Amanda Doyle

And yet we have to go further because we often replace a bad guy with an even worse guy because taking out a bad guy is never our why.

It's also overwhelming and chaotic that everything seems singularly insane and inexplicable.

And when that happens, we have to widen the lens.

We have to look back in order to see today clearly.

So today we are going to start by tracing the history of American CIA covert operations and military regime changes and to see how they've always happened and

Then we're going to talk with brilliant investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill to help us understand where we are today with Iran and Gaza and what is ahead.

So buckle up, buckaroos, because you are not going to believe this bullshit.

American history of regime change goes back to, well, actually before we were America.

The American Revolution precipitated a regime change, replacing a monarchy with a new representative democracy.

As Americans, we hear a lot about what incited the American Revolution.

The rebellion arose from taxation disputes, you know, no taxation without representation, tea in the Boston Harbor and all that.

It also arose from new enlightenment ideas about the dignity of self-government and from colonial resentment of imperial control.

But something we don't really hear about as much as Americans, because it doesn't fit that nicely into our revolution narrative...

is that a big part of that imperial control that colonial elites were fired up about, and which was a main motivation for them to foment everyday colonials to take up arms, was that Britain had really messed up the profits of the colonial elites who had been heavily invested in land speculation to the west of the colonies.

So after the Seven Years' War, when Britain was really, really tired of the massive military cost of waging war with the indigenous nations on the American continent, they tried to solve this through the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

This proclamation outlawed colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.

This was not only good for indigenous people who had lived on that land for thousands of years,

It was great for Britain because it was sort of a truce on the very costly wars they were funding.

But it was really not good for those wealthy colonists who had invested speculatively in the Western lands.

And these wealthy investors were super pissed.