04/07/15 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
You'll be happy to know that I got Jacob Hornberger on the line, president, founder, and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org, which, of course, helps to sponsor this show.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Jacob?
Yeah, good to be back.
Doing great.
Thank you for having me back on, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you on, and especially for this occasion.
Tell them all about the occasion.
Well, we've got a big conference.
I mean, it's really turned out to be an exciting event scheduled in Austin for this Saturday, Saturday afternoon and evening.
We've got three of the best speakers in the freedom movement.
You've got Glenn Greenwald, who I think is maybe the best public speaker in America, at least on issues relating to civil liberties.
We've got Radley Balco, who's a Washington Post columnist, one of the libertarians who's really had a successful career.
He writes on issues relating to the drug war and the militarization of the police.
And then we've got Ron Paul, who, of course, needs no introduction, that has inspired just millions of people to favor freedom for our country.
And those are our three speakers we're going to have at the University of Texas at the LBJ Library on Saturday, free admission.
We've already got about 650 people lined up, and so we may be filling the auditorium.
It's going to be in a first-come, first-served basis on registration.
So anybody that hasn't signed up, come on over and join us.
It's going to be a great time.
Cool.
Yeah, well, I'm all signed up, so I'll be seeing you there.
I'm bringing the wife with me, too, so that'll be cool.
Awesome.
Yeah.
It's been a while since we got to see each other, but I've never met your wife before, so I look forward to that.
Yeah, it should be fun.
I always want to get my picture taken with Ron Paul.
Maybe I'll have a chance this time.
Yeah.
Just squeeze your way up there.
Yeah.
So, anyway, yeah, so now I wanted to give you a chance to elaborate on a few of those things there.
Of course, Glenn Greenwald is a liberal and not a libertarian, and he'll fight about that because people accuse him of being a libertarian, of course, but the thing about him is that he's perfect on the Bill of Rights, and I think even including guns, although he doesn't usually talk about that very much or anything like that, but he absolutely is the kind of Jewish lawyer who defends Nazis' right to free speech and means it 100 percent, and I think you and I spoke before about that debate he did at Cato with the former drug czar, where Glenn just mopped the floor with him, where he is really a force to be reckoned with and has been long before the Edward Snowden and the NSA thing, and so he certainly is.
If you define that liberty movement broadly enough to include him on those points, I sure would be happy to let you include him, because he really has been great for a long time.
Yeah, I mean, clearly he's not a libertarian, because especially on economic issues, he's a liberal progressive.
But people often ask us, how come you guys have liberals, progressives at your conferences?
Well, we don't have them on economic issues, obviously, but we do have them on issues relating to the national security state, the warfare state, foreign policy.
Why?
Because these principled liberals, like Glenn Greenwald, their positions on foreign policy are the libertarian position.
I mean, they're just this clear overlap.
And so you've got, as you know, Scott, you've got conservatives within the libertarian movement.
They call themselves conservatives, but I think they're more like conservative libertarians.
They look at us like, wow, you shouldn't be having liberals here.
We can't have them, the conservatives that are part of the movement, because they're horrible on foreign policy.
A lot of them favor the interventionism, the invasion of Iraq, the war on terrorism.
The case that Greenwald makes on these issues is the libertarian case.
And that's why we have him, because we want people to hear the libertarian case.
Now, he's not the only one.
We bring Ron Paul in, who clearly is a libertarian.
But there won't be any disagreement between Greenwald and Ron Paul and Radley Balco.
I mean, Balco talks about the drug war, and that's the theme of our conference, end of the wars on drugs and terrorism, two of the burning issues of our time.
I consider them two of the greatest infringements on liberty in the history of the United States.
And so you're going to see a clear overlap.
And sometimes people say, are you having a debate?
No.
Everybody's going to be on the same page here.
And that's how we carefully vet and select our speakers.
Yeah.
Well, you really do have the cream of the crop here.
And then so that brings us to Balco.
I had mentioned about this conference to a friend of mine, or I guess he found it out somehow and said, hey, did you know Ron Paul was coming and this and that?
And Balco was the one he hadn't heard of.
And when I explained who Radley Balco was, he was pretty enthused about that, that here's a guy who really is the best guy that we have on the militarized police state in the U.S. right now.
And he's such a damn good writer and journalist on breaking these stories and following them up and all of that.
He's got himself a place at the Washington Post now.
And it's not because he sold out and compromised and became a Washington Post guy.
It's because he's that good at doing what he does that he even got a spot at the Washington Post.
And that's a very important resource that I hope people will look at, and they should know that name.
Yeah, he's a rising star.
And the fact that he wrote this book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, long before this was up in the public eye on the radar screen and public discussion and so forth about the militarization of the police, he was writing this book on it.
And so to me, there's no greater authority on the militarization of the police than Balco.
I mean, Balco is going to bring this synthesis of showing how the whole national security state, the whole military CIA environment, the constant warfare, perpetual warfare has seeped down into the police department.
And so now you've got this whole military mindset that's controlling the whole country.
Yeah, I was just reading a quote the other day of a cop saying, yeah, it's just like in Iraq.
And they're saying, no, no, it's not just like Iraq.
But then, yeah, it is, I guess.
As long as the cop feels that way about it, he makes it true in a Heisenberg certainty kind of a way.
All right.
And now, so who's this Ron Paul guy?
Well, I'll tell you, Ron has been one of my real heroes in life.
I mean, it's just incredible what he's done.
And I think everybody knows that, that, you know, when he ran that first time for president, when he engaged in that presidential debate where they talked about why the terrorists had attacked on 9-11 and they were all, all the other candidates were bringing up this nonsense of, oh, they hate us for our freedom and values and so forth.
And Ron just hung in there and said, hey, they came over here to kill us because we, the government's been over there killing them.
You know, he later, I heard him say later that he thought that was the end of his campaign.
But that was really the start of his campaign.
People recognize, here's a man telling the truth.
He's got the courage of his convictions.
And he's hung in there on foreign policy.
And it's been great.
I mean, we link to his articles every week in our FFF daily newsletter.
And then it's not just foreign policy.
I mean, he's fantastic on economics.
You know, he's one of the earlier ones.
It was saying abolish the Fed.
And he's been a proponent of Austrian economics for, you know, umpteen years.
And now, you know, we won't be getting into that at the conference.
But that's certainly, you know, he's a libertarian through and through.
I mean, he's a real, just what a heroic person.
Yeah, that's what I think too.
Really, you know, Anthony Gregory used to say, Ron Paul makes Thomas Jefferson look like James Madison.
Which, you know, Anthony, he parses these things very carefully.
And, and yeah, no, he really is right that all of the founding fathers have some real fatal flaws in their, in their person, in their deeds, in some of the things that they said that he's not burdened with at all.
I mean, he really is all of the best parts of Jeffersonianism without all of Jefferson's baggage at all.
And he's, he's the most American of America's legislators that we've ever had, I think.
But yeah, that's just me.
When the history of liberty is written, he will certainly be at the top as far as those who help bring it about.
Yep.
All right.
Now we got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Jacob Hornberg to talk a little bit more about this national security state.
He's relentlessly attacking.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
Hang tight.
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All right, guys.
Jacob, what is this national security state that you are always claiming is an alien grafted on extra and unnecessary or worse part of the American government, as though it's not just part of the American government?
What is it that you're really trying to get at there?
Yeah, I consider this to be the biggest mistake in the history of the United States, was the grafting onto this national security state to America's governmental system.
And it was done.
It was so revolutionary.
And yet it was done without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment, which is the process by which the citizenry are authorized to alter the original form of government.
If we go back to the original republic that was founded, we see what the mindset of the framers was.
And really most Americans, maybe 99% of Americans, there was a deep antipathy to standing armies.
And you can see the quotes.
We have them on our website at fff.org by people like Madison that just said, look, standing armies are your biggest threat to liberty.
And because of what their potential is in terms of oppressing people.
And we see that time and again.
We see in Egypt right now where there's a military dictatorship oppressing people.
And so the founding fathers were against that.
Now there was a basic military force.
We know that.
A basic army.
And they got into a lot of skirmishes.
They did a lot of bad things.
No question about that.
But in relative terms, like when you compare it to say World War I or World War II, I mean the casualties are very small with the exception of the Civil War.
But if you look like the Mexican War, casualties are relatively light.
So I'm not suggesting that there wasn't some wars and military skirmishes.
And the War of 1812 and so forth.
But there was just a basic standing military force.
And then if you look at the foreign policy of the American people, that was demonstrated by John Quincy Adams' speech to Congress on the 4th of July 1821.
It's called In Search of Monsters to Destroy, where he says, look, the foreign policy of this country is envisioned by the framers and the founding fathers is that the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
A lot of monsters, tyrants, civil wars, oppression, starvation, famine.
But our government is not going to go over there and fix those.
And let's keep in mind also that there was open immigration where the message was, look, we're not going to send troops to bomb you and save you.
But if you can get out, you have a place you can come to.
And we won't forcibly return you to your country.
Well, OK.
So we see the seeds of that abandonment coming up to like 1898, where the Spanish-American War, the US assumes the role of the Spanish Empire with the aim of taking control over Cuba and the Philippines.
And then we see entry into World War I, which was a total abandonment of that philosophy of non-interventionism and total waste of American life.
It accomplished nothing.
And then you got World War II, which is really a continuation of World War I.
But the big watershed then takes place in the aftermath of World War II.
And this is the revolutionary transformation.
In prior wars, there was always a demobilization where, OK, we fought this war.
Big government came.
But we're laying off the troops.
We're discharging them, sending them back in the private sector.
That didn't happen.
Instead, we end up with a giant standing military, huge military establishment, permanent military establishment to fight the so-called Cold War against America's World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union.
And so that began the big communist scare about how the communists are coming to get us.
And then on top of that, you bring the CIA into existence, which was really an outgrowth of the OSS in World War II, which is this secret intelligence agency that has the power to affect regime changes, coups, assassinations, and MKUltra, medical experiments on Americans, hiring of Nazis.
I mean, it was a totally alien form of government that America had never seen before.
And I mean, this is what totalitarian countries had, this kind of apparatus.
And it was all justified.
This revolutionary change was because the communists were coming to get us, which was absolute nonsense.
But Americans were deferring to authority.
They trusted government.
Well, by the time Eisenhower comes along in 1961 and he's leaving office, he gives this farewell address where he says, look, this is an alien form of government apparatus.
He called it a military industrial complex.
And he says, this is entirely new to America.
And it was.
And he says, and it's a grave threat to our democratic processes and our liberties.
And it is.
And it continues to be.
They're bankrupting us, for one thing.
But now they have the power to assassinate Americans, the power to round up Americans, to torture Americans.
I mean, this is not consistent with a free society, Scott.
Yeah, see, that's the thing of it is we're all younger than that.
And so we've all known this.
You know, I was born after Vietnam and raised on I guess I'm kind of lucky to understand war as in through like Catch-22 eyes growing up because it was I was born pretty much right after that war ended and everyone was so jaded by it.
But still, I mean, the basic assumption is aim high Air Force and be all you can be in the Army every Sunday at football.
That's what they tell you.
And everybody seems to agree.
Right.
Everybody's dad.
Everybody's coach.
Everything knows it.
That's just the way it is.
That's, you know, 40 percent of your choices on a career or a job when once you leave high school is go and join and become a man in the service and protect your country and all that.
It's so built in.
Can you really separate it from what really is Americanism now?
Or I mean, is it fair to say it's alien anymore when it's kind of devoured?
Devoured whatever was the republic.
Yeah, I think it is.
I think it's just as alien.
We can say it's just as alien as the welfare state is.
The notion that government should take care of people with welfare state programs.
It's possible to repeal those programs.
The crown jewel is Social Security.
It is possible to repeal these things.
Is it difficult because so many people are on the dole?
Of course, it's difficult, but nothing's impossible.
And the same thing with this idea of a huge military establishment, empire of bases overseas and so forth.
But you're right.
The propaganda machine has been so successful, especially since the fiasco in Vietnam, where 58,000 American men died for nothing.
Again, they said the communists were coming to get us if they didn't go into Vietnam.
Well, they lost the war and the communists never came to get us.
So it shows that it was just a lie.
But it is possible for people to reexamine the role of government society.
And I know there's differences among libertarians as to what that role should be.
But at a very minimum, I think we can all agree that a legitimate role is not involved with having these totalitarian apparatuses.
And it is possible to dismantle them.
If enough people decide, hey, we want to restore a republic.
We want to get rid of this empire, for example.
It's not that difficult to all of a sudden start closing military bases overseas and bring the troops home from Korea, bring them home from Germany, bring them home from the Middle East, from Africa, Latin America and discharge them.
And then once that process starts, people can say, oh, OK, now I can understand that why we shouldn't have troops all over the world like that.
Now let's start examining here in the United States.
What do we need all these bases here in the United States for?
I mean, are they like forts that are protecting the cities from from kind of it?
Huh?
The Comanche.
Exactly.
I mean, that's the way I really look at these bases here in the United States.
They're like forts to protect us from the Comanches and the Apaches and so forth.
Yeah.
No.
What they really are is they're they're basically there to prop up towns like Killeen outside of Fort Hood, which really you think about why Fort Hood's there.
I'm pretty sure that's not about Indians.
That's about being 100 miles from the capital of Texas in case they ever think they're going to succeed again.
But, yeah, the entire town, a huge town, really, Killeen, that is just entirely, you know, 99 percent subsidized by the military base there.
Well, that's what's really fascinating is how they have accomplished this by having you know, the Eisenhower called it the military industrial complex by having these contracts for the development of weapon systems in every congressional district across the country.
And then they have military bases in every state so that then if anybody starts to make waves about, hey, look, we got to cut spending, we're going to bankruptcy and stuff that everybody can mobilize to save the project in their district.
I mean, it's really a welfare dole.
It's no different from Medicare and Medicaid and farm subsidies, Social Security, the whole shebang.
It's military largesse.
And so you're right.
These cities, they panic if you start thinking about, oh, well, let's close the Fort Hood or, man, all of a sudden everybody starts having a panic attack.
And it shows you how dependent people have become on this military largesse.
The situation's no different in principle in Egypt where the military dictatorship controls most economic activity there.
I mean, that's why they're so poor.
That's why they're having such a hard time.
And people keep looking to the dictatorship to solve the economic problems.
It's the dictatorship that is the problem.
Right.
And that's why I always ask you the same thing when I bring you on this show because I think this is why you're always writing the same thing, to just make people understand, to just break through.
It's almost, I mean, not that you don't get into details.
You certainly do.
But you always boil it down to just this separate entity that was somehow created by Congress and could be abolished again and that, you know, how the separateness of the national security state from a constitutional system of a republic and a rule of law.
And you say it in such a way where I think, I imagine that people hearing it for the first time really understand.
I think it's really important that people have a chance to have it spoken so clearly that, look, the DOD, the CIA, and all of them, we don't need them.
No, really, we don't.
And people have just never heard anyone say that before, Jacob.
That's the thing about it.
You are absolutely right.
And you grow up thinking this is a free country because I'm an American and I know that as an American I'm free.
And therefore, this governmental system is a free country.
It provides and it keeps me safe and so forth.
No one sits there and questions that things have changed.
This is why it was so significant on both what Roosevelt did in the 30s where he had this welfare state revolution but made it look like he was saving free enterprise when really it was an abandonment of the principles of free markets.
And then the same thing in the 40s where they made it look like it was just a continuation of what had gone before.
And so people that are born in that period of time, they grow up with it.
They're taught that they're free.
But yeah, once people start questioning, oh, okay, now I see why America is involved in these perpetual crises.
Oh, now I see, yeah, that came into existence in the Cold War.
Well, the Cold War is over.
Why do we need that?
Why can't we repeal the National Security Act of 1947?
Why can't we repeal the Espionage Act of 1917 or so?
And start all of a sudden, you start abolishing the CIA and the NSA and the Department of, quote, defense.
And you start looking at countries like Switzerland whose foreign policy America was founded on.
I mean that's where we got the idea for our constitutional republic.
They depend solely on defense in their country.
And so all of a sudden people start saying, oh, now I see what he's saying that we don't need this big apparatus.
It's anti-freedom.
And then all of a sudden we start moving toward a free society again.
Right.
All right, well, listen, so that's why I'm so appreciative of what you do.
I mean you're really normalizing what should be the basic assumption of everyone in this society.
You're doing a lot to move that forward.
And what you're doing this Saturday, of course, is a huge part of that.
And so for anybody in Texas, I don't know if anybody farther away than Texas can get here because Texas is pretty big.
But any Texans want to come on out, it's at the LBJ Law School this Saturday at UT right there at 26th Street, Dean Keaton and what, Trinity or San Jacinto or right around there.
Anyway, just off I-35 on Dean Keaton.
Yeah, it's actually at the LBJ Library, not at the law school.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Well, they're right next door to each other anyway.
You'll see the signs, right?
Yeah.
Sorry.
But yeah, no, thank you for correcting me on that.
The library there.
Oh, so then that'd be on Red River, I guess, closer to the freeway.
All right.
So thank you.
That's 1 o'clock Texas time here in Austin at the LBJ Library.
Look forward to seeing you there again, Jacob.
Hey, can't wait to see you, Scott.
You're one of my heroes too, man, so keep up the great work.
All right.
Appreciate it.
Talk to you soon.
See you there.
All right, y'all.
So Ron Paul, Radley Balco, and Glenn Greenwald.
Jacob obviously is putting the thing on the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's at FFF.org.
And we'll be right back.
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