Banjo Star Clifton Hicks Lets Loose On Metals Music Culture and War | Rafi Farber
Summary
Transcript
The real zinger in that is these IDF, presumably infantrymen who took over his position. They turned his guns around and looked at the manuals and within a few minutes they were firing his own guns on his retreating troops. Oh my God. He was just. This interview with Clifton Hicks is brought to you by dirty man safe. If you want a very low tech way to hide your wealth, then dirty man safe is the safe for you.
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So click on the link in the description below. You’ll get to this site over here with a floating dirty man safe. It looks very spiritual. And click on get my discount, you’ll get 10% off your order and enjoy this interview with Clifton. He is a very interesting man. And don’t forget to subscribe for free to the endgame investor at substack link in the description below. Hey guys. Raf here from the endgame investor.
And today I have a surprise guest. That’s Clifton Hicks, the banjo player of Ballad of Kyle Rittenhouse fame. You can find him on YouTube. His banjo playing has millions of hits. Look him up. He’s very relaxing to listen to, especially when you’re writing about the end of the world and kind of calms me down. Listening to him strumming and puts me in a better mood while I’m talking about how everything’s going to collapse while the war rages all around me.
So, Clifton, you’re in Arkansas right now. You’re on an archaeological dig. Somehow you found me. And I just wanted to say, just the quick story of how I figured out that you were following me is that I was listening to your songs for months. I don’t even know how I got to them. I just put on YouTube mixes and suddenly just one of them came on. And then I was like, who’s this guy? So I checked your channel and I subscribed and I put on your playlist.
It’s one of the things I listen to. And then my co host that I do a show once a month with, Phil Lowe, you responded to something, and then he noticed that you were following me. So I was like, wow, Clifton, Nick is following me. I don’t know how that happened. And now you’re telling me that your father knows Hebrew was in Israel during the 67 war, interviewed prisoners of war or something like that.
I don’t know if I got the story right, but we’ll talk about that in a second. How did you get to me and tell me about how you became a banjo player? Maybe a little bit about the ballad of Kyle Rittenhouse? And did you expect for it to take off like that? So I guess let’s try to organize that. Yeah. How did I get into the banjo? First of all, I could sort of glaze over that, looking for any kind of culture to interact with which, for a young american growing up in the early 2000s, it was difficult to find anything, any kind of genuine culture.
It seems to me that maybe it’s a problem that you all don’t have in Israel. You seem like a very cultural society. I’ve never been there, but seems like you all really value your culture, and we don’t have that here. It’s kind of just scattered to the wind. Your parents don’t know anything. You don’t know anything. So that’s how I got into the banjo. I was striving for some kind of culture, and I had music in my family that I’d heard about.
I had a grandfather from Alabama, a great grandfather from Alabama, who was a fiddle player. Apparently his father was a fiddle maker, violin maker. So I wanted to have some kind of contact with that and fell in love with the banjo. Around the age of 13, I started playing and just never put it down, really. So you had a sense of missing culture. You had a sense of a vacuum and a culture when you were like, say, 1112 years old, I mean, that’s pretty precocious in terms of cultural awareness.
Yeah, I guess that’s unusual for that age. Certainly none of my friends were concerned with anything like that, and they all thought it was weird. Like, I did not grow up in a traditional household per se, did not grow up around traditional music, not really. So I had, like, a hole, like a vacuum. Yeah, I wanted to experience that. I wanted to make contact with that past. And for me, in the.
We thought the banjo was an irish instrument. That’s how we knew about it through bluegrass music. And then anything that was perceived to be older than bluegrass music was like irish celtic music, and we all assumed the banjo was an irish instrument. Only through the course of the 90s did researchers begin to make it evident that the banjo has this african origin, specifically an afro caribbean origin. It seems to have been developed in the Caribbean by enslaved Americans in the 16 hundreds.
So really interesting. But if there was a racial boundary, it jumped that racial boundary pretty early on. So by the middle of the 17 hundreds, certainly by 1800, it’s sort of a multicultural american, truly an american instrument. That’s really fascinating. Go on and on about that for hours, but that’s how I got to that. And then the ballad of Kyle ridden house, it was sort of a reluctant project that I undertook.
So that shooting happened, I guess, in 2020, during the peak of those BLM riots and stuff. And at that period of time, I would go on the Internet at night and watch live streams of the riots. You could just tune in and watch riots happening all around your country every night. You could watch it live. And so I kind of took a pastime to checking in on the riots.
I was really interested in that. And one night, there’s this horrible, ugly shooting that happens up in Kennesha, Wisconsin. Kenusha, Wisconsin. I don’t know how you pronounce it, and I pretty quickly started looking at that, and I wouldn’t say the night that the shooting happened, but within a few days after the shooting happened, there was enough video evidence there that I watched and reviewed the shooting, and it was pretty blatant to me what had occurred.
Young man has every right to be anywhere in the United States he wants to be. He can carry a rifle if he wants to. And the young man was targeted and chased by a gang of thugs, essentially. I don’t know what else to call him, who were pretty clearly intent on taking his life for no reason other than he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was perceived as being on the wrong side of the issue.
So he was targeted and attacked, and clearly, there was a group of armed people there. And Kyle was obviously the youngest. Was. You could see that he was the youngest one. He looked like the weakest one. I’ve seen these types of things happen. I’ve been in the military myself. I’ve seen the dynamics of how crowds will lock on to the one person who’s perceived as the weak link.
That’s clearly what happened that night. And they chased him. And you can see anybody who reviewed the video evidence very early on, right after it happened, you could clearly see that young man, Mr. Rittenhouse, was in the right. He was defending himself in a place that he had every legal right to be, from people who had no right to be assaulting him. And he very reluctantly pulled the trigger.
And when he did. What he did was nothing short of amazing. It’s like the hand of God guided every bullet. Each bullet found its intended target. No innocence were harmed. He was not seriously harmed. You can even see in the video, he, immediately after the shooting, when he breaks, puts distance between him and the enemy. He goes straight to law enforcement, attempts to turn himself in. In the confusion, law enforcement waves him out of the way, and he has really no alternative at that moment but to flee the scene and go to safety, which he did.
And then he gets hauled in, arrested, drugged through the court system. His family suffers. He suffers. And I watched that. And then I took an interest in the young man, and I wanted to see how the court case was going to turn out, because it was so obvious that he was innocent. And thank God that our court system held up in that instance, and the innocent man was able to walk free when the verdict was passed.
Did he ever talk to you about. Did you ever get in touch with him? No, he’s never contacted me. I have heard through intermediaries, I guess you might say that he’s aware of the song, but I don’t ever expect to have any contact with the guy. That wasn’t why I did it. That wasn’t why I wrote the song or performed the song. It was almost not about him to me.
It was just about this incredible event and this time in history. And I come from, or I have this tradition that I’ve embraced where people compose ballads about noteworthy events, typically violent events. We have a long tradition of that in the southeastern United States. There’s a long tradition of it in Mexico with the carrito songs. And the anglo tradition goes back to Europe, of course. I mean, you can go back and you can find songs, some of which are 8900,000 years old, that describe in sometimes gory detail these bloody events that occurred.
And it means something to our people. And these songs persist. They stay in the culture. And I thought I could just see that nobody else was going to write this song, and this song had to be written like it had to be written. I’ve never had a seldom in my life have I had a feeling like that, a compulsion like that, where something had to be done, and it seemed to have fallen to me to do it.
I didn’t have any faith that anybody else could write the song. Right. Hold that thought for a second. We were talking before we started recording about. I just wanted to point out two things about a cultural vacuum. Or was that when we started recording, talking about a cultural vacuum and the Kyle Rittenhouse event seemed to happen on, let’s say, where America is moving from lack of culture to anticulture.
So that’s what’s happening now. The culture is being unraveled and undone into something negative. Whereas maybe the were an absence of culture. The Americans had lost what they had been, and now it’s turning negative. It’s like we have to stop the decay by replacing it with real culture. And we were talking about ballads and singing about violent events. Absolutely. I mean, one of the oldest songs in the world is our song, the song of the sea after the sea split for the Jews.
So we sing it every morning from the Torah. There’s another one, the song of Devorah, that’s in the Book of judges after the war with Sisra, the king of Yavin. So there’s another one, and there’s a few of these. And David writes one or two. And he has a whole book of 150 psalms. Those are all songs, ballads, but not necessarily about war. Some of them are, but yes, song and dance is a huge part.
And I just noticed this, that the very first description of David before he was king, when God is telling Samuel, like, he has a new candidate in mind who’s going to be king of Israel, the first word that he uses to describe David is a songwriter. Of course. I didn’t know that. You can read it in English, too. It’s there. It’s in Samuel one early on, I think.
Chapter eight, nine, something like that. Fascinating stuff. I’ve got to find out more about you all songs. That’s really interesting. All right, so what were you saying? Keep going? Well, yes. So I felt this compulsion that I had to do it, and I was reluctant. I knew it was going to be. I’ve already faced tons of ugly pressure in the music scene just because over the COVID thing and over the BLM riots and all that, it kind of was a tipping point in my music career, where I’ve become very unpopular in circles where I used to be popular.
So I was reluctant to do this. I knew it was going to be a big mess, and I actually thought that YouTube would probably pull it down and at least demonetize that video or all of my videos or potentially delete my account. But going into all that, I still felt like I had to do it. And the best way for me to get that song to the greatest number of people would be to put it on my YouTube channel.
And so I did it. And I will say it was very difficult to record because I don’t know if it was post traumatic stress or something like that. But I kept having little minor panic attacks come up in my throat as I would start reciting the verses, when the violence actually occurs in the song, when he first shoots Rosenbaum, it would start welling up in me, and it took me several takes to record that song.
Usually I’ll record a song in one take and just upload it. I don’t care. That was very difficult for me. And then I waited. I sat on the song until the verdict was passed because I didn’t want to release the song before the verdict. I felt like that would be inappropriate, not in keeping with. Be disrespectful to the judicial process if I was to release it early. So I waited for the verdict to be passed, and the moment the verdict was passed that day, I published this song.
And it was pretty well received. I mean, better than I hoped. So you’re an archaeologist. You’re in a motel right now. You’ve been stuck in a motel, you said, for about a year, working on an archaeological project. Were you drawn to archaeology as maybe a yearning for past culture, or. You seem to be a guy associated with the past and trying to carry on a message. The way I try to explain it to my kids is all the books behind me are my own culture, and they were passed down to me to remind me of what our people used to be and what they have to keep being if we want to stay intact, I guess.
Writing a book is speaking to the future, and reading a book is speaking to the past. So you could say writing a song is speaking to the future, and singing a song is speaking to the past. It works the same thing in music. Yeah. I never thought about it quite like that, but I agree. Yeah. I think I’ve always had an interest in relics, old arrowheads. My mother, early on, found a spear point, a stone spear point in the backyard in a flower bed that I now know through my training is probably a 9000 year old spearpoint.
That’s how we would date it. Very old, very early piece. So I had an interest in it from early on. And, yeah, it’s sort of the same thing, just trying to get in touch. Initially, it was an interest in the human past, obviously, but really now it’s more like just trying to make contact with just the nature of humanity in general. When you uncover something like that, an artifact that’s thousands of years old, or even if it’s 100 years old, you can’t deny that you’re making a very important contact with whatever it means to be human.
And whether you want to view that through studying the human past or studying, trying to talk about the future or, I don’t know, studying current culture, past cultures, it’s about making contact with the essence of what humans are. And that is really the basic draw. You can’t describe the feeling. If you’re working on an ancient burial mound, for example, which I have, and you come into contact with people’s daily refuse from their daily life, things that maybe they lost and just got trodden into the earth floor they lived in.
The native Americans around here, they commonly would bury people inside the home. Some of these groups, like in this. This mound I’ve worked on, a burial mound where there was burials on it. It’s an unmistakable, inexplicable feeling, and you don’t get that feeling anywhere else. It’s very special, and it’s an extreme privilege to be allowed to work on any archaeological site. So there’s that. And once you get into it and you get a thirst for it, and people are willing to pay you to do the work because you’ve demonstrated that you can do the work effectively, ethically, so forth, you don’t just throw that away.
You don’t walk away from that. So that’s why I stick with the profession. And, yeah, it’s the same sort of feeling that I’ll get. The only feeling that compares with that. Walking into an ancient cave with artifacts everywhere or excavating an ancient burial. The only feeling close to that is maybe sitting around a campfire with a banjo and reciting some 500, 600 year old ballad. It’s a similar feeling, and you’re clearly tapping into something there, which I’m not really able to describe it, but that’s why I keep going back to it.
I don’t see myself ever quitting music or archaeology. It’s just two things that are always on my mind everywhere I go. It’s difficult to explain. I really would have never figured out how to explain the feeling or the know, but it’s just there. It’s a good one. It’s a healthy. I do. I work with people who have done work in Israel. I’ve got a guy on my crew who’s.
He couldn’t care less about southeastern prehistory or southeastern United States history. He’s all wrapped up in classical archaeology. He’s fascinated with, you know, the fertile crescent, Egyptology, all that. You. You’re around, interesting people in this profession know, maybe kind of like the investing world. It puts you in contact with all types of different people. Yeah, well, I’m sort of in the investing world. I’m more of a monetary philosopher than an investment advisor.
I just try to explain to people the nature of what money is and sort of like you’re trying to reconnect Americans with culture. I’m trying to reconnect people with a real economy and what it is to own money and to hold it. Everything has gotten so empty. Everything has been hollowed out, including money itself. And it starts with the money, but that’s the message. I try to spread that in order to get back in touch with resources in the earth and where we come from and creating things and creating wealth, even like creating a banjo when you’re a slave in the middle of the Caribbean, those kinds of things.
But everything has become digitized and spiritual. The physical has become spiritual, and the spiritual has become physical, and everything’s been crossed in a way that it shouldn’t be. And we got to get things back in order. But I’m going on. I wanted to talk to you, obviously, about your experiences in Iraq, because you told me that you were a veteran and you saw the sausage was mean. I can’t imagine it was fun there.
I was also in the army. People don’t know that. I don’t advertise it. I’m not that proud of it. I was in the IDF for six months, and I did pretty much nothing because I was already 24, 23, 24 by the time they drafted me. So I did six months, and they taught me how to shoot a gun, basically. That’s the only thing I really learned. And other than that, I just escaped to the library and read books and tried to stay out of people’s way.
But that was it. It was just a giant waste of time. And that was when my Zionism, the way people perceive Zionism as like, support for the state of Israel because the state itself is holy. That’s not the kind of Zionism that I subscribe to at all, because I’m anarchist and I don’t believe in states. But that’s when it started to die. I was like, this whole state thing, it’s not working.
I see it. So what did you see in Iraq and how did it change you? Yeah, baby. I felt very compelled to join after, when the 911 attacks happened, September 11, 2001. And as soon as I was old enough at 17, I joined, and my mother had to sign off to let me join. And I didn’t wind up going to basic training until I was 18. And then I showed up in Iraq.
Later that year, October of 2003, I showed up in Iraq at an 18 year old kid. In Iraq? Yeah, 18, because I joined at 17. So I was right in there, and they sent me to a unit that had already been there. So a unit called the first squadron of the first us cavalry regiment, and they had already been there for several months by the time I showed up.
So I showed up as the cliche green replacement in the movies or whatever, who shows up and knows nothing. And I was very eager, just wanted to help, very patriotic. And at that time, you couldn’t get me to cuss, you couldn’t get me to drink, you couldn’t get me to do drugs, nothing like that. I was a straight edge, all american kid, and all that just completely went out the window once I got used to my new role, and things just changed very rapidly.
Like my first day with the unit, they took me out to the motor pool. I was in a tank unit, and I was going to be the driver on this tank, an m one Abrams tank. And my first day in the motor pool, as they’re showing me my basic duties on the tank that I’d be expected to do, a huge explosion occurs behind us, a good distance behind us, probably 500 meters behind us, but it was a huge explosion, and we found out later it was an artillery rocket.
It was some soviet, I don’t know, 100 millimeter, 150 millimeter, some heavy artillery rocket that they had fired just sort of haphazardly at our base, and it happened to blow up a long distance from me. But that was day one with the unit, and we were never involved in heavy combat. I never was. But that day, that started the tempo of, we would get bombed sometimes every day, at least once a week with mortars.
They had a 60 millimeter mortars, an old soviet mortar that was very popular. So they would shoot 60 millimeter mortars at us all the time. And then you would go out on patrol, usually every day. My platoon was responsible for, you had to do a day patrol and a night patrol, and usually these patrols were 4 hours each, and so there’d be a calendar, and you’d go out and just ride around.
And our tactic in those days was just trying to incite the Iraqis to shoot at us, trying to incite a fight so that we could return fire and kill them. That was the only strategy. That was their brilliant plan. Here’s what we’re going to do. Take your clothes. Also clap your arms and make noises like a bird. Hey, Rick, what are you waiting for? Shoot the bastard. Shoot him.
Shoot him. Just to send us riding around and get shot up. So I was pretty disgusted with that. I got pretty disgusted with that pretty quick. And you could quickly see that there was no helping the situation. It was obvious that none of the people in Iraq had anything to do with 911. And you have to remember in 2003, that was a major selling point of getting young guys like me to enlist, was that there’s our enemy, Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
They were part of this huge attack on us. We’ve got to go and root that out, prevent it from happening again. Once you actually get there, anybody who’s got any kind of brain, you rapidly realize, I was in Baghdad. These people in Baghdad, they have no idea. They have nothing to do with 911. So it was stupid, it was pointless, and it was clearly a waste of time, material waste of lives.
I could talk about that situation for a long time, but suffice to say, I very quickly got disenfranchised, disenchanted with the situation. And you could see that once a couple of your friends get killed, and it was clear to me my friends were being killed for nothing. And that puts a hole in a human heart that doesn’t ever get filled. It puts a darkness over you, as I’m sure you know.
And you start really being aware of what actually matters, what doesn’t matter. So I got pretty disgusted with it early on and became something of a rebel out there. And I started getting in trouble for running my mouth. They took my rank away. I was confined and all this other stuff. But my story with the army is I eventually rehabilitated myself in my unit and they gave me awards and they promoted me back and all this other stuff.
And once back in Germany, I put in for a conscientious objector discharge. And they investigated me and determined that I really was opposed to war and violence and stuff. And they let me go. They gave me an honorable discharge. I couldn’t believe it. Wow. So I was in and out of the army in about two years and seven, eight months, just shy of three years that I was in and got out.
I was very happy to get out and went right into the anti war movement and the american left. I became like a left wing activist, anti war activist in those days. I started a whole nother chapter in my life. And then now you look at left wing politics in America today. You wouldn’t recognize it versus what it was in the early two thousand s. Now the left is pro war.
Yeah. For example, I could never have foreseen that we would find ourselves in a current situation. Well, the left now is like the left during the leninist stalinist period where the left was just for absolute control. But there’s no more conscientious left like it used to be. It doesn’t exist and the right isn’t much better. But it’s the same in this country. There’s no left and there’s no right.
There used to be a left and a right in Israel, but they’ve both been hollowed out into corporate as there’s really, there’s really no direction in Israel either. We’re fighting a war, but we don’t know what we’re doing. Nobody can agree on what is supposed to be done or how. Meanwhile, they’re just sending people into Gaza. Some of them are my friends and they want to fight, but they’re not sure what are we doing? What are we trying to do? Just tell us.
And nobody can say anything. They can’t tell you what the goal is, can they? No. Same thing. There’s a similar thing in Iraq. And that was the conclusion I came to with the Iraq war. I never went to Afghanistan, so I don’t really talk on Afghanistan. I had friends who went there. But my conclusion with the Iraq war was I came home and immediately I heard NPR news reports that were talking using words like victory and winning the war.
And anyone who had actually been there in my unit, anywhere near the front line, you know, there’s nothing to win here. There’s no victory. The only way to win the Iraq war would have been to kill every single Iraqi. And it was clear that we were not going to do that. So if we’re not going to do that, then there’s nothing to do here. We should just go home.
And I’ve never been to Israel. I don’t know what y’all are dealing with, but I feel the same sort of thing there. The only way you win a conflict like that is the extermination of one side. And if we’re not going to do that, then we need to do something else. That’s how I feel about it. If we’re not going to exterminate the enemy, then you need to come to peace some other way, and let’s set about doing that instead of wasting lives like we’re doing now.
That’s the way I see it. We still have to talk about precious metals a little bit. But I’m too drawn into this other topic that you said to me that your father, what was his name? John Watson John Watson Hicks. Okay. Watson Hicks. John Watson Hicks. So I’m going to share a screen here on a tweet that you put out. It says here my father, John Watson Hicks, born 1944, learned Arabic at the Defense Language Institute before being shipped to Kagnu station, Ethiopia.
He eventually taught himself Hebrew and was present in Israel during the Six Day War and the attack on the USS Liberty. You also mentioned to me that he had been involved in some prisoner negotiations or prisoner interrogations or something. Before you get into that story, does your father still know Hebrew? Could he have a conversation with me in Hebrew? I think he could have a very broken conversation with you, yeah, he probably wouldn’t speak to you because he’d view you as some kind of right winger or something.
Okay. I haven’t spoken to him in a while, but I encouraged you to try to find him and reach out to him. You guys could probably have an interesting conversation. Yeah, I would definitely be interested. I want to know what he saw in 1967, and that was going back to war and goals in a war. The goal of the jewish people in 1967 was to not get slaughtered.
That was a very unifying goal. And we accomplished that goal because we struck first and tripled the size of the country in six days and pretty much scared every Arab in the world to not mess with us for a little while. But then we committed a grave error and a grave mistake. First of all, in my view, as the right winger, the biggest mistake we did was we didn’t rebuild the third temple on the temple Mount.
We should have done that right then. But Moshe Dayan, our defense minister, know we’re just going to give it back to the Arabs. Leave Hadal. Hadal Kolakovatal Aniyurad. The regaze. The regaze. No lamb loyalty, no gear. The Abne Hakotel Hama ravi. The most valuable archaeology in our people is right under there. And we just gave it all to them and they’re still dumping everything and just desecrating the place.
It’s horrible. But, yeah, 1967. The other big mistake we made was that we started to willingly rely on american weaponry and american foreign aid. We didn’t get a dollar in american foreign aid until 1967. Right? We didn’t take a dime of taxpayer money until then. And we committed the huge sin of stealing from you guys now. And it’s infuriating. It’s infuriating to me. It’s infuriating to you, I’m sure.
And it ruins any good relationship we could possibly have on a national level. That’s going to have to stop, and it’s going to stop, and the jewish people are going to be cut off one way or another, and then we’re going to be on our own again. We’re going to freak out, and then we’re going to figure it out. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but that’s the destiny.
We’re going to have to be cut off, and you’re going to have to stop giving us money, or the dollar is just going to die and you won’t be able to one way or the other. So what did your father do? What was he involved in? Prisoner exchanges? What do you think happened with the USS Liberty? What’s going on there? He joined the army in 63 as they were just starting the Vietnam draft, and he didn’t want to go to Vietnam.
He came from a military family, so he always expected to serve. My grandfather was a career officer and so forth, going back to the founding of the nation. So my father went and enlisted. He figured he’d get ahead of the draft, and he enlisted and signed a contract to be, I believe, a chinese linguist. And of course, when he actually showed up at the defense Language Institute in California, they put him in Arabic classes.
Is he just like a natural philologist, natural guy who just picks up languages very easily? No, I don’t think so. He actually didn’t do very well on the language exam, according to him. But he’s a smart man, and I’m sure he’s a high iq individual, and he must be, because even though he did poorly or just barely well enough on the language exam to get in, he eventually wound up teaching himself Hebrew and just on his own free time in Ethiopia.
So they taught him Arabic and they sent him to Ethiopia, to Kagnu station, Ethiopia, which is a little listening outpost on top of a mountain. And I only know about this from his stories, but apparently he was part of what’s called the army Security Agency. It’s a now defunct intelligence agency that got what’s now the NSA, the national security agency. But I guess back in the 60s, there were smaller, more fragmented intelligence communities.
So he was part of the army security Agency, and they didn’t really wear uniforms, hardly ever. It wasn’t a military situation. And from what it seems to me, there weren’t supposed to be U. S. Troops at Kagnu station. So they were kind of posing as NGO workers, maybe USAID, State Department people. They all always wore civilian clothes, but really their job there was to listen in on arabic radio traffic from their listening station on top of that mountain in Ethiopia.
So they were just spying, know, just the ordinary radio traffic of there was, and which was all encrypted in code and stuff. So at that station, they had cryptologists and linguists and radio specialists, and they also had to jam other signals because, of course, the Soviets and I’m sure the Israelis and everybody was trying to spy on our traffic as well. Radar about to be jammed. The radar, sir, it appears to be jammed.
So they had to countermeasure stuff that they did as well. But his job, essentially was an arabic linguist, so he would get stuff from the one they would break. They would intercept the traffic, they would decode the material into Arabic. And then my father’s job was to translate it into English and then flag anything that was important or whatever and send it on up to supervisor or whatever.
And that’s pretty much all he did that and just party like a young man in Africa in the 60s. Had a hell of a time, had a great time partying it up in Ethiopia in those days. All kind of stories about. I was raised on these stories about Ethiopia. So naturally, they’re intercepting radio traffic, and I think they’re also intercepting and listening to a ton of israeli radio traffic in Hebrew.
So he’s got friends who are hebrew linguists, and they’re all hanging around on each other’s shifts and hanging out. And he starts to learn Hebrew. And that’s how he taught himself Hebrew through other hebrew linguists listening to the radio traffic, I presume, reading hebrew texts, stuff like that. But he taught himself Hebrew enough to where? And of course, the US army could see the six day war coming before it happened, through intelligence and stuff like that.
So sometime around the spring of 67, his superiors figured out that they came up with this idea to send guys to Israel who could speak Hebrew. And he was one of the few guys they had on hand, even though he wasn’t formally trained in Hebrew, he could speak it. So they sent him to Israel, and I think he showed know it was such a fast war, right? I think he showed up right at the end.
So by the time he finally got there, and the whole purpose of their mission there was they were going to observe prisoner interrogations, and I think they were supposed sort of an advisory. They were going to advise and observe. Observe, Israelis interrogating Arabs. Yes, sir. Observe and advise. Basically help because there was other Americans who went, who were interrogation experts, stuff like that. So he was sent there, I think, as part of a group of linguists and interrogation guys to observe and advise.
But what actually happened when they got there was the israeli army just shut them away and kept them away from everything. So they essentially, when they got there, they did nothing. He told me immediately he had an israeli girlfriend right off the bat and looking back, he thinks that she was some kind of massad person or something who was purposely attached to him because he just partied with her the whole time.
So your father got honey potted by a jewish girl? Yeah, that’s what he thinks. And I think that sounds reasonable because they just didn’t want all these Americans involved in the process. He has all these theories as to why, but it just kind of makes sense. So it’s like, imagine in the israeli army you’re processing all these prisoners and stuff in the wake of a bloody war and they send you a bunch of american 20 year olds who are supposed to watch you and report back on what you’re doing.
So of course you distract them and get them out of the way. Makes sense to me so that you can do the real work. But he did get to sit in on one interrogation. And that’s always an interesting story. And I think it was an egyptian artillery officer. It was an arabic artillery officer. I think he’s egyptian. And my father tells the story that the guy was a young man, young artillery officer, and he was in tears during the entire interrogation.
Egyptian fear. I think he was egyptian. Yeah, I believe he said he was egyptian. And the guy was in tears the whole time out of shame and embarrassment. And in the interrogation he’s explaining to the israeli interrogators and I guess to my father and whoever’s present that the reason he’s so ashamed is that he had this artillery unit, this battery, and they had these new type of soviet guns or something that they had trained up on in preparation for the war.
And trained and trained and trained. And when combat actually happened, his guys just fell apart and they couldn’t effectively handle the guns. I believe they were up in the Goland Heights and the israeli army was attacking up. Forgive me, I’m not familiar. No. Then he wouldn’t be egyptian. He’d be was. And they were firing and something about how they couldn’t get the guns to actually hit any of the targets and their position was rapidly overrun by IDF.
Sorry, keep going. Yeah. The final point about that is the real zinger in that is these IDF, presumably infantrymen who took over his position. They turned his guns around and looked at the manuals and within a few minutes, they were firing his own guns on his retreating troops. Oh, my God. He was devastated. It was just shameful for the guy. And so it was really like, they were just, like, consoling him and trying to get information out of him.
So that’s the one interrogation that he sat in on. I’m going to remember that story forever, because when you read Tanakh, when you read the Old Testament, the Bible, it’s filled with these kinds of stories where the Jews are outnumbered. And then God puts this crazy fear in the huge army that’s about to attack them, and they just run away for no reason. They don’t know why. And it’s filled with those kinds of stories.
But you’re saying that this is what actually happened for no reason. They just get scared. They can’t operate the guns. And then the Israelis just come up, take their guns, turn them on. It’s unbelievable what happened in 1967. And dare I say that I believe that the jewish people are being punished. Now, I don’t want to say we deserve this, and yay that my brothers and sisters got murdered on simplest Torah on October 7.
I’m not cheering that on, but I’m saying we’ve made terrible, terrible mistakes from what I went through, and I don’t know exactly what side, but I would assume you’re closer to my side than the mask everyone up and shoot everyone up with drugs. But I was extremely. Again, that whole era was much worse for me than this. This I can understand. I know what war is, but watching my own friends turn on me and turn into zombies and not think about even the most basic logic anymore, that’s much more terrifying.
And everything. Everything that we’re going through now, we led the world. We led the damn world into mass medical force because we were the example. We always set the example. We set the negative example this time. And we showed the world that you can drug up an entire country with experimental whatever, and they’ll just do it. And so everybody followed, and we shut down our economy. We raped people medically.
So God said, you want to shut down your economy? Fine, I’ll shut down the whole country. And you want to put people in forced quarantines, fine, I’ll kidnap. I’ll have somehow kidnap 300, 400 people and stick them in Gaza and put them on quarantine. It was just horrible. And we have some punishment to go through, so I hope we get through it. I have the same perspective on the.
On the COVID stuff. That was a major line in the sand for me. You’re never going to get that injection into my body. You’re never going to force me to wear a mask, and I’m never going to back down from that. When I go into the VA hospital and the nice old lady behind the desk asks me to put on a mask in the VA hospital, I do put on a mask in the VA hospital when they ask me to.
But outside of that, and I do so very reluctantly, and I absolutely refuse to accept that injection. I’m right there with you on that. Right. So I have a huge story on that. There was only one time where I wore a mask, and that was for an interview, a technical interview I had to do with the government office of the firearms office because I was applying to get a license for a gun.
So I figured, like, I’m going to have to put a mask on, because if I don’t, they’re not going to give me a gun. I put the mask on, and this was after I had to bring a group of my friends together because I had made a vow not to put a mask on. So I wasn’t able to put a mask on until I annuled the vow. So I annulled the vow, and then I put the mask on.
And then, like, a few months later, I was charged with assault for dropping my daughter off at kindergarten without a green pass. And I kind of, like, nudged my way in. So I was charged with assault, and I’m suing the woman for that, for falsely accusing me of assaulting her. And I have a whole video of the whole thing because I had my iPhone in my pocket recording, and she didn’t know, so she went to the media and said that I had screamed nazi slurs of children.
I’m like, well, here’s the video. I was just sitting down and playing with my daughter. So anyway, I was accused of assault, and then the gun that I had gotten was taken away from me. I guess it was God’s way of saying, you don’t really need this right now, and shouldn’t have put a mask on. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m reading too much into things. But the good news is I got it back.
I’m armed again. Right after the war started, it got really easy to get guns, and I’m not really into them, but I’d rather have it. I’d rather have it than not. And that’s it. Yeah, I feel the same way. My gun is I have a handgun that I carry with me on the road. It’s within arms reach of me right now. Not because I like it, but it’s necessary.
So what did your father think about the USS Liberty? How was he involved with that? Because I hear two sides to that. There’s some people in Israel that insist it was an accident. I’m not so sure it was. I think it might have been on purpose. I don’t know much about the situation. I read a little bit about it in the book six days of War, but I don’t trust the author.
I think he’s a propagandist. Michael Oren. I don’t really like him so much. But assuming it was on purpose because maybe the ship was spying on Israel or something, assuming it was on purpose, then the fact that Israel could attack a us ship and still get the US to become our closest ally after 1967, it kind of suggests that if we were to conduct this war, how we need to conduct this war to win it with an actual goal, maybe America would get pissed.
Yeah, maybe the world would, but I think we would be okay. And maybe that’s very irresponsible of me to say that, but that is my gut feeling. What happened with the USS Liberty? Was it attacked? Was it an accident? You know, my father was extremely bitter, is still to this day, extremely bitter about it. And I was raised on the stories of it. Now, of course, he didn’t see the attack happen.
He was not on, he was not in the navy, he wasn’t on the liberty, but he was in the intelligence community in the Levant in 1967. And so the word got around among the guys. My information I have is not only. It’s like Thirdhand, because my father wasn’t there, but it’s hearsay from stuff that he heard from, like, navy intel guys and other people who. So my father always maintains, and I’m sure he’ll tell you this today, if you were to ask him that he spoke with a guy who convincingly claimed to have heard the radio traffic, which is plausible, because my father was in this intelligence unit.
That’s all they did was listen to radio traffic. So it’s plausible he would have spoken to somebody who had accurate knowledge of it. And that guy claimed that you could hear the wing commander, the Israeli, like the pilot who was commanding aircraft in the attack, radio to his supervisor, this is an american ship. And he tried to call off the attack. And that there was sort of an argument, as much of an argument that could ensue in that short amount of time with that power dynamic.
Some type of disagreement ensued. And of course, the israeli pilot lost out and they went through with the attack. But he said, this is an everybody, you know, call it off. Call it off. And word came back on the know ignore the liberty was flying a huge flag. That’s, that’s a major point of the story, a huge us flag. So it was clearly everyone saw the flag. And the pilots are even, they’re radioing back this information about this large us flag.
They’re radioing back information about, there’s numbers painted on the hull of the ship, all these identification numbers, and the orders just kept coming back. You’ve been ordered to attack that ship, attack the ship, follow your orders. And ultimately they did pretty quickly. They went through with the attack. And that’s the gist of it. Apparently there is radio traffic out there where an israeli air force officer tries to call off the attack and is forced to go through with it anyhow.
So I just don’t know much else about it except that is, I do believe that’s what happened. I believe clearly the guys in the ships and the aircraft that were sent to attack the liberty, they saw the huge us flag and they tried to call it off and they were told to go through with it anyhow, and they did. So something happened there. I don’t understand. It seems far fetched to me that Israel would purposely do that, but yet they did.
And it seems like it was purposeful, but I don’t know why that would like, it was some kind of huge mix up or something. I was talking a few weeks ago on my show with an israeli politician named Moshe Faglin, who I’m a supporter of. He got as high as being the deputy speaker of the Knesset. And he was in Netanyahu’s government in 2013, 2014, something like that.
And he’s on my side of things like we have to rebuild the third temple, all those kinds of crazy religious right wing nuttersm that you would hear. They call us nuts, but they call the Zionists nuts. Well, the Jews are going to come back to Israel after this many. Well, we did. Okay, so why can’t we just build our house? So he was saying that Israel deliberately attacked the USS liberty because the ship was supposedly broadcasting troop movements to the Egyptians.
I have no idea if that’s true. I don’t know what sources he’s talking about, but he seems to be pretty adamant and he’s like a history nut. So he’s right. And if Israel had the balls to do that to mean they must have been on some kind of like, or the commanders must have been high on something. I’m not saying physically they were on drugs, but when you’re fighting for your survival and you’re winning, it can get pretty intense, and you might be crazy enough to say, okay, let’s bomb that american ship.
Okay. If the liberty was broadcasting information, was sharing information with the Arabs, it seems like Israel had justification for the attack. I just don’t know. But my father is adamant that it was a purposeful attack. He’ll go to his grave knowing that it was a purposeful attack. Okay. I can’t say one way or the other what happened there, but, yeah, clearly the liberty was attacked with impunity, and there were no consequences, almost no consequences for Israel for that attack, whether it was on purpose or not.
And that has a potential to tell us a lot about the dynamic between Israel and the United States. Yeah, that dynamic is going to change soon. I don’t know what it’s going to look like when the dollar does collapse. And it’s not that America will stop supporting us because they don’t want to, it’s that they won’t be able to. It’s going to be something like that, and then we’re going to be left alone here, as we should be, and then figure it out from there.
And I hope I survive it. I hope you do, too. Please, God, I will. I have faith. And maybe I have the merit, maybe I don’t, but I’ll keep praying. Well, you know that. It seems that you’re confident that whatever is going to happen is what should happen. Yeah, that’s almost axiomatic. It’s like we’re stuck in a spiral. We’re always at the front pages of the progression of history.
Somewhere where there’s a big movement forward in human history. You see the Jews somewhere at the front of it. It’s kind of eerie and creepy, and I didn’t ask for it, but that’s where we are. Anyway, I wanted to close the conversation off with a little bit about precious metals. I’m just one guy who talks about gold and silver, but it seems that the way that I speak of it, for some reason, connects to you.
And I’m just asking why is there something about what I’m saying that’s different from other precious metals? Guys, it seems that you have a sort of mind that would understand my message, because it’s not just monetary, it’s also cultural, historical, it’s integrative into everything that’s wrong with us. And I see the root of it in the money itself, because once you start inflating your society starts inflating. Every part of it starts inflating, and then you lose it.
Yeah. Inflation is what brought me to the precious metals and to you. Since I was 18 years old, I’ve earned a paycheck. I have worked, and I’ve been very frugal my entire life. I have saved and saved and saved. I’ve always been the type of. Even when I was a young kid, if I see a group of other children who are all running one direction, my first instinct is not to join and run with them.
My first instinct is to hold back and assess the situation before I determine which way I’m going to go. And I’ve always been frugal and saved my money. And for the first time in my life over these past few years, I started to amass what was to me considerable wealth. I started earning six figures a year, working multiple jobs. I was working in construction, full time construction. I was a full time banjo teacher, musician, and I was working part time in archaeology.
And that was right during that Covid. When Covid was hitting in 2019, I think 2020 was the first year I made six figures of us dollars, which to me was the gold standard. It’s just as good as having gold. And I’m just hoarding these us dollars in my bank account. And I’m already pissed off that because when I was a young kid, if you had a savings account, you actually earned interest from the bank to where you could just leave your money in a savings account and you’d make a little bit of money on it.
And they already took that away from us. So I wasn’t expecting any kind of interest from a savings account in a bank. But I just thought, well, I refused to invest in stocks. I didn’t know. You can’t go into Walmart and buy groceries with a brick of gold. You have to have cash money. So I didn’t see any value in precious metals, and I figured the stock market was akin to going into a casino and gambling.
So I just hoarded us dollars. But then the pandemic came. 2020, 2021, inflation spikes, and literally before my eyes, I see everything. I’ve spent my adult life hoarding and building up those savings. I’m watching it just degrade before my eyes. And once I realized that, it was very clear I had to do something else. I had to put my money into something that was actually valuable. I have that feeling now.
Any dollar I have just sitting in a checking account or in my wallet, I have this feeling, and I know in my mind that every morning when I wake up, that $20 bill in my wallet, it’s worth less than it was when I went to sleep. $20 today is not worth $20. 10 years ago. Right. And it’s drastic. It’s right in front of your face. They’re throwing it in your face.
They’re forcing you to invest is how I see it. So I’ve been forced to invest. And I initially thought commodities, right? You got to invest. How do you invest in things like food or fertilizer? That was my first thing. And I also was drawn to the aerospace and defense stocks. So the first stocks I bought was actually aerospace and defense etfs. Putting my money into the military industrial complex, which I never thought I would ever do.
Completely abhorrent. But I’m doing it because I know, I feel very strongly that that’s a good place to store your money because these companies are not going away. So I started investing in aerospace and defense and I started investing in some commodity etfs. None of that really went well for me. And I started seeking out, I started looking into silver, gold, uranium, platinum, which has gone poorly for me so far.
And that’s how I found you. And when you come into this world of investing, people trying to make sense of markets and geopolitics, people are trying to predict what’s coming. And also there’s lots of historical analysis, right? Like what did the markets do before ratio charts from 50 years ago? And looking at the Great Depression, all this other stuff, there’s so many opportunities. Most people go with the consensus and that’s where they find safety and they stick with the consensus no matter what.
So when I came across you, I could see very clearly that you are not concerned with the consensus. You don’t concern yourself with what other people are predicting, you’re really concerned with. You’re an original thinker. To me you seem like a very original thinker and a pretty knowledgeable guy who spends a lot of time thinking about these things. So I subscribe to your channel and when you speak, I listen to what you have to say because I value your opinion.
I don’t think that you’re somebody who would spread a mistruth just because it was fashionable or because it was popular. You seem to me obviously like the type of guy who will speak the inconvenient truth, the very unpopular truth that might cost you everything, but you’re still going to speak the truth. That’s the type of man I try to be. So when I encounter somebody like that, I listen to what they have to say.
And that’s how I came to you, sir. Well, I’m flattered. I mean, that’s how I like to think of myself. I get myself into trouble because of that for many times. There were many times during. During the whole Covid thing where I got myself into serious trouble. And by the grace of God, I was able to stay out of it. But, yeah, I’ll try to speak the truth.
It doesn’t mean that I’ll be right, but I’ll try to be. What do you think about platinum? What’s going on with platinum? What’s going on with platinum? I don’t really buy in platinum a year ago, and I keep buying it. I don’t know why I wouldn’t go too heavy in platinum because it’s a quasi money. It’s not really money because we only had the technology to melt it down into coins since the 19th century.
So it’s relatively new. It could be used as money, but it’s not going to be because there’s plenty of gold and silver out there that we don’t need to. But I look at the platinum group metals as a cue for what might be going on in the banking system, because I’ve noticed that whenever there’s a crunch that’s about to happen, rhodium, palladium, platinum, they all kind of, like, tank at the same time.
And I can’t tell you why exactly, but I’ve noticed this. So right now it’s happening in palladium less platinum, but they’re all falling, especially rhodium. Rhodium is like, stuck in a big coil that I just reported on the end game investor, but I would have maybe like 1% or 2% platinum, because I do think that once the fed starts to print for the last time, I think this time is going to be the last time, then it’s the platinum group metals that are going to move the fastest in the initial stages, but then gold and silver will catch up and just keep going.
So I’m not big into platinum, but I’m not against it either. If you want some, have some. But you want to have this stuff physically, because the etfs are just ways to use metals in order to multiply your dollars. But in the end, the dollar is not going to be worth anything, and the ETF isn’t going to be redeemable. It’s nice to accumulate dollars. It’s not a bad thing.
But if you really take this to its logical conclusion, all the dollars that you’re going to have, they’re not going to be able to buy you anything. And it’s going to come down to what’s literally in your piggy bank. You can see it’s starting to happen. Yeah, it’s starting to happen in the sense that the entire Gen Z or I guess kids who were born in 2000 and up, they have given up on saving.
Once they feel the train pulling away from them and there’s no way they can get on it, they just splurge on whatever they have because why not? And that’s the first step of hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is let’s just splurge everything we have immediately, because otherwise I’m not going to get anything. That’s where it’s headed. And once it heads there, then everyone has a sudden eureka movement and then everyone’s destitute that doesn’t have real money.
And then from there, you either tear each other apart or you rebuild. And hopefully you rebuild. I think you’re safer in Arkansas than, let’s say, New York City or La or Chicago. You’ll never get me inside city limits ever again. Never again. After those riots in 2020, you’ll never get me in the city limits. No, I stay out here. I’m very happy out here. So it’s staying out there and building yourself a small community of people around you that are basically like minded and sane and moral people.
If I were american, then I would probably run away and join the Amish. Something like that. Yeah. They’ve got a few things figured out. Yeah. They’ll be the best off. Are they completely self sufficient? They’re close to it, yeah. And they could quickly become that way. I was at an undisclosed army base over the winter doing a lot of surveys on their training areas. And there happens to be a lot of amish people around the army base.
So I was actually around them all winter. And in my home community back in Tennessee, there’s actually lots of amish people there too, but I didn’t get to see them as much. But this job I had over the winter, working for the was because I was on army land that butted up against amish land, up against their farms. In our archaeology surveys, we were sometimes all the amish kids would come out and stare at us and stuff like that.
And I got to actually, it was the closest glimpse I’ve got into their lifestyle without staring. I try to not stare at people’s property when I’m working around it, but I couldn’t help but just admire their well built structures, their large healthy families, lots of happy children who are very active and healthy, running around, little boys going to work every morning with their lunch coolers, barefoot, going to work.
They’ve got something figured out. They all really got something figured out. They have nice property. Their soil is nice. They have great soil. They got something going on. And most of them are probably not self sufficient right now, but their structure is such that they could very rapidly be self sufficient, I have no doubt. And they interact with american society in ways that benefit them. So they take and choose what they want to take from our society and interact with, but they don’t need us.
The only problem they might run into is they’re probably not really as proficient with firearms. They don’t have a lot of veterans in the amish community, stuff like that. But I did see, when I was around the army base for the first time, I saw amish boys with deer rifles who were going out to hunt deer. So that’s an encouraging sign. Like you said, I think those people are in a pretty decent position to weather a lot of uncertainty.
Yeah. As long as they can defend themselves from mobs. Yeah, that would be their issue, because they have a lot of valuable material stored up, and they have very desirable land, so they would need to be able to defend it. And of course, their neighbors are rednecks who are very sympathetic to them, and they could probably bond together and stuff. But we’re getting into a very theoretical realm now.
But it’s pretty obvious they’ve got a good model. They didn’t all get injected with poison, and they didn’t stick poison in their kids veins. That’s a major advantage they have over the rest of us. Yeah, I hear they have almost no autism in their communities. I don’t know what causes autism. I’m not making any claims here, but who knows? You know what I’m alluding to? And before 2020, I was never into the whole antivaxx thing.
I didn’t have any opinion, and I did what the doctors told me to do because I just trusted it made sense. But that opened my eyes. I’m like, wait a second. What if nothing makes sense? You have to question everything now. Yep. We can’t trust anything that we’re told. Yeah, I just came across this. If you look up Edward, is it Edwin or Edwin? It’s Edward Jenner, the inventor of the smallpox vaccine.
The so called inventor of the smallpox vaccine. In his doctoral thesis, or explaining what this vaccine is, he talks about the myth, what he calls the myth of the milkmaid’s disease, smallpox vaccine, that you can’t just take pus from a cowpox pustule and inject it into a kid and then he’ll be immune. It doesn’t work that way. But that’s exactly what we were told in school, that he said that it did work that way, and that’s why he was such a genius.
So if you look into his written word and he’s saying the exact opposite of what I was told he said in school, but what was his way of marketing it? He changed something about it. I forget what it was. He made it a little bit more. He changed some of the formula to make it a vaccine, to make it work. But then there’s. I forgot the name of the doctor.
But this was also circulating online, some other doctor who was circulating a 19th century pamphlet about why the smallpox vaccine is a bunch of malarkey and it doesn’t work. And he was citing all these medical records from the 19th century, ostensibly proving it, but nobody’s ever heard of this, so who knows? It goes all the way back to smallpox. I mean, it’s just like a tiny little mistake or a myth can get injected into the scientific community, and then everyone just assumes it’s true and then builds everything off of that, and it’s all just nonsense.
I don’t know for sure, but I’m definitely questioning everything now. Where they take science on as their religion is what it seems to me, and then whatever dogma comes out of that religion cannot be questioned. And then it’s a false religion that’s based on nothing. So, of course they’re led astray, and it seems like that’s what’s happened. Our scientific institutions have become pseudo religious institutions, cult institutions, and they’re no longer concerned with helping out humanity.
I know the smallpox vaccine. The only history I know about that is with the early United States army in the revolutionary war. And they forced all those guys to get the smallpox vaccine, which back in those days meant they actually cut your arm and rubbed some pustule in the cut in your arm. And that was the first mandatory vaccination program put out by the US government. And apparently, according to all the history books, it was a raging success.
I don’t know. I got the smallpox vaccine when I was in the army. Okay, I’m full of vaccines. So am I. Just not the newest ones. Those I didn’t take. No, that’s where I draw the line. Yeah. Well, it was really a pleasure to talk to you. And if you want to talk again, I’m certainly up to it. And if you want to learn some hebrew and come to Israel, I’d be honored to have you as a guest.
Oh, thanks for the offer, Rafi. I’m thrilled to hear it. I’m thrilled to be on your program here. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And we’ll be in touch. This interview with Clifton Hicks is brought to you by dirty man safe. If you want a very low tech way to hide your wealth, then dirty man safe is the safe for you. You just dig a hole somewhere on your property, or not even on your property, and put it in there and bury it like a pirate.
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