Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 53 - The Donkey Reading Series: Max Boot

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

On this entry into the DRS Joe and Travis read Max Boot's "Why winning and losing are irrelevant in Syria and Afghanistan" from the Washington Post. It might just be the dumbest fucking thing ever read for the show. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy a shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Follow us on twitter @lions_by

VIEW! SHUN! HA! This couldn't be any more embarrassing! So now you know how it works! We don't have much time! Hurry up! Let's practice it now! What's wrong, Vegeta? Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of The Lions Led by Donkeys.

I'm Joe, and with me today is Travis. Howdy. It's been a couple months. How have you been? with me today is Travis. Howdy. It's been a couple months. How have you been? Yeah, well, I mean, it's been a pretty busy couple of months for a number of reasons, particularly in the last, like, I guess, like two or three weeks. For those who have been remotely online, probably noticed that there's been a lot of tensions with iran um in the last like two weeks or so more so than usual yeah for a bunch of nonsense uh nonsense reasons that we don't really need to go too much into depth but the bottom line was that um the u.s claimed that

the u.s government claimed that uh iranian militias in iraq because there's there's a number of militias in Iraq that are supported or backed or some way involved with the Iranian government and the US government was claiming that these militias were imminently planning attacks on American citizens

working in Iraq either like civilians working in aid or development or whatever like I am or development or whatever, like I am or military or government facilities. Cause right now there's more than 5,000 us troops in Iraq. And so the, the us government was claiming that these militias were, you know,

imminently planning serious threats or attacks against these American targets. And as a result they did the actually unprecedented move to evacuate all non-essential personnel from the u.s embassy in baghdad as well as the u.s consulate in erbil and uh just to note like the u.s didn't do this in 2014 when isis like took mosul the u.s consulate in erbil did not evacuate even when isis like took mosul the u.s consular and airbill did not evacuate even when isis was within like a rocket artillery range of airbill like they didn't evacuate yeah i'm serious um and but now because of some like political bullshit they evacuated everybody um and as a result any aid organization or company that had some connection to the U.S. government, which is you, which is me, not to give too many details, but there are subcontractors of subcontractors, which means that if the highest level company or contractor, which is closely connected to an american government organization if the u.s

government is starting to evacuate its personnel its subcontractors have to decide whether or not they need to do the same thing and the highest level ones did um so that meant that there was about a week where i was um unsure whether or not we would evacuate um and it wouldn't be like oh we're leaving in like two weeks like don't worry it's like we're leaving now like grab your passport and your like residency card and any cash that you have and like walk out the door and we're leaving the country that's what we were like thinking it was going to be um but uh, cooler heads prevailed. At least they seem to have done so, so far. And, uh, I mean, it could still happen. I mean, I think we know that there's a lot of dumb people, um, in government in the U.S.

and probably in Iran as well. Um, but I'm more worried about the American ones, at least for my situation. but I'm more worried about the American ones, at least for my situation. And like, for example, the US government said that like it warned airline companies flying over the Persian Gulf that they could be misidentified. Again, are they going to put the fucking US Vincennes out there for old time's sake?

Yeah. Like I tweeted about it when I saw the news, I was like, look, dear US Navy, if you can look it up on flighttracker.com don't shoot it down like it's a bad idea you might get a medal for it but you it might weigh on your conscience yeah it didn't seem to hurt his career too much yeah unfortunately if we did

start shooting down airliners nobody would get in trouble for it but like it's bad um so we shouldn't do it and uh i could probably find at least three people who work for certain news organizations who would disagree with you travis yeah i guess that's a pretty interesting segue there i mean it's so dumb all right so before we start this reading series oh by the way it's an entry in the reading series, part two of however many for people who couldn't read the title. So if you don't want politics all up in your donkey, go ahead and just leave. We do this every once in a while because one, everybody knows how much we hate people twisting historical fact to meet horrible present day policies. But, you know, we were looking so hard for an article supporting the invasion of Iran, and we just could not find one. Yeah.

I mean, I even looked on a website called American Greatness, and you'd figure a website called American Greatness, or sorry, yeah would be like that makes even less sense somehow it's incredibly stupid i mean there's no accounting for like weird american conservatives but um even they like their main articles were about like you know we probably shouldn't invade iran because like we can't afford it right now um of course all the reporting all they're reporting on like the events themselves were very it was like it's like all the ammunition for like why we should go to war with iran of course it's all bullshit but like they gave all the ammunition blaming iran for everything bad that's ever happened like iran has to go like their america is as good as like the correct actor in the region but then they

stop just short of actually advocating for war because i think even anyone who looks at it for like more than you know would be a disaster the likes of which we really haven't seen like in world history since like the fall of the roman empire i think this might be our soviet version of afghanistan if we invaded iran there's no way we could handle that. We would beat them militarily, but I think we've talked about this. The position is completely untenable.

I've talked to a number of people who were like, yeah, we could probably win, and then I tell them that Iran is bigger than the entire Western Front of Europe during World War II, and they're like, oh, wait, that's a lot of space and uh iraq is like smaller than france right i think um and it's still we still didn't really win that one

although again as we will segue into some people might think we have yeah or no winning is irrelevant yeah it's but but so yeah so to sum it up we couldn't find any articles um supporting a war with iran at least outright i mean they would give all the ammunition to say that we should do the war and then say that we shouldn't but which is i was I was surprised. I was surprised. Which brings us to Max fucking boot. So, ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the maximum amount of boot

we can handle. Our boot runneth over. So, I did not know who... I knew about Max Boot. I didn't really know who he was as a person like i thought he was just like a soulless ghoul who constantly champions for which he is but like i didn't know there was so much more to him uh which is bad also until i read an article that he wrote for washington post which we will get to. But for people who are unaware,

we have to kind of get into Max Boot's background and why he looks and writes like a developmentally stunted kidney bean. I'm going to... You gotta untie this boot. Yeah, gotta untie this fucking boot. First, his name. For people who are unaware,

a boot is a marine corps term for a dumbass new private um which is something i feel like the army should adopt because we don't have any cool nicknames like that we just call them new private uh a boot is someone so dumb and worthless they're just a pair of boots that take up space also a boot means vomit uh both accurately describe max boot um yeah the real pain here and i i feel like travis can probably identify uh with my pain here is that he actually did graduate with a history degree so like i can't like when we did a prager you episode i couldn't just like scream like these dudes didn't even fucking study history max boot studied history just then decided to fucking

throw out the window or uc berkeley just fucking sucks i don't know which one yeah i don't know i feel like i just think people with history degrees they they go one of two ways one way is they don't really question anything and they don't really spend that much time learning they just like learn the facts do well on the tests and then graduate without ever having learning anything and the other the other history degrees they all become uh they all become communists in some form or another pretty much yeah uh max boo definitely took the other turn there uh because he graduated with a master's in diplomatic history from yale uh that's gotta be bullshit i yeah i've never heard of that degree uh also if there's one twitter's awful it's it's not cool um other than if you're gonna use it to buy my book but uh

twitter has done one good thing and that has proven uh that you can go to ivy league schools and still be a complete fucking idiot uh like nothing like before i found my way into twitter like i think like two years ago i'm like oh he went to yale he must know what he's talking about like you don't get to yale if you're not smart or at least rich or both um and like ever since then it's been a platform that has proven to me that i'm absolutely wrong about that well i mean my my experience with uh like top level universities and the kind of people go to them is it really is like half of the people are either like clearly like they deserve to be there they're really really smart people and like you really enjoy talking to them and the other half is just like

you can see why they're at a top level university because like they say all the right things and they they you know they they talk the way the right, you know, those kind of people should talk like they all have. They have the elite signifiers. But there's just something missing, whether it's like a true intellectual curiosity or just they're actually a huge dipshit. Like, yeah, it's really frustrating because you'd hope that you'd hope that someone with a Yale degree a harvard degree or whatever um that that should actually mean something but it really doesn't uh it really it really doesn't mean that much what you really got to do is look at their work um and then evaluate them especially if it's like a non-stem degree and you know as a liberal arts major myself like uh this like the ivy league

schools are really really good for stem degrees they have some of the greatest minds in their fields absolutely um but like when it comes to the humanities it seems like everybody they put out is a fucking soulless ghoul yeah it really depends um and it depends on what program like for example i went to the college of william and mary which is uh um at least for the east coast is a pretty prestigious school um like it's a virginia public school that sends a ton of people into government think tanks uh stuff like that and uh for example like the poli sci department and the government departments um no offense to the various people i knew who were in those departments but most of them were like full-on like like yeah like soulless ghouls who are going to go into um

like some creepy consulting firm they're basically like pete budaj people um and uh if any of y'all have listened to other podcasts or read articles about p Buttigieg, she's like a soulless, ambitious guy designed to like advance in government. I believe our producer once told him to suck his dick. Yeah. And that's I feel like that's really common in those kind of departments like poli sci, government, international relations, and to a certain extent, history. But if you get into like, I mean, I'm just here to recruit people into Middle Eastern studies. But if you go into Middle Eastern studies, there's going to be a handful of people who want to go into like the CIA, but they get weeded out once they realize that like everyone else in the department, all of the professors are like pretty left because it's

hard not to be um if you know that much about middle eastern history and like american involvement in it and so those departments i feel like nothing bad ever happened travis i don't know what you're talking about yeah and so like and and the prestigious universities they unfortunately are the ones with the money to hire like the academics for these like more interesting smaller departments that are less likely to turn out these weird pete budaj types but yeah but then you get max boot every so often yeah and you know he graduated with his master's and ended up making a really long too fucking long career out of writing books and articles about the military and military

history. And I think this is why I hate him so much. He has given speeches at both the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College. For people unaware, that's like a university for military officers after they are already graduated from like with

a bachelor's degree. Like you go there when you're like becoming a general and shit this guy spoke there he originally considered himself a defense writer because he wrote a fucking blog about it but he all he did is blog he's a fucking blogger uh the the difference between him and that weird, kind of sort of alcoholic mom that you know who always makes wine jokes in her shitty blog is not, like, there's not many shades of difference there except one with the Yale. Yeah, one was a dork who read too much, like, historical military fiction. Like, one read the Sharp novels by Bernard Cornwell and the other actually had fun in college. You know, I'm really disappointed. And the other actually had fun in college.

You know, I'm really disappointed. So, I mean, everybody is aware that I'm kind of like a weird Napoleon fanboy, which doesn't really square well with my political beliefs. I get it. I get it. You don't need to point out to me. I am really sad there isn't a French version of the sharp novels because I would buy those and read them religiously. Yeah, that would be tons of fun. religiously yeah that would be tons of fun it's it's a lot harder to like enjoy um the sharp novels once you like realize that the british weren't actually the good guys necessarily no that's why it's my favorite part of that entire conflict is like the french despot was the good

one that's a shame yeah one day we'll dig him up and put him back on the throne uh so so after his his blog he um one of the things that he did on his blog was like scream about the need to uh be at war wherever like he he could randomly think of this guy has never seen a war he did not support like he him in war is like a boy when they're 16 uh you've never had sex and you've never come close to it but you're all about it in every way shape and form like you just talk about it a lot yeah you talk about it way too much you make people uncomfortable with it you start to freak out your teachers a little bit yeah if anybody asks you totally know how to go about it like there's a there's a war in canada that like you just don't know like this war goes to a different

high school have you seen the the british show the in-betweeners no okay well for anyone in the audience who has seen the show max boot is like jay uh from the in-betweeners um just gonna i'm gonna hope somebody gets that uh says through his blog he got a job with the weekly standard uh the weekly standard was a publication which is thankfully finally died i believe this year uh that was built upon the lives of people like elliot abrams john bolton bill crystal and robert fucking kagan it was founded by john bud horitz famous street boy famous street boy uh so for people who are unaware john behart's is a giant asshole that looks like a hefty bag full of cake mix and spends his free times yelling at waitresses because food was

three minutes late. He also once told a dear friend of the show, Francis Horton of Hell of a Way to Die, that he should choke to death. And also he probably started the Iraq War. Yeah, exactly. So during his time with the Weekly Standard,

Max Boot joined in with all the other soulless fucks and wrote dozens of pieces about the U.S. needing to invade Iraq. Articles titled like Saddam must go, the right war for the right reasons and what to do about Iraq and the bumpy road to democracy in Iraq. Yeah, you could call it that. Yeah. They knew George W. Bush read their publication like it was the fucking Bible. They knew George W. Bush read their publication like it was the fucking Bible. You know, I feel like I think we talked about this before, but I feel like it's probably a bit of a pipe dream of me. And maybe I think too little of the incompetencies of the George W. Bush administration when I say if the weekly standard didn't exist, we may have not invaded Iraq. Yeah, or at least maybe not in that way at that time.

yeah or at least maybe not in that way at that time i i considered the weekly standard um the yellow journalism version of modern day that caused the uh the spanish-american war it's pretty like it's i've remembered the main it was just like john pohor is talking about his burger at schnippers first as tragedy then as farce it's important so this is all important when it comes to boot he has never seen a war he did not agree with or one that he supported further than that he refuses to apologize for being part

of the group of assholes that beat the drums of war in 2013 he wrote quote the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war has occasioned a lot of interesting and anguish appeals. For those who have supported the decision to invade, all such occasions present a chance of reflection on what went wrong and right

and whether our backing for the war effort was misbegotten. Most of those who initially supported the decision to go to war, including our current secretaries of state and defense, long ago disowned their early hawkishness. For my part, I have resisted the urge to repent as critics of the war effort would have it maybe you should you fuck yeah like a million people are

dead dude thanks he goes on further to brag about he still supports it and he said this when american casualties are actually at their peak which means iraqi casualties were also at their peak yeah this bootuck has also written multiple books about the military and military history. One of them titled Savage Wars of Peace, and it was called, quote, essentially meaningless by the Journal of Cold War Studies.

Damn. He also won an award for opinion journalism, which is something so fucking meaningless it's almost impressive. That's like if we gave out an award for opinion journalism which is something so fucking meaningless it's almost impressive that's like if we gave out an award for shit posting i mean honestly they should they should give that out now i mean drilled win it every year oh obviously but like he won an award for having opinions so who gives a fuck opinions so who gives a fuck all this is so all this is a bit of a warm-up stretch for the flawless exercise an insane ode to manifest destiny titled why winning and losing are irrelevant in

syria and afghanistan jesus this is the main article that we get to today. It's a doozy. It is the worst thing I have ever sat and read all the way through because I did not read the entire piece from the last reading series because you took that duty upon yourself. So I didn't have to. And this I would argue this is worse. And there's a reason for that. This was this year um we were reviewing an article uh from prior to the invasion of iraq last time yeah i think it was from 99 or something yeah this no so when he was writing this max boot knows everything we know like he's not missing 20

30 fucking years of history so this is arguably worse and it's not racist 20, 30 fucking years of history. So this is arguably worse. And it's not racist. Well, it is. It is racist, but not as racist. Yeah, it's it's it's not the same kind of like old school, old school racism that can just be like immediately dismissed because the shit still happens. I mean, this is what published on January 30th, year of our Lord, 2019. Yeah. what published on january 30th year of our lord 2019 yeah uh so yeah i mean probably i don't remember when we recorded the the episode on what was it yeah i forgot his fucking name but um that was probably we recorded that probably in like february or march or something like that

so this article was published you know weeks before we recorded that episode yeah and uh it's it is i agree i think it is in many ways worse um because i think most most people going into the like high level defense like um positions or like military positions to like advise the president they probably are like smart enough to read why arabs lose wars and realize that they probably shouldn't be like handing that out to the generals you'd always hope hopefully um because it's like a little obvious now and it's been pretty thoroughly like excorciated by by us which clearly means that everyone thinks it's bullshit now yeah we got him he's definitely canceled now they're canceled they're hardcore canceled um but this one i mean this was published in the washington post and isn't that the one where they say democracy died yeah yes it's on

the top fucking header the washington post owned by jeff bezos um says democracy dies in darkness and then in 2019 two years almost to the day after trump is you know put in office officially they publish this freaking article so like this is it's not as long and it's not as like maybe like fun to tear apart because it's just kind of infuriating infuriating but it is so bad and dangerous it's really bad and the reason why it's dangerous is max boot continues to talk to people that are very influential in the military to include like the general staff college and things like that yeah and the main reason why this is bad is because it's all in the title. Winning and losing is now relevant. He writes, James Dobbins, a former U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his colleagues at RAND are closer to the mark when they write, Winning may not be an available option, but losing certainly is.

A precipitous departure, no matter how rationalized, will mean choosing to lose. The result would be a blow to American credibility, the weakening of deterrence, and the value of U.S. reassurance elsewhere, an increased terrorist threat emanating from the Afghan region, and the distinct possibility of a necessary return there under worse conditions. The Rand report is about Afghanistan, but the same analysis applies to Syria. the possibility of a necessary return there under worse conditions. The Rand report is about Afghanistan, but the same analysis applies to Syria. Okay. Yeah, like where to start?

Like, I guess like what they're talking about is kind of if you want to like back out a little bit, they're saying that since like the u.s military won't necessarily be like defeated on the ground by the taliban of course in afghanistan but just because they don't necessarily overrun all their bases doesn't mean we still haven't lost um and so basically what they're saying is we don't want like the helicopter on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon moment.

And right. They're worried about how it will look for us to leave. And I think that's why even when Obama pulled the majority of troops out of Iraq, he still left a whole whole bunch behind. Yeah. And also, if winning isn't a possibility, the only other possibility is fucking losing. That's just how the world works. Yeah, it's like what they say in Talladega Nights. Like, if you aren't first, you're last.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like we need to apply that to our foreign policy. Max Boot's one of those never-Trump-or-right-wingers. Max Boot's one of those never-Trump-or-right-wingers, but the whole... The group of people who constantly make jokes about participation trophies apparently only want one for the U.S. military. That's the only thing that's working here. And we've come full circle

back to the very fucking reason that Max Boot and those other people were making the argument for invasion in the first place. We've got to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here like they're they're either thinking or hoping that americans are this fucking stupid or they're goldfish because like i know i was alive hearing that and i still hear people say that well what if they come over here motherfucker the taliban is is not going to Florida Pasadena. Like you're probably going to be fine. Yeah. The Taliban, the Pashtun like nationalist Islamist movement is absolutely planning to

invade like Indiana. Yeah. And an institute like Sharia law on like one of the four million towns named Springfield in the US. Yeah. one of the four million towns named springfield in the u.s yeah and uh like the guy who owns like the the used boat dealership and like lives in the cookie cutter suburb named like winding brook lane like their number one fear is the taliban coming from afghanistan yes because they clearly uh have the logistics necessary for all this to be necessary even

though they can't beat the afghan army which is equally as fucking worthless like most people already put like even people who are as shitty as boot who don't want to pull out have punted that argument like 5 000 dead american soldiers ago yeah and like the blow to american credibility like that part do you think we fucking have any reality show tv host who wants to fuck his daughter president man that boat sailed a long time ago and like yesterday i was talking to to one of my iraqi co-workers she asked about like so what about the war with iran and i was like yeah like I don't think it's gonna happen fortunately

and she's like yeah America's gonna lose America fucking sucks like I mean she didn't use those words but the point was there I mean like nobody believes in the US like I don't blame them like a handful of weirdos like Max Boot like even the EU

is like like even the EU and nato's like yeah we should probably move on from this whole america thing like we we have not only burnt every bridge but like we've burnt every bridge and then pissed off the precipice like it's fucking pointless to make this other side to fuck off yeah like i mean obama kind of repaired it a little bit but only surface level yeah because um only like the diplomacy level i mean the deal with iran was huge um but like you know he was still drone striking half the world yeah exactly i mean for the people who got fucked over by obama like they didn't really care but in terms of image repair he did a little bit but whatever he built up trump like stomped on and pissed on and then like threw in the toilet and flushed but then it clogged

the toilet and then the sewer backed up and now there's just shit everywhere yeah yeah it's it's literally everything is shit we are the dog sitting at the table in that cartoon where everything's on fire this is fine this is fine yeah exactly like we have no credibility so we we shouldn't worry about losing it when we pull out of afghanistan this whole idea we don't have anything to lose no this whole idea of national pride and credibility is fucking bullshit because we have been drone striking so many people that like kids in pakistan are afraid of the blue sky because they know more drone strikes will come like at any point you have induced a drone related phobia on children but there's no there's no pride to lose anymore we don't have any yeah um i mean okay

and on a lower level like on a dumber level you go to the grocery store here in Erbil and you have one side of the aisle labeled American products and one side of the aisle labeled Syrian products. And on the American side, it's pumpkin. It's literally pumpkin spice, frosted flakes and preserved, preserved, bagged mayo tuna. I assume it would actually just be a kid kid named trent who's gonna shoot up the local high school yeah well that's the other thing that america people think about america and then on the other side you know on the syrian side it's like handmade olive oils and like um like really good spices and stuff but the american side is like pumpkin spice cornflakes we must defend western culture travis like that's what when people think america they think like garbage food school shooters

drone strikes and like dumb asses that's what people think about america yeah like literally the best thing we could do to improve people's opinion of America is make them see less Americans. Exactly. Just like pull out, shut the fuck up and like just kind of hope people forget about us. Let's just focus. Let's just focus on us for a while, guys. So he goes on to say the longer u.s troops stay anywhere the greater their chances of achieving our objectives when the u.s troops pull out the consequences are

usually costly whether it be the communist taker of cambodia laos and south vietnam vietnam of 1975 or the rise of the islamic state after 2011 oh boy okay oh boy let's look at some history here like let's look at how the communists took over in cambodia laos and south vietnam maybe it had something to do with the enormous massive illegal bombing campaign of cambodia and laos which killed half a million people and emboldened the khmer rouge and they also supported the khmer rouge when they were fighting in south vietnam we support we supported the vietnamese not south vietnam we supported the the khmer rouge government long after the khmer rouge stopped being the government because vietnam invaded them yeah exactly we were so opposed to communism that we supported like perhaps the worst communist

government yeah because vietnam was fighting them and we were still butthurt that they kicked their asses the only reason that the khmer rouge didn't kill as many people as the great leap forward or or anything else is because they didn't have that many people in cambodia that was it yeah i know and the same with like uh the rise of isis um and it's interesting that he says the rise of the islamic state after 2011 because he's trying to pass that hot potato over to asad yeah exactly he's trying to like blame that like he to Assad. Yeah, exactly. He's trying to blame that. He's like, yeah, this is somehow because of the Arab Spring. Which, yeah, ISIS did exist.

With different names, but all the way back to 2005. Yeah, and so what we really blame the rise of ISIS on is, or really, I would say, put the date as 2013-2014. That's when it started becoming a relevant um entity that like as we see it today for sure yeah yeah and and also like let's like why did isis exist isis wouldn't fucking exist if we didn't kill saddam you stupid bitch like and even going back before that like the early roots roots of the jihadist movement in Iraq, I mean, you trace that back to U.S. support for the Mojahedin in Afghanistan. Yeah. And the Dawa Party.

Yeah. U.S. producing, like, you know, jihadist textbooks and stuff for Afghan kids and funding. Don't give that up. We talk about that in the Afghan Soviet. Oh, sorry. I forget what I just said. You you can totally die you're my source for that anyway you're the one who pointed me in the right direction oh yeah um but yeah so like we the u.s is like largely responsible for the rise of like hardcore um salafist islamist movements in the middle east since like the 70s and 80s because we funded it and supported it and kind of nurtured its ideological rise because we viewed it as a viable alternative to communism and uh that didn't work out great because then those you know people

who we paid for to travel from you know saudi arabia egypt to go get trained in pakistan and fight in afghanistan when the soviets withdrew from afghanistan they didn't just like go back home and like go back to work at their construction company they went to chechnya they went to chechnya they stayed in afghanistan uh they continued building yeah they call them the afghan arab brigades exactly and then when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, boom, they all went to Iraq and helped form the like the Al Qaeda in Iraq or these other groups to fight against the American forces there. iraqi state and the descent of iraq into chaos by the criminal actions of paul brimmer and the uh like provisional was it the coalition provisional authority or whatever yeah and uh of course the invasion as a whole and so like we can't just say isis just sort of like pumped into it like existence and out of like a vacuum a contextless void in 2011 travis you got it all wrong a whole

bunch of groups got together you ever watched dragon ball z this is how it happened they did the fusion dance and when they touched the when their when their fingertips touched isis was formed had nothing completely independent of american involvement um and like what's even fucking dumber than that it's open and known history fuck we talked about on the show when the, the U S supported Kurdish separatists in Iraq to simply fuck with Saddam. And we did more than that. We support the Islamic Dawa party,

which I believe is the one that crippled his son in an assassination attempt. Cool. Yeah. Way to go guys. It's, Oh, it's that time.

The CIA hip hop horn. go ahead and hit that shit they're back can't go a single goddamn episode without bringing them up yeah i mean he's literally buying right back into the domino theory bullshit that even richard nixon thought was stupid yeah i mean everyone thought the domino theory was bullshit like even back in the day and somehow we're bringing that shit up again but like about isis or something like i don't fucking get it i don't either and he keeps reaching back into history to pick up the next reason we go to war it'll be awesome when he writes like a washington post opinion article why we need to invade iran

for spices or because baron trump's rightful claim to the shah's throne like i look forward to like oh we just need to export all these opiates no he's gonna be claiming shit like baron trump is actually like the the like the last remaining scion of like the kajar dynasty or some shit like that yeah because some weirdo is going to be paying him to publish that op-ed in the washington post i really look forward to when we invade the Holy Russian Empire because some dude in fucking Mississippi has a claim to the Romanov throne. And Mac's boot will be there. He'll be there and he'll be all about it.

His boot will be on the ground. That's not literally. No. Safely from his computer while he operates his blog in fucking new york or wherever jesus and i like and then he says um in this next sentence like while the via kong weren't trying to attack the american homeland the islamic state and al-qaeda are um the new york times reports that u.s intelligence has warned that a complete withdrawal of u.s troops from afghanistan would lead to an attack on the united states within two years like i don't know man that

sounds like bullshit to me and also like it has been bullshit yeah i mean we invaded afghanistan in what 2001 right yeah and like november or something um and it is now may late may of 2019 and uh pretty sure like osama bin laden didn't show up in springfield number 2045 and like started beheading people in front of the local walmart um so i guess uh i guess we can stop worrying about that now i mean by the same idea like you know the nine after the 9-11 attacks and we attacked afghanistan like we very easily could have just left after that like we could have just like even like a little bit of negotiation with the taliban yeah the taliban completely agreed to hand over osama bin laden like but the exchange was recognizing the taliban as the government of afghanistan which who gives a shit we're gonna fucking do anyway like two or three

years we're gonna recognize the taliban as a legitimate party we haven't even labeled them as a designated foreign terrorist organization because we if we did that we would lose leverage in our fucking negotiations with them which we also are trying to pay back we're trying to reimburse the taliban's travel expenses like we are we fucking lost dude like we it's it just took us 20 years to get to that point when we saved all this trouble back in september of 2001 and just been like hey like can i hand him over all right here's like here's your travel expenses like you know 20 years early you know one of my favorite things is uh totally off top subject i'm writing a paper on uh the confederate economy during the civil war because history degrees

are boring sometimes and uh i made a note that uh more countries recognize the the taliban than they recognize the confederate states of america and it's true but uh we need to put up some uh some statues of mullah omar in uh in richmond virginia go ahead yeah go ahead and drop that bitch in the little birmingham alabama uh you know it's like and i understand that we didn't want to negotiate we want to kill people i understand how revenge works i'm not fucking stupid but i have full faith in 20 years when the Afghan government is completely destroyed and is rehoused somewhere like rural Pennsylvania. But we will still have an embassy there. And it's like the Khmer Rouge.

We recognized the Khmer Rouge all the way up until Pol Pot was living in a hut in northern Cambodia and had no control of anything else. What's the current president of of afghanistan's name um ashraf ghani i believe yeah ashraf ghani he's gonna be living next to like gulen mariam rajavi and uh like ahmed shalabi like um just like in this one suburb of pennsylvania batista's fucking cousin that still lives in the united states we'll call it losers row oh jesus us and robert e lee's great great grandson all have a timeshare it's like we'll rename the suburb to lost cause yeah jesus yeah so he goes on to say advocates for retreat will argue that open end deployment is not sustainable but that's not true u.s troops are volunteers so as long as they're taking many casualties

the public isn't opposed to their deployment okay so thanks a lot uh advocates for big retreat um this is so dumb because the the iraq war anti-iraq war protests before the invasion were like the largest in American history until this year. Until when the Me Too movement, I believe, broke it. Or whatever the hell they won. Women's March, yeah. That broke that this year or late last year.

Forever War is not just sustainable, totally acceptable because we have an apathetic American public, dulled by the constant news of 20 years of war. Fuck it look i love this sentence structure advocates of retreat will argue that an open-ended deployment is not sustainable but i'm not racist yes this is the i'm not racist of foreign policy institutes people are saying we can't go to war forever but if you look at the charts people simply don't care so we can do whatever we want uh yeah it's like u.s troops

are volunteers yeah but like i mean kind of like this is the modern warfare version of a pity fuck like you just keep asking and asking can we stay at work can we still stay at war and the public's like fine fuck it we don't care like you get it you get a pity fuck you're getting a pity fuck for foreign policy that is ending yeah like we're taking probably our lowest casualties right now since 2001 but like that doesn't change the fact that every time there is you know some new guy gets killed in afghanistan um it's in the news because every time it happens people are like fuck like we're still there like why did you make a point of it yeah yeah like the last person to die but i mean i'm i might be wrong here uh the last person to

die in afghanistan i believe he's a ranger or something he was like three when we invaded or when 9-11 happened yeah i mean didn't there was an article i saw a couple weeks or months ago where a marine got deployed who was born after 9-11 yes and they tried to make and it was like him and his dad got deployed at the same time or something ridiculous like that and they tried to make and they tried to make it heartwarming jesus that's so depressing. I just don't understand. It's like the idea that we can just continually abuse our military with constant warfare just because they're volunteers is just so disgusting. It only can be written by someone who's never actually had to do anything in his entire life. And that goes beyond our casualties. And I know it sucks when a soldier dies.

It sucks when anybody dies. are casualties and i know like it sucks when a soldier dies sucks when anybody dies but like for every one person that in uniform who is killed we're killing so many civilians it's ridiculous dozens or hundreds depending on which war we're talking yeah and they just decided to stop they recently decided to stop reporting it because it was so bad it's so fucked up and not to mention that like if we're looking at it from a purely selfish reason um i think i think it was on the maybe the eyes left pod where they were talking about how during like certain parts of the afghan war you know maybe not a whole lot of americans were dying but they were having something like one amputation like every like 12 hours or something like that or every day or something like that and uh just because people, American soldiers, aren't dying there doesn't mean that they're not still being blown up or being shot to pieces.

Or even just, I say just, PTSD. That's still obviously a horrific, debilitating issue that you don't even have to be killed like shot or blown up or anything to suffer from the effects of being deployed to war and there's hundreds of thousands of veterans um with ptsd and going mostly untreated yeah and one of the things that people don't understand is the advance in technology has led to a skyrocketing amount of grievously wounded people coming home like they're like oh our casualties are really low i'm like no just a killed are and like there's still been thousands of americans killed in the wars yeah it's it's i mean like you said like the only person who can say shit like this is somebody like max boot who hasn't like you don't necessarily even have to

be like in the military be deployed to get it you just have to kind of have like you have to look at it as more than numbers like he says u.s forces have suffered six fatalities in syria and 66 in afghanistan since 2015 those losses are tragic but yes yeah and it's like no like you just can't like yeah these people died but it could be worse like no fucking shit you can't say a part yeah like their families their friends uh you know all the people who um were involved um in you know like the the just because somebody dies doesn't mean like you know dozens of people are gonna have to take care of the body and that itself is traumatizing yeah um and so like one person dying means dozens of casualties and then dozens of people back home being you know losing a family member or a friend or a loved one it's like

it's not just six fatalities it's not just 66 since 2015 like it's not just six fatalities. It's not just 66 since 2015. Like it's not just an average of 18 a year. Like you can't say that you can't put these into numbers and have that really mean something. It tells you who he is as a person because the only number he talks about is how much it costs in dollars. Like, like, well,

it might cost, you know, however many billions of dollars, like how many fucking, what's the pressure of constantly rotating through deployments on people their families and like their untreated mental health like nick my co-host most of the time is a soldier he's probably going to deploy eventually rich she's a soldier she'll probably deploy again like and like it weighs over them and like because the things that they're worrying about and things they have to do and the things that their families have to worry about and like those are that's two

out of you know a half million people that are go through this like it's like we have made deployments to a war zone routine which is absurd and isn't it like a new rule now where like you have to be deployable or something like that yeah you have to be able to go yeah yeah which means that like everybody in the military has to be have that like constantly weighing over them um like every kid who wants to just like get the college or get like the job training or something and get out after like four years or whatever doesn't matter they like the moment they sign the paper they have to start worrying about like am i gonna have to go to fucking afghanistan and become the next poor fuck who

gets blown up by an ied and then nobody gives a shit and the only thing people think about when they see my name in the news is fuck we're still there yep that's it man everybody the whole military millions of people yep and like that is like just such an enormous unquantifiable cost um and that he just doesn't even it doesn't even rate a mention i mean this is leave it to a a fucking yale graduate who really wanted to stick his dick in a skull so he could be in some secret society with the bush family this guy once cited rich people as an embattled minority in america he's he's the guy that's hand-waving away the death and destruction the war has brought an entire generation of afghans iraqis syrians and americans

yeah he's just like nah don't worry about those and this is this is where things get even worse he writes these kind of deployments uh are invariable in length and frustrating think of our indian wars which lasted roughly 300 years that's right boys we went zero to white man's burden in 60 seconds flat oh god oh shit i forgot white man's burden is actually the name of a poem that he actually got the name one from one of his books from the savage piece it's it's a i didn't put that together yeah it's a kipling book or a big kipling poem dude you can't you can't do that like dude roger kipling was like he got his own son killed in war like that's the one person that you don't use for this yeah i mean like he literally wrote the fucking poem called white man's burden and it's not satire like as far as i remember it's

not satire um it's like it's like genuinely advocating for like using um like not not specifically military force but like for white countries to i think it was written specifically actually about the the u.s colonization of the philippines i want to say i could be wrong about that but it was around that same time where it's like um euro euro people so including the united states um they have to go into the like these dark savage regions like africa um and colonize them in order to bring them to civilization and uh even at the time he was widely mocked um like i think i can't remember who i think it's some french guy wrote a poem that's like a satire of it called the brown man's burden or the black man's burden or something like that where he's like yeah the brown man's burden is getting fucking machine gunned by the white man's

burden um in the name of civilization yeah and i did not know that boot unironically referenced kipling for an entire book yeah and Kipling isn't the guy you want to use for advocating war because he advocated for war all the way up until his unending appetite

for the western front of World War I got his own son killed like his son they made a whole movie about it his son they made a whole movie about it um his son had really bad eyesight and at the time you couldn't enlist if you had glasses so he used his connection to get around that and get him a commission and which got him immediately killed because he was wearing glasses he lost them and got machine gunned glasses he lost them and got machine gunned jesus christ yeah good job fucking boot so he goes on to say u.s troops are not undertaking a conventional combat assignment they are the policing in the

frontiers of pax americana just as the police aren't trying to eliminate crime so troops are not trying to eliminate terrorism but instead to keep it below a critical threshold that threatens the united states and our allies this isn't as satisfying as pursuing unconditional surrender but as as we may discover before too long it beats the alternative okay jesus dude so he is in favor of fighting in afghanistan for the 280 years 280 years i mean so we invaded in 2001. So I guess he would find it reasonable if we eventually leave in 2281. When his great, great, great, great grandson Max Millie.

Have also not enlisted. Max Millie. Who did not enlist. No one in his family has enlisted uh he will be advocating for you know kind of re-upping the war in uh afghanistan um or what's left of afghanistan uh after we've drone striked literally all the mountains into dust and there's it's just a flat plane in the shape of afghanistan he'll just be abdullah abdullah sitting in kabul saying the mission's going great but like his head's in a jar from

futurama and the taliban will still have more than 20 000 members and control 80 of the country yes yeah and i like how he also cites uh the british deployment on the northwest frontier today's pakistan afghanistan border yes the famous time the british lost like hard in afghanistan yeah we made an entire episode about that yeah exactly like it was embarrassing um and also the entire reason the british were in that region was just to like prevent the russians from having it too they literally called the great game yeah um and then the british like left um in disgrace because they couldn't hold it eventually i have no idea how anybody can get an article published citing the indian wars which is i will say one of if not the greatest sins in our history, just outside slavery, as something we need to adopt.

That would be like if Angela Merkel's like, look, guys, I understand we're having a problem with migrants, but if we look to the Holocaust and everybody's like, hmm, I'm listening. Like that is exactly what max boot did we committed genocide against the native population of the united states he is advocating for genocide

we need to like go into kandahar or something and be like all right everybody grab a blanket we're gonna give you we're gonna give you some really great territory in uh yakutsk um it may be below zero celsius all year round but believe me it's amazing place it's amazing territory we're just gonna walk you there it's a short walk only six or seven thousand miles yeah um and uh you know no no problem. Just like, just go, shoo, and that's it. And now we'll settle. We'll settle Kandahar. Yes, he's saying like, look, guys, so go ahead, gather your belongings together. We're going to walk in a trail.

We're going to keep walking. Yeah, there might be a lot of crying. Some cavalry soldiers might rape your wife. We're going to walk to Argentina. There might be some land down there i understand it's not ours it's not yours either but it's fine uh we understand that you're not argentine and that's fine um uh yeah it's a reservation now yeah the the indian wars are a national crime that should stain our nation's history until the heat death of the universe and never once be used in any positive anything ever.

I mean, and if you look, it's quite apt that what he wants is a military related genocide, because like even though poverty and starvation and disease played a huge part in the native population dying, that was spread through military action, uprooting entire societies using the military like he accidentally advocated for genocide say what you will about ben shapira but at least he's up front with his with his wanton destruction of the palestinians yeah no i mean it's i guess he he may have a history degree but i i've definitely still met tons of people with American history degrees who just refuse to believe that somehow we were wrong in what we did against Native Americans. And what they'll do is they'll either just pretend it was necessary, say it was kind of bad, but they fought us too. Or just put all the blame on the English as if all of it happened before 1776 yeah and uh like you you can't any you spend five minutes reading about the actions of the american military or american settlers um on the western frontier starting in 1776 all the way through till fucking 2019 and uh like it's it's atrocious the whole time so we have quite a few international listeners uh so for people who maybe did not fully understand what

happened in the american west um the government's mission was to break the soul of the native american people until they were either all dead or lacked the will to resist colonization any further. Native children were kidnapped, forced into schools, and forced to be white. Massacres were committed at Wounded Cree, Sand Creek, and countless of other places. Native Americans were forcefully located

to burn stretches of land onto reservations that were only a few shades away from concentration camps. And those reservations are through various government programs they still exist today and they are still mostly kept in abject poverty um it is gross uh for lack of a better term uh this pax americana shit um is just fucking gross like it's just so absurd. And,

you know, they obviously, they, they stole it from Pax Romana. And another thing they stole from history and badly reapplied to modern day. That did not mean Rome was at peace. That meant nobody was invading Rome.

Yeah. That's all that meant. Rome was busy invading everyone else. Exactly. They were, they were fighting, raping and destroying native cultures all throughout, you know germania and and i don't think they're quite in britannia yet but all over the place um all that meant was that citizens at home could rest

peacefully knowing that it wasn't going to happen to them um and if that's the future that we're aiming for i have some really bad news about how the Roman Empire ended because it's not good. Yeah. Well, like just going back to the the the Western frontier, like the whole manifest destiny thing and the way the Americans conquered the West, as it were, it was directly cited by Hitler and his like general plan east. Yeah. It was directly cited by Hitler and his general plan east for what to do with Eastern Europe and Russia by killing or displacing all Russian people or Slavic people and resettling it. yeah yeah the crimes of hitler in world war ii were essentially taking the crimes of europe in the united states what we did to africa or to the native americans and just doing it in europe on a large industrial scale um it wasn't anything new like he learned it from the best the united states uh or you know europe you what the uk did in South Africa or in India.

Or Belgium did in Congo. Yeah, Belgium and the Congo. There's nothing new in this world. It's just people remixing people's previous songs, as it were. And they're just sampling them on the international stage of SoundCloud. Yeah, exactly. America is the world's mumble rapper is what we're saying exactly um so you could argue that like the the holocaust was just hitler like you know sampling manifest destiny and so what boot is doing is essentially sampling manifest destiny while kind of ignoring the fact that Hitler did that too.

So they're going to have a beef, I think. Yeah, I look forward to the Max Boot Hitler rat beef. And even though it's off topic to cite Hitler again, he got the idea of eugenics from the US too. So whoops, our bad world. Sorry. He even called these america's frontiers this was like what bothered me like that bro i'm pretty sure those are several tens of thousands of miles

away from our border i guess when you freebase old weekly standard issues kaboom looks an awful lot like the dakotas yeah it was it's like that that classic um i think it was a tweet or something where it's like oh like you're you're defending our freedom in Afghanistan? Like, how the fuck did our freedom get over there? What's it doing over in Afghanistan? Yeah, when did it leave? This abortion of a take quickly earned Boot the ire of pretty much everybody with a soul left on every platform of social media it quickly led him

to defend himself in a tweet storm where he where he said the main difference between the wars was American soldiers aren't committing war crimes in Afghanistan which ignores multiple people are serving life sentence in prison due to committing war crimes okay side note here I wrote this script before the Eric Gallagher thing

started coming up so yeah um it turns out it's gonna be a whole lot more like the indian wars than we thought because uh alec gallagher didn't get a pardon he's gonna run for office and he's probably gonna fucking win christ he's gonna be fucking president like after so biden's gonna win in 2020 he's gonna slash the national debt. Yeah, and then fucking Eric Gallagher is gonna run for president in 2024 on a platform of like,

yeah, I killed a fuckload of Iraqi civilians. It was fucking cool. I only felt recoil. God, Jesus Christ, I hate that meme. I had it cited to me like this week. Oh, Jesus. But yeah, he's going to fucking win. Eric Gallagher is going to be fucking president in 2024 or 2028.

His vice president is going to be fucking Barron Trump. Yeah, and fucking Dan Crenshaw will say something mildly critical of Eric Gallagher or something. And Dan Crenshaw is going to become the fucking democratic presidential nominee opposing eric gallagher um i hate this timeline so much yeah i mean that's what we're that's what we're aiming for with this shit with uh pardoning war criminals i mean not that not that trump's actions are like particularly like they're they're obviously egregious but like you talked about in the um i guess i think it was the haditha haditha massacre episode like pretty much none of the people who did that got punished no they made sure of it yeah and so i know for a fact that there's a lot more eric gallagher's out there right now in Afghanistan in Iraq and Yemen um there is absolutely and uh

just because we're prosecuting this one guy it doesn't mean he's the only one I mean just the fact that a squad like took forever to like they tried um they tried to report him multiple times and they were warned they were like this is going to destroy your career. And they're like, okay, well, we're going to report it anyway. And they tried to kill the report. They did not back down, which is that should tell everybody how awful it is. soldiers in the navy but it's military people ratting out other military people and more than that it's special operations reporting on their own which is fucking unheard of happens unless you're fucking eric gallagher yeah yes yeah and that should tell you how bad he is and yeah and to go further away so there's absolutely more people i wouldn't i will say there's probably less people that did awful as awful things as, but there's definitely a couple people still floating around who shot innocent people and planted a gun. I've heard multiple people admit that they did it to me, or they admit it to me that they did it.

And thinking that they're talking to a friend. dozens of people doesn't mean there's not probably hundreds or thousands of american soldiers during like the troop surge in iraq or in afghanistan who did smaller scale but similarly criminal um things um to iraqi people or afghans um and those are war crimes they may not have ever been reported or punished um no they're absolutely war crimes nonetheless and then all the like uh we probably killed the iraqi government estimates that 40 000 people died in the battle of mosul um mostly due to american airstrikes maybe those aren't technically classifiable as war crimes but that doesn't really matter to the families who died. Right. Um, they're like, the actions are like, it's still pretty fucking bad.

If we go off our own definition of war crime during the Nuremberg trial, it's not. But if you go off of the UN statues, it absolutely is. Um, yeah, but you know, it hits,

uh, yeah, that is the nature of human conflict in counterinsurgency operations. There's and that's why you simply should not do them. Like that's you cannot put people in situations where they're not fighting someone who is wearing a different uniform and is going to stand and fight you like a soldier and expect not awful things to happen. Like it's and I'm not explaining those things away i mean you cannot look at a single counterinsurgency war from human history and not see awful amounts of war crimes in fact most counterinsurgencies are won by the side who does more war crimes

because that's just war crimes as strategies yeah and i mean that's not something we should ever aspire to be um yeah so when a lot of people pointed this out to max boot he immediately began to backpedal but not on the shit you thought he would um he he said he didn't uh he didn't say what you think he said he was simply misunderstood he said quote i wasn't suggesting u.s troops fight with muskets and horses like that was any of the shit that anybody was upset about. Yeah, Jesus Christ. What a fucking asshole. He even went with the well, both sides hate me, so I must be doing something right.

Excuse to defend the massive amount of hate he was getting. He literally said that to put this in a way that boot might understand. Well, Shia and Sunni are planting IEDs. So that must mean we're winning, right? Both Shia and Sunni are planting IEDs. So that must mean we're winning, right? If both the US and the Soviets are attacking me, I must be doing something right. Like, it's so fucking stupid.

So he eventually, so sick of the endless tirades, he published an entire other article titled, On Wednesday, the Twitter mob came for me, where he compared himself to the Covington Catholic kid and said people mischaracterized what he was trying to say he obviously wasn't talking about the bad parts of the Indian Wars only the good parts all of the good parts yeah the good parts he doesn't bother trying to expand upon because I'm assuming he

couldn't find one yeah his favorite part was what like wounded knee or something yeah his i mean they gave out like 20 medals of honor for that so it must be good right did you do an episode of that one not yet i'm definitely working on it i mean that would be like i'm not talking about the third reich only the good parts like when hitler banned smoking in public or like he really liked dogs uh you know you joke but a lot of people unironically say that kind of shit i mean that should tell you the like the duality

of an awful dictator like yeah sure hitler did those things but he was also fucking hitler in closing i'll say this is what boot does he makes a living being wrong he's fucked up every single thing he has ever done while trying to smooth it out over and over and over and he still has a high-paying job and as part of a think tank that recently attempted to smooth over another genocide his books are a perfect outline of failed american foreign policy he is a guy that has made his living as a fake expert i will not call him a historian because that title requires critical thinking, which Boot clearly lacks. He seemingly brags about going out of his way of failing to develop that skill. He rubs elbows with military officers and gives speeches at their schools while writing articles about how American soldiers need

to fight forever so suburban dipshits like him can feel safe in the racially segregated neighborhoods despite the fact he never fought for anything himself. Max Boot is your friend who's really into general management of a sports video game or your annoying friend who's really into fantasy football. He swears he can do it just as good as the real actual experts. If he was in charge, none of this would be happening. Instead, he is a man who literally looks like the sketch artist rendition of the zodiac killer he is he is exactly like the review of his own book essentially pointless damn damn you canceled the shit out of him max boot is canceled you know i i hate him so much

that i notice like nobody listening to the show will ever like read a max boot article and be like you know he really has a point and i yeah i get that that's fine but and if he would have just said maybe we should just stay in afghanistan forever uh because i i don't want to admit that america lost at something i wouldn't even have made this episode because once you drag history kicking and screaming from the pages and try to apply them to foreign policy in a horrible disaster, in like a horrible genocidal maniac kind of way. Like I,

I have to make a hate episode about it. It's it's, I have no choice. This one was long overdue. I mean, as a, you know, I, I know we've taught you and I've talked, This one was long overdue I mean As uh You know I know we've talked You and I have talked

We don't really think that we're necessarily going to go to war with Iran At least not in the near future But I don't know I feel like maybe someday it might happen And uh We're gonna have fucking people like Max Max Boot Just going out there and being like

You know Maybe 20,000icans did die on the first day of the war in the straits of hormuz but really that's not that many if you look at world war ii yeah um if you look at the psalm yeah if you look at the psalm only 60 000 people died on the first day of the battle of the psalm so really we're like only a third as bad so in that reasoning we should continue this war and uh until everybody except me has been drafted and i know when i know when saddam invaded across the kujistan he only made it five miles in his first day we made it six so really we're winning this could be going much worse uh but it's like i know that the only way we can win now is the like deployment of nuclear weapons and that

we're currently in the process of firing the missiles but really it's iran who is the aggressor here um because of uh because they they put a they may have put a missile on a sailboat maybe where we think we're not entirely sure actually i mean have you ever gone so hard backwards through history you ended up back at the fucking gulf of tonkin incident like unironically because that's what we're doing no no it's it's worse at least we pretended that the vietnamese attacked an american ship like now we're pretending we're pretending they attacked a norwegian oil tanker like who gives a shit like norway doesn't give a shit like so why should we yeah norway's like no guys this really cool this happens like on the reg we'll be fine and like no no fuck you like this is like we are the a guy in a bar who is drunk as shit and somebody

just looks at him from across the world you fucking looking at me like yeah and i ran it's like no man i just i'm just trying to get to the bathroom i fucking bitch i'll fucking hit you that that's that's us i mean we are now the annoying drunk in a bar that nobody wants to admit is the guy that they brought with them. Jesus, yeah. Travis, thank you so much for coming on. This whole episode has made me upset. And I hope it has the same effect on everybody else. That's honestly like whenever I come on the show, it's like, let's just get really mad and yell about America for an hour and 20 minutes.

Yeah, you tend to do that a lot. Well, unfortunately, that's what I know about, both from my education and from my job. Well, I mean, whenever we talk about anything from the region, I try to bring you on because you always have. Well, I mean, whenever we talk about anything from the region, I try to bring you on because you always have, you know, there's, there's people who are taught, who like to speak from a position of expertise on the Middle East or Iraq or Iran or whatever. And they've, they've never even been there, let alone studied it. And I am guilty of being that. I literally made a six part series about being that guy, but I always cracked a history book or six before then um but you know it takes a lot of study for me to uh to to fake my way into being a podcast expert on a subject yeah and at least like you admit you know your whatever limitations you may have on a given

episode yeah and you're not you're not like fucking minimum shoe who uh who uses the fucking indian wars as a positive justification for war in afghanistan so yeah i feel like for my next series i'm just do a whole bunch of dmt and talk about chimp dicks like joe rogan probably my probably my best bet yeah it'll probably better for your mental health too definitely uh so would you like to plug your twitter or i know you started writing uh little pieces for with a medium or something that you can go ahead and plug those yeah i might um i guess what all i can say now is just uh the only plug i can give is to follow me on twitter i'm trying to post um maybe some articles about the uh the whole iran thing in the next couple

of days if um if the work continues to be slow um so i'll be writing those hopefully but yeah follow me on twitter um heycraft underscore travis or just search t55 it's probably going to be one of the first things that comes up that's right uh our holy armored mother uh so you can follow the show at lions underscore by. You can donate to Patreon if you think what we do is worth a dollar and get a whole bunch of bonus stuff, as well as access to the communal discord, which we run with the hell of a way to die podcast. And that shit is the Thunderdome. It's hilarious. If you like a shirt, buy a shirt.

if you like a shirt buy a shirt all that money goes in right back into the show and helps pay for the growing library of books I've managed to acquire I went to a bookstore in Canada and managed to find a book for the fucking show so I literally never stop I am entirely too online once a poster always a poster never stop posting online. Also, if you want a poster, what's that? Always a post. Once a poster, always poster.

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