Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Mike Meharry from the 10th Amendment Center.
That's 10thAmendmentCenter.com.
Oh, he got in trouble with the U.S. government the other day.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Hey, Scott.
It's great to be on.
I always appreciate you having me.
This is my favorite show to be on, by the way.
Oh, good.
Well, I'm trying not to screw up too bad.
Well, you can't screw up.
It's your show.
So if there's any screw up, it's my fault, right?
Probably not.
So listen, when I say you got in trouble by the state there, I mean official government propagandists challenged your claims on official Russian propaganda channels.
So, okay, fair enough.
These things happen.
So you went on the RT, and you made some claims.
And then what happened was the voice of America attempted to take you to task, I guess is the best way to put it.
So let's start out with you carrying water for the Ruskies here.
What was all that about?
Yeah, I was a Russian bot.
And I knew I was going to get some crap for going on RT.
And I get it.
But my thought is, if somebody's going to give me a platform to say what I'm saying every day, and talk about US foreign policy, particularly in this case, the economic warfare that the United States wages, it's often the prelude for the shooting wars.
We do all these sanctions and maneuver countries into a corner.
So they offered to let me talk about it.
And so I did.
The original interview was actually a live TV interview.
And they did a little web story based on what I said on the thing.
And basically what I said was that the United States uses the dollar as a weapon.
And it uses the swift payment system, which is the global system that moves payments all across the world.
It's done in dollars.
And the fact that it's done in dollars gives the US a tremendous amount of influence over it, shall we say.
And they use this as a foreign policy tool, particularly to enforce sanctions.
So this is what I said.
And yeah, so the Voice of America, they have a fact-checking arm called polygraph.info, which I'd never heard of before.
I don't really think a lot of people actually read this, but it's out there.
Not to be confused with antipolygraph.org, the great website of the heroic George Matsky there.
Go ahead, sorry.
Yeah, that's a much better website.
Go there.
But yeah, so they sent me an email and asked me a couple of questions and asked if I had been quoted properly, which of course I had because it was a live segment.
So they really couldn't quote me improperly.
And I made the decision not to respond to the email because I knew – you could tell by the tone of the email that they were basically going to – it was going to basically be a hit piece on what I said.
And I figured anything that I contributed would probably be used against me or misconstrued.
So I just decided to ignore their email but instead actually respond to what I figured that they would say before they actually said it.
So Michael Bolden and I got together.
He's the executive director over at the Tenth Amendment Center, and we put our heads together and we decided, you know what?
We're going to respond to this because we knew – I had done some research.
I know the Voice of America's position on this.
They claim that – the words that they use is that the US government has no control over SWIFT, which is technically true.
They don't have direct control over it.
They don't run it.
But they have tremendous amount of influence.
So I actually went through, did a real long article debunking what I knew that they were going to say, laying out the case, using a lot of documented information from mainstream news sources like Bloomberg and Reuters and others to show that the United States does indeed put pressure on SWIFT to cut people and banks and countries out of the payment system in order to push that foreign policy.
And so I did that.
We wrote the article, and interestingly, the Voice of America folks actually did their fact check based on the pre-rebuttal that I did, which was kind of fun.
And we did – Which is big of them, by the way, that they could have just gone with what you said on RT, but they went for the more substantive follow-up.
I have to say to you, my friend here, that their criticism of what y'all wrote is just devastating here.
For example, they say, in February 2012, SWIFT responded to US and international pressure and agreed to cut off Iranian banks from the system as part of sanctions against that country.
So obviously, you've been completely refuted here.
Yeah, yeah.
It was – devastating is a great word to use.
And I like the way Daniel McAdams – we had some back and forth on this as well, and Daniel put it really well.
He basically said they confirmed everything that you said and then called you wrong.
Right.
Yeah, exactly right.
That was the fact check.
And this is the truth.
This is a fact.
The United States uses its position as the world's economic power.
It uses the dollar as the official reserve currency, and they use that as a weapon in foreign policy.
And people can argue about whether this is a good way to use power or not.
I say it's not because I think ultimately it undermines the dollar and could have very bad ramifications on the US economy down the road.
But to try to say that the US doesn't do that is just absurd.
And the fact that they went to the trouble to fact-check Mike Meharry – I mean who the hell is Mike Meharry, right – shows that this is a narrative that they really don't want to get out there in the mainstream.
They really want to crush this down.
This is the first time they've tried to debunk the notion that SWIFT is a foreign policy tool.
They did it way back in – as far back as like 2012, 2013.
So this isn't anything new.
This is something that they don't want you to know.
Didn't they just try to – or didn't they just succeed in kicking Venezuela out of SWIFT as well?
I think that they probably did.
Sorry, I should have Googled that while you were talking to make sure, but I could swear I remember that from just a few months ago.
I'm thinking that that's true, and it's part of the broader economic warfare that goes on, and we don't talk a lot about that.
We talk about the shooting wars, and the economic warfare is in some ways can be even more devastating.
We know that some 300,000 children died as a result of economic sanctions on Iraq before the invasion of Iraq.
That's a lot of kids.
That's a serious impact on innocent people because a bunch of governments are pissed off at each other, and we don't talk about that.
And then like I said, oftentimes this foreign policy tool is used, and they maneuver countries into a corner.
And then when the shooting war starts, the US points the finger and says, look, they started this.
Well, no, the US started this years ago when they started putting economic pressure on.
It's just another part of the warfare state that is kind of under the radar, but I think just as devastating and oftentimes the run-up to the real shooting wars.
And if you are a non-interventionist like I am, if you believe that we should do everything possible to avoid these wars, to avoid killing innocent people, to avoid starving children, then we need to address the economic aspect of this as well.
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Well, I mean, and we're seeing this with Iran right now where even under Obama, they were called crippling sanctions and we know severely affected the population of that country.
And now Trump's sanctions are much harsher because he's even gone ahead and banned the waivers for Korea, Japan, and other American allies in the Pacific who are heavily dependent on Iranian oil.
And so, and we have reports out of Iran already, people going without medicine, of course, the destruction of their currency, not just by monetary inflation, but by the financial war against them.
And the U.S. essentially is the world government.
They can tell any corporation on earth, you better not trade with Iran or else.
And other than the Chinese, pretty much any other company from any other country in the world must bow down to that, swift or otherwise.
And we see from – there's no ban on medical exports to Iran.
It's not like that.
But what it is is that the shipping companies just won't dare to defy the sanctions.
The central bank isn't there to clear the transaction and all this kind of stuff.
And so it just doesn't happen.
The trade breaks down even without specific sanctions on those specific goods.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's interesting because the other narrative that the VOA people have put out is that the swift corporation, the actual entity, is European-based and therefore Europe has control over it and it operates under European law, which is true.
But here's the interesting thing.
The Europeans, the EU, Britain, Germany, they're not really as keen on this pressure on Iran as the United States is.
In fact, they want to continue oil trade and various other interactions with Iran.
They didn't want to remove themselves from the nuclear arms deal.
So what the Europeans have done is they've created an alternative payment system in order to circumvent swift and to circumvent the US sanctions.
So if Europe has so much control over swift, that would raise the question why in the hell did they have to create an alternative payment system in order to get around the sanctions?
I mean why couldn't they just put the pressure on swift and say, hey, let us do our transactions?
Well, they couldn't do that because the US is the 500-pound gorilla in the room.
And even China isn't immune.
Back when the United States was ratcheting up sanctions against North Korea under the Obama administration, the United States directly told China that if they did not go along, if they tried to defy the sanction regime, that they were going to basically lock China out of the swift system.
And when you start swinging a billy club around, when you start bullying people, you need to watch out.
You darn well better be able to back up what you're saying.
And that's what really concerns me just from an economic standpoint because all the Chinese really would have to do to cripple the US economy is start dumping US treasuries on the market.
I mean they hold trillions of dollars worth of US debt.
The United States depends on China to monetize the debt and actually maintain the empire that it has.
It's playing with fire with these economic sanctions.
We all know that the US is probably not going to get beat in a shooting war, at least not directly.
I mean I guess they could get bled into oblivion, but the economic warfare is a little bit shakier in countries across the world, Russia, China, and not just them.
We're seeing countries like Poland, Hungary, buying gold, trying to diversify away from the dollar.
So people are getting tired of it, and at some point the house of cards is going to collapse and the United States is going to find itself in a position where the dollar isn't all that strong, and that's not going to be good for the US economy.
Well, I just don't understand why you're such an isolationist.
Yeah, isn't that weird?
And I'm not an isolationist.
In fact, think about this.
We're arguing about sanctions.
Isn't sanctioning somebody isolationist?
You're trying to isolate them.
I'm all for free trade.
I'm a George Washington, Thomas Jefferson foreign policy guy, robust commerce with everybody, friendly relationships as far as is possible, and entangling alliances with nobody.
And that's a big part of the problem is the US has gotten into all these entangled alliances with countries like Israel and NATO and all of this stuff and used that position to basically empire build.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to call the US an empire.
Some people bristle at that because it has negative connotations, but we call a spade a spade.
And I want friendly relationships with people.
I don't mean anything against any Iranians.
I mean they've never bothered me any, so why don't we try to open up some trade, open up some negotiations, try to be friendly?
I say that with all of these countries.
It's much better to talk than it is to bluster and bully and ultimately kill each other.
So, yeah, that's why I'm a quote-unquote isolationist.
It's really funny, too.
I'd like to see the list.
I think there was a story like this, maybe William Blum or somebody had a thing like this back a few years ago that listed all the countries that we have under virtual blockade to one degree or another right now.
And it's probably more than half of them or something.
Even though most of the countries in the world are America's allies, we've still got sanctions on some of them.
And certainly any so-called rogue state outside of the American world order is under layers and layers and decades of sanctions.
And then, yeah, if you oppose that, there is no other term.
I mean, American media, they cannot, I don't know if you even saw this where, I'm sorry, I don't know if you saw this where even they couldn't pronounce non-interventionism.
They were talking, a TV station was talking about Tulsi Gabbard and the guy's like non-non-non-interventionism.
Sorry, that's such an alien concept to me.
I have no idea what these people are talking about.
There's only one fair description for someone who's against constant imperialism and invasion and regime change and carpet bombing campaigns, and that's an isolationist.
And if you say you want to be friends with the whole wide world, just not sanction or bomb them, isolationist.
Sorry, we don't have any other words for that.
We can't even pronounce non-interventionism.
And people can read about that, by the way, at fairnessandaccuracyandreportingfair.org.
They had a write-up about that.
The other thing that's interesting along those lines is people that get into any kind of prominent position that take a non-interventionist position end up getting unpersoned.
They're trying to unperson Tulsi Gabbard now, and there's a lot of things wrong with Tulsi, and I don't even know that she's the best foreign policy person in the world, but she's certainly more non-interventionist than anybody else that's out there in the Democratic Party right now.
But you look at it.
They're trying everything in the world to discredit her.
They ignore her.
When they do have her on, they throw hardball questions at her as opposed to the softball stuff that they throw at the other candidates, and we saw the same thing with Ron Paul when he was running.
I remember back in the day when you'd get the polling and they would have all the leaders in the polls, and you noticed that there was this big percentage that was missing.
Well, those were Ron Paul supporters that they were just completely ignoring.
So if you're a non-interventionist, if you actually believe that it's not a good idea to kill people all over the world, starve children, and cripple other countries' economies, well, then you deserve to be unpersoned and not even fit to have a voice on the stage.
That's the one place where you can always guarantee that you'll get bipartisanship, and that's when it comes to sticking its nose into other corners of the world.
All of a sudden, we have all the bipartisanship you could ever want.
Well, you know, the funny thing is, too, though, is for crafty politicians, this is a huge gap.
This is a giant opening in the market for them to exploit in political terms.
A new poll just came out that said the American people and the soldiers are all agreed by super majorities.
More than 63% that say never should have fought the terror wars.
In other words, forget it.
The whole 21st century shouldn't have done it.
Bush and Obama's wars shouldn't have done them.
And so, you know, for Tulsi Gabbard or for anybody else who wants the American people to support them despite the wishes of the establishment and the central state, there you go.
There's no better way to frame the opinions of the American people versus the opinions of those with the power than on the question of war and peace.
And that's how Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and that's how Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders or whoever could beat Trump, if they just focus on the wars.
And the fact that the media won't have it just makes it that much better, you know, for Gabbard or anyone else.
Let's make that a talking point against the media.
Maybe that's the one thing about Ron is he's just too friendly of a guy to scapegoat the media the way Trump did.
But maybe if he had decided just to pick one public enemy, it could have been the media.
Look at how much they hate me.
Why do you think is the answer for that?
You know what I mean?
And just certainly in this time, I don't know about in 2008 and 12, certainly in 2020, that narrative is wide open for the taking.
Yeah, you remember those fond old days of the campaign where it almost looked like Trump might kind of try to be non-interventionist.
And he actually talked about the Iraq war being a debacle and even in places like South Carolina, and that was well-received.
So that messaging didn't hurt him any.
But you're just up against such a tremendous power when you talk about the military-industrial complex.
And it's almost become a cliche.
You say that and people are like, oh, yeah, some kind of nut job.
He's talking about the military-industrial.
It's a thing, and it's a powerful, powerful thing, and it just goes to show how powerful it really is because it completely overrides the voice of the average person out there.
But I'm a little bit optimistic that there's more and more war weariness out there, and maybe this will get some kind of traction because you've said this before.
I completely agree with you.
The number one issue is the wars.
I'm concerned about a lot of different things and federal overreach and domestic surveillance and all these kind of things.
But so much of it flows out of the warfare state, the militarization of police, the surveillance state at the domestic level, the economy, the spending.
All of that is attached and part of this warfare state that we've developed.
If we could get rid of the wars, a lot of this other stuff would vanish on its own.
So I'm with you, man.
It's the number one issue, and I just wish more people would vocally say what is resonating with the masses out there.
You can hear the Scott Horton Show and Anti-War Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM, KPFK in LA, kpfk.org, APS Radio at apsradio.com, the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
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And thanks.
You know, there's that famous phrase from Jean Kirkpatrick, who was a neoconservative and was Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, where at the end of the Cold War, it was in 1990, the USSR was still there, but the Cold War was over.
And she wrote this piece.
You know, I was familiar with the phrase.
I didn't realize it was actually, she had written an entire article titled, A Normal Country in a Normal Time.
And she talked all about how, forget greatness.
This is an OG neocon, a real shockmanite from the Social Democrats USA, turned Reaganite.
You know, she is one of them, absolutely.
And she says, look, the greatness of a country is not measured by their heroics in foreign policy of righting all the wrongs in the world.
It's the way that people live at home.
And, you know, whether they're free, whether they're safe, whether they can prosper and thrive, whether we're progressing on this, that and the other kind of thing.
And so that's what we need to focus on.
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, we shouldn't think of them as out of our way.
We should think of them as no longer justifying our attempt to dominate the rest of the planet in the name of protecting the planet from communism.
It's dead now.
We're okay now.
And so just think about if Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and all of those guys had all just had heart attacks and died right then.
And you just had Jean Kirkpatrick and Brent Scowcroft and even Colin Powell or any of these kooks, other than the very worst of the neocons and the right-wing hawks up there, to hold that consensus.
I mean, I don't know, Powell and them, they're pretty one-worlder types.
But without the neocon hard-edge hawks pushing all of that stuff, I mean, it's pretty easy.
I don't know.
What if Perot had won instead of Clinton and had called off Iraq War I and a half that Clinton had waged?
Or what if even stupid Dukakis had won and George Bush Sr. had never taken us to Iraq War I?
And just the whole post-Cold War era was not based on bombing Iraq.
And think of this, 30 years of bombing Iraq and turning the whole Middle East inside out and none of it had to happen at all.
And just what if they had taken Jean Kirkpatrick's advice to be a normal country in a normal time?
And the only reason I'm going on and on like this is because just imagine for a second how different everything would be if we had just not had a foreign policy after the dissolution of the USSR.
And instead focused on, hey, our highest political goal here is freedom for our own people.
Yeah, the Iraq War I was such a turning point, not only in the trajectory of foreign policy but also in the mindset of the country, I think.
It was such an easy, clean war.
It was on TV.
I mean I was just graduating from college and I remember distinctly when that war started, going home after work and sitting on the couch and turning on the TV like this war was some kind of spectator sport.
And we had all the technology and the military learned its lesson from Vietnam and they carefully controlled the narrative.
They carefully controlled the media.
We had the yellow ribbons and we welcomed the troops home victorious.
And it was at that point that skepticism about war and U.S. foreign policy disappeared and was replaced with basically – I don't know.
I hate to say bootlicking but basically bootlicking where everybody is thanking the troops and it was that success, quote-unquote, that I think turned the mentality of the United States.
And all of a sudden you had every football game.
You had the patriotic displays and our heroes at home and blah-da-dee-blah, blah-blah.
That mindset, that change in thinking I think has allowed this to go on because I think if we still had the skepticism that arose out of Vietnam, it would have been a whole lot harder for the United States to move down the path that it has.
But so many people have bought into it.
Robert Perry thought that that was the single most important overriding reason for Iraq War I.
That after, as Perot said in the debate, as we all know, the administration has essentially invited Saddam to go ahead and take the northern oil fields of Kuwait.
And he just got carried away and took the whole thing.
But then they saw the opportunity to have a short, quick war.
No jungle cover.
No Ho Chi Minh Trail.
We'll just blast the hell out of them from the air and send in our tank divisions and knock the hell out of this Third World Army.
We'll talk about how big it is and not how weak it is.
And it'll be a great triumph.
And we'll tie a yellow ribbon around every tree.
And then, as Bush Sr. said, I have the quote here somewhere.
We have finally, by God, it's a great day for America.
We have kicked the Vietnam syndrome.
That was this terrible disease of the American mind that the people were reluctant to send their sons off to any more of these complete debacles.
And Bush Sr., of course, had said repeatedly, and this was the cover of Newsweek, was this will not be another Vietnam.
That was 30 years ago.
We're still fighting in Iraq right now.
Exactly.
You know the thing that's interesting too?
I took a really interesting class when I was in journalism school, which was like 06, 07.
And I was still pretty much in neocon mode at this point.
So I didn't really appreciate it to the degree that I do now looking back.
But it kind of traced the way that the media has reported war in the modern era.
So it kind of started in World War II and worked our way forward.
And the US military learned a huge lesson in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, they basically let reporters wander around and cover what they wanted to.
And, of course, that resulted in pictures of bodies being brought home and the realities of the horror of war.
And the Pentagon press people, they were bound to determine that that was not going to happen again, that they were going to control the narrative, that they were going to control the reporters, that they were going to make sure that the images and the messaging that they wanted out there was going to be what's out there.
So they made sure that reporters weren't just wandering around reporting on stuff.
And it came to its head in 2003 when we had the whole concept of the embedded reporter.
Well, how objective are you really going to be when you're dependent on the guys next to you to protect your butt?
You're not going to say bad things about what they're doing or report on the horrors of war.
It's going to be all cheerleading and propaganda, and that's exactly what it was.
And as a media person, I miss the days of reporting on the reality of war.
They need to beam the reality in.
Go into Walter Reed and show these guys with their limbs blown off and their heads screwed up.
Show the mutilated children that were killed in a drone strike.
Make that real because I think for most people, war is just this abstraction.
It's a video game.
They're even using the damn video game imagery for army commercials now.
It makes me sick every time I see these army commercials.
It's like you're watching a damn video game that they all play.
I can't even remember the name of it.
Call of Duty.
Call of Duty.
That's no mistake either.
It's not that the army is necessarily behind all those games, but they work with them on all those games.
And they have projects dating back to the 90s.
There's even that Robin Williams movie, Toys, where it's all about just growing up drone pilots to be drone pilots from the time they're little kids playing these games.
Ender's Game.
Same thing.
Yeah.
So it's a huge network of – we see the shooting wars, but there's a whole lot that goes on behind it of media manipulation, of propaganda, of economic warfare, of corporations and government entities locked together.
It's a gross thing, and you end up with a bunch of dead people.
You know what?
And the plain truth of it is so plain to see, too.
As you said, people want to try to dismiss the military-industrial complex as some kind of conspiracy theory.
Well, the phrase was coined by five-star general-turned-president Ike Eisenhower.
What kind of nutball was he?
He was saying, listen, the companies that sell the weapons to the military have a lot at stake.
And you people need to use your democratic voting power to keep them in check, keep them from running away with this whole state.
And guess what?
We all know there never was a reckoning in all the time since then.
They spend a trillion dollars a year on militarism in this country.
Oh, yeah, no, but that has nothing to do with why it keeps happening or anything like that.
You're some kind of nut if you think that the cart could possibly come before the horse.
I mean it must have been the Soviets who coined the phrase self-licking ice cream cone, right?
Oh, no, that was our Pentagon describing themselves.
You know?
Give me a break, man.
I've got a relative that is a defense contractor, and my wife and I were actually talking about this the other day because I ran into him at a funeral.
And he works in submarines, and the company that he works for is based in Indiana.
And I was telling my wife kind of what he did, and she goes, wait a minute.
Why do you have a company in Indiana making components for submarines?
There's no oceans or water in Indiana.
And the reason that they have companies like this that are involved in something like a submarine in an inland state like Indiana is it's political.
Because it makes it harder to shut the program down along the way when they decide, oh, we need to downsize this.
The congressman can all run out and say, oh, no, look.
It will take jobs away in 45 states if we get rid of this tank or this submarine.
All of this is intentional.
Donald Trump, as much as Ike Eisenhower from the other point of view, has made this perfectly plain himself, repeatedly exaggerating the amount of money that America is making off of arms sales to Saudis.
He even claimed at one point in the last few weeks that a million American jobs depend on selling weapons to Saudi.
I mean, what a crock.
Who could possibly believe that?
But he does.
Somebody told him that, and he went, oh, wow, really?
OK.
And that's a thing of his now is how America would go out of business if we weren't selling weapons.
And the thing is, is it's a lot of money to the corporations involved.
But in terms of the overall GDP of America, it's a drop in the bucket.
You could fire every single one of these people that works for these arms companies and make them get real jobs.
And it wouldn't cause a recession or anything.
It'd be a blip.
The jobs that we're talking about overall are probably still in the low millions out of 350 million of us.
So come on.
Right.
Well, and instead of making bombs and things that we never get to use, all of that production capacity could be used to make things that actually people want.
But even in the transition, right?
Even if I Dream of Jeannie fired them all and so you all have to get real jobs now, it'd still be fine.
Even for the few weeks it took them to all find real jobs.
There's no big deal at all.
No full loss.
And then Trump comes out and says, oh, hey, it's $450 billion.
So in other words, I mean, how else do you put that?
America is a mercenary force.
The USA on the global scene is there to kill people at the behest of foreign powers.
Not that we didn't already know that, but that's the way the president himself explains it.
Well, let's look at the other side of the equation, too.
You can – oh, yeah, the military and the defense contractors, they produce all of this GDP growth for the United States.
Well, let's look at the other side.
How much money is the United States wasting on all of this military interventionism?
And look at the condition of the US economy.
We're $22 trillion in debt, and that's not the real debt.
I mean that's the official debt.
The real debt is far, far higher than that.
The Federal Reserve has to monetize all of this by devaluing our currency.
So this is costing you and I a tremendous amount of money for what?
For nothing.
I'm not getting anything out of this.
I mean I – somebody is going to say, oh, well, Mike, it's getting your safety.
Well, I just am skeptical of the idea of some poor Iranian peasant is a threat to my health and well-being.
And this is a – I put this at the end of the article on Swift to kind of drive home the broader picture.
Since 2001, US wars have cost each American taxpayer $23,000.
So think about this.
If you had had to write a check to the Pentagon every year for the last 17 years, you would have had to write a $1,352.94 check to the Pentagon every single year just to fund your portion of the war.
I damn well guarantee you if people actually had to sit and write that check out, the wars would stop.
And two, people want to fantasize and daydream and think, well, my money went to provide cover fire for our brave infantry guys on the front line.
But no, it didn't.
It actually was just stolen, embezzled money that never did go to pay for some tires they didn't need for a plane they weren't flying or some insane thing.
That every bit of everything they've taxed your entire lifetime, they piss away in an hour and a half.
That's the part that actually makes me so mad, too, because I'm a working class kind of a guy.
And what's the hugest of margins to me was the amount of wealth they take from me and from people who make the kind of money that I make is everything to us.
It's the difference between some health care for our wife or not.
It's the difference between private or public school or the difference between having bail money for your brother or not or God knows what.
It's everything to us.
And yet to the government that taxes us, it's nothing.
We're talking about fractions of remainders on the edge of a thing that was all just waste in the first place.
A whole lifetime worth of taxation just evaporated away into the ether.
Hate them.
I do, too.
Sorry.
I got a chip on my shoulder.
It's not ever going away, Mike.
I'm just stuck like this.
I'm with you because I tell you what, every single month, $350 disappears out of my checking account and goes to the IRS.
And it ain't personal.
It's for everybody.
That's the thing.
And by the way, and I'm sorry I'm so late and out of time, I wanted to talk less and give you a chance to talk more about the Tenth Amendment Center.
But what I will do is this, is I will tell everybody to go to your website.
First of all, check out this article at RT.U.S. is using Swift as a kind of billy club is a story about Mike's appearance there.
And then this hilarious confirmation in the guise of an attack on Mike is at polygraph.info.
It's called RT Falsely Claims U.S. Uses Swift as a Weapon.
And they go on to confirm every bit of it in there, of course.
And then, again, tenthamendmentcenter.com.
It's Mike and the great Michael Bolden over there as well.
And they got write-ups for you on all this.
It's all about interposition, nullification, and the process of using power from the bottom up to tell the national government to stop as best as possible.
It's really great stuff.
And please, everybody, go look at it, tenthamendmentcenter.com.
Thank you very much again, Mike.
Great to talk to you.
Thanks, Scott.
It's always a pleasure.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Thanks, Scott.
