Hey y'all, Scott here.
The International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C. is coming up on the 17th through 19th of February at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park, and me, Sheldon Richman, and Jared LaBelle, three-quarters of the Libertarian Institute, will be there.
Go to isflc.org slash register and use promo code libertarian to get $30 off registration.
We'll have a table, there'll be a ton of other great speakers and groups, and who knows what, it'll be cool.
Check it out, isflc.org slash register.
All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org, and twitter.com slash scotthortonshow, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay, good.
On the line, I got my friend Jim Bovard, our friend, the great Jim Bovard, author of a great many books, including the great memoir Public Policy Hooligan, explaining why all the directors of all the agencies hate Jim so very much, and then before that, a bunch of books, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, Terrorism and Tyranny, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, The Fair Trade Fraud, The Farm Fiasco.
What'd I leave out, Jim?
You know, it's close enough for government work.
That was pretty good.
All right.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, my friend?
Hey, doing good.
Thanks for having me on, Scott, and congratulations on the Libertarian Institute.
I'm glad to see that y'all are off to a strong start.
You've got a strong web presence.
It's great to see your stuff on Twitter, and y'all are doing some hard-line stuff, and you're just punching it out there with some good humor, and best of luck to you and the Libertarian Institute.
Awesome.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate that.
Good deal.
Hey, listen.
I read these great things that you wrote.
That's why I wanted to talk with you about them.
A billion dollars of federally funded paranoia.
That is at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
It was in the Future of Freedom back a few months ago.
Now, it's online for everyone to see at fff.org, and we'll get to that one first here in just a second.
But in USA Today, hey, wait a minute.
Trump's fear-mongering isn't new.
There sure is a hell of a lot of fear-mongering, and we'll get to it in just a second.
Maybe we can combine both of these into one kind of big discussion.
But yeah, a billion dollars of federally funded paranoia.
You're talking about the Fusion Centers, 70-plus Department of Homeland Security-funded Fusion Centers.
So I guess that's my first question right there.
Are they Homeland Security things, or they're just multi-jurisdictional tasks?
Is anybody the governor of the Fusion Centers?
Who really is in charge of these things?
The DOJ?
It's Homeland Security is financing them, so Homeland Security's got a lot of oversight of them.
I mean, it was interesting to see some of the congressional reports on this.
Senator Tom Coburn did some great stuff on this, and something which he and other investigators found out is that the Homeland Security does not even know how many of these Fusion Centers are out there.
Maybe it's 71, maybe it's 75.
There was an internal report from DHS that admitted that four of the 72 did not actually exist.
But that internal report did not stop the DHS from keeping on bragging about the existence of these non-existent Fusion Centers.
But fundamental issue is that this is basically turning to vacuum cleaners and encouragement for the people to make reports on almost anything that seems unusual or suspicious, or anybody who looks suspicious.
And so you've got these fairly funded vacuum cleaners out there.
They're stockpiling all this information, all these unverified accusations, and these are databases that get shared and get used and could be used against people.
Yeah.
Well, now I can't say I've heard of too many abuses by these Fusion Centers.
That must mean that there haven't been any, and that it's not a big deal, and these are people just trying to help and keep us safe.
Jim, what the hell is the matter with you all the time?
Well, you know, some people were born paranoid.
What can I say?
But part of the reason you haven't heard that many controversies is most of what they do is behind closed doors, and it's often very difficult to get access to find out how they have used the power that they have claimed.
But some of these Fusion Centers have tagged different groups as dangerous extremists, such as gun rights activists, people who are concerned about the federal authority, prefer state and local authority, people who champion the Constitution.
You know, there was one DHS report that said that people who were, quote, reverent of individual liberty should be considered potential right-wing terrorists.
So this is, these are like a series of Pandora's boxes that are being opened with federal money around the nation.
Yeah.
Well, now, you know, this is only sort of a side issue, Jim, this new ACLU report about the TSA's behavior observation system.
I'm sorry, I forgot what I called it.
But just what completely bogus junk science it was, and how bogus the parameters were, as you're saying, you know, pretty much along these same kind of lines.
Anybody who says they have a preference for being free is suspect in America?
Really?
Even on the 4th of July?
Or just on the 3rd and the 5th?
Or how does exactly that work?
And of course, you know, the rules, and you've covered this probably better than anybody in our country, actually, on the TSA.
Their rules include, you know, he's got his hands in his pockets, or he's sweaty, or he's not sweaty, or he's looking down, or he's looking up, or he's looking straight, or he does what you say, or he doesn't do what you say, or whatever it is.
And then you basically really have, in some cases, some kind of score, right, where they try to quantify based on these sort of bogus parameters in the first place.
Then they put you through a threat matrix and figure out how dangerous you are.
And as you say, kind of, they're referring to gun rights activists and whatever, people who are actually just plain old, quote, unquote, law-abiding citizens, become the subjects of maybe worse than criminal investigation, anti-terrorism investigations.
And what does that mean for them?
Well, I mean, it's, again, it's a Pandora's box, and the government's got a lot of different ways that they can open that and maybe toss you inside the Pandora's box, to mess up my metaphors there.
But going back to what the DHS has done, I mean, even a dozen years ago, DHS was encouraging, you know, police and others to take a very broad view of potential, of people that could be potential problems.
For one, there was an advisory DHS sent out around the start of the Iraq war that the law enforcement should keep an eye on anyone who expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.
So this is, you know, this is you, this is a lot of your listeners.
Heck, that's something that might even apply to me.
Yeah, I think so.
In fact, I'm pretty sure you're on the top of the blue list there, judging by the denunciations on the back covers of your books there.
And, you know, really, what a badge of honor.
You should wear those things like medals on your chest.
And you know what, for those who aren't as familiar with Jim, no, really, every department of the federal government that you could name, he's been officially denounced by their boss, at least at one point or another, and maybe twice.
So it's really something else.
In fact, I think on your Wikipedia page, people can read the direct quotes of those denunciations and laugh.
Oh, it has been up there at various times, but other folks go in and edit and take it off.
You know, I haven't checked the Wikipedia page for quite a while.
Yeah, I gotta admit, I haven't either.
But I thought I remembered that.
Anyway, good stuff.
Yeah, you're you're sure a hell of a public policy hooligan there, Jim.
All right.
Yeah, on the overreach thing.
Let's talk about overreach on the right and overreach on the left and this and that kind of thing.
On the right, you get some pretty dangerous neo Nazis.
And I don't know how dangerous the Klan is anymore.
But you know, presumably they could be and you probably want to keep them surveilled.
And then it's government work.
And so now all of a sudden, any kind of right winger who's not a Republican Party rank and file voter and supporter first is suspect.
You know, the Gadsden flag from the American Revolution, that, you know, ought to be owned by all of us is somehow now supposed to represent some kind of right wing terrorist threat against the state, which you would think would just fly that right next to the Stars and Stripes proudly and all of that.
It's the legacy of our history and all that.
Anyways.
And then yeah, there was one.
I'm not exactly sure if it was a fusion center.
I think it was a fusion center report that had Ron Paul bumper stickers, right?
NRA bumper stickers, any of these kinds of things, casting a very wide net for people who could be, you know, either prosecuted or maybe targeted to be recruited to be informants, help set up and entrap other people.
And we've seen quite a bit of that.
You know, mostly people when you think of the entrapments, you think of, you know, the local idiot, you know, in the Muslim community that gets entrapped.
But they have a history of doing this to right wingers to remember the Hutteri militia and all that was one of these entrapment jobs.
The plot, there's a guy being prosecuted right now for a plot to kill a bunch of Muslims, I think, on the internet.
I'm sorry, I'm not all that read up on it.
But he was basically put up to it, encouraged at dawn by an FBI informant in that one, that kind of thing.
So it seems like, I guess what I'm getting at, Jim, is that they could really be making people who are more or less harmless, a lot worse with this kind of thing.
Letting people know that, hey, if your politics are to the right of the Republican Party at all, you're possibly in deep trouble.
That's gonna, people are going to react against that.
Well, and it's, there are a lot of different things wrong with it.
I mean, for one thing, it's a complete waste of, you know, government law enforcement resources, because you're going to the assumption that almost the 10 or 20% of the population is a dire threat.
Whereas the actual fact is you've got to, well, as far as the clan of the neo Nazis, you've got a very, very small number of folks.
I mean, you have a lot more folks who might say dumb things or things that are offensive on Twitter and Facebook, or elsewhere on the web.
But it doesn't make sense to assume simply because someone throws out some really stupid or obnoxious or noxious idea that that person is the same level of threat as, you know, someone that wants to dress up in a World War Two German uniform with a swastika on it.
So, but I think a lot of folks have tried to profit from greatly exaggerating the threat from both left wingers and right wingers.
Oh, that's something which helps sanctify the government power and the DHS and local and police law enforcement.
But maybe it'd make a lot more sense to look at the people who are actually violent.
Because that's a hell of a hell of a lot smaller universe.
And these are folks who might actually do harm.
There's, again, a very small number.
I think on the right, as far as the left, I don't know, because it's fascinating to see the reaction from a lot of the left wing media, including the UC Berkeley paper, to the riot that happened, I guess, last week when Milo, what's his name, was supposed to speak there.
And it's sort of like, okay, this is a virtue now to be smashing things up and setting fires and smashing ATMs. It's like, you know, this is it's very strange.
Yeah.
Either they've got agents provocateur, or they don't even need them because they're such dumbasses that they're going ahead and doing their enemy's work for them.
I don't think that they need an agent provocateur at Berkeley, so.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, exactly.
You know, it would have been easier to say just not very long ago that, come on, these Earth First guys, what do they do?
Occasionally they let some monkeys out somewhere.
They smash some SUVs at some parking lot.
I mean, these are crimes, but these are not, you know, terrorist threats to the homeland here.
But then you have them saying, oh yeah, we are too.
Watch this.
See how many fires we can set at Berkeley for just one example.
And, I mean, of all the protests going on and all that, that's not really representative.
But on TV it is.
Well, there was a nice piece that Tom Knapp has on the Libertarian Institute website on the anti-fascist types who were using basically authoritarian tactics to silence anyone who they disagree with.
It's like, not the best way to fight fascism.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Again, like if these guys were really goose stepping down the street with swastikas on or something, that'd be one thing.
But all of a sudden now we want to define fascism as broad as possible, which is fair in some contexts.
Like Bob Higgs says, well, it's a participatory fascism.
Yeah.
America is a fascist state.
There's not really a question about that.
I would strongly disagree with that.
But anyhow.
Yeah.
Well, let's say there's a lot of corporatism and a permanent war, whatever you want to call it.
Well, yeah.
There's a lot of unfortunate policies.
There's a lot of bad foreign policies.
There's a lot of government agencies.
You've got way too much power.
And at times there's a lot of people cheering on government abuses.
And all of that's ugly.
Well, and anyway, even if you agree with Bob Higgs that it is a form of fascism that we already live under in this country.
If you're just going to go ahead and take that and say, oh, well, then that means I can start a fistfight with anybody to the right of me now.
You know, that kind of thing, then that's obviously a cheap excuse and not any kind of real emergency worth fighting.
I mean, you're right that whatever his name is probably obnoxious, but that's not the kind of thing that you insult somebody over.
Well, I mean, it's fine to insult them, but you don't smash the windows and have the pyrotechnics and just busting up the student center and just menacing.
I mean, that was the same tactic that both the communists and the Nazis did in the 1920s in Germany.
They would be, you know, they would be out there menacing and shutting people down and doing all kinds of stuff just to maximize intimidation.
It's like, you know, do we need this on a college campus?
Yep.
Well, and of course, to the DHS, hey, look, some more homeland security to secure.
Well, this actually serves the state perfectly.
Yep.
Yep.
You know, you might get a new federal program of grants to colleges to have more safety or whatever, which is, you know, which would be complete BS, but not a novelty.
Yep.
And, you know, I'm not saying I agree with this necessarily, but you can see where they're coming from.
When I saw some communists on Twitter, I mean, I think legit like hardcore leftist ideologues saying, you know, basically accusing all these left-wing activists in the streets of basically being fools and being, you know, basically the agents of Himmler or whatever, creating the crises that the right wing would use to react against and all of that, because it was on its face so destructive to them, that was the only explanation for it, was that it was an inside job, you know?
Well, and it's easy to understand why the actual hardcore leftists or communists would feel that way, because there's been a bunch of different laws, bills introduced in state capitals around the country to cut back on these demonstrations and protests, which is something I'm totally against.
I mean, I'm all in favor of protests, as long as they're, you know, relatively peaceful and don't block the damn road.
So, I mean, this is part of the joy.
It used to be part of the joy of being an American, you know, to go out and protest and insult the government, insult the politicians and all that, and then, okay, end of the day, we go home.
But now it's supposed to be like, well, you know, it doesn't really count unless you set fires and bust open at least two ATMs. It's like, what's the point of that?
I mean, it's funny, folks are talking about Soros paying the demonstrators.
I mean, I would think as far as those ones down at Berkeley and University of California, heck, I mean, Trump was overwhelmingly the beneficiary of that violence.
And after the riot, you have the students in the paper out there all in favor of it.
It's like, you know, it was a triumph of virtue busting things up and setting fires.
It's like, folks, you can do better than that.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lou Rockwell's fascism versus capitalism narrated by me, Scott Horton at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty.
From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes, and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism versus Capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audiobook.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes, or just click in the right margin of my website at scotthorton.org.
Yeah, well, you'd like to think so.
Yeah, I mean, I guess at the end of the day, really, all it means is a bunch of cops get raises and get expanded powers and get to say, see, we told you so.
And, you know, certainly Trump meant it.
That's Horton's law is you can take all their bad promises to the bank and forget all their good ones.
And he promised he's going to be a law and order.
And nobody loves cops more than Donald Trump.
And, you know, he's certainly taken that attitude.
Anything you boys want, you just let me know.
And so, yeah, giving them a bunch of excuses right now, picking fights that you can't win and this kind of thing.
Maybe not the best thought through strategy.
But anyway, it's unfortunate.
It's unfortunate.
Trump's comments on police are one of the most unfortunate parts of his entire ideology.
So hopefully that part doesn't get even more prominent or doesn't get put into law.
I don't think it's going to go that far in law because there'd be a lot of resistance from Democrats and quite a few people in the GOP like Rand Paul and Justin Amash.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder what, you know, I mean, they had these new executive orders that came out yesterday.
They can only go so far with that.
I mean, I guess Trump has said that he wants to make it a federal crime if anybody ever kills a cop, even, you know, a local cop.
But I wonder how the local cops in the local district attorney's offices and the local state governments are going to like that, because I think they really like prosecuting and executing cop killers themselves.
Right.
Yeah.
This is something which has helped a lot of district attorneys become congressmen.
Exactly.
Don't take that away from us.
Well, and not only that, but it's total BS to to fertilize crimes across the board, like like the the the federal hate crime of the the evil guy that killed the folks at the church in Charleston, South Carolina.
I mean, look, I mean, South Carolina, South Carolina law would have done fine to convict him.
And South Carolina is probably death penalty friendly.
So it's like, but no, it's got to be a federal case.
So.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, Trump, it's not just that he doesn't have any background or any real understanding of the Constitution or federalism, old or new, or or, you know, pre FDR traditions post or any of this kind of stuff.
He's got not only that, he has apparently he doesn't care about any of the norms and the customs and the sort of rules of respect the the unwritten ones.
Anthony Gregory was pointing out to me just how many rules of the way the government operates are really just based on tradition and respect and that without those, you know, norms basically holding these guys down, they can do a lot of damage.
And he doesn't seem to have any idea of what the limits are that he's even willing to break, you know?
Well, I mean, that's true.
I mean, flip side of that is you had Eric Holder and Obama trampling a lot of norms as well and abusing power left and right.
And a lot of the demagoguery that the anti gun, anti Second Amendment demagoguery by Obama and Eric, you know, folks are more justifiably mortified by Trump's comments this week on asset forfeiture.
But you turn the clock back to 2009.
It was Eric Holder who was championing asset forfeiture and pushing it at the state and local level.
It was Eric Holder and late in the Clinton administration who saved asset for forfeiture from attack from Congress.
So, you know, a lot of nasty things, but it's not like there's.
Loretta Lynch, too, was really big on that in New York, right?
That's yes.
Yeah, she was huge on that.
So, you know, it's not like there is.
Yeah, Trump has said and done a lot of things are just are utterly head shaking.
But it's not, you know, what's the baseline?
That's you know, that was the point I was trying to make in that USA Today piece is kind of like, yeah, Trump, you know, there's there's been so much fear mongering going on since Woodrow Wilson.
And, you know, there are so many people, so many of Trump's critics now are acting like their previous presidents were a mix of Jesus and George Washington.
And it's like, you know, well, aside from Jimmy Carter, well, not even Carter.
But no, I mean, it's you know, we've had we've had a lot of bad presidents who were demagogues.
And it's like that doesn't mean people should defer or trust or anything like that towards Donald Trump.
But so many of the folks, you know, so many of the so many of the criticisms I'm hearing is as if people were born yesterday.
Yeah, no, it's really true.
And the thing is, especially that, you know, for for those of us keeping track of these previous crises in history, especially with the hindsight in the 2020 and all of that, you see just how completely ridiculous some of this stuff is, like the Zimmerman telegram, where Look, everybody, the Germans promised Mexico, they're going to help reinvade America and conquer the entire Southwest and take back California and Utah and Arizona and New Mexico and all of that for Mexico.
We got to stop them in Germany before they're on our shores.
I mean, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life.
And I've heard a lot of ridiculous things.
But that's how they got us into World War One.
Yep.
Yep.
The worst thing that ever happened that caused every other worst thing that ever happened that happened after that, like the rise of Stalin and Mao and Hitler and the American Empire.
Yep, it's a major negative.
And then, well, so what are some of your other favorites?
How about the North Koreans or the the Vietnamese communists?
If they win, then what's going to happen to us, Jim?
Well, yeah, I mean, it's there.
Presidents have pushed so many fear buttons in order to drag, drag the nation into war.
And they, you know, going back to the sinking of the main in 1898.
So President Roosevelt did the same starting in 1940, if not before then.
So there are so many different levels where they were presidents greatly exaggerated the perils that sometimes sometimes were actual perils.
I mean, there were a lot of things about Hitler and that were very profoundly evil.
FDR was kind of painting with a broad brush.
And there was probably no reason.
Well, anyhow, there was it was President Roosevelt was painting with a broad brush and was acting as if the Japanese were as evil as a Nazi regime.
And it's like, yeah.
And, and some of the efforts to try to portray the Japanese as a threat to the mainland US were way overboard.
And that's, that's, that's how Roosevelt justified the concentration camps for Japanese Americans.
So but no, I mean, this is this is apparently goes way back and people should be very wary of Trump.
And if certainly if Trump tries to drag the nation into war, but it's interesting, some of the stuff I've seen online, it's like, so many people are all set to, you know, well, okay, about an hour before the this interview, I saw online that the Trump, the White House has decided not to appoint Elliott Abrams.
Oh, really?
Thank God.
Yes.
So you hadn't heard that?
No, I had not heard that.
Thank you.
Okay.
Right.
Yeah.
So I mean, this is, this is great.
I mean, this is this is one of the this is perhaps the the, this is the most positive foreign policy development and the Trump administration since the government of Yemen prohibited the US from doing any more ground attacks there.
So no, I mean, that's, which is not to say that Trump is not going to be a massive screw up.
Personally, I'm glad that the US is not bombing massively bombing Syria right now.
I think if Hillary Clinton had been elected, that that the US might be bombing all the so called anti aircraft installations in the city of Damascus.
Sort of like we've bombed the hell out of Baghdad before we invaded there.
So I think that there's in short term less carnage, though certainly it could get a lot worse.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
And now you know, I think the worst fear mongering going on now is all very much tied to Trump, but it ain't him.
It's against him.
And the conflation of him with Vladimir Putin, and Hillary Clinton herself, his opponent in the election last summer, said that he was a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
And then the acting director of the CIA, Michael Morrell said the same thing in the New York Times, or was it the Washington Post?
I think it was the Times.
Which is, you know, the agenda setting media, this is a big deal.
They're saying, well, you know, he might be an unwitting puppet.
And then ever since then, there's all the different hype about what Russia's behind all the fake news, and Russia's behind hacking the DNC, and Podesta's emails, and leaking them to WikiLeaks, and Russia fixed the election for Donald Trump.
And to me, it's so reminiscent, Jim, of what it was like living through 2002, where everybody is just repeating all this stuff like myna birds, and none of them know that it's true.
They all know that they don't know it's true.
They just go, Oh, yeah, we all heard this.
And we're all saying this.
So, you know, one of the lines back in 2002, I would say to people, well, everything that they've said so far has been debunked, right?
You know, all the aluminum tubes and this and that, that's already debunked.
And then everybody would say the exact same thing.
Well, I'm sure that the present has secret information that we don't know about that.
In other words, if they're doing this, there must be a good reason.
And so I'll just rationalize it that it must be true.
And you have that same kind of thinking going on, especially with the Democrats, but of course, a lot of the centrist and neoconservative Republicans who don't like Trump, too, who already have a grudge against Russia.
And especially, man, if they can, if they can corral the so called liberals, to be in that hawkish against Russia that easily, then I guess the entire consensus of the American people can't be that far behind if Trump ever does want to turn on him and bring the right wing with him.
And, and people are willing to just suspend disbelief.
It's like watching the Empire Strikes Back and going, Yeah, I believe in Chewbacca for a minute, fine.
You want me to believe that the best thing is confrontation with Russia?
Okay, as long as that's what partisanship dictates, let's go with it, everybody.
And then it works.
They do it.
It's incredible.
Well, let's see how it plays out.
I don't know.
I mean, it's hard for me to know what the heck Trump is going to do.
And I'm, you know, there's he's done, he said a number of things that, you know, maybe, you know, that were jaw dropping.
And but he's done a few things that were like, oh, that was better than I expected.
So like his choice for the Supreme Court nomination.
So um, and he's shown a learning curve at times.
Other other things, he's not shown a learning curve.
So but again, the the fact that he's not going with Elliott Abrams is like, that's something that has been fixated a lot of libertarians and anti war activists for the last 8-10 days.
Got that right.
Yeah.
Yep.
And it looks like okay, so that's good news.
So yeah.
And I mean, yeah, for people not familiar, go check out especially right web.com.
Or is it.org?
I think it's Yeah.
Anyway, Tom Barry, and they got a great write up on him there.
And he's, you know, directly married into the pot Horitz family, and is one of the more dangerous of the neoconservatives by his record.
Not he's not just a writer like growth hammer or something he gets things done very bad things often.
So yeah, that's really, really great news.
That that he didn't get the job there.
But yeah, so it's nice to have a little bit of hope for change, I guess.
After all, Obama really was better than john mccain.
I mean, john mccain would have got us all killed in a new I agree.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's there's a long a long list of things which I criticize have criticized Obama for but a couple of things I give him credit for is he was was that he was not railroaded into going to war with Iran.
When the Washington establishment when the Washington Post when both parties were just kind of hollering for war, President Obama just, you know, there was a lot of bs as far as some of the details on the Iran agreement.
But it's a delight years better than having an actual war and that that's, and that was Obama.
So, you know, there was, I think he realized that, well, you know, this isn't going to go so well, it's too bad that he greatly increased the Afghanistan war for no good reason.
It's I mean, the thing in Libya was a complete fiasco.
But that was with the Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice and that other woman that drive that, you know, basically stampeded into that.
So but thank God we didn't go to war with Iran.
Well, did you see?
I don't know if Obama even okayed this.
I mean, I guess we should assume he did, but they sent 300 more Marines to the Helmand province in southern Afghanistan in the last week of Obama's presidency.
And then the general in charge of that war Nicholson testified before john McCain's Armed Services Committee in the Senate yesterday and said, Oh, yeah, we definitely need thousands more troops to and not just for training to advise and assist, he said, which means embed with and lead the Afghan National Army in their quote, stalemate with the Taliban, which never goes away.
So it really is like 2009.
They're basically already trying to jam Trump, as Obama complained later to Jeffrey Goldberg when they jammed me while he let them, of course.
But it's already on the generals are already trying to box in President Trump on Afghanistan.
It looks like to me, man.
Well, that's a real bellwether as far as what to expect from his administration.
It's also possible that the Trump that the Trump will see how he's how he got that the Trump will see how things worked out with that raid in Yemen.
1012 days ago, it was such a complete devil and killed so many innocent civilians.
And that maybe he'll say, ooh, you know, you know, somebody fed me wrong information.
And Trump doesn't seem like the type is very forgiving.
So maybe that would make him a little more cautious from doing really stupid things in the future.
Not I'm not paying the mortgage money on that.
But yeah, no, I mean, that's what I'm hoping for, too, is that he will come very quickly to resent these guys, because their promises never come true ever.
And, you know, I was thinking it's sort of like a mini Bay of Pigs, right?
Because that's the story of the Bay of Pigs.
Is that after that?
That's a good analogy.
I not thought of that.
I mean, that this would be a much smaller version.
That's not like he's going to fire the head of the CIA and all of this stuff kind of thing.
But it's just sort of the thing where they told him, yeah, it's going to be great.
And then it wasn't great.
And like you're saying, yeah, we can maybe his personality will be such that, hey, quit trying to jam me on Afghanistan.
I'll tell you what I'll do.
I'll pull the troops out before I let you make me double them or something, you know, hopefully it'll just be a personal problem for him.
And that'll work in our favor.
I mean, I don't think he's ever going to have Trump doctrine on Afghanistan that we could hope for, of being, you know, a non interventionist, go ahead and cut and run now kind of a policy.
But maybe if he just gets mad enough as a Secretary of Defense over it, that they'll have a little fight, and he'll order the end of the thing.
Well, I mean, it's interesting looking at some of his campaign speeches.
And even after the campaign speeches, I think in November, December, there were a number of times where he said, Look, you know, these foreign, these foreign escapades have worked out very badly, the US has been failing at this, and we need to, you know, stop wasting money and lives doing it.
So whether he believe whether that's whether that will be his guide star, I don't know.
But there have been times where he said things is to take a couple steps back, you were mentioning the John McCain, the hearing that he was chairing.
There was someone in the Washington Post who was snapping at the White House spokesman because he had criticized McCain's view on the military and stuff like that.
And they were saying, Well, this just shows that the Trump team doesn't learn because in 2015, Trump was making Trump mocked McCain, even though he was a war hero, POW.
And the, the post seemed to think that people should defer to McCain's judgment on military matters.
And I'm just thinking, Oh, my, I mean, you know, I don't know that there's ever been a war that John McCain was not in favor of.
Yeah, or the post.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
So I mean, the Yeah, I mean, that was Obama's big mistake.
I mean, he could have said, because it wasn't just Petraeus and Gates that were rolling him.
It was McCain.
And certainly, politically speaking, he could have spun it that way that this is all john McCain's doing, basically.
And he could have just said, Look, this senator is a sore loser.
I beat him fair and square.
And the reason I did is because you the American people wanted me not him making these calls.
And so sorry, Senator, sit down.
We heard you but you're wrong.
And you lose and we're not going to do what you say.
And watch, I'm going to get reelected on that.
And instead he caved in.
So well, yeah, and he had some folks in the White House, he had Vice President Biden, from what I read, was totally opposed to the Afghan surge, that he understood it was bs.
And he was outspoken and just kind of did everything he could except resign.
Or maybe he didn't go even nearly that far and push that hard.
But from the things which I read, he was definitely not in favor that he was outspokenly opposed internally to the Afghan surge, which has become such which was such a disaster, right?
Well, of course, he had General Ikenberry, who had been the general in charge of the war, who was at that time, the ambassador to Afghanistan, who wrote these memos saying, forget it, Mr. President, you can't do it because the whole theory is based on relying on Karzai and his government to be, you know, in charge here and to take up for us when we're done.
And that's not going to work, we might as well call it off now.
And that should have been all the cover he needed.
I mean, even though he was a State Department weenie at that point, he was a three or four star general, I guess, a three star general who'd been in charge of the Afghan war.
So, you know, he could have not just invoked Biden, but he could have invoked Ikenberry and just said, listen, the people who know about this best, other than Gates, the Republican that he shouldn't have kept, are telling me forget it, but he didn't do that.
Well, and there was also an internal, a confidential CIA analysis that showed that there'd be almost no benefit from a surge in the troops because of the situation with the Afghan government, a lot of different factors, but the CIA judge was just profoundly negative as far as the proposed surge.
Well, and they went again anyway, just because of politics.
And after all, and I got a paragraph just like this in my book, it was probably a smart decision, right?
Because the Republicans were placated.
Okay, well, at least he escalated the Afghan war.
They didn't have that issue to attack him on.
He didn't have to deal with Petraeus and Gates resigning and weakening him and that kind of thing.
And all the Obama voters, they had so much hope and change in their eyes that they didn't even notice or care at all that he'd escalated the war.
And it didn't really hurt him with his base when it came to the election of 2012 at all.
Well, there were some that had hurt him with it, but not many.
Yeah, I mean, the honorable exceptions accepted.
So that's the real shame of it, is that really doing the wrong thing was the smart thing for him to do in terms of public choice theory.
And I guess that's how it goes, you know.
Well, look out for number one, Jim.
Well, it's, yeah, and ugly business, ugly business.
Hey, listen, I'm so glad that you're such a great writer and that you'll come on my show and talk to me about the stuff that you write.
Well, thanks so much for your kind words, Scott.
And thanks for mentioning the books.
And I'm happy to hear you back on the air.
I'm glad you've got a new institute and that you're raising hell online and elsewhere.
Well, thanks very much, Jim.
Good to talk to you again, man.
All right, take it easy.
All right, Shaw, that's the great Jim Bovard.
I didn't say this at the beginning, Jim Bovard dot com.
He's got a website where he keeps all the stuff that he writes.
And he writes for USA Today and I think still sometimes for The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal.
And, you know, James is he's sort of I don't want to compare him to anyone else, but he's an investigative columnist is what he is.
He really does all the original research and original reporting.
But then he makes some opinion columns anyway, so you can really stick it to him.
And he's really such a talented writer, too.
I think you guys will love Public Policy Hooligan.
And there's a they're all really great.
But my favorite really is Attention Deficit Democracy.
It's probably a decade old now, but it's not outdated.
It's great.
You got to read Attention Deficit Democracy.
So there.
How do you like that?
I like Jim.
Here he is at USA Today.
Hey, wait a minute.
Trump's fear mongering isn't new.
And at FFF dot org, the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF dot org, a billion dollars of federally funded paranoia.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Scott Horton dot org is my website where I keep four thousand three hundred and something interviews for you to listen to if you want.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
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