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All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org, at libertarianinstitute.org, and yeah, follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow, et cetera.
Okay, good.
Introducing Jacob Hornberger, why, he's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org, and of course, he puts out the monthly journal, The Future of Freedom, which will just cost you 15 bucks, man, at fff.org slash subscribe, I might mention.
And you got a couple of big events coming up that I want to talk with you about here, Bumper.
First of all, end the war on drugs.
What's the matter with you?
You want everyone to use drugs?
Well, not exactly, I just want to get the government out of jailing people who are addicted to drugs and people who are transacting drugs, because it's really none of the government's business what people do with drugs or really anything else they do as long as their conduct is peaceful.
All right, then, cool.
Well, so tell us about this event that you've got going on.
It's when and where?
Yeah, we're really excited about this, Scott, that, you know, we've taken a fervent stance against the drug war.
It's immoral.
It's highly destructive.
And we've taken the stance for the whole 27 years of our existence.
I think the first time we published an anti-drug war article was in April of 1990.
And since then, over the years, the 27 years I've been running FFF, I've attended lots of conferences, lots of seminars, programs, including the ones we've hosted, and I've noticed that there are very few African-Americans attending any of these conferences.
And yet the drug war is falling disproportionately in blacks.
It always has.
It's really a racist, bigoted government program.
And so if anyone should have an interest in ending this program, it should be blacks.
So we put on a program a couple of years ago at the University of Texas on ending the drug war and the war on terrorism.
It featured Ron Paul, Radley Balco, and let's see, a third person, Glenn Greenwald.
And we had 750 people in the audience, most of whom were students, but not, I think, maybe one or two blacks at most.
So at that point, I said, you know, if blacks aren't going to come to libertarian conferences, I'll just take my conference to them.
And so we started doing research on what are called historically black colleges and universities.
They've got an acronym of HBCU.
And we dug up a bunch of them, a long list of them.
They're on the Internet.
You know, the major news magazines rate them and rank them.
And we started reaching out.
We found criminal justice professors, administrators, students.
And it was very, very difficult to get through or get people enthusiastic about it.
And so finally, we prevailed with Morgan State University in Baltimore.
And we had a fantastic conference there.
It featured two African-American speakers, a woman from the Drug Policy Alliance in New York City, another from LEAP, the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and Radley Balco.
And it was a tremendous success.
And you could tell the students, virtually all of whom were African-Americans, were really, really grateful for this.
And we talked about the racist aspects of the war on drugs.
So we've been trying ever since to do it again.
And we finally got another one going in Florida, at Florida A&M University.
We're actually doing it at the law school.
We found a student who's the ACLU rep on campus.
And she is as enthusiastic as we are.
So she's taking charge of promoting it.
And it's open to the public.
It's on March 22nd.
It's in the evening at about 6 o'clock.
And all the information and the details are on our website at fff.org.
And we're excited about it.
This is the second HBCU that we're presenting this program on.
And we're highly enthusiastic about it.
We're excited about it.
And if any libertarians are in that area, it'd be great for you to come over and interact with students and others that are African-American and any color.
I mean, just so that we can start, you know, interacting with each other and get this war on drugs finally ended.
I think if African-Americans would start taking a firm public open stance of war on drugs, that could be the catalyst to finally push this thing over the edge.
Well, and, you know, I think historically it's a frustrating kind of fact of history that a lot of the crackdowns of the drug wars in black communities have been at the behest of black community leaders and particularly ministers who have said, you know, look, we've got terrible drug epidemics and violence and all this crime associated with all this drug abuse.
And where are the police?
They're not doing anything to help us.
We want a crackdown.
And right now, in some cases, even calling for martial law, we want troops in here to round up these heroin dealers and get rid of them.
And so, but of course, they're presuming the black market system in the first place.
And so, yeah, it's absolutely true, right?
They got, you know, crack and heroin making zombies out of people and no one to help them.
You got drug dealers committing horrible crimes against each other in order to enforce their turf and all these kinds of things.
But then so what ends up happening is it's Bob Higgs ratchet effect, right?
Or actually, it's not really the ratchet effect.
It's Mises middle of the road leads to socialism is what it is.
Everything that they do makes it worse and worse and worse drives up the price more and more and more causes more and more and more effect to the point where it becomes like a totalitarian system.
In fact, we'll probably if they ever do legalize heroin, you'll have to get your heroin from the government.
They won't let, you know, private companies sell it in packages at Walgreens or whatever.
It'll be some kind of government program.
And then probably it'll have all the perverse incentives that go with that.
So just keeping people junkies instead of trying to help.
Yeah, that's a really good point that you make about black supporting this.
I mean that you know, but it's it's it's absolutely natural.
I mean, if you see drug addiction in the inner cities and people, you know, tripping out on these horrible drugs, it's natural to think, oh, I need to turn to the police.
I need them to clean up the neighborhood.
And I think now, after several decades of experience, people are realizing that the that that supposed cure is worse than the disease, that you end up with a police state, you end up with racial bigotry, harassment, set up of blacks, search and seizure.
It really the solution to all this is to treat drug addiction and drug abuse as a as a social problem, a health care problem, a problem where people just go in and get help where they can need it.
So you you're best off bringing it out into the open where people can talk about their addictions openly, not have to worry about a narc busting them.
So I think more and more blacks are now starting to realize that, as many of us did 25 years ago.
In fact, you mentioned crack cocaine.
Crack cocaine, as Milton Friedman pointed out to some 25 years ago, was a direct result of the drug war, that blacks couldn't afford the high price for cocaine because it was a black market price.
It was an illegal price.
So they figured out how to make cocaine cheaper for people that couldn't afford the exorbitant black market prices.
And that's how crack cocaine came into existence.
And it ravaged the black community.
But really, the only solution to this is just legalized drugs, as you put it, leave it to the free market.
You can rely on the free market to provide good quality drugs instead of the corrupted drugs, the polluted drugs that often kill people.
It's really the solution to the violence that afflicts the inner cities as well as other countries like Mexico.
There's really only one solution to this thing, Scott, and that's just legalize all drugs in this drug war once and for all.
Yeah.
Well, and especially, as you say, the trade in it, too, not just possession of it or abuse of it or being a consumer of it.
But the business of it has got to be legalized because that's where all the crime and violence comes from.
But now, so I'm almost positive this was a link that I got in your morning email that you sent, which everyone should subscribe to, please, at FFF.org.
And it was an article in some international business press.
I forgot the name of it.
It was something kind of obscure.
It wasn't The Economist or something, but it was some kind of business thing.
The person who wrote it was not apparently to me an ideological libertarian, but just someone who had business experience and a little bit of worldly experience, I think, and wrote this article about why the Philippine drug war will not work and cannot work.
And this is the one where they've declared really total war, open vigilante mob murders of drug consumers as much as of distributors.
And under the name that we're just going to get rid of drug abuse in the Philippines once and for all with machetes, man.
And then when we're done, it's going to be over.
And this guy is saying the economic argument, right?
He never had to go to the Philippines in his life.
It doesn't matter where we're talking about.
He's saying this is why this can not work.
And of course, the most obvious part, I think, would be because when you crack down that hard, that drives the price way up.
And then that's a huge incentive for new people to take the place of those you just killed, even with all the risk involved, because of all the risk involved.
But then he went on and made a lot more economic arguments.
And I think that's the real benefit that libertarians can bring to this, like yourself, is that we can't convince all the left and the right to become libertarians.
But the places where we really have the advantages, we're the ones who are right about everything.
But we can get them to agree with us on these things one at a time, right?
Not tell them that we're turning them into libertarians, but just getting them to see that, listen, even if you had the best sheriff, even if you made your minister the sheriff, it still wouldn't work.
It can't work.
It's an equation for self-defeat.
It's like running the wrong way on the football field.
It can not achieve the aims that you're looking for.
And once people hear it that way, that it's not a matter of, well, you know, Reagan treated us unfairly or, you know, Bill Clinton's policies needed to be reformed some or Barack Obama, you know, his drug war was a little bit better or worse in this way or that.
It's that this whole thing, it can succeed if your goal is to build up police forces and destroy freedom.
It cannot succeed if your goal is to abolish drug abuse or even really curtail it.
It doesn't seem like to me.
Yeah, your point about the Philippines is absolutely perfect.
It's just dead on because, you know, for 30, 40 years, you hear people in the United States saying drug warriors saying, well, we just haven't cracked down hard enough.
We really just cracked down the way I want to crack down.
We would finally end drug usage and drug abuse in America.
Well, the fact is there has been a crackdown over the years.
You've had mandatory minimum sentences where people are sent to jail for 30 years for possessing a little bit of marijuana.
You have acid forfeiture laws where the cops are stealing money from people on the highways.
You have this massive police state, really, with respect to the drug war.
But in Philippines, they've carried it even much further.
They have death squads.
They're shooting people on the streets without going to taking them to trial or arresting them.
Anybody suspected of drug abuse, they're shot.
And there's already been thousands of people killed there.
And the president's saying, I'm just cracking down on the war on drugs, and I'm going to crack down until we win it.
Well, he isn't winning it.
As you point out, the war, the price spikes up.
People can make big money, and that's why they enter the market.
Regular people start entering the market.
And so it has this countervailing, counterbalancing effect.
The more you crack down, the more people are induced to enter the drug trade.
I suppose, theoretically, you could establish a complete police state like in China.
But from what I understand, there's drug abuse in China.
There's drug abuse in prisons.
And so who wants that police state?
That's the whole point.
If that's the price to be paid to get people to stop taking drugs, that's just too high a price for me.
I want freedom.
And then if people do get addicted to drugs, let them work it out.
They'll figure it out.
If they want to, they'll go into Alcoholics Anonymous, Narconon, or any of the other drug rehab centers or programs, and they'll deal with their problem.
But to take away my freedom to live in a police state because of what they're doing?
No thank you.
Yeah.
Well, and I think overall, you look at communities that are ravaged by drug abuse rather than individual people with a drug problem, and what you see there is it's poverty and pain and abuse and fatherlessness and hopelessness, futurelessness.
People got nothing to do but sit around and do drugs all day, and that's not a black thing.
That's the same thing in Appalachia.
That's the same thing anywhere where poor people live in America, is you'll find people who the drug trade becomes the dominant thing.
There's nothing else really for them.
In fact, a lot of these towns that we talk about, these manufacturing towns that Trump says are tombstones all across our land, a lot of them kind of were boom towns.
They never really were meant to be permanent fixtures.
They were built up on one government subsidy or another over the years, maybe a war industry or two or whatever it was, and these things change, but the people who stay behind get addicted to drugs.
It's pretty easy to see the whole economic dislocation, drug abuse correlation.
There must be a thousand studies that show that this is the way it is.
It's not because people are deviant.
It's because their lives suck.
Well, and they suck because they live in a socialist welfare state, warfare state society.
There was a lot of alcoholism in the Soviet Union, not surprisingly.
Living in a socialist society is a pretty depressing thing to do.
Well, it's no different in a welfare warfare state, which is what we live under, and it's even worse here because people are inculcated with the notion that this is freedom.
From the first grade when they're pledging allegiance to the flag, they're taught America's freedom, America's freedom.
They grow up in a welfare warfare state.
They can't get a job.
Minimum wage laws lock them out of the labor market.
Licensure laws do the same thing.
Huge amounts of taxation and regulation prevent them from starting businesses.
So you have people in the inner cities and elsewhere that say, this does suck, and they unfortunately end up starting to deaden the pain by moving toward alcohol or other drugs.
So yeah, there's an interweaving here of the welfare state, the warfare state, drug addiction, which then the state handles through a massive drug war that destroys freedom and makes the drug addiction problem even worse.
Well, and you know, I like the way that you talk about every once in a while focusing on these prison sentences here and in comparison to the actual contraband involved and that kind of thing, because it's easy to, it's sort of like people in the hospital.
Those of us who are healthy out here in the real world, we sort of don't think about them because who wants to focus on sickness?
Leave that to the doctors and the nurses, right?
And it's sort of the same thing with people in prison is they're just out of sight, out of mind.
They're far away.
They're un-people.
They're cons.
When they get out, they're ex-cons and they're marginal and what have you.
But then when you go back all the way to the first step of why are these people in prison in the first place, a lot of them really don't belong there at all.
Or even if they're involved in violence, it was part of this entire system that we're talking about where, in other words, it didn't have to be this way at all.
And so that's the thing of it.
We're talking about real humans locked in real cages.
And subject, as you said, if drugs get in there too, every other bit of crime takes place in prison too.
And especially when you have a lot of criminals concentrated together like that.
So a lot of horrible stuff happens in prison where a lot of, and while they're there, their families are without them and all of the hardship that that entails.
The future drug abuse on the part of their kids that comes with that and all the rest of it.
It's a huge, it's like a giant came and just put his foot in the center of our country and just dislocated every freaking thing.
Yeah, it really is horrible when you see a young mother that just, she was financially desperate and, and, and let's face it, you can make big money.
You can score big money very quickly and drug transactions due in large part to the crackdown.
And so people are sucked into that, you know, a young mother, she's tempted to do it.
She does it.
And then she gets caught and convicted.
She's sent up for 10, 20 years of her life, leaving her toddlers behind to fend for themselves, living in some foster home or, you know, grandparents or whatever.
I mean, it's just all so unnecessary and it's a direct result of the drug war itself.
It's really horrible what this thing has done to destroy a family life, the fabric of society.
Look at Mexico.
I mean, they're just, I mean, they totally, the drug wars totally destroyed the country.
You know, a hundred thousand people dead, not because of drugs, but because of assassinations and kidnappings that resulted in murder and shootouts and gang wars.
All of this is because of the drug war, not because of drugs, because of the drug war.
And your point about prisons is very good too.
I mean, nobody in prison for a drug offense, purely a drug offense, deserves to be there.
I don't care whether they're selling or consuming.
That's none of the government's business.
The government should have no role in that.
And as you point out, though, a lot of the violent crimes have been, have occurred as a direct result of the drug war itself, you know, where there's turf wars and people are shooting it out to see who's going to get to control the drugs in this particular area.
None of this would have happened if there had been no drug war.
All right, now, so back to the issue of going and speaking to black colleges and that kind of thing.
I mean, I don't know if it is a safe assumption that that means that they're mostly liberal or not.
But I think an important part of this strategy has to be focusing on black ministers who they come in liberal and conservative as well.
But overall, our arguments, our libertarian arguments are most effective when we're attacking the right from the right and attacking the left from the left.
Right.
More liberal than the liberals and more conservative than the conservative kind of thing.
And I always thought kind of my dream in the Ron Paul years was when he was running for president that he would make a deliberate part of his campaign to go and talk to groups of especially conservative black ministers and push ending the drug war to them because they're the ones who really need convincing.
And I don't think that they believe you.
I don't think they understand this thing from your point of view.
And it's their, you know, pressure from below that's going to make the difference that, you know, young men and women, you know, we're not saying it's OK.
We're just saying Hornberger's right.
This ain't working.
We've got to do something else.
Same thing with the wars.
We're not saying give in to terrorists.
We're saying stop doing the wrong thing that happens to be what's motivating the terrorists.
OK, that's the deal here.
And it's the same thing where you have to, you know, make sure that the people that you're recruiting to ally with you, that they don't have to change their their whole set of beliefs or anything.
Just what they think is the right way to handle this problem.
Full stop.
And then they can sign up easy.
Right.
Or it's more it's easier to sign them up that way when when the issue is more narrow.
You know, your point about black ministers is so fantastic.
I mean, I couldn't agree with you more.
I mean, they're so influential and people really look up to them.
And if they could ever be made to see the horrors of this war, I think you're absolutely right.
I think it could be a major watershed event in the history of the drug war and bringing it to an end.
There's a there's a great African-American professor named Michelle Alexander, who is making he's playing a big role in this.
She's written this fantastic book, which I highly recommend for everybody to get called The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration in the era of something or other.
It's called The New Jim Crow and where she's talking about the drug war as the new Jim Crow.
This is how how the establishment is keeping blacks down with the drug war.
And she has so much credibility and she's so well thought of that she could very well be playing right now without us really realizing it, be playing a very prominent role in doing what you're saying.
And that's reaching black ministers.
Boy, if you could have every black minister across the country preaching from the pulpit the horrors of the drug war and why we need to end it, including as a way to deal with drug addiction, man, I think that would really tip this thing right over the edge of the cliff.
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Yeah.
And then, you know, there's no end to all the creative ways that people can deal with drug abuse outside of calling cops on people.
I mean, there's just there's a million and one programs, you know, starting with N.A., as you mentioned earlier, I think.
But there's a thousand other ways to go.
And you could make it where, you know, this isn't as libertarian as could be, but you can make it where, come on, you need a prescription to be on heroin and you've got to get it from Walgreens, not just 7-Eleven or something like that.
But still, you know, you get it, maybe a little flyer, hey, have you hit rock bottom yet?
Give us a call.
We'll help you out.
And of course, recovering addicts live to help other addicts.
I mean, that's their thing, man.
If you know any, that's kind of how they are, is they're on the lookout for other addicts that maybe they could lend a hand to.
So, I mean, there's just no reason to think that you need to state police to be running this thing, man.
You know, so once once we legalize it, that's not surrendering to a society of crack zombies.
You know, that that begins to open the door to real solutions.
That's what that is.
Oh, absolutely.
I couldn't agree with you more.
All right.
So now let's talk about Jack Kennedy and who it was that shot him in the head and why it is that it matters so much.
Jacob, you've got a big conference coming up about that, too.
We have what I think is going to be the most exciting and important and relevant conference in our 27 year history.
I cannot tell you how excited I am about this conference.
I've been thinking about it for about three years.
And finally, I just decided we're going to do this.
And and I and I knew what my dream lineup of speakers was, but it never occurred to me that every one of them would say yes.
And this is a conference called the National Security State and JFK.
So it's not just on JFK.
It's on the National Security State as well.
And so I wanted to invite a mixture of speakers, some that were experts on the assassination, but who didn't necessarily take a stand on the assassination, and then the premier experts on the assassination itself.
But not to talk about bullet trajectories and things like that, but to talk about the Cold War context of the Kennedy administration, the war that Kennedy was waging against the CIA and the military, a war that a lot of people don't even know existed.
The debate over what the role of the National Security State should be, the relationship with Cuba, the various assassination attempts, and then in the larger context, the regime change operations, all the things that the CIA has been doing ever since its inception in 1947.
We're going to be examining these.
And here's my lineup of speakers.
We've got a guy named Jeffrey Sachs, who is a world-renowned economist.
He's a leftist, but he's not going to be talking about economics.
He wrote a fantastic book called, I forget the name of it, but it's on JFK's famous peace speech at American University in June of 1963, where Kennedy said, I want to reach out to the Soviet Union in peace and friendship.
I want to end the Cold War.
We can establish good relations with each other.
It was a remarkable speech.
It was broadcast all across the Soviet Union, the first presidential speech that had ever happened.
And so Sachs has written this remarkable book on how Kennedy came up with that speech.
We've got Michael Glennon, who I know you've had on your show being interviewed, the author of a great book called National Security and Double Government.
Stephen Kinzer, who's one of my real heroes, he's spoken at our conferences before, former New York Times reporter and Boston Globe reporter, who's written these fantastic books on regime change.
And then we've got five speakers, Doug Horn, Peter Janney, Jefferson Morley, David Talbot, who are really the premier speakers and writers that posit that the national security state orchestrated a regime change operation in June of 1963.
Now what you don't see on our website yet, because we just got notice of it, is that our final speaker is going to be none other than Hollywood producer and director and Oscar winner Oliver Stone.
He's going to be the wrap-up speaker for this conference.
And I'll be speaking there, too.
It's going to be at the Dulles Marriott, right near Dulles Airport, like one minute away.
So people can easily fly into Dulles Airport and stay at the hotel.
It's going to be a one-day conference on June 3rd, Saturday.
So yeah, this is going to be a fantastic conference.
Well, I'll tell you, JFK, let's see, it came out when I was 14.
And I took a real interest in it.
I didn't know who Alan Dulles was, but I thought, yeah, sure, it makes sense that this guy probably killed the president.
You know, why not?
Who's going to stop him?
And then he's in charge of his own investigation.
What more do you need to know?
On the other hand, I admit that I decided a long time ago, too, really when I was a teenager, that there are so many different books about the JFK assassination that I'm going to basically just plead agnostic and not try to solve this one myself because there's just too much competing stuff and I don't want to sift it all, whatever.
Maybe that was a lazy and dumb decision.
But I will give you this, that our friend Mike Swanson, the author of The Worst State, in that book, he did a better job than anyone so far of convincing me that Kennedy really did have a change of heart after the Cuban Missile Crisis and that even if he was Barack Obama before that, that he was starting to turn into Kucinich after and that, you know, my words, not Swanson's.
But something along those lines, that in other words, I think it really is plausible what you're saying, that that speech wasn't just some pretty Obama type speech, that he really meant that we're making a real change here and yes, even over the CIA and the Pentagon's dead body and they decided that they begged to differ and that it was going to be his dead body instead.
But now, so in all your investigation of all of this, do you have a favorite theory as to who were the shooters and who actually contracted them?
It was the special operations guys or it was the CIA, it was French mercs who pulled the triggers like they say in The Men Who Killed Kennedy or what do you think?
Well, let me first address your other point because it's so important about this sea change in the way Kennedy saw things because that's really the critical point.
To answer your second question first, I don't know and it really doesn't matter to me who the shooters were and where they came from.
I mean, there's no question when you look at the circumstantial evidence that the shooters, it was a cross shooting ambush.
The shooters were coming from different directions, but especially from the front.
But who they were and it's really irrelevant that really what matters is the overall political context of the assassination and this is what guys like, when you say you don't know which books to read, sure, I can relate to that, but the speakers we're having at this conference, they are the premieres.
I mean, their books are the ones that really hit the nail on the head.
People like Doug Horn and David Talbot and Jefferson Morley and Doug Horn, they hit the nail on the head in the terms of let's look at the overall political context of what was happening here and there's no question but that Kennedy's attitude was entirely sincere when you look at the evidence.
If you look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy as well as Khrushchev, it was both of them.
It wasn't just one.
They both realized how close the United States and the Soviet Union had come to a nuclear war.
I mean, it was within an inch.
If Kennedy had followed the CIA's and the military's prescription, they wanted him to bomb and invade Cuba because the Soviet had put these missiles there.
If he had done that, there is no question, none, that it would have been an all out nuclear war because what the CIA didn't know at the time was that Soviet commanders on the ground in Cuba had fully armed tactical nuclear weapons and battlefield authority to fire them without seeking permission from the Kremlin.
So if Kennedy had invaded or bombed, there's no question the world would be a lot different from what we're living in today.
There probably wouldn't have been a world in which people were living.
So Kennedy knew that.
He knew how close they had come.
He had children and so did Khrushchev.
So they have this watershed event saying, my gosh, we almost destroyed the world because of ideological differences.
I mean, how ridiculous is that?
And that's when Kennedy starts questioning the whole Cold War concept, the concept that had come into existence at the end of World War II.
He starts saying, this is bull.
Why can't countries live in peaceful and harmonious interactions with each other?
The same way, for example, we live today with Vietnam and China.
And so he starts thinking this, well, this is contrary to the whole national security establishment.
This goes contrary to the whole Cold War paradigm that says, we can't, you can't trust the communists.
You're going to disarm.
And this is going to be their invitation to conquer America, to take over America.
And oh, by the way, it also was threatening to upend the entire national security establishment that had come into existence to wage this whole thing.
So Kennedy clearly posed a threat to the whole paradigm, as well as the institution that was dependent on that paradigm.
And they were entirely sincere.
When you look at Alan Dulles and the people in the military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you look at the CIA, Dulles, all of them really believed in this stuff.
I mean, they really believed that Castro posed a threat to national security, that Cuba did, that this Cold War could never end except unless you had a winner.
Many of them were advocating nuclear war with a first strike by the United States.
They were telling Kennedy, we have a chance right now before the Soviets catch up to knock out all their nuclear missiles with a nuclear strike.
Well, Kennedy saw this and he said, this is not what I want.
I don't want this for the country.
And so he starts moving in an entirely different direction.
And that's the point.
And including secret negotiations.
Now get this.
He is secretly negotiating with Khrushchev and Castro on a person-to-person basis.
He has secret letters going between him and Khrushchev, because Khrushchev is experiencing the same kind of water jet event.
And Kennedy's not telling the CIA, he's not telling the Pentagon that he's engaged in these secret negotiations.
In fact, he didn't even consult with the Pentagon or the CIA before he gave that peace speech at American University.
So that's what this conference is going to do.
It's going to examine this whole national security state way of life.
People say, you know, people over the years, Scott, have said, you know, why do you study the JFK assassination?
Why do you write about it?
Why do you publish e-books about it?
Well, because the structure that brought about this assassination is still in place.
That's the national security establishment.
I mean, this is what this whole idea of the CIA's war against Trump is about.
The CIA does not like its orders countermanded.
For four decades or so, they have been the most powerful part of the federal government, together with the military.
It's the national security branch of the government.
And so here's a president that's not playing due deference, that isn't going along with everything they say, that wants to establish, oh, by the way, friendly, peaceful relations with Russia, which was once the core of the Soviet Union.
Well, they're all going ballistic.
They need a crisis with Russia.
They need crises to sustain their existence.
So that's the relevance of this thing.
I might add also that the L.A. Times published a piece not so long ago saying that, you know what, it very well could be that we may need a military, the military may see a need for a coup against Trump if Trump moves off in a direction that the military doesn't approve of.
So not only is this conference important, exciting, it's very relevant to what is happening today with respect to the CIA, the Pentagon, and the whole national security establishment.
I'll throw in there the NSA as well.
Hey, let me ask you this, man.
In the early 70s, did libertarians and leftists, I mean, I know liberals are liberals, so never mind them, but did libertarians and leftists suspect that really Watergate was nothing but a military CIA coup against Nixon as revenge for pulling out of Vietnam and making peace with Mao Zedong?
And for that matter, detente with Russia?
I never heard that, but I did read, I forget the guy's name, there is one book that posits the idea that the CIA set Nixon up to, on the Watergate thing, that they figured that he would try to cover up a burglary that went wrong, and they knew that once he engaged in the cover-up, they had it.
Now, remember, there's CIA agents within the White House, I mean, at that time.
There's E. Howard Hunt.
Now, they claim, well, he had already resigned, but that's nonsense.
You know, people don't just resign from the CIA to go and do another post to the government.
They retain their CIA relationship.
So is there any truth to that?
I don't know.
I really am certainly not expert to talk about it.
I never heard about that theory in the 70s, so it wasn't until I read this book, and I forget the name of it, that I heard the other theory, and I don't really have an opinion on it.
All right, now, to go back to Dallas now.
Just recently, I think last year, there was a shooting in Dallas.
A guy took a rifle and he killed, I forgot how many cops, quite a few cops, in the name of we're sick and tired of the cops and we're fighting back against the cops kind of thing.
And yet, it turns out that actually, the Dallas police had one of the most quote unquote progressive police chiefs in America who was really trying to do a lot less persecuting and a lot more protecting of people like he thought his mandate was, and they got a pretty good DA who was going back and setting people free who'd been convicted of crimes falsely and this kind of thing.
And so, in other words, this idiot took out his anti-cop anger on, of all the police forces in Texas, he picked the coolest one to go and attack.
The guys who were trying their hardest.
So in other words, what I'm saying is, maybe Jack Kennedy was doing these things and still Oswald shot him because he was a red and he thought of Jack Kennedy as some kind of right winger and he hated him and he wanted to be famous or whatever his problem was.
So, you know what I mean?
Just because he was doing the right thing, does that really mean that his opponents in that conflict had to have been the ones that hired the hitmen that did the killing that day?
Well, the problem with that scenario is that Oswald doesn't ...
It makes no sense.
I mean, Kennedy was not a right winger in the sense of relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union.
He was very sympathetic to some of these third world movements.
Well, but to a red, though, right?
To a red, a Democrat is a capitalist and one of them.
Well, yeah, except that, look, look, if Oswald was a genuine communist, which is really doubtful.
I mean, how many US Marines do you know are out now, communists?
I mean, look, this guy is going to study communism in the Marines and nobody's going to make a fuss about it at the height of the Cold War.
He's going to supposedly defect to the Soviet Union, the premier Cold War enemy, and be allowed to come back in the country without being indicted, subpoenaed to a grand jury, investigated.
In fact, the government even helped pay his way back.
Every indication is that this guy was a CIA operative, Oswald was.
And so when you look at Kennedy's peace efforts up to the time of his assassination, he gives his peace speech.
He has a nuclear test ban treaty.
He talks about peaceful relations with the Soviet Union.
He's establishing contacts with Castro.
Well, why would a guy that supposedly favors all these things want to kill him?
And knowing that he's going to elevate Johnson, who really is an extreme militarist, is going to expand the military and send the troops into Vietnam, makes no sense.
And they've also said, well, Oswald was going to kill General Walker.
Well, now, Walker really was your premier right winger.
This is a guy that really hated the Kennedys.
Kennedy had Walker arrested at a protest in the South over whether blacks should be admitted to colleges and sent him to a psychiatric institution.
So why would a guy like Oswald want to kill a right winger?
Well, of course, that would make sense.
But then at the same time, kill the right winger's enemy, the president, who's making peaceful relations with the country that he supposedly loves and adores.
Is it possible?
Yeah, but it makes no sense.
It's not consistent with rational, logical thinking.
What really is consistent with this thing, and it's really the only logical thing that makes sense, is that Oswald is working for the CIA.
He's a U.S. Marine.
That's where they recruit people.
He was working at a top secret facility in Japan where the U-2 spy plane was secretly based.
And he accepts the recruiting.
He learns Russian while he's in the Marines.
How many people can self-teach a complicated language like Russian?
It's almost a certainty.
He was sent to the Russian language school within the military.
And so then he's a false defector, and they had a false defector program.
He goes over there and portrays himself like a disaffected American.
But everything has the air of fakeness to it, that he's in there to spy on the Soviet Union.
That's what CIA agents do.
They spy.
And then he finally says, I'm coming home.
They help pay his way.
They don't interrogate him.
They don't indict him.
Now compare the way they treat Oswald to what they're doing with Edward Snowden or to John Walker Lynn.
Oswald didn't get that treatment.
Why not?
This is a guy who defected to the Soviet Union and, oh, by the way, told the U.S. ambassador in Moscow that he intended to give all the secrets that he had to the Soviets.
That would be U-2 secrets.
That was anathema to the military.
So it's much more logical to think that Oswald was a CIA agent, worked for the FBI also as an informant.
And in fact, the Warren Commission had to deal with that rumor.
In a top-secret session, Warren calls together the commission and says, we have received information that Oswald was a CIA informant or FBI informant.
And after that meeting, Warren ordered all transcripts relating to that meeting to be destroyed.
One survived, unbeknownst to him.
That's how we know about it.
And so that's, to me, the much more logical scenario.
A CIA agent, they set him up, they frame him, they do what they taught in Latin America for years, that in state-sponsored covert assassinations, blame it on the communists.
That's what they were teaching at the School of the Americas.
Why a communist?
Because there's so much prejudice against communists that people will not suspect that the state was involved.
It's a way to distract attention.
Sure.
At the same time, though, if some wingnut, left, right, or anything, had, God forbid, done anything extrajudicial like this to our former president or to our current one, people would immediately chalk it up to what was good about them.
It must have been why the forces of evil took them out.
Really no matter what the real explanation was, that would be the assumption, right?
Well, not necessarily.
When Hinckley shot Reagan, I don't see very many people saying that the national security state was behind this.
I don't know.
There were at least some thought, yeah, of course, his family knows George Bush's family.
And this is a put on.
I think that was probably part of the reason he did it, was a personal reason.
But there are people who think that, yeah, that was a whole MKUltra, this and that.
Well, I don't see any books being written.
I don't see- Well, no, not like this.
Investigations.
You're right.
You're not on this level.
That's for sure.
I mean, the thing about the Kennedy assassination, it's not just conspiracy theories.
There's evidence now.
I mean, if people are looking for a confession, forget it.
I mean, they'll never be convinced.
It's been established policy in the CIA never to put assassinations into writing in any memo or anything.
They're really what you have to look at is the circumstantial evidence.
And if you look at the circumstantial evidence on the autopsy, that's really the Achilles heel.
And that's- And you've written your own book about this.
What's the name of it?
Yeah, the Kennedy autopsy.
And it's been a bestseller on Amazon now for three years going.
And when you look at that and you see the shenanigans that went on the autopsy, then you have on the very night of the assassination, you have to ask yourself, why would these shenanigans take place?
I mean, what's the purpose of them?
And there can be only one purpose, and that's cover up.
Okay, well, then why cover it up?
On the very night of the assassination, what are they covering up?
Why are they covering it up?
And you work backwards that way.
And once you work backwards that way, you reach but one conclusion, that the people who were covering up were covering up for themselves, because the Darcher wouldn't be covering up for some independent assassin like Lee Harvey Oswald or something.
They would be covering up because they themselves were involved in the crime.
All right, now let me ask you this.
Did you see our friend Jeff Deist at the Mises Institute and his article about Truman recently?
About Truman and the CIA?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean- This quote is from Truman, I believe, told this biographer this opinion about the CIA in 1961, right?
So before the Jack Kennedy assassination, then I think you'll probably want to also follow up and tell the story of his letter to the Washington Post after the assassination if you want.
Yeah, it wasn't a letter, it was an op-ed.
When Truman calls the CIA into existence, he was the president when the National Security Act was enacted.
His intent, as he made very clear, was to just call an intelligence agency into existence, one that would gather up facts and information, compile them, and give them to the president.
The CIA was supposed to be just a strict intelligence-gathering operation.
Somebody slipped some nebulous language into the Enabling Act that the CIA seized upon that says, no, we have omnipotent powers now.
We can assassinate, we can do regime-change operations, we can do much more than just intelligence-gathering.
And that's what Truman was saying.
He says, the CIA has gone far beyond what I intended its mission to be.
And when he wrote that op-ed 30 days after the Kennedy assassination, that could not have been in existence.
I mean, a coincidence.
He saw how that assassination had taken place.
He saw the intelligence agencies and the military maintaining strict secrecy in the whole thing.
And he saw the earmarks of a CIA operation.
I'm convinced that's the case.
So then he writes this op-ed in The Washington Post that says, this organization has become a sinister force in American life, and we're getting a bad reputation around the world, and something has to be done about it.
And unfortunately, nobody paid any attention.
Nobody suspected that the CIA would actually do something like this.
Well, I shouldn't say nobody, but as the years went on, people knew something was wrong with the Warren report.
The whole thing smelled a high heaven.
It's too bad he didn't come right out and say it then, that the American people must suspect that the CIA may have been involved in this thing, and that question must be investigated.
Because trying to be coy about it is, you know, it's like he left a nice little footnote for you and me generations later.
But it's really too bad he didn't come right out and say it.
And you know, his language in that, the quote to his biographer that Dice cited, I really like the way he says it.
He says, oh, those boys out there in Virginia now, they've got their own military, really.
They got their own separate government out there, and just hearing it in his words that way is nice, you know?
Well, it is, and he's an old country guy, and so he says it in a very old plain speaking way.
And yeah, but he's right.
If you look at the CIA in Virginia, you see the Pentagon's in Virginia.
They're sort of like their own force outside of Washington, D.C., and they're the most powerful force of the federal government.
I mean, the fact is, de facto, the national security state could remove a president violently and nobody can do anything about it.
You know, the Justice Department cannot indict them, because how are they going to enforce an indictment against the 82nd Airborne Division?
And an analogy of this, Scott, is the Chilean coup that the U.S. fomented from 1970 to 1970 to 2003, exact same type of situation.
Allende, a socialist-minded president, is reaching out to the Soviet Union in friendship.
He is deemed to be a threat to national security.
The U.S. CIA and military and State Department go into Chile and convince the Chilean military, you have a moral duty to oust your president from office, even if he's democratically elected, because he is a threat to your national security.
And they finally bought into that concept.
Now, that's our national security state firmly believing that, that that's the purpose of a national security establishment.
If your president starts engaging in conduct that is a threat to your national security, it is the solemn duty of your military and your CIA to remove him from office and put somebody else in who's going to protect national security.
Hey, by the way, and I guess I'll leave you with this, Jacob.
I was talking with Gareth, Gareth Porter, and he was telling me he was reading this book and I'm sorry, I don't remember the author, but I'll figure it out and because I want to read it.
I'll figure it out and let you know.
But Gareth said he's reading this book now that's just this meticulous study of the war scare of 1948.
And how, even though we really blame Truman a lot, right, go out there and scare the hell out of him, Harry, and he played his role, right?
He signed the National Security Act.
He did, you know, entertain all this Iron Curtain, this and that and everything else.
And yet Gareth said, oh, it's so clear here that it was the military that just foisted this on him and he had no choice at all and that they were just behind it and they just lied and lied and lied and no, they didn't believe the lies they were telling.
They were lying because they didn't want to give up their power.
And so this was the real basis of the whole Cold War was the war scare of the kicking it off was the war scare of 48, which I guess they'd already been going since 46.
But I guess I don't know enough about it.
But he was saying that the book is just great and an absolutely solid in its conclusion to about the whole thing was, you know, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love you to email me the title.
It sounds fantastic.
Yeah.
I'm writing it on my hand right now.
So I don't forget.
That's one place I never forget to look because it goes with me everywhere.
See, it's what they've done since the very beginning.
They create these crises, the Soviet Union, which had been America's partner and ally during the war.
You know, the and the last thing that Soviet Union was going to do was attack the United States.
I mean, we had nuclear weapons.
We had a strong industrial base that had not been bombed.
The entire Soviet Union had been decimated.
It lost.
I forget how many people, 20 million people or so in the war.
I mean, yeah, they're going to really want to go to war against the United States.
Such nonsense.
But the national security establishment created that sense of, oh, they're going to be coming around the corner at any time.
The communists are practically here.
Look under your bed.
But it worked.
And it worked all the way up to the time Kennedy said, wait a minute, this is a bunch of bull.
We don't need this.
All right.
So here we go.
March 22nd in Orlando at the what?
At Florida A&M University at the law school.
OK.
And that is the big drug war event.
So everybody go to that.
You can read all about it at FFF.org.
And then on June 3rd, it's the JFK event where?
At Dulles Airport, Dulles Marriott Airport.
One minute away from Dulles Airport in northern Virginia, right outside D.C.
It's going to be a one day event on a Saturday, June 3rd.
And I think it's going to be the best conference in our 27 year history.
Great.
And how much is it to get in the door?
Well, we're still deciding that.
We're trying to decide how to structure it, meals, snacks and so forth.
So within the next couple of days, we should have a definite answer on that.
OK, good deal.
And everybody, you can read about that also at FFF.org.
That's June 3rd at the Washington Dulles Airport Marriott.
Thanks again, Jake.
OK, sounds good.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
Wait, that's Jacob Hornberger, the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
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