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I had to stop by the White's Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw us.
He died.
We ain't killing they army.
We killing them.
We be on CNN like they ain't been saying.
Say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Aren't you guys introducing Jacob Hornberger?
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation FFF.org and I always like introducing you this way Jacob.
There's the great Marie Rothbard essay.
It was mentioned on Twitter this morning.
In fact, do you hate the state?
What he says in there, I always confuse it and forget whether he actually specifically mentions you or not.
I always think of you where he says, I will take a radical minarchist over a conservative anarchist any day.
That's the thing.
You're a constitution guy, George Washington and all of that and yet boy you really really mean it at the expense of 99.999% of the U.S. national government as it exists today.
I love that about you and I love the fact that you're right every single day too.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Oh man, it's always good to be talking to you Scott.
Honor to be on your show and doing great.
Good.
I'm very happy to hear that.
Hey listen, so you've right this.
I got flip answers but I really want to hear you delve into this here.
Why no outrage over U.S. killing of children?
Yeah, that's a fascinating thing because you see this huge outrage pouring out against the Trump administration for separating children from their parents on this immigration policy that Trump has implemented.
I mean, what he's really trying to do is to deter immigrants from coming into the United States, specifically from Latin America and so he figures, okay, if I separate children and word spreads and there's the risk that the parent's not going to get the child back for many months, at least a long period of time, and even wonder whether he's ever going to get his child back, especially after we deport him, this will dissuade people from coming in.
And so there's been this huge outpouring of rage against what the president is doing, using his children as pawns, political pawns, to achieve a political end.
And it's all been justified as far as I'm concerned, but you know where I stand on immigration, I oppose all these enforcement measures, including this one.
And this is just one more enforcement measures.
I'm an advocate of open borders, but here's the hypocrisy.
I'm happy to get back to that subject if you want later on, too, though.
Yeah, that'd be great.
But here's the hypocrisy is that, you know, the left, of course, has been among those who are pouring out this outrage, but you can't help but wonder whether it's really driven by politics rather than real moral principles.
Because if we go back to the Clinton administration, the U.S. sanctions on Iraq were killing tens of thousands of Iraqi children every month, and nobody cared.
When Madeleine Albright, who is the official spokesperson for the U.S. government, the Clinton administration, she's a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she's asked, I think in 1996, whether the death of half a million Iraqi children had been worth it, 60 minutes after this.
She says, well, it's a difficult issue, but yeah, it's worth it.
And by it, she was talking about the effort to get regime change in Iraq.
And so they're killing these children as a political means to achieve a political end.
And there was just this indifference to what she said.
I mean, clearly she was expressing the official position of the Clinton administration, but there was no outrage.
I mean, like, if there's going to be outrage over separating children, why not outrage over killing children?
And three high U.N. officials resigned because out of a crisis of conscience, and they were mocked and ridiculed by U.S. officials.
And then even today, when you look at sanctions on North Korea, they are specifically designed to kill people, but through starvation, through ill health, infectious illnesses, just like they were killing the children in Iraq.
And whenever they kill more people, like if there was a huge outbreak of death in North Korea, the U.S. media and the establishment would exult.
They'd say, oh, their favorite term is the sanctions are starting to bite.
Isn't this wonderful that the sanctions are starting to bite?
And that's the word they use, and they use it on Iran, too.
And they measure the biteness by how many people are suffering and dying from the sanctions.
And yet there's a sense of, oh, well, that's just sanctions.
They're different.
They're not like separating children from their parents.
It's OK to kill people for this political end.
It's outrageous.
The hypocrisy is so horrible.
You don't support these sanctions.
Why, Hornberger, you're an isolationist.
Well, that's an interesting term you use, and it's fascinating because, you know, actually libertarians are the opposite of isolationists.
I mean, when you're building a Berlin Wall on the southern border and you have travel restrictions against different countries and you're scared to death of letting people in the world, and you're scared to death of letting Americans travel to places like Cuba, so you have to put restrictions on, that's classic isolationism, where you're isolating the private sector, but you're unleashing the federal government to go out stomping on people and torturing people and killing people, none of whom have ever attacked or invaded the United States.
I mean, even 9-11 was retaliation for U.S. interventionism abroad.
So libertarians want the opposite.
We want to reign in the government, want to bring all the troops home, stop the interventionism, and unleash the private sector, you know, eliminate all the sanctions and embargoes and travel restrictions and tariffs and trade wars and immigration controls so that Americans will be free to interact with the people of the world.
And for that, they call us isolationists, but actually it's the exact opposite.
We want to, the American private sector, unleash it and reign in the government so that it becomes a limited government republic that does not go abroad in search of what John Quincy Adams called, in search of monsters to destroy.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I think we should be a little bit more careful with our language, though, when it comes to the left.
And, you know, I mean, language is just language.
It's symbolism.
We're trying to keep facts straight.
Sometimes we've got to try to add some nuance.
So to anyone who's not on the left, the left is everything to the left of the center, like full stop kind of thing, right?
But to leftists, that's totally wrong, right?
For them, there's this huge spectrum from the center left and neoliberals and liberals, which I think mostly means principle-less, mindless Democrat voters, right?
And then you have progressives and then actual socialists and communists and left anarchists to the left of them, who have varying degrees of principle.
And truly, the further left you go, in most cases, the more anti-war they are.
So when it comes to Bill Clinton's starving Iraqis, there were libertarians like you, and your only allies at the time were people like Alexander Coburn and people who were hardcore, serious leftists, who were the only ones who care.
It wasn't the right-wingers who were sticking up for the poor, starving Iraqis, right?
It was some libertarians and leftists.
And the same thing with hating Barack Obama's wars.
The liberals didn't have a damn thing to say for eight years, but the leftists hated him all along and said, this guy's just Hillary Clinton, you know, with curly hair.
What difference does he make?
Look at what he's doing.
And so we should give them credit.
Now, we don't want to let them take over our agriculture policy.
We're all together on that.
But they do hate Democrats, and they mostly hate Democrats because of their wars.
Yeah, that's a fascinating point, because clearly there are people in the left that share the libertarian perspective on foreign policy.
We link to their articles.
We've had them speak at our conferences.
But then there's people also on the right that share the libertarian position.
The people at American Conservative are very good on this.
I mean, they're not as solid and pure as libertarians are about just limiting government to defense, but they're totally different from your standard Republican or conservative.
And the same with people on the left that expound essentially the libertarian perspective.
And I think it's not so much a question of, you know, what people call themselves and what their label is, it's what do they stand for?
Because let's face it, if enough people, if we reach a critical mass of people that say, we want to stop foreign interventionism, we want to restore a republic that doesn't engage in foreign interventionism, what do we care whether that block that brings that about are libertarians, leftists, conservatives, or whatever?
All we care about is that stopping the foreign interventionism.
Another example is like the drug war.
I mean, we're reaching, we're getting very close to reaching a critical mass on ending the drug war.
Well, what do we care if part of that mass is, I mean, the mass consists mostly of non-libertarians?
I mean, it doesn't matter.
So that's why we keep driving the issues.
I think that's what matters, not, hey, well, let's try to go convert these people to libertarianism.
Right.
See, this is exactly my thinking, and we're going to get back to drone bombing, little kids to death in a second, and sanctions and the rest of that, the wars.
But on this point, I mean, this is what you're talking about is the realignment that we really need.
And, you know, this issue oriented thing where we oppose the very worst things that our government does the most and first, and try, as you say, not to convert the left and the right to libertarianism.
We're frankly always going to be outnumbered by super duper majorities of liberals and conservatives, leftists and rightists of different stripes.
But we can help them to get their priorities straight, and we can help to, you know, hopefully lead them and work together on prioritizing the biggest issues.
Because after all, like, we could go ahead and fight and have fun fighting over social security if we'd already abolished the entire empire and let all the drug prisoners go home to their families and taking care of, you know, the very worst things about what our government is doing to people right now, then the rest of this stuff, we could hash out without even being mad necessarily.
I mean, depending on how bad the national debt gets and whatever, but you feel me?
Absolutely.
And even with the welfare state, my hunch is that if you start knocking it out for some people, like farm subsidies, corporate grants, then those former recipients of welfare now have the incentive to join up with us to end welfare for this group and that group and this group and that group.
And suddenly, all of a sudden, the avalanche starts.
So yeah, I agree with you.
Priority matters.
I mean, when you're killing all these people abroad, that in my mind has priority over social security.
They're both evil, but I think their evil comes in gradations.
And the foreign policy of this United States, I consider the greatest threat to our freedom and well-being to be this foreign interventionism in the national security apparatus.
And that's the one we spend a lot of our time focusing on here at FFF.
Yeah.
Well, it really has gotten to the point too.
And, you know, I always like the way you put it, that this national security state has been grafted on to what was supposed to be the constitutional system around here, putting our government in the role of England enforcing a world empire that was never supposed to be our role, as contrary to the interests of having anything like a Republican form of government here and all of that.
But now when you look at, I mean, we're having this conversation deep into the future here, 2018, pretty far into the long war here.
And we've got at least special operations forces and CIA drones, but in many cases, infantry as well.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, more and more infantry in Somalia now too, fighting al-Shabaab.
We just found out there's been 500 bombings of Libya since 2011 and the victory over Qaddafi there, working on the consequences from that.
We've got troops in Mali, in Niger, in Chad, and, you know, down, I don't know all about it, but I should, down in Nigeria, fighting Boko Haram.
You know, as Nick Terse has explained, special operations forces embedded with militaries all throughout Africa, you know, 80 something nations or whatever it is there.
And so, you know, looking at this, looking at the trillion a year, or somewhere between, you know, 800 billion and a trillion dollars a year being spent on this militarism, how's this end?
How can we, I mean, you talk about blowback, think of all the consequences of today's policies for 20 years on, right?
All the ISIS and al-Qaeda guys who come home from Obama's war in Syria, where are they going to go?
And then what are they going to do?
And what are the second order and third order consequences of that?
Seems like we're in for a really rough ride here.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, we're looking at two separate problems here, but they're related.
One is foreign interventionism, and the other is a national security state.
And Eisenhower pointed this out.
See, a lot of Americans think we have the same type of government that we've always had since the United States was founded.
Eisenhower pointed out very clearly that such is not the case.
In his farewell address, where he talked about the military industrial complex and the huge arms industry and so forth, he says, this is a new way of life for the American people.
And the justification was the Cold War.
And the idea always was, okay, we need to convert this government to a national security state to fight the Cold War.
But as soon as the Cold War is over, you get your republic back.
Well, the Cold War ended, and we didn't get our republic back.
Instead, we got this activist interventionist national security state.
So it has the means to do to be the world's policeman and intervene in all these countries.
And it's important to point out that in all the places you mentioned, not one government in all of those regimes has attacked or invaded the United States.
So it's U.S. soldiers that are over there meddling and intervening in foreign conflicts, and they're producing the crises.
And then they use that as the excuse to say, oh, well, we're really sorry, but we need to have more surveillance, more powers for the NSA, more powers for the CIA, the FBI, because we have to keep you safe from the dangers that we're producing over there.
So the first objective is to stop the interventionism, just bring all the troops home from everywhere.
You'll be like Switzerland, Switzerland, Switzerland, limit the government to the defense of the United States.
And that's what they call isolationism.
Well, it's not isolationism.
It's reigning in the government and stopping it from intervening, and then ending all the embargoes and all the stuff that they're inflicting against other countries.
In other words, unleash the private sector to interact with the people of the world.
But the second problem is necessary, and that is we have to get a republic back, that it's just not a healthy situation to be a national security state.
North Korea is a national security state.
Egypt is a national security state.
And so, yes, that's what happened.
They grafted on what is essentially the fourth branch of government.
And as the noted professor of law at Tufts University, Michael Glennon, points out in his remarkable book called Double Government, this fourth branch really has become the most powerful branch.
The other three branches have the veneer that they're in control.
And the military and the CIA and the NSA let them have that veneer.
But the real power, the real people running the show, are the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
And that's why it's so dangerous.
In a sense, the system is very similar to the one in Egypt.
But in Egypt, the military is very much overt.
It's in control, overt control.
People can see it.
Here, it looks like the military, the CIA, and the NSA are sort of in the background.
They follow orders and so forth.
No one wants to think about the possibility that this, because most of the force of government is situated in this particular branch, that it's the one that's actually running the show.
You left out the FBI.
The FBI is another factor in this.
Now, the FBI was founded before the national security state came into existence in the 40s.
I think the FBI had come in the 20s or so.
But yes, it has become a quasi part of a national security state apparatus.
It all fits together.
Now, in places like Egypt, it's all just one apparatus.
I'm sure they have different departments and agencies and stuff.
But here, it makes it look like these are different agencies, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA.
But once you start thinking of it as one huge operation that is divided into subsets, the different little agencies, then you start seeing it as one giant national security establishment.
Yeah.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
So, now, back to killing people outright.
First of all, I wanted one note on when you mentioned North Korea and the sanctions on them, that when civilians die, that that's when we know they're working.
I mean, it sounds like kind of a cynical thing, but I'd remind people, and they can check it, that Rex Tillerson, when a fishing boat full of, I think they were already dead, or just absolutely famished, starving North Korean fishermen washed up in Japan, I think they were just dead bodies, washed up in this boat, that he said that this is proof that it's working, that the sanctions are doing a good job of making the North Korean people this desperate.
And that will, you know, be beneficial for driving Kim to the table.
That was just a few months ago, at the beginning of this year.
I didn't hear that.
But that's the measure.
See, we've become so accustomed to sanctions as a tool of foreign policy that hardly anyone questions the horrible immorality of this weapon.
There's a lady named Joy Gordon has done fantastic work trying to raise people's vision to how horrible this thing is.
She's got a great article that you can find online called Invisible War.
She's got a book out.
And we've got to just raise people's vision that this is a bad thing for a country like the United States to be doing, trying to starve people out, inflict economic harm on the populace.
And the aim is, okay, look, if we can create economic suffering among the populace, maybe they will have a revolution, like in Syria, which brings death and destruction on a massive scale.
We all know that revolutions do that because regimes are going to not go peacefully, or that there's going to be a military coup, or the hope is that the ruler abdicates, or he conforms his behavior to what the U.S. wants, which never happens.
We see that with Cuba.
And so all you do is cause misery, death, and destruction among innocent people.
I mean, the citizens of these countries, many of them are innocent of what their government does.
And yeah, interesting anecdote on this.
I was visiting Cuba once, and everybody was so nice to me.
I was just amazed.
They really love Americans.
They just hate the federal government.
But they draw a distinction.
See, a lot of Americans can't draw that distinction between the federal government and the country.
But I asked one guy, I said, why is everyone so nice to me after what my government has done with the embargo?
And he said, why should we hold you responsible for what your government does?
I thought that was a fascinating answer.
Yeah, exactly.
Just because you're holding us responsible for what our government does, doesn't mean that we're going to be like that.
Maybe we're the ones who taught him that lesson.
Exactly.
I mean, because that's what sanctions do.
It punishes the citizenry of a country because of what their government's doing.
I mean, where is the morality in that?
You know what I want to talk about for a second?
I read this thing once about the children of the Gaza Strip.
And also, it was in the Washington Post, so the reporter's unavailable to talk to.
There's also a study about this in Pakistan, living under drones, it's called.
And I think if people just search Gaza Strip, drones, Washington Post, it's five years ago or something.
And you've got to get through half an article worth of poor little Israel has no choice or whatever.
But then you get to the meat of the article.
And it's all about the absolute terror of growing up in Gaza with the sky constantly buzzing with drones.
So even if it's not an active canned hunt by Netanyahu and his buddies launching a massive war, everyday life means when you go outside, you duck and dodge and run across the street, or at least you're constantly worrying, even if you're just walking down the sidewalk boldly, that they might vaporize you.
They're definitely watching you, and they're definitely armed, and they never go away.
And think about the terror.
I mean, there's never been an airstrike in America ever, really, right?
Except our own hijacked planes.
Can you imagine the neighborhood where you grew up when you were a kid, if there had been armed Reaper drones preying and killing?
And you know in your experience that random people in your neighborhood have been killed in the recent time.
And so these are the kids, what I'm asking you about, I guess, to tell us what you think.
What about the people who aren't even killed in this thing at all?
They aren't starved to death, they don't lose their limb, but they've got to live in the terror of American air war for their whole childhood growing up.
I mean, what does that do to the psyche of a human person?
Oh, it's got to destroy them.
I mean, it's got to be so nightmarish, the thought that an American drone that you can't even see can suddenly fire a missile and kill not only the person it's targeting, but everybody around him.
And everybody around him is considered a justifiable death because he was near the target of the missile.
And here's the ultimate horror of this.
There's no trial here.
These are U.S. officials imposing the death penalty on people that they have decided are evil.
I mean, this is remarkable that government that purports to be a free and democratic country has the power to murder people.
I mean, really, that's what it amounts to, murder.
To just go anywhere in the world and assassinate people with these drones just by firing a missile on them and growing up into that, where at any moment something out of the sky that you can't even see is going to rain a missile that's going to blow up everybody around there.
It's got to be the worst thing in the world.
It's almost surreal to have to grow up in something like that.
And especially if you have loved ones and friends that have borne the brunt of this.
And of course, we all have seen the wedding parties that have been bombed in Afghanistan and that people were near the target.
But I question whether they even have the legitimate authority to kill anybody over there with their assassination program.
If you believe somebody's committed a crime, bring them to justice, either there in the country or through extradition or whatever.
But this is like those movies we used to watch where the cops would have their little death squads.
Or in Latin America, they had death squads.
That's what the U.S. is engaging in.
This goes back to the national security state, how the CIA and the Pentagon have omnipotent totalitarian powers.
And the ultimate totalitarian power is the power to kill somebody with impunity, where nobody calls you to account for it.
Yeah.
Well, so but the thing is, I mean, isn't your kind of instinct to think that, yeah, but you know, the intolerable must come to an end soon, right?
Like we can't have this.
It's insane.
It's outrageous.
As it well, sorry, I'm sitting here reading the title as I'm saying this.
Why no outrage over this outrage over the killing of children by the U.S. government?
And so but instincts are wrong, right?
The situation in Palestine, the outright occupation, never mind the Nakba, but the outright occupation has gone on for half a century.
And it goes on.
I mean, Mao was able to rule China.
That was the most intolerable thing ever.
And it still happened for 25 years, right?
Yeah.
But, you know, that cannot dissuade those of us who see the wrong from continuing to fight against it, because things can always shift.
I mean, 30 years ago, when we talked about the horrors of the drug war, people thought we were nuts when we call for drug legalization.
And now we stuck by our guns and we kept advocating drug legalization.
And now it's it's on the table.
I mean, I think we're getting close, at least with respect to marijuana.
But I think the whole drug war is going to go.
And so when we see these areas where these wrongs are taking place, I think it's imperative that we continue adhering to principle and doing what we can.
I mean, sometimes you just can't change things.
You can't change the world.
But you can you can continue speaking the truth and then ultimately thinking the truth will will will cut through the falses like butter.
But there's personal example, too.
You know, in these sanctions, there's a guy named Bert Sachs that is just heroic.
This guy knew what the sanctions on Iraq were.
He knew what was happening with the children.
And so he decides he's going to take medicine into the people of Iraq.
And he knew was violating the sanctions.
And, you know, this would prevent more deaths.
And therefore, that would inhibit the chance of regime change if people's lives are being saved.
And that was the opposite of what the sanctions were supposed to do.
They were supposed to continue killing these children.
Well, they went after Sachs with a vengeance.
I mean, you talk about, you know, Moby Dick and the obsessive nature of Ahab there.
That's how they went after Sachs.
They fined him ten thousand dollars.
And then they started adding penalty and interest on top of that.
And this is the Treasury Department.
And Sachs is just everlasting credit.
He said, the heck with you, I'm not paying a dime.
And he fought them and fought them and fought them.
And hardly anyone, it seemed like, from what I could tell, came to his defense.
The Seattle papers where he was from came to his defense.
But maybe there were some leftists that did it.
But this guy deserves, I mean, the Medal of Freedom, as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, he is just heroic.
And he ends up winning.
It took him like, he fought him for like 10 or 11 years.
It's really a great story.
And finally, some federal courts dismissed the case, and he never paid him a dime.
But that's the type of thing we need in society, that kind of heroism.
Even if somebody doesn't want to break the law that way, like he did, at least speak out against it.
I mean, we can all speak out against injustice, Scott.
And that's what you and I are doing.
And that's what other people are doing.
And I think that's, that's the key to this.
You just got to keep protesting.
Well, this is no argument for these policies.
And I know you would never agree with them either.
But I know you also are exposed all the time to arguments.
I just saw one this morning about taxes, but usually it's conscription.
Unless there's a draft, people won't care.
They won't protest and end the war like they did in Vietnam.
Otherwise, it's on autopilot forever.
I saw one this morning that said, at Tom Dispatch, great article about the true cost of war, now $6 trillion of terror war now, $8 trillion.
And how, but it's all deferred through debt and through inflation and QE, this and that and whatever.
And so unless people have an outright tax hike, this is your share of the war in Afghanistan.
They're just not going to react.
I mean, look at what we're doing here.
We're just treading water as hell, man, and getting nowhere.
Not sure about that.
There was a lady named Elizabeth Cobbs, who teaches at Texas A&M. About a year and a half ago or so, she wrote this fantastic op-ed called The Founders' Foreign Policy.
And it was published in the LA Times.
And it detailed, you know, how different America's founding foreign policy is than the interventionist one we have today.
And she cited a Pew Foundation poll there that said, 67%, something like that, maybe getting the number wrong, but it was extraordinarily high, that 67% of respondents said that it's now time for America to mind its own business and let the world figure out its own solution to its own problems.
And that that number had actually gone up from a poll that had been, a similar poll had been conducted a few years before.
Well, that's an incredible statistic.
I mean, if close to 70% of the American people now say, it's time to come home and let the world figure out its own solutions, that's essentially saying we don't want the U.S. government to be the world's policeman anymore.
Now, it's a huge obstacle.
You've got the, I mean, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA have assets in Congress, and they, I'm sure, have assets everywhere.
And so it's difficult to move this huge thing.
But, you know, ideas have consequences.
Ideas have power.
This is why totalitarian dictators shut down people like you and me, because they know that even when they have total power, ideas on liberty can sweep across a country that brings down even the most powerful regimes.
And that's what I think we need to just keep in mind, that we can bring all this wrongdoing to a stop.
But the only way to do that is to continue fighting.
Hey, can you give me five more minutes about Cuba here?
Yeah.
So why do we still have a Cold War against Cuba?
Or do we still?
Obama ended it.
How much?
Yeah, that is a fascinating question.
I mean, you know, Trump's telling North Korea, if you denuclearize, we'll lift the sanctions.
Well, as I wrote, Cuba denuclearized in 1962, and we still got the embargo against them, squeezing the lifeblood out of them.
Well, and under the excuse that they were a forward asset of the U.S.S.R., which stopped existing, what, 27 years ago now?
Right.
I mean, the whole idea, well, the whole thing against Cuba has been ridiculous from the beginning, you know, that it was this communist dagger threat to national security.
Cuba never attacked the United States, never threatened to attack the United States, never had the means to invade the United States.
It was ridiculous from the beginning.
And the only reason they brought those Soviet missiles in was to deter the Pentagon and CIA from invading again, which is what they wanted Kennedy to do.
Which they'd already done in 1961, right?
Sorry, not everybody remembers.
Yeah, the CIA had invaded through a paramilitary army at the Bay of Pigs, and they failed disastrously.
But after that, the Pentagon continued to demand that Kennedy invade Cuba.
And Kennedy kept saying no, and then you've got Operation Northwoods, where it was going to be a false flag operation.
They unanimously recommended this to Kennedy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Kennedy said no.
Well, Castro got wind of all this.
He knew he couldn't beat the Pentagon and the CIA in a real full-scale war.
So he asked the Soviet Union, bring in these missiles to deter these guys, or to let me defend myself.
And the Soviet Union says, okay.
Well, as soon as Kennedy says, okay, I will not let the Pentagon and the CIA invade, it's not going to happen, Khrushchev says, great, I'll remove the missiles, and so they removed the missiles.
But they kept the embargo on.
Why?
I think it's because the Pentagon and the CIA have never been able to get over the fact that the communist regime defeated them at the Bay of Pigs, that they never succeeded in their assassination attempts against Castro, and that it's just all personal.
They can't get beyond the fact that the Cold War ended 20-something years ago, and it's really time to just normalize relations, which is what Kennedy was doing at the time he was assassinated.
I mean, it's just outrageous.
I guess I wouldn't be surprised if they started using drones to kill Cubans, you know?
Well, of course not, because their idea always was that it's not wrong to kill a communist.
I mean, look, they were trying to assassinate Castro.
They enter into this partnership with the mafia, this heroin-running criminal organization that murders people.
So the CIA and the mafia got this assassination partnership going, and they said, oh, well, it's okay to kill Fidel Castro because he's a communist.
Well, since when is the person's ideological or political belief subjected to assassination or murder, which is what assassination really is?
Hardly anyone asks that question.
Where do you get the authority to murder somebody in a foreign country simply because of his ideological or political views?
Supreme Court, man.
Sovereign immunity.
That's what they call it.
Qualified immunity.
And deference to the national security establishment.
I mean, that's the other pathetic thing that the courts have always said.
Your mass murder is a political question.
We won't intervene.
I'm sorry?
I was mocking the court there.
Oh, exactly.
Exactly.
Political question.
Well, any excuse to defer to the military and the CIA and the NSA.
You know, the thing about Cuba is, it's just like with Yemen.
It's just as absurd as it is cruel.
I mean, what's going on?
It's completely crazy.
I mean, think about it.
Like, if everyone just found out that this was going on, wouldn't they think it was totally nuts that we have any kind of sanction, restriction, embargo of any kind on Cuba?
I mean, it would make sense to me if they passed a law saying Americans can't buy up their island or something like that, because that's been a problem for them in the past.
But even then, so?
I mean, Mexico has a law like that, too.
Big deal.
We're not enemies of them.
Here's the thing that nobody thinks about.
The embargo is really an attack on our freedom here at home.
I mean, when you go to Cuba and spend money there, the U.S. puts you in jail.
It's not a cashier that puts you in jail.
The U.S. government puts you in jail for freedom of travel, exercising freedom of travel and exercising economic liberty and private property by spending your money there without their permission.
And so it's incredible.
In the name of fighting the loss of freedom under a communist regime, they destroy our freedom here at home.
Yeah.
And make a lot of money.
If you're going to fight communism or socialism, fight it with freedom.
Don't fight it with more communism and socialism and economic control.
It's ridiculous.
You'd think that'd be common sense, but maybe it is.
All right.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Hey, I always enjoy it, Scott.
Thanks so much.
Enjoyed the visit.
Hey, have a good week, man.
Good to talk to you.
Thank you.
You too.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys, that is the great Jacob Hornberger.
He's at FFF.org, the Future of Freedom Foundation.
And you know what I should say, too, about his foundation and this website here, that they've been in existence since 89 and online since 94.
And there is a ton of great, not just Hornberger, but Bovard and Anthony Gregory and all kinds of great writers.
And now decades worth of archives of great stuff to read.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash scotthorton show, libertarianinstitute.org.
And buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, scotthortonshow.
Thanks, guys!
