All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And our first speaker is somebody I think most of you know pretty well.
He's Scott Horton.
He's someone I've known for years and years and years when he was a young guy still doing pirate radio.
Over the years, he's conducted thousands and thousands of interviews.
He's perhaps best known for his book about Afghanistan, this war we never, ever, ever seem to get out of called Fool's Errand, the Longest War in U.S. History.
And he's got a new book out which contains all of his interviews with Ron Paul.
We've got all these books out front, and I'm sure he'd be happy to sign them for you.
And I'm sure a lot of you in this room used to follow and read Justin Raimondo on antiwar.com.
I certainly did most days.
And it's a little painful to wake up in the morning and not see his acerbic overnight tweets from the West Coast.
But nonetheless, I think Scott is really the rightful and proper heir to Justin and antiwar.com.
So please welcome him.
Hi, how are you guys doing?
Yeah.
All right.
Tom Woods told me always start with a joke, but I couldn't come up with any jokes.
So you're gonna have to settle for this.
I checked my morning email yesterday, and on the email list of a site called Defense News, which is pretty much just war propaganda, it's sponsored by Northrop Grumman.
They sometimes have some good journalism in there.
And they had a story that said that the Air Force is gonna embark on a brand new program to see if they can get the F-22 and the F-35 to be able to talk to each other.
That's it.
That's the joke.
I'm glad you guys liked it.
So here's my new book, The Great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004 through 2019.
There's 39 of them in here as current as this June, and including my speech that I gave about how much I love Ron here last year.
And I'm really proud of it.
It's really great.
And there's actually a little bit of story behind it, which is that the IRS is trying to kill me.
And you know, because I've been working for antiwar.com for literal peanuts for 15 years.
So they're going back 15 years on me.
And I thought, you know what, I wanted to put this book out anyway.
And I thought, you know what I could do is just like remember when the IRS came after Willie Nelson, and he put out the IRS tapes, and they seized his ranch anyway.
I don't have a ranch to seize.
But this is my IRS tapes.
And I figure what better thing to try to sell to make some money to pay off the feds than a book of interviews with the man who every year of his congressional career introduced the Liberty Amendment to repeal the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution and set us free.
I have a whole rant about income taxation that I'm going to skip right now.
The title, I want to apologize to Dr. Paul.
I know he does not like the title, The Great Ron Paul.
But the reality is that the book just named itself.
There were no other titles.
What was I supposed to call it?
The Great Ron Paul is exactly who he is and exactly what the book had to be called.
It named itself.
And I want to mention, too, this great sketch by this young artist, Sarah D. Young, who did such a great job on this great picture of Ron for the cover art, which I'm really grateful for.
And let me say real quick, too, about another book we published at the Libertarian Institute this year.
It's William Norman Grigg's posthumous work, No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
For you regularly Rockwell.com readers, I'm sure you remember Will as by far the single most eloquent writer and speaker in our movement.
His death was a real sad loss for us.
But this book is absolutely a fitting legacy.
For all of you who loved Will Grigg, you will absolutely love this, I promise.
So now I'm business.
Okay.
So here's what we're doing here.
And here's why propaganda in the 2020 campaign is such a problem and going to be such a big deal.
And that is, as I think you all understand, right, the post Cold War, moderate centrist neo liberal consensus has been shipwrecked mostly by George W. Bush's war in Iraq.
But also, of course, the financial crisis that was partially caused by that war in Iraq.
And of course, the refugee crisis that was caused by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc.
And that's how Donald Trump became the president.
He stomped Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, the liberal Republican and the conservative Democrat, the Bill Clinton's wife and George Bush's brother, the two people who represented most this neo liberal consensus.
And now that it's fallen apart, they're in a total panic.
And that's why we've had to suffer through three years of this fake Russia gate hoax, where they blamed the Russians for interfering in the election of 2016.
Instead of I mean, don't tell me you're surprised.
We're talking about Hillary Clinton and friends here, instead of taking any responsibility for discrediting their own power, and their own right to it, and leaving themselves so vulnerable that the American people would even choose Donald Trump if he would stop Jeb and Hillary for us, which is exactly what happened.
So that's why they're so upset.
And that's why they're kind of going crazy with all their Russia propaganda.
Now collusion aside, we all know as soon as the Mueller report came out, they just dropped collusion completely.
Whoever heard of that?
Was someone accused Donald Trump of high treason with the Oh, yeah, no, forget that.
Never mind that.
But the narrative that the Russians did hack the election, and put him in power, even though that remains absolutely unproven, remains the common narrative in this country.
If you listen to NPR, they don't just say they hacked the election, they attacked our election.
The Russians attacked our election.
I heard that just a few days ago.
That narrative stands.
And it's the basis for a whole new level of hype about, you know, as we just begin as we're really just starting the 2020 campaign season here, about the potential for Russian interference and the potential for anything that centrist power does not like as being some kind of Russian effect.
Now here's a short aside here, okay?
The new Cold War with Russia is all America's fault, not Russia's, okay?
When the Soviet Union was collapsing, George H.W. Bush's government promised Mikhail Gorbachev in writing, they denied it was in writing for a while, like that was a good enough excuse, but it is in writing.
You can find its release now.
They promised that if the Soviets would pull their troops out of Germany and allow the reunification of Germany, that America's NATO military alliance would not expand one inch to the east.
And as soon as Bush was gone and Bill Clinton was in there, they started with the NATO expansion in 1996.
At the same time, they did the shock therapy, which is where they pretended, oh, yeah, we're going to give you a libertarian laissez-faire market, meaning we're going to take every communist government-owned industry in your society, and we're going to turn it over to a few oligarchs who are going to liquidate it and leave.
And it just decimated Russia.
I mean, it was an economic war against Russia.
Larry Summers and the Harvard boys, what they did was as bad as dropping a couple of nukes on them, really, being America acting as the worst kind of sore winners of the Cold War.
And Clinton, of course, also had two wars against the Serbs, the Russians' closest Slavic allies in Eastern Europe.
And he began to launch the color-coded revolutions, including against Milosevic in Serbia and Shevardnadze, who had heroically helped Gorbachev to end the Cold War in the Soviet Union in Georgia.
When George W. Bush came in, he tore up the anti-ballistic missile treaty, he expanded NATO even further, and he launched six or eight more color-coded revolutions against which is just a fancy name for a National Endowment for Democracy coup d'etat, CIA-type coup d'etat in Russia's near abroad against their friendly states, including in Tajikistan and including in Ukraine in 2004.
Obama came in, and Obama overthrew the government of Ukraine again in 2014, and he used a bunch of literal Hitler-loving Nazis to do it, the proud grandsons of the Galatian SS who had helped the Nazis perpetuate the Holocaust in Ukraine.
Those were the guys, the social nationalists that Barack Obama's government used to help overthrow the government in Kiev.
That was what led to the seizure of Crimea, and that was what led to the horrible war that killed over 10,000 people in the east of the country when those predominantly Russian speakers refused to accept the results of this illegal coup against their elected government.
And not only that, he supported al-Qaeda in Syria for about four and a half, five years, leading to the rise of the Islamic State and Iraq War III, and necessitating Russia's return to the Middle East for the first time in 25 years, okay?
Happy 30th anniversary today, guys, of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So you see, you are all now assets, either witting or unwitting, of Vladimir Putin.
You know, he also opposed Iraq War II, so if you were good on that, then you're also really bad.
Just like Tulsi Gabbard is really bad.
She fought in Iraq War II.
She's running for president right now.
She is currently a major, an active duty officer in the Hawaii Army National Guard.
She served at the Balad Air Base north of Baghdad on a medical team.
They call her combat vet.
She wasn't pulling triggers, but she was at a very dangerous air base where mortars were coming over the walls and where the roads to and from were laced with IEDs.
She was in real danger.
Her second deployment, she was in Kuwait, but they call her a traitor in no uncertain terms.
They accuse her of being groomed.
Oh, see, she's unwitting.
It's not up to her.
She's just like a little child being groomed by a predator.
She's not in control of her own mind.
She's under the mystical spell of the Russians somehow, and if you agree with her on anything, then you might be a traitor, too, and you probably don't want to get too much of that stink to rub off on you.
That could look pretty bad.
When they're not outright accusing Tulsi Gabbard of being an agent of the Russians, they always get in these great subtle digs.
No matter how many times, and Ron Paulians will remember this one, no matter how many times she denies it, they never stop asking her, are you going to run as a third party candidate?
Are you going to run as a third party candidate?
And you see what they're doing there.
They're arguing past the sale.
The built-in presumption is you, lady, cannot be the Democratic Party nominee.
The question is whether you're going to betray your party the same way you've already betrayed your country, and it's just built in, and she says, no, I'm running as a Democrat.
I already swore a hundred times over, and they ask her every time, and it's just to propagandize you, to make you think that she is unacceptable.
And the other thing that they use against her is that some right-wingers and some libertarians have complimented her, but they don't ever say why.
The only thing any right-winger or libertarian ever said good about her, it wasn't about her Medicare for All program, it was that she's anti-war.
And they don't want to say, well, you know, some right-wingers are anti-war, so it makes sense why people would admire her for being pretty good.
No, they go, oh, a right-winger endorsed her.
Why does she love right-wingers so much?
Why do the right-wingers love her so much?
As though we don't already know the answer, because she's less worse than the rest on the most important thing.
That's the answer.
And here's an irony, the real irony about Tulsi Gabbard, is she's really not that good.
Okay, Barack Obama's war in Syria was absolutely insane.
After September 11th, after Iraq War II, he had America fighting on the side of Al-Qaeda just because Assad is friends with Iran.
Well, for someone like Tulsi Gabbard who served in Iraq War II and can tell the difference between the shirts and the skins in this contest, that was never going to be acceptable to her.
And she said, this is absolutely crazy and wrong.
And she introduced a bill to stop supporting terrorists.
That's what a traitor she is to America, you see.
So she's great on wars for Al-Qaeda.
But on the wars against Al-Qaeda, she sounds like George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
She's already written herself a writ for eight years, a permanent drone and special operations war from hither to yon.
She put out a thing saying, first of all, it's not blowback.
It's not that Bill Clinton was killing Iraqis from bases in Saudi Arabia all through the 1990s that caused the September 11th attack.
Know what it is?
It's radical Islam, this Wahhabist and Salafi Islam, which is just self-refuting on its face.
There are millions of Wahhabist and Salafist fundamentalist Muslims in the world.
How many Al-Qaeda terrorists have we ever faced total at the height of the Islamic State?
30,000?
40?
And most of those are just local fighters.
You want to talk about actual Bin Laden-ite terrorists, you're talking about a very small number of hundreds, low thousands of men who are radicalized politically against the actions of the U.S. government.
And it's not Islamic extremism, it's political extremism that drives their war against the United States.
And so not only does she get the cause of the entire war wrong and falsely put America on the defensive in the entire thing, she then says, you know what, there are Al-Qaeda groups in Idlib province in Syria, in Yemen where we're fighting for them there too, in Somalia where, wow, Al-Shabaab, now she's defining Al-Qaeda pretty broadly, okay.
Then she says, well, there's Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, okay, that's four.
And then she says, there are hundreds of these groups around the Middle East that we must fight and must confront and must destroy, which is just a lie, which is completely stupid.
And it's so wrong that it's a hole that George Bush and Barack Obama could drive 10 wars through.
You know, don't you know we have to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of these hundreds of terrorist groups that she says threaten us, et cetera.
But she's good on not supporting Al-Qaeda and that's enough to make them absolutely hate her guts and do everything they can to try to make us hate her too.
Now Bernie Sanders, real quick.
I doubt there's very many Bernie Sanders fans in here.
You don't have to agree with the socialist senator from Vermont to notice that they give him the Ron Paul treatment this year just like they did in 2016.
The oftentimes unspoken but every time at least baked in message is you cannot choose him.
He is a man who is running, sure, but he is not actually one of your choices.
You can choose Kamala Harris or you can choose Pocahontas or you could choose Joe Biden.
I'm sorry, I just forgot her name.
I don't care about the Indian stuff.
Warren, Elizabeth Warren.
You can pick the approved candidates.
You may not have him.
He is not to be taken seriously by you.
And just like in 2016, he'd have a rally with 4,000 people and Hillary Clinton would be giving a speech to six old ladies in a library and they would cover Hillary Clinton.
They would cover Donald Trump's empty podium.
That was a favor to Hillary, by the way, the Pied Piper strategy to promote Trump to help cheat for her.
He'll be the easiest to beat in the general, don't worry.
While they give a total blank out and blackout to Bernie Sanders, who after all is not really more socialist than probably any Republican or Democrat in the race when it comes down to it.
And who is very unlikely to start any new wars as much as he's unlikely to end any either.
And he's got a really great, and this sounds maybe trivial, but it's not.
It's really important that he has a really great program for legalizing pot on the federal level and essentially ending for all time the American National War on Drugs, which is for poor and minorities and everybody else in this society.
It's one of the lowest and cheapest pretexts that our police state has to use to persecute innocent people.
I thought I smelled something and kick in some guy's door and kill his wife.
This happens every week.
50,000 SWAT raids a year in this country.
And huge numbers of those are based on bogus probable cause over somebody said that they found a seed or a roach or a thing on the ground.
And there's really no way to overstate the importance of something like that if he was able to truly implement it and repeal the National Drug War there.
It's worth mentioning.
And I think that's why that we're not allowed to hear from him, is that he's essentially not under the control of the people who can be counted on.
Remember when Chelsea Manning liberated all the WikiLeaks, and Chelsea Manning is in prison right now for refusing to testify against Julian Assange for that, by the way.
Thank you for that sacrifice.
But in the WikiLeaks, there was an email from a corporate vice president at Citigroup.
And the email said to Barack Obama's staff, this is who your new cabinet is going to be.
You're going to have Hillary as secretary of state.
You're going to keep Gates at defense.
I want what's his name at treasury and whichever.
And they went down the list.
And that was where Barack Obama's cabinet came from.
Bernie Sanders is not likely to go along with that.
And so, you are not allowed to consider him to even really be a major candidate even though if you watch the polls, he wins them.
But if you watch the TV coverage of the polls, they just won't say his name.
They'll pretend.
They'll rank him and pretend he got third when really he got first.
They'll lie about him all day the same way they did with Ron.
Remember Jon Stewart said, what is this guy, the 13th Florida hotel?
You just can't mention him?
And that's the way they treat Sanders.
You don't have to be on his side to notice that that's what's true and that's the agenda against him.
This Justin Bloomberg is running.
I know, nobody cares.
It doesn't matter.
And it doesn't matter because of Tom Wood's law.
Tom Wood's law that says that no matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
Which is a pretty authoritarian law for a libertarian, Tom.
Thanks a lot, dude.
See, I told you there was a joke in there somewhere.
And you know, here, before I run out of time, Donald Trump is bad on everything, okay?
The fact that John Brennan is trying to kill him doesn't mean he's not a terrorist.
Donald Trump has escalated the war in Afghanistan.
Escalated Iraq War III in Iraq and Syria, which is waning now because the Islamic State is destroyed.
But there's still thousands of troops in both countries.
He has escalated the war in Somalia, even sending in the infantry.
He has escalated the special operations and CIA drone war in Libya.
And he has escalated Barack Obama's genocide in Yemen.
A deliberate starvation campaign against the civilian population there.
Donald Trump's Yemen policy makes him absolutely as bad as Barack Obama, who is as bad as George Bush, who is even worse than Bill Clinton.
Which brings me to my...
Oh, but one more thing though, sorry.
But they still hate him anyway, don't they?
And the reason why is because even though he likes kicking butt, he doesn't really believe in the empire, does he?
He doesn't believe in America's divine and mystical mission to lead, that is, dominate the world from now on.
He's sort of just a crotchety old Fox News-watching golfer type who says he looks at it more like an American nationalist and says, this is just too expensive.
The neoliberals and the neoconservatives say, well, the fact that it's against our national interest is what proves what nice people we are and that we're doing this all out of the goodness of our heart.
Donald Trump just doesn't buy that.
And he doesn't insist that we believe in it either.
And that's what makes him beyond the pale.
That's why they've done everything they could to try to stop him by drumming up the Russia hoax in the first place and doing everything they can to drive him out of power now.
And he does deserve to be impeached and removed, but not by a CIA coup, but by the American people asserting the rule of law and putting him in prison for his illegal war crimes.
And that brings me to my real point, okay?
It's been 18 years of this war on terrorism.
You don't have to know a thing about it to know that that's not right.
We were attacked by 400 men and we haven't figured out how to clean this mess up yet.
Does that sound right to you?
And the right, most importantly in America, the American right is over it now.
And Trump deserves a lot of credit for that.
Not for pulling troops out of anywhere, he hasn't, but for talking like he wanted to and for speaking in such absolutes.
George Bush's decision to go to the Middle East was the worst decision anyone ever made.
Wow.
Not quite as bad as Wilson getting us into World War I, but close.
And listen, for a Republican president, one presidency removed from George Bush to continue to speak that way, that is huge.
That is a benefit.
That is something that we can use for us.
He's already done so much to change people's minds on the right.
Now, I don't know if you guys saw this, it was an Associated Press story that ran about two or three weeks ago.
It was about how the Kurds don't need us there anyway.
They're going to strike a deal with Assad to keep the Turks out and everything's fine.
All your crocodile tears, you can flush them, okay?
But then three quarters of the way down the article, there's this one paragraph.
And it says that Donald Trump says to his staff in the White House, well, I don't know.
When I was at that rally in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, the crowd all started chanting, bring them home.
So I don't know, it seems like the people agree with me.
That was his argument with his whole staff.
This is the key to everything, okay?
When Donald Trump looks out his window and imagines the American people, imagines his constituency, what does he think they think?
Does he think that they want to bring them home?
Or does he think that, eh, they like explosions and kicking Muslim butt and being tough macho guys?
And doesn't it matter what he thinks the right wants?
Doesn't it matter that we have the ability to influence that narrative and that perception?
Last week, there's a huge event taking place in Washington, D.C.
It's put on by a brand new veterans group called bringourtroopshome.us.
It's led by a guy named Dan McKnight.
He's got a lot of great combat veterans.
It's led by all combat veterans.
They're all libertarians and conservatives.
There are plenty of great left and liberal veterans groups as well.
But these guys are essentially from the right.
And they're doing good work.
They mean to primary Liz Cheney and keep her out of the speaker's chair in the house.
If you guys pray, now would be a good time for that.
And they're really doing this great work.
And they are with this.
This is what they want to do.
This is one of their tactics.
They're going to talk to Republican congressmen, but they want to make themselves clear at Trump rallies and at other Republican rallies.
In this next year, we have a year.
It's still only November 19 right now.
It's not too late.
It's not hindsight.
We have a year ahead of us now where libertarians and conservatives and especially veterans of the 21st century terror wars can go to these Trump rallies, go to Republican congressional meetings and rallies and demand.
Our president says he wants to bring them home.
Are you with him and us?
Or are you with the Democrats who want to leave them behind and force this issue?
And what's the media going to do?
If at every Trump rally for the next year, the crowd breaks into chants of bring them home.
You can participate in that.
You can help to make that happen.
For real.
And think about the counterfactual.
What if that doesn't happen?
What if that was a one-off in Minneapolis and for the next year, no one yells bring them home at Donald Trump ever again?
Can you imagine the catastrophe if that was his sentiment?
They just don't care.
Apparently, I can keep the wars going.
No one's going to object.
That's the number one surefire way to maintain our horrible status quo.
And here's the deal.
This is a room full of libertarians.
You don't have to be right wing, okay?
You don't have to be a conservative.
You just have to be not socialists.
You just have to not be of the left to go and participate in this.
Attack the right from the right.
Unless you are from the left.
In which case, I got a mission for you too.
That is, you need to attack the left from the left.
The way our conservatives are going to be attacking the right from the right.
But the left is always attacking the liberals for not being good enough on this stuff.
But I got a secret weapon for you.
A little ace you can keep up your sleeve.
Attack the left from the left by using the right.
Go to your local democrat's campaign rally and invoke Rand Paul.
Liberals think that Rand Paul is a far right wing conservative.
We use what we're dealt, you know, the cards we're dealt.
Play the best we can.
And you just tell your democratic congressional candidates, you can't be to the right of Rand Paul on war.
Rand Paul is a right wing conservative.
If he wants out of Syria and Afghanistan yesterday, then you want out of Syria and Afghanistan three weeks ago.
Or else, what are you telling me here?
And isn't that right, fellow liberals and leftists in the crowd?
That it is absolutely unacceptable to us that our democratic leaders would be to the right of Rand Paul and Donald Trump on any foreign policy issue.
And the answer from the crowd will be yes.
That is absolutely unacceptable.
That may be what the donors want to hear and that may be what the national security state in D.C. wants to hear.
But that is not at all what the democrat constituents of America want to hear.
And so, if we can attack the right from the right and create a real anti-war movement on the right, and we can hand that tool to our friends on the left to use against the enemies on their side as well.
And we could have a great effect.
And here's the thing about it, right?
There's no magical solution.
There's no political solution to our problems.
As Dr. Paul always says, education is the key.
But these kinds of political activities can be huge for education and for getting the truth and the point across to the American people who need it the most.
How much time do I have?
None?
Two?
Great.
One more thing.
Murray Rothbard once wrote an article called, Do You Hate the State?
And in the article, it's actually a critique of a book that was written that's sort of a utilitarian case for anarcho-capitalism.
And Murray Rothbard said, you know what, I'll take a radical minarchist over a conservative anarchist any day.
Because we're not here over naval gazing and we're not here over some mathematical equation.
We're not here over a marginal change.
We're here because we love liberty.
And we're here because we hate injustice.
We are here to save mankind.
We are here to fight.
And there's a guy, I know him very well.
I know you guys know him very well, who I always thought, I actually cannot remember whether Murray mentioned Jacob Hornberger in that article or not, or whether that was just my imagination because that's who I always picture.
The radical minarchist.
We have him here, just like Ron Paul.
We have Jacob Hornberger.
And he has officially announced that he is running for President of the United States as the Libertarian Party candidate.
Applause.
Applause.
Okay?
Now, for those of you who aren't that familiar with Jacob Hornberger, I'm here to let you know, he is good on everything.
He is good on libertarian principle and libertarian philosophy on every issue you've got all the way up and down the line without exceptions.
He's great.
And not only that, at the Future Freedom Foundation, Jacob has written an article every day for 30 years about what is going on in the world, what are the crises that face the American people, and why the libertarian answer is the answer for the American people at large to solve the problems that all of our country, that our whole country are suffering under.
And he has such a great ability to tie our current crises to our government's bad policies and to the libertarian solutions to turn it all around.
And the truth of the matter is, again, it's only November.
We have a year.
And with y'all's help, if the libertarian movement could join the libertarian party and really prioritize, do everything we can to elect each other to those delegate spots, to make sure to play the libertarian party game as much as we can to ensure that this man gets the nomination, that he is the one who is representing us in the campaign against Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren or Hillary or whoever it is that they put up there in the fall, this is our best chance.
It's been 25 years, it's been 20 years since we had a libertarian candidate who really knew what he was talking about, was really good on principle, was really good on the facts, was hardcore anti-war at the top of his list of priorities.
And it's been such a disappointment the last few cycles that we have not had that.
But now we really have a chance.
I am joining the libertarian party now for the first time in my life.
And I beseech you all, I really, I truly, I beg you to do it too.
There are only 15,000 current members of the libertarian party, you know that?
Tom Woods' audience alone could quadruple the membership of the libertarian party.
I mean that, I mean that.
This is our year to do another Ron Paul revolution, another real libertarian run for the presidency.
To change this country, okay?
Thank you.
All right y'all, thanks.
