Name: Joe Rogan Experience #553 - Thaddeus Russell
Uploaded: 2014-09-24T00:03:35.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #553 - Thaddeus Russell' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-09-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #553 - Thaddeus Russell' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-09-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #553 - Thaddeus Russell

mr russell hey thank you very much for doing this man i appreciate it thank you
it's uh we
were saying right before the podcast got started it's always a weird thing when
when people sit
down it's like you don't want to talk too much because there's so much to say
on the air you don't
want to get it out before you get to air but i was saying it's very it's
appropriate having you on
today because we're just now going to war with syria right and uh we were uh we
were just talking
about how bizarre this isis thing is and how it's just american people said you
know we don't want
to go to war with syria it was this big thing and obama was on television
everybody just openly
rejected it left and right it was pretty much the american public was like we're
done with war
like we want to get out of afghanistan we don't want this iraq thing anymore we
don't want to go to
syria and so everything just sort of calmed down and then all of a sudden isis
rose up from the from
the ashes and this isis thing i different names isis i've seen it isil right
yeah and um like i was
saying i don't like to get conspiracy oriented because it's so easy to do but
if you wanted to
you would say well this is obviously they've come up with a mechanism to get us
into syria yeah sure
i mean so there's two kinds of conspiracies there's an open conspiracy and then
there's a
closed conspiracy right so i think this is sort of an open conspiracy a lot of
people are saying
both left and right by the way that isis was really a creation of american
foreign policy not that
there were a bunch of dudes sitting in a room in the white house with cigars
and saying hey we need
to create this monster in order to sort of impose american will abroad but that
through many many
conscious decisions over many years in the middle east through direct
interventions militarily and
otherwise they created the conditions for this bunch of psychopathic 20 year
olds with rpgs and swords
beheading people right so you know creating a vacuum in iraq right by going to
war there by removing the
dictator who was at least holding control over the people and or people like
this uh funding the rebels
in syria and also more importantly a lot of people miss this you know what's
one of the things that's been
happening if you look at it just from a material standpoint over the last 12
years at least is that
the united states has been flooding that area with weapons right so and if you
look at there's a great
piece i think it was in the guardian uh a few weeks ago uh isis is using
american-made weapons right that
have been coming into that region mostly into iraq but elsewhere for just
decades right so it's just it
creates this it creates a situation where uh sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy
sort of an open open
conspiracy because you could certainly say that american foreign policymakers
and all of them really
and that's bush and that's obama and that's all of them really want to have an
american presence a
military strong a military presence around the world and in particular in the
middle east where all the
oil is so you know it's not it i'm not saying it was deliberate that they it
wasn't a deliberate choice
to create this beast that's called isis but it certainly serves their purposes
and it seems like
if you i mean if if you look at the entire situation in the middle east it
seems like there's no good way
to just get out of there it seems like is there i mean please tell me i mean
there's a way to yeah i
mean so i'm an out now guy okay yeah i mean i i think that was the answer in vietnam
right that's
right that's what the anti-vietnam war called for for many many years was out
now not not a gradual
withdrawal which is what the politicians called for because that's the quote
responsible thing to do
but out now and i think history proves that was the correct answer to that
right i think that
if the united states had left immediately in 1964 65 name a year name a time it
would have been a
better thing for everyone now communism would have the communists would have
taken control of vietnam
but they did anyway right and so what we had was instead of about two million
people mostly civilians
die right we would have had far fewer we would have had the same outcome
essentially with far fewer and
then also and we got to talk about blowback right so you know the the carpet
bombing of not just vietnam
but several countries during that war caused untold numbers of people to hate
our guts right america's
guts and that you know uh that's blowback right they didn't come and fly
airplanes into our buildings
but you know it was anti-american in many ways and it also served and here's
very important thing
it served the interests of the goddamn communists right because it's because
the communists could say
look at these barbarians coming here and killing our children and women right
you should support us we will
protect you from them so it actually played into the hands of the communists
and the very same thing is
happening and has been happening in the middle east for many many years david
petraeus of all people
said before the senate about three years ago he said u.s funding of israel in
particular u.s funding of
all these corrupt regimes in in in the middle east and our interventions is the
number one recruiting tool
for al-qaeda right and it's the number one recruiting tool for isis they say
look here's these infidels who have
been invading us and killing our people and taking control of our resources for
decades right
we will we will fight back for you right and so it it's it's it's uh it becomes
a self-fulfilling
prophecy if you want to maintain a presence there which they do the united
states does you keep creating
your own enemies to fight against it's perpetual so what could be is there
anything that can be done to
mitigate the disastrous effects of us pulling out and creating this power
vacuum is there anything
that can be done i mean once we're already there we can't go back in time we
can't stop the iraq
invasion it would be nice if we could pretty much no one thinks it's a good
idea now today in hindsight
everyone thinks it was a terrible idea the only good that came out of it was
getting saddam hussein out
getting rid of his psychopathic sons but now look at all the shit you have
there and you have a million
people dead right so the anti-interventionist argument is simply that pretty
much every intervention
has a negative consequence so so the less the better right so my position is
let's do none right but when
you have a guy like a hitler or someone along those lines that's causing
genocide and planning to take over
the world and so but and so so for hitler right there's a large stream of
thought among historians
very respectable stream of thought that the nazis rose to power out of
conditions created by the allies
after world war one so that you know extracting all these resources through
forced payments from the
germans as reparations after world war one uh really laid the groundwork for
the rise of this this
totalitarian who said hey look what those westerners did to us they decimated
this country they shamed us
they brought us into shame and degradation we need a strong powerful leader we
need discipline we need
order we need to get rid of these foreign influences like jews who were
considered to be foreign right
in essence because they were a nationless people uh and the communists who had
allegiance to no state
right um and so many people have argued not just wacko conspiracy theorists
that that it was
actually american and western foreign policy in the early 20th century that
really made the rise of nazism
possible like that's the greatest possibly the greatest example of blowback in
human history
that's a crazy example of blowback it seems like it's a perpetual cycle then it
seems like everything
we've ever done in the past has led us to do more things in the future to
combat the blowback from
the things we've done in the past and yeah so i mean if you look at but if you
look at the history
of foreign policy and by the way that's the book i'm working on now uh so this
is a very appropriate topic for me
um you know you will see beginning really even in the early 19th in the early
18th century uh
with uh or not sorry late 18th century with some of the founding fathers but
certainly through the
19th century and certainly through the 20th century one continuous thread among
policy makers which is we
must change the world in our image right i mean that's been bipartisan it's
been the left it's been the
right it's been i mean the liberals and the conservatives it's been the
democrats and the
republicans for centuries now we must have america abroad now not everyone
agreed with that there were
people in the senate who were sort of isolationists or anti-interventionists
but that's been a pretty
there's been a near consensus among american politicians for about two
centuries that we should expand
what is great about america and unfortunately that has meant killing a lot of
people well that's what
everyone's terrified of with the islamic state is that they want to impose sharia
law throughout the
rest of the world right i mean that's what everyone's afraid of the the the
religion of america the uh
you know what we subscribe to versus the religion of sharia law yeah so um i
have an answer for that okay
yeah so good luck motherfuckers imposing sharia law on the whole world right
and so what my a lot of what
my work is on now and i'm not the only one who's done this is to look at what's
actually going on you
know in places like tehran and in places like riad and in places like cairo um
what are the what are
sort of ordinary folks iranians and egyptians and saudis actually doing all day
long and you can figure
it out really quickly by simply looking at the skyline in those cities and what
you'll see is
you'll see these big apartment buildings these big cinder block apartment
buildings and on top of those
cinder on on top of those apartment buildings are dozens sometimes hundreds of
satellite dishes which
are streaming in fox the simpsons porn like you wouldn't believe during the
porn i ran they love porn
middle east and pakistan google did google has announced for several years pakistan
is the leading
country in the world for searches for the word sex whoa and then in particular
uh also interesting
uh uh searches for gay sex like terms like gay sex terms like anal sex and men
man on man or whatever
the middle east is like leading the world in that right and they what they love
is they love american
nasty pop culture and western nasty pop culture they love they love women in
bikinis and they love
whiskey and they love stupid you know they love jersey shore and the rest of it
stuff that we look down
on and actually what it's doing my argument is is that it's subverting the hell
out of sharia law every
single day but you say we look down on it but we obviously create it support it
and probably consume more
of it than anybody else when i say when i say we i mean up to you and i no i
know i know i mean uptight
professors like the ones i deal with not like normal people well you you've
been fired yeah from from
being like a little too controversial yeah i read an article about you and huffington
post that you wrote
yeah yeah yeah yeah what what what was that all about well i mean um so i uh
you know i was trained at
columbia university i got my phd there in american history and uh sort of found
that like um historians
in general but in particular the historians i was being trained by you know
they consider themselves
to be left-wing and radical but there was a real limitation on that and one of
the limitations was
that they had a real disdain for what normal people do all day long like what
they're doing in
riad and tehran uh they had a real disdain for sort of the the normal
activities of working-class
ordinary folks like they thought that what people wat