This episode examines America’s most devastating military defeat—the Vietnam War. We trace the conflict from its origins in French colonialism and Ho Chi Minh’s ignored appeals to America, through the Gulf of Tonkin deception, the escalation under Johnson, the Tet Offensive that exposed the lies, the domestic upheaval that tore America apart, and the fall of Saigon in 1975. We examine why the war was unlikely to succeed under the chosen strategy, why the government systematically deceived the public, and why the lessons were never learned—ensuring that the pattern would repeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This contemporary application episode examines why congressional oversight of intelligence agencies has failed systemically since the Church Committee’s 1975 reforms. We trace how the Iraq WMD intelligence failure—which took the nation to war on false premises—produced no accountability, with Director Tenet receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. We examine the structural incentives that discourage oversight: 97% incumbent re-election rates, institutional self-protection (as evidenced by the 357-65 vote to bury congressional sexual harassment records), and the absence of consequences for documented failures. The Clapper perjury case provides the starkest example: the Director of National Intelligence—the position created to ensure accountability—lied under oath to Congress about mass surveillance, faced no prosecution, and became a cable news contributor, while the whistleblower who exposed his lie remains in exile. We connect Operation Mockingbird’s media infiltration techniques to present-day coordinated messaging campaigns, including Senator Graham’s admitted coordination with foreign intelligence and friendly media to shape war policy. The conclusion: oversight mechanisms exist on paper but have produced no meaningful accountability in fifty years.

This special episode examines the motivations of the principal actors behind the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. It traces Benjamin Netanyahu’s thirty-four-year campaign against Iran, documents how President Trump was persuaded to launch the war he spent a decade opposing, and identifies the congressional and institutional figures across both parties who pushed for, enabled, or laid the groundwork for this conflict. The episode presents the strongest case for those who support the war before offering a libertarian, non-interventionist critique grounded in documented evidence, sourced quotations, and clearly labeled analysis.

This episode surveys thirty years of CIA covert operations—from the recruitment of Nazi war criminals in Operation Paperclip, through the infiltration of American media in Operation Mockingbird, to the overthrow of governments in Cuba, the Congo, Indonesia, and Chile. We examine the documented conflict between President Kennedy and the CIA, the mass casualties in Indonesia’s 1965-66 massacres, and the Church Committee’s brief moment of accountability. Throughout, we trace how the black budget funded operations that American taxpayers knew nothing about

This contemporary application episode examines how American regime change evolved from covert CIA operations denied for decades to open presidential assertions of authority over foreign governments. Tracing the trajectory from Korea through Syria, we analyze how President Trump’s statement that he “must be involved” in selecting Iran’s next leader represents the culmination of seven decades of executive aggrandizement and congressional abdication. We examine the Venezuela model, the Board of Peace governance structure for Gaza, explicit regime change rhetoric regarding Cuba, and the systematic failures of oversight—including the Pentagon’s eighth consecutive failed audit and Congress’s rejection of war powers resolutions by party-line votes.

This episode begins Part IV of our series—The CIA and Covert Empire—by examining the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. We trace the British oil interests that motivated the coup, the Dulles brothers’ WWII background that shaped its methods, the operation itself, and the blowback that produced the 1979 hostage crisis and four decades of U.S.-Iranian hostility. We also examine the cases of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames to illustrate the dangers of intelligence agencies operating without oversight.

As American military operations in Iran continue, this contemporary application episode examines how the national security state—built for the Cold War, expanded for the War on Terror—has delivered the very outcome the Old Right warned against and Donald Trump himself promised to prevent. We trace the War on Terror framework that enables executive war-making without congressional authorization, the transformation of campaign promises into regime change, and the global application of targeted killing methodology from Mexico to Venezuela to Iran. The episode connects the institutions built in 1947, first deployed in Iran in 1953, to the war now underway—a seventy-three-year arc of consequence.

This episode examines the institutional transformation that followed World War II—the construction of permanent agencies, alliances, and war footing that replaced the founders’ constitutional design. We trace the Truman Doctrine’s unlimited commitment, the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA and NSC, NATO’s entangling alliance, the Korean War’s constitutional precedent, NSC-68’s blueprint for permanent militarization, and Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex he himself had built.

This contemporary application episode examines how the rhetorical techniques used to silence the Old Right in 1940-1941 continue to be deployed against critics of intervention today. We analyze the function of labels like “isolationist,” “Russian asset,” “antisemite,” and “conspiracy theorist” as tools of exclusion rather than argument. We document how the Old Right’s predictions about war’s consequences for the American republic have been vindicated by eighty years of evidence: the permanent expansion of military spending, the creation of constituencies dependent on defense contracts, and the erosion of congressional war powers. We profile modern inheritors of the non-interventionist tradition, from Ron Paul to Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna. And we discuss what listeners can do to recover constitutional limits on war-making in an era of potential conflict with Iran.

This episode recovers the lost tradition of principled American non-interventionism that flourished between the world wars. We examine the intellectual foundations developed by thinkers like Albert Jay Nock and Garet Garrett, the political leadership of Senator Robert Taft, and the mass movement of the America First Committee. We trace how this tradition was suppressed after Pearl Harbor and systematically discredited by historians who wrote interventionism into consensus—and we evaluate which of the Old Right’s predictions about war’s consequences for the American republic came true.