyms or whatever, and or liaise with the local GOP and said, we need to start doing rallies. I mean, like somebody like Alex Jones, we're like, Alex, you know he listens to your show, Matt. And I think, Alex, I'm going to implore you right now to lead the free peoples of Texas on a march the state capitol in Austin. And you demand that those leaders send a message to Washington that if you don't rescind the COVID mandates by October 1st, we go on strike. And if you will raise the banner, I will answer the call, Bap. I think this is how we would do this. And I think by having strikes or giving teeth to this, this could be a kind of nursery or petri dish for future networks and leaders to step forward

and maybe attract the national leaders, know, like Trump and the like, because we have to fight this thing and we have to stop it. Yes. The mandate, I think, is overreach and there has been some chimping out from Republican governors, which is hopeful, but we will see how far they actually resist. I agree with you that rallies are needed. I need to say I myself don't call for rallies, and neither do you, because we have small audiences. So if we did, no, but it's true. We would only be able to gather small audience, and I am interested in winning, not in a performance. But I do think that, well, Alex Jones has a quite big audience. Ideally, it would have to be some national figure who would call, you know.

And then this topic, the COVID mandate, the lockdowns that probably will be imposed and so forth, it can be used to mobilize the respectable MAGA-boomer, of which there are tens of millions. And if you can get even 3 million of them on the streets, nothing can stop that, you know, which is why—I don't know if you agree with this—I am very upset at Trump for a long time. They did not expect him to do it, they neutralized him somehow. But he could end all of this in a matter of weeks with, by the way, no violence or nothing like this. He could just call for civil disobedience. And I think you're right, however, even if he does not come forward, this, what they're doing now is such an overreach and such bullying is that maybe it can be organically, spontaneously

arise, just the mega boomers will say we've had it and here we are striking. I don't know what you think. Yeah, I agree. All joking aside, I firmly believe we have everything that we need to mount and win a successful resistance against this. There are already countries like Denmark, for instance, that are rolling back their mandates. This isn't unreasonable. Going back to the whole NRX points of this stuff, there are people like Tucker, there are people in the media who would be willing to cover stuff like this. And as far as Trump goes, I think this is an opportunity to redeem himself a bit. He did make mistakes, and this would be an opportunity for him to get out in front and try to set that stuff right, to say nothing of, there may be up and coming leaders in

the GOP who could have a bright future, and this could give them an opportunity to get in front of this. here's a win that the vast majority of people would support. Going back to the whole politics as patronage, there's an entire constituency here that wants something and you can help give it to them. And so I think that this is a good near-term objective, I think, but it can be done. Yes, what I see opportunity in this, of course I'm against the COVID mandate and I don't want to call it COVID, you know, I call it Wuhan, whatever, but fine, call it COVID hoax, whatever. I'm against that and I want the American people broadly to rise up and to oppose that. But my audience and yours is quite small compared to, let's say, the tens of millions of MAGA.

My model for—I don't know if you agree with this, but I first came on Twitter in 2013, during the protests in France against the gay marriage law, because the French, unlike actually in America where the gay marriage was imposed without much protest against the will of the people, but the French actually came out in huge numbers, protested against the gay marriage. It was—and they still have that organization, it's called the Banif Pour Tous. And it's Catholic, respectable boomers and so forth, middle-class people in huge numbers. And I'm very much for something like that happening. And then this is the point. I came online because riding on that wave of mass respectable popular discontent were were a small group of young nationalists who, although the mass protests were against gay

marriage, and I think that was the year in which Dominic Venner commit suicide, and he was saying, it's great you're protesting against this gay marriage law, but the real issue is mass immigration and our national heritage. And that is what these group of youth were doing, riding on top of this wave. They were bringing attention to this other more fundamental problem of mass immigration and French national identity and so forth. So I came on Twitter to observe them and toóI had a very small account, I think 20 follower when I came on and so forth, but to give them whatever support. But to observe them, it was very exciting time, because they were actually using Twitter the way it was designed to be used.

I could see them organizing on Twitter, go to this plaza, go to this street, do this. It was very exciting. Of course, we would be shut down if we tried to use Twitter that way now, but there are other communication platforms. However, I think if there are mass protests over COVID, as there very well could be and should be, and someone like Elon Musk or whoever could become national hero by leading a nationwide resistance that, again, as you point out, Denmark did it, other countries are getting rid of these mandates. So it's not an unreasonable request. But that aside, we could ride on that, Sam, us and our friends could ride on that in smaller groups and bring attention to—I don't know what you think about that. I agree, because it's all kind of related in roundabout ways.

I mean, even just like with the, you look at, there was a guy who wrote a book, The Transgender Industrial Complex, about how there's all this overlap between COVID and the transgender issue or whatever. And this is, a lot of these same sort of people who back these groups, you know, these foundations and what have you, and NGOs, they're also, you know, in the bag for, you know, really liberal immigration policies. And because they're at heart globalists. And it's like, all this stuff is kind of connected. And I think like the time is ripe for, that people would come out in droves for anyone who would just say, you don't have to be afraid anymore. We don't have to live like this. And when we do these things, you do not have people come out with like pitchforks

and chimp out and everything, but it's just as ambassadors of the sort of world they wanna live in. And I think to go at it in that spirit, I think that would do nothing but good things. I think it must happen, again, there are normal advanced countries that are ending restrictions. Some of them actually never really put them in place. Iceland was never locked down. I saw this anal sex monster, Claire Blakney, yeah, but, come on, that's what she is. Before I got banned, she was bragging to me how she likes to take it in the ass and this. And now she's writing article about, oh, people are laughing at Australia, but look at our death rate. Well, Iceland also had very small death rate, never had any lockdown, really. Japan has very small death rate, never had lockdown.

And Japanese National Health Authority come out for Ivermectin, which is being horribly misrepresented in Reddit American media now. But I'm saying these are easy, practical, reasonable demands. And if it doesn't happen, Sam, if these lockdowns and this Wuhan-Asianity continues, I think this could be something like filter. You know, people talk about the great filter. The great filter for humanity would be these kinds of governments that have been set up on top of mass democracies that use a relatively small crisis. And it is a real disease, whatever, but it's a small crisis, and they use it essentially to destroy a society, because you cannot keep permanent lockdown like these people want and like many of these middle-aged, mentally ill women on SSRI and so forth.

They actually want that. And what would happen in that case maybe, I would hope, is some kind of mass exodus of freedom-loving young people, or not just young people, freedom-loving people, you know, we could all move perhaps to maybe we could buy Dominica, maybe I shouldn't say Dominica, I mean, you can buy something, but I don't know. But look, that might be a science fiction scenario. I don't know if you want to talk to that. I've kept you very long on this show. In closing, I want to ask you, since you are on the subject of science fiction, futurism, what comes next, path forward. I know you love the book Dune and it was an inspiration for your writing. Is that correct? I also like this very much. Would you like to tell the audience something about Dune

and also if you like David Lynch Dune, if you're looking forward to watching the new version of Dune? Oh yeah, there's a number of books I really got into. You know, as you're growing up and you find books that speak to you. And that was one that I really got into whenever I was like a freshman in college. And I don't remember most of my courses, but I remember a lot of lessons I learned from Dune. And I even like the later books of God-Emperor and Chapterhouse dude. I'll full on nerd out over that stuff. And that man was singing around corners. Yes. Yeah. I love that stuff. Do you like that? Because people don't like David Lynch movie. Have you seen it? Of Dune? But I like it. I think it's a masterpiece. Oh, I tried. I really tried to get into it. I couldn't do it. I love David Lynch.

I loved Twin Peaks and I remember Lost Highway, that was one of those where we had some dudes who were really into weed in college and they were esoterically trying to break it down for us. So I love his stuff, but I couldn't get into that one. Yes. Well, I understand there are many people who don't like it, but I like it. And what if you found out that I knew Ben and Jezzarit's mother and she said that I am the Kwisatz Sadarach? what would you say? I'd say the spice must flow. Yes, yes. Sam, look I've kept you long on a long time and now I think whiskey may be getting too close to us what do you say you know come back on show we talk many thing we have many topic left to talk why you not come back. It would be my pleasure. Thank you for the

invitation to get to sit in on with this with you. Yes, very good. Now we must go to conference call with putler me and sam and putler on the phone so uh we leave audience very good sam thank you for coming on show and until next time uh very good pap out