Why Tech-Savvy Pros Should Care About Global Conflicts | Greg Stoker DSH #635

First of all, we're sending all this money.

All this spy tech is going to eventually be used on you.

And I try to get Americans invested in this because I don't think a lot of people care about, you know, a war that's happening somewhere in the Middle East.

They're like, oh, you know, most people think like that's just what happens over there.

Actually, there's a lot you can do about it.

Are bombs being used to kill over 32,000 innocent men, women, and children.

All right, guys, we got Greg Soaker here today.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me.

Got the water bottle, Ephora.

Shout out to our sponsor, and

we're going to make it happen.

We're going to try to talk in beginner language because you talk about some interesting stuff, man.

Yeah,

trying to make geopolitics understandable.

It's possible to, you know, the layperson.

Yeah.

What have you been covering lately?

So basically.

Currently, the most dangerous flashpoint for a wider regional war in the world right now.

And it's not Ukraine.

It's what's happening in Palestine.

Wow.

So centering that, I'm a former UNI States Army Ranger.

I have a background, practical experience in military intelligence collection and analysis.

And I'm kind of like an anti-war activist.

And, you know, whatever activism or journalism I do comes to the context of, why don't we find a diplomatic solution?

Got it.

Why is U.S.

and Western policy always to

bomb the poorest countries on earth?

And, you know, I used to be part of that apparatus, so I understand that it's the decision-making decision-making

that goes into those processes and those political decisions as well.

So basically, we've been talking about Palestine for the past six months, exclusively.

Got it.

And you think we shouldn't have any involvement there?

Well, first of all, on a very basic level, this is still a contentious topic for a lot of people.

The whole Israel-Palestine conflict that's been going on since 1948, since the creation of the state of Israel, and

the fact that Israel's been in illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and Palestinians have a right to armed resistance under international law and UN convention.

But there's, you know,

and trying to navigate that and trying to make that,

because there's propaganda on both sides

understandable for people is something I've been trying to focus on for six months.

Also, I've been focusing on the military analysis and military aspect of what's going on in Gaza, more so than the West Bank, because West Bank's under, it's a part of Palestine, which is inside the state of Israel,

that's under military occupation and martial law.

And what's happening in Gaza, some people call it a war.

It's, in terms of the genocide conventions, actually a genocide, demonstrably so.

And that's what I've been talking about for six months.

And the military aspect or the lack of military strategy that's going into the ground war on Gaza.

Yeah, that's kind of what my platform has been about.

Got it.

Yeah, you see so much content on social media about it, and a lot of it's just, what do you believe?

You know what I mean?

Well,

there is one thing that's great about social media.

Yes, there's misinformation, but there is incontrovertible video evidence, time-stamped, geolocated evidence of things like war crimes actively being committed.

So, you know, if a Snapchat has a location feature, has a time feature.

So if, you know, a lot of Palestinian civilians are recording these things.

So there can be evidence for the International Criminal Court, the ICJ, like there's incontrovertible evidence of Israeli snipers just shooting kids.

Damn.

No, I mean, I mean, it's just, it's just what happens.

They've been doing, and Palestinians are like, yeah, they've been doing it since like my great-grandfather was a problem.

But people are shocked that this is happening.

Because there's a lot of propaganda that goes into

Israel

and the IDF, which is the Israeli Defense Force.

It's their military.

There are talking points like it's the most moral military on the planet.

That's what a lot of people believe, especially in the West.

And

a lot of preconceptions are being challenged right now

because

regardless of where you stand on the issue,

Israel's reputation is being damaged.

forever.

Right.

And the United States,

by backing it, and the West, by backing it unconditionally, is also being dragged down.

So a lot of people are not happy with the Biden administration on both sides of the aisle.

And this is one reason.

Yeah, that is crazy.

I was on your Twitter,

interesting tweets.

So you are not a fan of imperialism.

I'm not a fan of imperialism.

So

just to kind of explain that.

to the audience that doesn't really understand it as a term.

I would say imperialism.

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Comes from the same root word as empire.

So that's basically

using the power of the West to

influence and control the global south, which is like Africa, the Middle East, a lot of post-colonial nations.

And it serves the interest of capital.

And we always have money for foreign wars in order to have access to the riches and the cheap labor and the natural wealth and resources of the global south, places like Congo,

where there's another active genocide going on.

It's where we get most of the coal tan that goes into our phones and radios and

all these electronics in the suite that I use as well.

This is from Congo?

Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Probably from China.

Well, the raw materials are generally the largest deposits of what we call conflict minerals do come from Congo.

So imperialism is, if we were to talk about how it's manifested,

an imperialist move would be to overthrow a democratically elected government in Africa, which the CI has done.

throughout the Cold War, and in South America and in Central America, ask anyone from those regions.

They'll be like, yeah.

And install a pro-West, pro-America fascist leader.

It could be authoritarian, totalitarian, or whatever, as long as they serve U.S.

imperialist interests.

So a lot of people

say that the Iraq war was an imperialist exercise.

There was a lie about WMDs.

CIA came out and said there's no evidence that there's WMDs, but you know, they still went with that anyways.

And we were involved in a foreign war for 10 years, didn't get anything, caused massive

regional instability.

And for what, well, Halliburton made a lot of money.

A lot of 0.1 private sector people made a ton of money.

And so when I talk about imperialism, the Western intervention in the global south for resources and wealth, essentially,

I try to tell Americans it's bad for them too.

It's bad for them too because

you get screwed.

Like if we look at Israel, it's a colonial project.

It was created by the U.S.

and Britain to secure

the resources and to have a strategic foothold in the Middle East.

So

if you don't believe how much of an imperialist project this was, you can google the situation in Palestine, CIA report from 1947.

it lays all this out clear as day.

This has always been a colonial project and why it's bad for Americans is because

Israel's in illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.

They have a duty to protect the civilians even if they're targeting Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or whatever other resistance movements going on.

They're not doing this.

They're damaging their whole reputation and we're supporting them unconditionally with no breaks.

So we just gave them 14 billion dollars earlier last in Q4 of 2023.

That's almost enough money to cure homelessness in America.

Wow.

The Biden administration wants to give them another $18 billion

to continue fighting a war, which from a military perspective, they've already lost.

And the reason...

Why we're propping up this project is

because it makes a lot of people a lot of money.

Israel is at the confluence of many different private sectors.

You have

one of the largest natural gas reserves

in the world sitting off the Gaza Marine Basin.

They're building a port into Gaza to get humanitarian aid in there, but everybody knows it's a maintenance stop.

for like oil derricks in the future,

they've already sold the exploration rights to British petroleum while war is going on.

And technically, that belongs to Palestinians, but they've never really followed international law.

So, energy sector, then you've got the defense industrial complex that makes a lot of money off Israel.

It's important to

special interest groups as well because they're the leading exporter of a lot of spyware and spy tech that all of our governments use on us.

So

that's a factor that you have to consider because

when I was in the military and when all these contracts were coming up, it was like tested in Gaza.

This was tested in West Bank.

So

one of

a guy I really respect his name is Anthony Lowenstein.

He's a journalist.

He wrote the book The Palestine Laboratory, how Israel tests and exports the technology of occupation and apartheid around the world.

So this is all

tested on Palestinians, and then it's given to police officers in the United States.

Wow.

So

first of all, we're sending all this money.

All this spy tech is going to be eventually going to be used on you.

And I try to get Americans invested in this because

I don't think a lot of people care about, you know, a war that's happening somewhere in the Middle East.

They're like, oh, you know, most people think like, that's just what happens over there.

Nothing you can do about it.

Actually, there's a lot you can do about it.

But motivating through self-interest.

So I could list off like a zillion reasons why you should care.

But those are just two big ones.

All your tax money, not going to you.

They get free health care.

You have to work a job that you hate

just to get your health care in the event you just want to like not die.

So

yeah, self-interest is how I

try to get the average American to care about our bombs being used to kill over 32,000 innocent men, women, and children.

Damn.

And it's not just that, because

it is a genocide.

And people are like, I argue with people a lot.

I was like, you know, if Israel wanted to commit a genocide, they'd already have done it.

I was like, that's not how genocides work.

They've never been able.

to be accomplished by conventional weapons.

So you can send them all the bombs and all the bullets.

It still won't still won't be able to do it with guns.

Because we saw this if we looked at World War II and the Nazi SS brigades in Poland just mass graving everybody.

What happened after a while?

Were they indoctrinated?

Yeah.

Were they assholes?

Absolutely.

But they were still ostensibly human beings with human psychologies.

Turns out, if you just murder a bunch of people, you're going to start drinking yourself to death and committing suicide, which is why they had to stop doing that.

And they had to industrialize it.

So

it's never going to be done through bombs or bullets.

What it's going to be done through and what it is being done through, because the World Health Organization says 2 million people in Gaza are at acute risk of and experiencing famine.

Wow.

It's done through engineering events.

So mass displacement,

no health care, no water, famine, disease.

And all of these things are being intentionally constructed in the Gaza Strip.

And one of the reasons why my voice became prominent in this

movement was because I came at it from a military perspective.

Right.

Yeah, you had that background of serving.

Yeah, so in Afghanistan, because I did four deployments there, we implemented something called COIN, Counterinsurgency Doctrine.

And

I have some issues with it, but

that's beyond the scope of this conversation.

But there is an acronym and a tenet of counterinsurgency doctrine.

And just to define our terms, what's happening right now with Hamas attacking Israel, that's an insurgency.

So Israel's response should be counterinsurgency.

So when we talk about counterinsurgency doctrine or operations, we're talking about how you implement those tasks and tactical objectives to defeat an insurgent force.

And one of the key tenets is something called, it's an acronym.

It's called SWEAT MSO.

It stands for Sewage, Water, Electricity, Academics, Trash, Medical Safety, and Others.

And it holds that if you, as the occupying force, which Israel is under international law, irrefutable,

if you're the occupying force and any of those sectors, sewage, water, electricity, academics, trash, medical safety, or other, if any one of these sectors are compromised and you're in occupation of someone else's land, they're going to want to kill you.

That's just something we accept as like American soldiers.

So what did we do?

We protected those sites.

We brought in contractors to rebuild these things, especially in Baghdad,

because we didn't want a multi-generational frigging

war.

Wow.

So that's like one basic thing that we always

recognize.

like we did.

So you have to protect those sites.

But what has Israel done during their their

counterinsurgency operation?

Well, they've destroyed, we talked about academics, they've destroyed every university and library in Gaza.

Wow.

Dozens.

They're all destroyed.

Crazy.

They did it with demolition charges.

They said Hamas was there, but it's like, dude, as a former combat veteran, if you can clear a building and you can lay a bunch of demo charges, there's no one in that building.

There's no fighters in that building.

Otherwise, you'd be getting shot.

So, I mean, it's all lies.

And then, medical.

They've bombed every hospital in Gaza.

There is a lack of aid.

There's no running water.

They've destroyed all medical infrastructure.

Al-Shifa Hospital, the oldest hospital in the Gaza Strip, was just blown out.

They were just executing people in the graveyard, digging up graves.

We have documented evidence of this.

And then they left after it's completely inoperable.

There are,

There's effectively no functional medical infrastructure.

So academics, medical, trash, how are you going to get rid of garbage?

Like everything's destroyed.

And electricity, there's really no power.

People are like using contraptions with bicycles to like charge a car battery, to charge a phone.

Dang.

So there's no real electricity.

Water, there's no water.

There's a massive water shortage because Israel controls the water going into Gaza and they shut off the water.

Sewage,

they've dropped enough bombs to destroy whatever sewage existed there.

So all these sectors that I just listed off one by one, they have intentionally destroyed, again, to generate a man-made famine and medical catastrophe.

Jeez.

That is intense.

So I, yeah, so that's

That's kind of why I think I've been effective in this because I can just cut through some of the noise and explain it from just a straight up objective of of military analysis.

Like, why would you try and do this?

Oh, is it because you're actually targeting Hamas?

I can also demonstrate that they're not targeting Hamas, but that could be a different conversation entirely.

So, yeah.

So that's just the excuse they use with Hamas, because that's what the media portrays as the enemy, right?

Yeah, I mean...

No one's denying that war crimes didn't happen on October 7th.

No one's denying that civilians weren't killed, both by Hamas and by Israeli soldiers, because they were shooting tank rounds into halts, kibbutzes, which are like communal neighborhoods, essentially.

And they're shooting rockets from attack helicopters into people at a music festival.

So they killed their own civilians, too.

No one's saying that didn't happen.

No one's saying that war crimes didn't happen on October 7th.

But

if you only bring in the history from October 7th,

you're kind of showing up mid-season, you know?

You know, if I saw season four, Joffrey in one scene, I'd be like, you know, he's not the bad, worst guy.

But, you know,

after watching a couple, you know, episodes, I'd be like, this dude's freaking nuts.

He's completely uncontrollable and unreasonable.

So can't start at October 7th.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And that's where a lot of people did.

Well, because there's a lot of propaganda that went out comparing it to 9-11.

And so people are like, oh, it's another 9-11.

It's like, no, it's not.

It's just not.

It's demonstrably not another 9-11.

Was it a terrorist attack?

It depends on your definition of terrorism.

As a guy who has a background in counterterrorism, I hate the term.

I actually consider the word terrorist to be a racial slur.

Wow.

Yeah, 100%.

Because it's only mobilized against brown people

from certain parts of the world.

Can you imagine if it was like Arab dudes going into schools in Texas and like...

freaking opening up with assault rifles?

It would be a terrorist attack.

And then someone would link it to the Islamic State.

But if it's a white dude, he's just a little crazy.

His mom was kind of creepy, you know.

Mental health.

Yeah, mental health.

So,

yeah.

And also

by the U.S.

definition of terrorism, states and state militaries and official sanctioned police forces cannot be terrorists.

So the IDF can shoot white phosphorus on civilians, bomb civilian infrastructure,

carry out mass shootings on civilians, which again, irrefutable documented evidence

of this,

but they cannot be

considered a terrorist organization.

Interesting.

So, but because Hamas,

which is

not just the

El Aqsa flood operation and the Al-Quds brigades and the Al-Qassam brigades,

They're actually the elected government.

They have

student organizations.

They have municipal bureaucracy in place.

So,

but

because they function as a government, but the United States and Israel don't recognize Palestinian statehood, you can call them a terrorist organization, even though they are pretty much sanctioned in the same way that any other military would be considered.

So from a counterterrorism perspective, I don't like the term because you only get called a terrorist if you're fucking with the money and you're not white.

that's in my opinion yeah well uh damn this is crazy so when you were serving in afghanistan were you questioning like why you were there and all that or did that these type of thoughts come afterwards um you know

i was made uncomfortable by a lot of obama's policies like

have you heard about like his horrendous record of just drone striking everything i didn't hear about it actually no he uh yeah um

in afghanistan we were drone striking people just because they were on

the wrong contact list in someone's cell phone.

Wow.

It's like, oh, this man is associated with this guy who is associated with the Taliban.

Drop them all.

Damn.

Yeah, that was happening.

He was ruthless.

Well, yeah, it was policy, but

it comes from the top.

Yeah.

So,

and there was also the overthrow of Gaddafi and Libya.

that Hillary Clinton oversaw and a lot of other shady stuff happened.

It wasn't, you know, I didn't question my involvement at the time.

It was just like, this makes me uncomfortable.

And then I got out because I thought I was going to go work for a three-letter intelligence agency.

Yeah.

So I went to college and in college I doubled in political science and anthropology.

Anthropology.

Yeah, it's a study of human culture.

Okay.

So

basically, I studied colonial projects like the British Raj in India, the French occupation of Algeria and Morocco.

And it's kind of hard to be like cool with overt imperialism after experiencing like war because Afghanistan was still an illegal war and then like actually being educated about this stuff.

So it was a combination.

It was like a one-two punch.

And it took years.

It took like a decade for me to get to where I am right now.

You're starting to see some vets though really question why they served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speak up.

Oh yeah, I mean, I have plenty of dudes from like Ranger Regiment.

some Marines,

some ex-special forces, which are commonly known as Green Braids.

Like, Like, yeah, you know, we talk.

And we're like, yeah, that was,

you know, we needed a job, didn't want to be homeless.

Also, like, we believed in a lot of post-9-11 propaganda.

Right.

That's a big one.

We're terrorists.

You know,

if we don't stop the Taliban and Afghanistan, they're going to get into their Toyota Hiluxes and cross the Atlantic Ocean or some freaking nutjob stuff that we, you know, that people actually believe in.

I bought all of that.

I grew up in Jersey, so that hit close.

We knew a lot of people involved in 9-11.

And yeah, I believed all that stuff, all the terrorist stuff.

Yeah.

so just so you know now um

we now employ al-qaeda and we employ the islamic state wow yeah i mean the bbc world documentary about u.s mercenaries in yemen

they just proved that like one of the guys who uh was responsible for attacking the us as coal in the early 2000s which killed a bunch of american sailors uh He's still running around.

He now works for the United States.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

So, yeah,

the freaking word terrorist for me has no meaning anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah, they really painted it in one way, but it's really not that.

Yeah.

And it also paints all these organizations and different types of people with one brush.

And it stops any amount of critical thinking.

It's like, why are they doing this?

Why are they fighting?

Oh, it's because they're terrorists.

We don't need to think about it.

It's just what terrorists do.

So

it's what we call a thought-terminating cliche.

It just shuts down thought.

Yeah.

So you had a conversation.

Yeah, I don't like the term.

Which president do you think has had the best foreign policy in your lifetime?

Which president?

I think they've all been bad.

Well, first of all, I'm of the opinion that presidents aren't the ultimate authority and shaper of foreign policy.

Because

politicians, it doesn't matter if they're a congressman, a city council member,

or the president, they all

have multiple pay masters

through campaign contributions, through

the revolving door, which is a term that applies to lobbyists going to work for a company, then going to work for the government, then going back to work for that company.

So

there is really no difference between the corporate and the public sector.

I don't think presidents have a lot of control over U.S.

foreign policy.

Wow.

That's why

so many

presidents' policies look the same.

That's true.

Like, yeah, there are some big doozies, like Reagan's war on drugs didn't work.

There was Bush getting involved in two wars

on two different continents.

And yeah, there's a lot.

But like,

if you look at Trump's policy overseas, how is it really that different than Biden's?

Like, Trump started the withdrawal of Afghanistan, which was done in the most irresponsible way, because we left all our allies to die that, you know, we made promises to.

Really?

Oh, yeah, they were all executed by the Taliban when they took out Afghanistan.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, and then Biden

had the same policy.

He could have stopped it, but he's like, eh, let it ride.

They'll forget about it by next election.

And

I failed to see.

any salient difference between people's foreign policy.

Domestic policy might be different, but not foreign policy.

Foreign policy is usually bipartisan.

If you look at the voting and the appropriations,

Democrats and Republicans,

they vote yes on the same wars.

They vote yes on the same military aid packages.

They vote yes on all the stuff.

Like we're set, we're divided by like culture wars.

Like, oh, you know, the liberals want us

want to, you know, turn football into like high heels sport.

And then like, you know, you have your own

uh preconceptions about like what republicans want but that's just bs culture war stuff yeah if you look at all either side of the aisle they vote

based on who they get paid by yeah it almost seems like they want internal conflict i mean when biden announced that transgender day last week i was like they that's what they want they want two sides to fight well yeah because you know the powers that be they want a race war They want a culture war.

What they don't want is a class war.

Class war.

Yeah.

What's that mean?

Oh, like class war.

Okay, a class warfare would be like you have the top one, ultra, you have the ultra-rich, and then you have the top 1%, what we call the upper class, then you have the rapidly diminishing middle class, and then you have the lower class in terms of socioeconomic status.

Got it.

So a class war is when all the lower branches unite and be like, hey, we're getting screwed here,

so we actually need you guys to change.

And if we don't, revolution happens.

You think that's a possibility?

I mean,

Americans have to get so uncomfortable before anything happens.

Yeah.

I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

No.

Yeah, this election seems pretty divisive.

I mean, yeah, so was last one.

Yeah.

I think it...

Anytime a polarizing figure like Trump is introduced,

it's going to be divisive.

Yeah.

You see this new fact-checking feature on social media?

Oh, yeah.

You been victim yet?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean...

I've gotten on a few too.

I get a lot of shadow banned stuff as well.

Apparently I'm shadow banned for life, according to

on Instagram or Twitter?

Both, probably.

I don't know anyone on Twitter.

Okay.

Instagram for sure.

They want to...

They're suppressing political content.

And it's not even just pro-Palestine content anymore.

It's all political content.

Because what they've realized is political content doesn't make money and you need to shut up and you need to buy the new shampoo or the new, like subscribe to the new VPN server.

Yeah.

Because, you know, everything serves like the

preconception that we have freedom of speech or that the First Amendment right is protected in the Constitution, not entirely because it doesn't serve the interest of capital.

So

yeah, any sort of political content, anything that

isn't like inane and then pushes views and pushes sales is going to get suppressed.

Yeah.

That's just how the algorithm is going to be designed.

So yeah,

the fact-checking thing, if you guys aren't tracking what that is, it's this new feature that Instagram introduced for like content creators that limits your post because it hasn't been like fact-checked.

And who's fact-checking it?

I don't know.

A robot.

Yeah.

A freaking algorithm.

They'll always link some random article and it's like not even a reputable reputable source.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It happens to me all the time on health stuff.

Anytime I talk about vaccines or certain topics, autism.

That's another hot button topic.

Yeah, cancer.

Anytime there's a potential cure for some disease, they fact check it and it gets deleted.

Yeah.

Well, you know, big pharma also lobbies as well.

Yeah, they fund half their ad spend, right?

Yeah.

50%.

It's crazy.

We got an uphill battle.

It's a free society, man.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Freedom of speech is gone, man.

It's been gone.

I mean, we have the

it's still, I mean, it exists more here than it does in a lot of countries that I have contacts in.

But

it's either free or it's not.

Yeah.

And it's getting rapidly repealed.

I think all of our rights are getting rapidly repealed.

Yeah.

The guns are next.

The guns are next, but there's also a lot of troubling stuff.

And to bring it back to like what's happening in Israel, they export all this spyware.

They also train our police officers.

So, you know, every time a cop like kneels on someone's throat and accidentally kills like a black man,

that's what they learned from the IDF.

They learned that from the Israeli military.

So, a lot of their brutal techniques are learned because they get sent over to Israel to train.

Wow.

Yeah.

I didn't know cops get sent there to train.

Yeah.

So they're basically

using

the same techniques that Israel uses to brutalize Palestinians and enforce occupation and apartheid

to our cops.

And then, you know, our cops go back and

brutalize American citizens.

Dang.

What a cycle, man.

This is crazy stuff.

Greg, I'm glad you're bringing light to topics like this.

Where can people find out more about you?

I'm on Instagram.

For now.

For now.

I'm on,

it's at greg.j.stoker, S-T-O-K-E-R.

If you don't spell it correctly, you will not find it.

So if you just type in Greg Stoker, because that's another way to shadow ban you, so your account can't be found.

So you have have to type it in perfectly.

Also,

YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, we have a podcast where we talk more about anti-imperialism and empire.

It's called Colonial, Colonial Outcasts.

Awesome.

We'll link it all below.

Thanks for coming out, man.

Yeah, thanks for watching, guys.

See you next time.