03/12/10 – Jeff Frazee and Brian Beyer – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Angela Keaton, our producer, is here in the studio today, and we're moving on to our next guest, it's Jeff Frazee and Brian Byer, both from Young Americans for Liberty.
Welcome to the show, guys.
Hey, how's it going?
Hey, what's up?
Hey, how's it going, y'all?
Not too bad.
Alright, so I guess introduce yourselves.
Jeff, you're the founder of this thing, huh?
Yeah, I'm the executive director of Young Americans for Liberty.
I work with people like Brian to hopefully build a large youth movement to end such things as this horrific war, so that's where we're moving.
Alright, and now, so tell us, what exactly is Young Americans for Liberty?
Basically you're a student group, right, at different universities around the country?
Yeah, we're a youth group, we're a membership for 15 to 39, so we're not solely student-based, but most of our members are college or high school students.
We have over 150 active and forming chapters in states all across the country, and really our mission is to identify, train, and mobilize youth activists to win on principle.
So it's about getting involved in the political process and hopefully affecting policy in this country.
Alright, and Brian, how long have you been a member of Young Americans for Liberty?
I actually joined back in May of 2009 when I first started learning a lot more about Ron Paul and getting pretty heavily involved in politics and economics.
And you're a student at a university here somewhere?
Well, I'm actually a senior in high school in Buffalo, New York.
That's cool.
There's a lot of bright high school students, you'd be amazed.
Really?
How many?
Oh, you're going to put me on an exact number?
We have about 10 active Young Americans for Liberty chapters in high schools, and in fact I got an email this morning from a student up in New Hampshire who actually got harassed by his principal.
Basically they'd been spying on his computer while he was at school for the past couple months.
And it's a pretty horrendous story, where actually he's looking with various organizations to press possible legal charges, but it's still in the very early stages.
But it's pretty amazing that some of the totalitarian approach that some of these principals have on campuses.
Yeah, well these kids have got to learn one way or another, huh?
Yeah, I'm sure Brian can tell you much more about it, and he probably experiences it well.
Well you know what I want to ask you, Brian?
Does anybody at your school care about the war?
Like there are a few kids who are interested in the whole politics, the whole war issue, but a vast majority of them, they really care to learn nothing about it whatsoever, and they're just completely ignorant of all the happenings.
Yeah, well I mean I can understand that, and that's the point of being a kid, right?
In a way.
I just am curious about, you know, what's the common mood?
I wonder, was there a time, say, I don't know, when you were in 7th grade, where people, you know, was the news big enough in everybody's life that there was a time when people were paying attention at all, do you know?
Well I remember when 9-11 happened, I was in 4th grade, and like even back then the kids actually were concerned, but as time went on, like people just weren't really talking about it.
It got put on the back burner, and I thought as I would get older that it would change.
There would be more of an open discussion on the war issues because we are getting older, and this is becoming more pressing because we are coming of age where many of us could join the military, but the silence is deafening, and it's quite frightening really.
Well Jeff, you're a few years older, tell me, when you were, you know, right around graduating from high school age, how big did the option of joining the military loom in your life?
I mean, was it kind of a, that was a real choice to make maybe, or you knew where you were going instead?
Yeah, you know, I remember filing for the draft and having to do all the necessary paperwork to I guess put me in my place in age, 9-11 hadn't even occurred when I was 18, I had half of my freshman year in college.
So filing for the draft really wasn't something that was more than a formality, never thinking that we were about to break out in warfare, but since then, you know, I remember throughout college being very nervous about just various whisper campaigns about the potential of a draft forming, and I even remember when, who was the recent Democrat representative who passed away, John Murtha, he had even started crafting legislation for the return of a draft, and that really, really woke a lot of people to the concerns of the war and our foreign policy.
And that's why it's always been an interest to me, coming from a pretty heavily conservative background, just this war never really adding up with those beliefs, and now just the tragedy that's occurred, the amount of money that's been lost, it's just really tragic, and it's something that our generation really has grown up with, and what Brian said, the silence now is deafening, it's just amazing that there's really no anti-war movement out there anymore.
Yeah, well, and you know, the thing is, I often think that the reason that they want all the new recruits joining the Army to be 18-19 is not just because you're young and strong and you can do the running and jumping, but it's because they know that you really don't know anything about it, and really the attitude that you're supposed to have as a young military recruit is that I don't care to know anything about it, that's, you know, the grown-ups back east somewhere or whatever, they know what they're doing, they're the ones in charge, they're democratically elected, they're legitimate, they decide what the mission is and I go and do it.
And I think that's why it's so important to have something like Young Americans for Liberty, where you're reaching out to these kids before they're even old enough to sign up and telling them, hey, look, this is wrong, and here's why.
Right.
Well, I shouldn't say I'm opposed to anyone joining the military, it's more the policy itself that I oppose, and I do think the reason young people, you know, can kind of gravitate towards that is because it's something that they can be a part of, it's something that the military provides discipline and direction, so I really don't fault young people necessarily for joining as much as the criminals in DC who send these kids off to war, and that's the real issue.
Okay, you guys are working on a money bomb.
Tell us a little bit what's coming up, your events that are coming up that are of interest to our listeners.
Well, I saw that in the whole, like, Liberty movement, there had been this thing called the money bomb, and so I familiarized myself with it, and I saw that many candidates, it was a very effective way of putting together a lot of funds, especially when they needed it by just, like, networking and getting the word out about a one-day big fundraising event, so I thought, why not try that for Young Americans for Liberty, because, I mean, we're a relatively medium-sized group, I don't know the exact stats and all that, but I mean, we need the extra money because it's tough economic times, so I thought, why not, you know, put together a money bomb, and it'll be on March 16th with the whole theme of, like, reigning in the American empire and ending all the lawless wars and just all the nonsense that goes along with it.
Well, elaborate a little bit.
What do you mean by reigning in the empire?
Well, I mean, we have 700 and some odd bases around the world, and people think, you know, a lot of people think that just because we're not occupying other countries, that we're not an empire, but when you look at it, the way we influence policy, the military build-ups and establishments we have around the world, our influence is so great and so dispersed throughout the world that we are an empire.
The trade agreements, everything, it can go on and on, and people just have to realize that you don't have to explicitly say this is, you know, a protectorate of the United States.
We're doing backroom deals, and that's what makes it even more dangerous.
We're a secret empire.
You hear this, Angela?
You see what's going on here?
Yes.
You see what Ron Paul has done?
This is a high school kid talking.
Yeah, Ron Paul has ruined America.
What do you mean by, you know, this is something that Ron Paul talks about, talks about, you know, a republic, and what would a humble republic be like?
What would the ideal foreign policy be?
I think the ideal foreign policy would, pursuing something like Switzerland, a policy of neutrality where you can broker agreements between nations, but you stay completely neutral.
You can act as a buffer, but you're not going to take one side or the other.
You're just going to say, you know, peace is the better option.
Are you going to be willing to take that step?
But I'm not going to push you to it, and I'm not going to push you from it.
It's all your choice, but I'll be there to back you up if peace is your option.
Well, something that's really important, of course, is things like this money bomb, and you guys have this petition to end the war, which I'd like to hear all about.
But I mean, who knows, you know, what good a petition can do at the end of the day.
But all during the day, though, this is how you reach out to people and give them something to actually, you know, wrap their hands around, get a hold of, do something.
Well, hey, Scott, I'll tell you one thing that the petition's been successful for.
We jokingly take credit for it, but when we first set out for this early in March, we just started a petition just to start, just to have a bill in Congress that would end the war.
There wasn't even a bill at the time that was written to end the war.
And just this week, Congressman Paul and Kucinich co-sponsored a bill to end the war in Afghanistan.
There was a bill on the floor.
So we were joking in the office as we were listening to it that our petition was already successful.
We already reached step one.
There's now a bill in Congress.
Now all you've got to do is get some votes in the House.
Now it just needs co-sponsors and needs to pass.
Oh, it is actually, I watched the debate on C-SPAN myself and was, you know, honestly, there's a part of me that was actually really hopeful that 60 whole people in Congress actually thought, gee, maybe peace isn't such a bad idea, and maybe, and it was a very tame resolution after all.
It was only, we're going to withdraw beginning at the end of the year.
But when you talk to young people on the ground about, you know, when you're trying to, you know, about the war issue, what do you find is the most effective approach?
The thing that I emphasize most whenever I talk to any of my friends is I try to take it to a really personable level.
I try and tell them that, you know, the 21 year olds that are dying, the 20 year olds, that that could be your brother or that could be your friend.
Because now I'm at that age where that possibility is so much more real.
And when you say that to them, when you bring it to a personal level, it makes them think so much deeper.
Because if you don't do that, they just think of it as a number, like, oh, what's the chances of that happening to me or my brother?
It's slim.
It's not going to happen.
But when you give them real stories of people in the area dying or people you know that have died, it just makes them wake up.
It's like that, I've noticed, is definitely the easiest way to get them to think about the implications of the war.
And also if you go to our blog right now, YALiberty.org, that Brian is a big contributor to, there's a chapter at the YAL chapter at Old Miss that just put up a wall of remembrance at their campus of all the soldiers that have died just in Mississippi alone.
And it's just a really powerful image, especially looking at their ages, all young people.
Well, you know, I was in New Hampshire back in November and the Young Americans for Liberty there, I helped them, we just put out flags representing the people who died in the wars just since Obama had taken office.
And it was this giant grass field covered with these flags.
They were red, the color of blood.
So yeah, I mean, that really is, I guess that's kind of what I'm getting at with the petition too, Jeff, is the idea that you've got to just, well, do more than sit here yelling into a microphone.
You've got to get out there, get people to put their names to a piece of paper, get them to visualize the numbers of their peers that have been lost in this futile exercise and break through that cocoon of myths and disinformation and half-truths that we're all brought up to believe.
And especially, like you say, because these are the kids that could be drafted if it comes down to it.
Right.
Exactly.
And that's, I think, far from beyond the realm of possibility, you know?
Right.
Well, when you think about it too, if our real goal here is to end the war, you've got to ask the question, who ends the war?
And it's Congress.
So we have to go after Congress and put pressure on them.
The bill that just came out, H.R.
248, I believe it is, that was recently just debated on the House floor, we need to take a look at that and we need to start leveraging our networks to get petitions signed and send them to a member of Congress and put some pressure on them and say, hey, look, we're going to vote you out of office if you don't co-sponsor this legislation.
And so it's really building coalitions in your hometown and leveraging your network to put pressure on your member of Congress to say, you know, enough is enough.
Well, now, you may know that there's a move on now to create some sort of anti-Empire League.
I'm not exactly sure what it's going to be called, but it's an attempt to bring the left and the right together.
And they've already had one big successful meeting and some articles have been written.
And there's a move on to do something.
And I sure hope that Young Americans for Liberty joins in with this.
Yeah.
Well, they had them actually during CPAC.
There was a meeting at another hotel that you referenced with this kind of left-right alliance.
And a couple of our staff went to the meeting with Dan McCarthy, the senior editor of our magazine Young American Revolution.
He's also the senior editor of American Conservative Magazine.
But yeah, they all went over there and said it was a pretty constructive conversation considering the enormous differences on other issues.
But to be honest, I don't know what's going to come out of it other than a few articles and maybe another meeting.
But yeah, well, you know, I would suggest you take a more positive attitude and try to participate in it, Jeff, because, I mean, you of all people, I don't think underestimate the influence that Young Americans for Liberty has.
And when you talk about making your congressman actually fear for his job, it's going to take more than the Young Americans for Liberty.
This is going to take Jeff Razy from the Young Americans for Liberty explaining to his congressman that he represents not just the Young Americans for Liberty, but these other 75 organized groups that have all come together and promised to destroy his career if he does not defund the war immediately.
You have to have something, you know, some brass on your knuckles to hit these guys with.
We have to do this.
Like you said, it's about ending the war, right?
It's not about getting elected to Congress for fun.
It's not about getting famous.
It's about stopping the war before it destroys our society, you know, never mind the people of the Middle East.
Right.
No, I'm 100 percent behind that.
I just I hope I hope that the coalition does build up.
That's what's lacking right now.
And something that hasn't been there since really 2006, it seems like the past four years have been just four more years of deafening years about the war.
So I'm hoping that's the right direction.
Jeff, we've got some comments in the chat room.
One person suggests on your on your donation forms to get a PayPal button and not just a credit card form.
Folks are exchanging links here in the anti-war chat room.
Oh, great.
And then actually, they're in luck because we do have that.
If you go to our donation page, instead of clicking on a credit card, click on the actual PayPal button and that will allow you to process it through PayPal rather than their credit card.
And I appreciate the support.
That's great.
I'm glad to hear people are talking about it.
All right, guys.
One more time.
Can you tell us where you can find Young Americans for Liberty?
Sure.
You go to our website, youngamericansforliberty.org.
And why don't you mention some campuses where you guys are active?
There's a one local in Buffalo, University of Buffalo, and I know they're all throughout the country.
I know some of the biggest are at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and also I've heard a lot from the University of Washington in St. Louis as well.
They actually had a controversial demonstration that got them a lot of press.
Great.
Well, and I know Alex Peterson at the University of New Hampshire, him and his whole group do a lot of great work as well.
Jeff, any closing comments here, bud?
Yeah.
Well, I encourage you to also go to youngamericansforliberty.org slash chapters to see all the chapters that we have active across the country.
And Brian's right, he's just one testament of the many people out there doing great work.
There's stories literally every day, I wish we could share them all from the students on campuses.
It's really a large and growing movement, and I'm just happy to be a part of it.
Yeah, I'm proud of you guys.
It really is something else.
And Brian, tell us real quick the web address for that blog where you've been writing here.
I write for Young Americans for Liberty.
All you have to do is go to yaliberty.org, and the whole front page is essentially the blog.
You've got to scroll down, and there are a bunch of great posts from a lot of great young writers in the liberty movement.
All right.
Killer.
Thank you both very much for your time on the show today.
All right.
Thank you very much.