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 scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing William S. Smith.
He is Senior Research Fellow and Managing Director at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at the Catholic University of America.
And he wrote this great piece, oh, he's got a bunch of experience on Capitol Hill and stuff like that, too, it says here.
He's got this piece at the Quincy Institute, How Empire is Destroying the American Republic.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you very much, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Happy to have you here.
So yeah, you know, some of us had noticed that these things are incompatible, even though in fact, spreading Republican government or democracy, at least, is the excuse for the empire.
It's all very counterproductive at home and abroad in so many ways.
But, you know, you start off here with probably the most important point of all in order here is the power of the president to take us to war now without any kind of official constitutional declaration like under the law.
Yes, yes, yes.
We're sort of in a post-constitutional period, particularly in foreign policy.
It's very troubling.
Really, what instigated me to write the piece is two kind of coincidental things that came together.
One, I read an article about Stanley McChrystal, who is a retired general.
You know him quite well since you wrote a book on Afghanistan.
But he he's reportedly deploying an artificial intelligence technology that was used as an anti-terrorism tool to kind of manipulate public opinion in Middle Eastern countries.
He's deploying that in the United States in the election.
He's been hired by a kind of pro-Biden PAC to use this technology.
And basically what it does is if the Trump campaign tweets out something, he can use this artificial intelligence technology to blast out a counter narrative, which other people then can put on social media and you can quickly change public opinion.
So that was kind of concerning to me.
We're taking anti-terrorism technologies and injecting it into the election system.
And at the same time I was reading about this, I was rereading Washington's farewell address.
And you know, the idea for this piece is not mine.
The idea for this Quincy Institute piece came from Washington, and Washington says in that farewell address, he said overgrown military establishments are, quote, particularly inauspicious to liberty, particularly Republican liberty.
And you know, as you know, Scott, you know, they did put standing army into the constitution.
They put the Navy in, but they didn't put a standing army in.
And they were very concerned about the growth of what Eisenhower later called the military industrial complex and how that could become a threat to liberty.
And I think it clearly has.
It's the technology they're using, the power of the military industrial complex, just from the perspective of the political faction, you have a trillion dollar organization now that is influencing popular opinion in the United States.
It's very, very troubling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other great, well, there's, you know, Jefferson had his say about peace and commerce and honest friendship and all that, but on the dangers of war, Madison, the principal author of the constitution, but also the guy who tried to invade Canada.
He said that war is the germ of every other violation of liberty in terms of building up the government and all their authority over the people.
And of course, their power of taxation and the necessity of it all.
In fact, you know, really kind of presaging what Randolph Bourne wrote in War is the Health of the State, you know, 120 years later, this is when the rule of law, either de facto or de jure is suspended and the government gets to, you know, act outside of any reasonable bounds.
And then I think, you know, Madison even said that, yeah, of course, that's how it is.
But you know, peacetime is always to be considered the default.
War is just the emergency when there's an emergency, otherwise it's got to end or there is no question among those guys that you couldn't have anything like a constitutional government if it was always at war.
That's exactly right.
They were extremely concerned.
They'd seen European monarchies go to war and they saw they could see what happened domestically when that happened.
You know, I look, this is sort of an aside, but I can point to a series that the BBC produced called Foils War.
It's just a wonderful series about World War Two, about a detective Foils, Foils, Foils.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's it's it's a detective show, but basically he's he's trying to solve these murders in the midst of World War Two.
And every single time he is thwarted sort of by the military who say, no, no, the rules don't apply.
And he's trying to enforce the rule of law.
But in every in oh, so many situations he is he's faced with the military or the RAF or somebody steps in and says, you can't pursue your investigation.
You can't pursue justice because the war takes precedent.
And, you know, that that series is it's not preachy.
It's just it teaches that that look, when when wars happen, all the other rules go out the door.
And if you want to have a Republican government, this is a very dangerous place to go constantly at war with the gigantic military industrial complex competing against every other interest and every other right.
It's a very problematic road to go down.
And we've done it sort of unwittingly, particularly in the post-Cold War world.
We don't we don't have any real genuine threats.
At least we didn't in 1992.
And yet we went forward with the gigantic, ambitious plan to democratize the Middle East and and expand NATO and do all sorts of things that were against shadow threats.
They weren't real threats.
And it's we're seeing the results now.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's straight out of the most obvious fable of all about this Star Wars where Han Solo says, hey, listen, there's no time to discuss this in committee.
We've got it.
It's an emergency.
And so that's the theme of the whole deal is war destroys your republic, you know, precisely.
And look, look at the you know, no matter what you think about Donald Trump, you've got to be concerned about the way the NSA and the FBI deployed a technology, their surveillance technology, which is extremely powerful.
I had a top secret clearance once in my life, and I know how powerful the NSA surveillance technology is.
They deployed that in a political campaign, you know, and this was the thing as they were developing this technology.
This was the thing they assured us would never happen.
This will never be used as a weapon domestically.
We will never become part of American politics.
And guess what?
They didn't tell the truth.
It has.
And who knows where we go from here?
So it's when you create the war state, civil liberties tend to take a backseat.
And I'm saying that not as somebody who's a libertarian.
I'm very sympathetic to libertarianism, but at my core, I'm not a libertarian.
But I'm very concerned about Republican government.
And and I as I wrote in the piece, I think I think it's very much under threat, in part because of the growth of the power of the military industrial complex.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, if you believe in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the supremacy of the constitutional law over the behavior of the federal government, then all Americans are some bit of libertarian there, if we can agree on those things, at least.
Although, I guess it ain't so that we all can, but there's there's plenty there for other people to agree with libertarians about, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
That's for sure.
No, no.
I'm like, I consider libertarians my kiss and cousin.
I think they're there.
They've been right about this for a very long time.
And a lot of people didn't listen to him.
The Republican Party in the for decades didn't listen to them.
But I think a lot of things they predicted have come true.
And it's it's it's alarming.
It's quite alarming.
And you know what, too?
I what I really like about this piece, too, is it really raises the question that is not usually raised.
What could have been?
Look, if it didn't have to be this way, never even mind with George W. Bush and the terror war.
But even going back to the end of the Cold War, if they had all just listened to Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul and all the people who said, OK, USSR gone, NATO gone to bring them all home from Japan and Korea and Germany and everywhere.
And let's do the best we can to shore up our republic and not have this empire, man, think how great that would have been.
You know, we'd be living in a Jetsons world by now, you know, I can I could recommend a piece to you that was written in 1990 when I I studied undergraduate at Georgetown.
And one of my professors was Jean Kirkpatrick, and she's sort of known as a neocon.
I think that's an unfair label.
She wrote this piece in The National Interest about what to do in the post Cold War world.
It's a brilliant piece and it's called A Normal Country in a Normal Time.
And she basically said, you know what, we've carried the world on our back for 100 years.
It's time for us to shore up our domestic politics, to break our alliances, to come home.
It's not an isolationist piece, but it basically said the the all the alliances and all the other military relationships we've built up need to be scaled back and we need to come home.
And it's a surprising piece for someone who hang out who hung out with neocons.
But I don't I'm not I'm not persuaded.
She's a neocon.
She was very critical of George W. Bush, for example, for the Iraq invasion.
So I think she's a complicated and very smart person.
But I highly recommend that piece to you and to your listeners.
A Normal Country in a Normal Time.
And it was in the national interest in 1990.
Right.
Yeah.
No, it's absolutely great.
And I couldn't find it on the Internet anywhere.
But I know a guy at the National Interest, so I have a copy.
But I had to promise not to post it online.
So I've read it.
Yeah.
I don't know where anybody if anybody else can find a link, send it on to me and I'd be happy to post that in the show notes here, because it really is a brilliant piece.
It's so well said.
And she even specifically debunks what she calls the mystical notion that America has this kind of supernatural destiny to lead mankind and all this stuff that, you know, snap out of it, get real.
That's all a bunch of just talk.
That doesn't mean anything, you know.
That goes back to the French Jacobins.
That's basically when the French Revolution happened and they tried to establish a democracy in France.
There was this big fight.
Robespierre was actually on the side of being more isolationist.
But a lot of the Jacobins said, wait a minute, we're free now, but what about all these people in these monarchies that are surrounding us?
Those people are not free.
We have to help them.
And what do you know, they launched the wars of the French Revolution.
And it went on for decades and turned into Napoleon and it became an orgy of war.
Democracies can be very dangerous when they adopt this ideology and say, we're exceptional.
Everyone else isn't.
We need to we need to convert the world.
We need to be evangelicals about democracy around the world.
And that's very similar to what the United States has done in recent decades.
And it's the opposite of what the framers of the Constitution wanted.
George Washington, his farewell address said, have goodwill towards all nations.
And he knew there were authoritarian governments out there and there were some, you know, some regimes that were pretty loathsome.
But he said all nations should be treated with goodwill.
That's that's kind of the opposite of where we've gone in recent decades.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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You know, I want to ask you more about this Stanley McChrystal thing I saw where he publicly endorsed Joe Biden last week.
And of course, Biden was against the Afghan surge and they really butted heads in 2009.
But he still says, you know, his reason for endorsing Biden is he will listen to the military better than Trump does.
That was his only value.
That's how he measured it.
That was what he said.
But then, you know, Mike Flynn is, of course, more famous than McChrystal now.
But Mike Flynn was his right hand man, as they were the leaders of the Joint Special Operations Command, a top tier special operations forces during Iraq War Two, and then also led the surge in Afghanistan.
And Flynn had really pioneered this, you know, network analysis, link analysis, your cell phone and talk to this guy's cell phone, talk to this guy's cell phone.
So we're going to bomb all you kind of thing.
And that method of fighting the insurgency, which they took to Afghanistan and killed so many innocent people that way, too.
But, you know, this is so this isn't just like, OK, some general brought some tool from the Pentagon.
This is what McChrystal and Flynn used in the Iraq and Afghan surges to try to target the high value target leaders of the Pentagon and that kind of thing.
And now they're using at least one or some of these tools, you're saying, against the American people in the election to spam people with pro Biden propaganda.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So they invented a tool that they used in Afghanistan and to some degree in Iraq, which was like a public affairs tool.
It basically was the way of counter spinning against what the terrorist narrative was.
They would blast out to social media people a counter narrative, the U.S. narrative that they tried to quickly get into the into the minds of the population to counter whatever terrorist messages were out there.
It was a technology that was invented by DARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon.
And it was a way to to tap into social media very quickly and turn around messages right away.
And he is deploying that technology now as part of a pro Biden pack to manipulate American domestic public opinion.
And it's it's just worrisome that they're using counterterrorism tools.
Now, we know they're using technology like drones and policemen are using drones and they're using armored vehicles and all sorts of other things that have come out of Afghanistan and places like that and are now in the U.S. domestic domestic life.
But this manipulation of popular opinion through this A.I. tool is worrisome to me.
You don't want these kind of technologies deployed in the American political system.
It should be illegal.
Right.
Did it used to be illegal?
I, you know, we're in a new world with Silicon Valley and social media.
I guess he's just a private citizen now.
The fact that he's a former three star doesn't mean anything.
Yeah.
Well, I try to point out in the piece that General Marshall, you know, the great George Marshall said military officers should never be involved in politics at this level.
They should eschew politics in every way that they can, even when they retire.
They shouldn't even indicate their partisan leanings one way or the other, let alone publicly endorse a candidate.
And I think that's a good model for the military.
And it's unfortunately a model that's not been adopted.
And I think guys like McChrystal just want to go back to 2015.
Right.
You know, Trump's been so erratic.
Sometimes he seems like he's for restraint.
Sometimes he's bullying.
He's all over the map.
And these guys want a more consistent support for the military industrial complex.
And so I think people like McChrystal are just saying, let's go back to 2015.
Biden will take a stare.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Marshall might have helped win World War Two, but Stanley McChrystal lost two wars.
And so that means he outranks Marshall in wisdom.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
Unfortunately, our generals have not been terribly successful.
And part of that is due to civilian leadership.
But but, you know, when you're not winning wars, it's you don't necessarily need to pay great respect for the opinions of some of these folks.
Yeah.
You know, you brought up the way that they used the national security state to spy on the Trump campaign.
I mean, this was after he was the major party nominee for president, the United States.
We now know, actually, someone has literally pleaded guilty and been prosecuted for here's how bad they purged themselves even to get that FISA warrant.
They had a guy who was a CIA agent, not an officer, but like a reliable agent or asset of the CIA who had been approached by people who he thought might be tied to Russian intelligence back years ago and immediately went to the CIA and told them that, hey, man, these guys approached me.
And then from then on, he would always debrief the CIA on anything that he ever learned or anyone he ever talked to or certainly anything that mattered when he went to Russia.
And the CIA told the FBI that.
And then the FBI, this agent, this lawyer, pretended to not know that and blacked it out from the FISA warrant so he could use a much lower standard of evidence of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to spy on this American citizen, a guy who actually was an American patriot.
Don't you love how the CIA hung him out to dry and didn't vouch for him in public for three years while he's being accused of high treason?
They vouched for him to the FBI who lied about it.
These guys, I'm sorry, one more rant here.
Remember when John Brennan, same guilty character involved here in both cases, when he tried to sick the Justice Department on Dianne Feinstein's staff when she was the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating, lawfully investigating, their illegal torture program?
And they hacked into their computers.
And the CIA had actually, pardon me, the CIA had accidentally given them the secret real history of the torture program that they didn't mean to turn over.
Maybe a real CIA whistleblower inside had given it to this staff, but they didn't steal it.
And Brennan knew that and he pretended that the staff had stolen it and tried to get them prosecuted, which is really the CIA acting like a co-equal branch of government with the U.S. Senate, taking on the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a way where, and completely unashamedly, maybe not even recognizing how absolutely out of line.
And then the same guy turns around and tries to frame the next nominee for president, the next winner for president, for the crime of high treason when the whole thing's fake.
And these guys talk about out of line.
This is ridiculous.
Other than the actual white marble edifices in D.C., do the old, quote, Madisonian branches of government, do they even exist at all anymore?
Or is this all simply an optical illusion so you don't realize the whole government is wrung out of the Hoover Building and out of Langley, Virginia?
Well, you know, I reference an author of Tufts, Tufts Law School named Michael Glennon, who's written a book called Double Government.
And his thesis is that the Madisonian branches of government, the presidency, the courts, the Congress, have been eclipsed by the military-industrial complex.
And he's very reasonable about it.
He's not a conspiracy theorist.
He doesn't say they meet in some secret room somewhere.
He basically says the bureaucracy for the national security state has grown so large and is so knowledgeable and has so much information at their fingertips that they've eclipsed in power the Madisonian branches of government, the elected and appointed branches of government that are more responsible to popular rule.
And they basically don't have to worry about what the Congress thinks or what the president thinks.
They just go about their business.
And from year to year, you see different presidents of different parties come in and you see a kind of consistent national security strategy.
You know, Trump pledges to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
He really never does.
Obama makes the same kind of promises.
We need to get out.
He doubles down in Afghanistan.
You know, different parties make different promises during campaigns.
But the national security strategy seems somewhat consistent.
And Michael Glennon from Tufts would say, well, that's because the national security is now more powerful than the Madisonian branches of government.
We're kind of in a post-constitutional era.
And I think there's something very much to his thesis.
I've read his writings, and I think he's very reasonable about it.
Moreover, he's a Democrat.
He was chief counsel of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the church committee hearings.
He's not a right-wing Republican.
He's a Democrat who has reached these conclusions based on what he saw during the church committee hearings and the abuses of the Intelligence Committee then.
And he's watched it grow, and now he's very concerned about it.
So he's a potential guest for your show.
I highly recommend him.
I think he's very well-informed and very smart.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I've talked with him back when he was first publishing that stuff.
And if you just think back to Eisenhower giving that speech on his last day in office, that warning, well, I mean, we had the Vietnam era, and then we had the 70s, a continuing Cold War, and then the Reagan years and the Clinton expansion, and of course, ever since W. Bush, the whole terror war era.
When was the time where there was a giant comeuppance, and a halt, and a shakedown?
Did Daniel Patrick Moynihan come and dismantle the military-industrial complex one day in 1990, and I missed it or something?
No, there never was a rollback of the thing.
And even after the Soviet Union was gone, they just expanded right to where the Soviet Union had been standing.
I mean, there's...
It never happened.
If Ike knew what he was talking about then, then it's still a problem right now.
And I think we can see it right in front of our eyes.
Again, no conspiracy about it.
These are all just oak tables in meeting rooms.
Exactly.
It's just, it's a very huge bureaucracy.
It's a trillion dollar bureaucracy.
And as Madison would have known, if you create a faction that is funded at the level of a trillion dollars, it's going to be very influential in the political process.
I mean, there's just no doubt about it.
But the harder problem is, I think in Congress there's some really, really strong members of Congress who are starting to say we should repeal the AUMFs and we should restore our constitutional authority.
And I think those types of things are hard, but maybe achievable.
What's really the problem now is that we have kind of an imperial psychology in our leadership.
We have kind of a will to dominate others.
And you see this in the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, where we're going to impose our will on them.
There's a certain outlook that some of our foreign policy elites have that encapsulates kind of a will to power, that we're better than everybody.
We can tell everybody what to do.
Kind of changing that psychology is a very difficult problem because that's the way they view the world.
They view the world that we're so exceptional, nobody should question our judgment.
And the framers of the Constitution were much more humble about what the United States could do in the world, what could accomplish.
They were much more of the opinion that we should set a good example with our freedoms and liberty at home and not get entangled abroad.
And we're far away from that in our mentality, in our psychology.
So on that, I have to mention this.
I just love this quote so much, where you quote Obama's former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, saying, Trump has lost the intelligence community.
He's lost the State Department.
He has lost the military.
How can he continue to serve as our commander in chief?
Yep.
Yep.
That's a frightening quote, because basically he's saying the military-industrial complex bestows legitimacy upon elected leaders.
They're the people that decide who's a legitimate leader and who is not.
And that's a very frightening statement that he made.
I don't know how else to put it.
None of those people, the military, the intelligence community, the State Department, none of those people are elected.
What gives them the authority to decide who's a legitimate president and who's not?
They shouldn't even be allowed to vote at all.
What the hell?
They're supposed to be our servants, protecting us, providing our security, not our overlords.
Or is this the old world?
Precisely.
Precisely.
But what I like about it, too, the same thing as you, is he doesn't realize how crazy this sounds.
Like, he doesn't even build in at the end.
Well, and of course, you know, you fly over country, people matter a lot, too, or anything like that, you know?
He has what I would call the psychology of empire.
He views the whole world and U.S. domestic politics through a prism of empire.
And only somebody who had that kind of psychology could say something like that.
And changing that psychology is a very difficult problem.
And you know, I can't think of a positive thing to say about Trump, but the only charm he's got is who his enemies are.
And boy, do they deserve to continue to be defeated.
All of these people are just horrible.
And with the Russiagate fake treason scam, you know, one of the highest things on their list of sins.
But now, so, and speaking of that, you know, again, with the chutzpah of the FBI and the CIA to dare to take on the elected president like this when they're not elected at all, as you just said.
And if the Congress and the court and the presidency look, in fact, one of the top headlines on antiwar.com today is how there are four, three or four different major news stories that came out where the military is just absolutely insubordinate on Trump saying he wants out of Afghanistan by Christmas.
And they're just saying, yeah, right.
Well, we'll see after the election, belay that order.
Never mind that.
And it's very all nonchalant.
Just like, who the hell does he think he is?
Just because he's the president, he can't order us to do that.
And it's amazing the attitude there.
But so then if the presidency itself even, and of course the Congress and the rest of it, amount to so little in terms of the size of their puzzle pieces in the real size of the state when it comes to the rest of the national security state and everything else, what can the American people use as a mechanism to ever change this?
The same dirty snowball that's been rolling downhill since Ike Eisenhower helped get it going back at the start of the Cold War that we haven't been able to stop yet and does nothing but find new excuses to go to work.
What can we do in order to bring this to a change other than, as Ron Paul said, just wait around until the dollar breaks?
Because at some point it will, you know?
Yes, that's the long term problem.
But you know, in the short term, all I can recommend is voting.
You know, if you're a Democrat, vote for people like Chelsea Gabbard, sensible people who've seen war upfront.
If you're a Republican, they're starting to emerge, a small group of core Republicans, even Matt Gaetz might be considered one of them, who are skeptical about our foreign policy posture.
Support those types of people.
That's all we can do.
You know, Trump is very erratic.
You know, he seemed to have good instincts in the beginning.
I'm more of the opinion now that he uses, he's more concerned about electoral politics than he is a restrained foreign policy.
I mean, his belligerence towards Iran is obviously, he doesn't want to put any light between himself and Israel.
But he's much more restrained on Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think that's probably because there are important states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania who have seen terrible casualties from veterans of those wars.
And a lot of those people are sick of them.
And he, I think, I think there's some real strong social science evidence that he carried those three states, which Republicans haven't carried in decades, because in key zip codes that had high casualty rates from Afghanistan and Iraq, they voted for Trump in big numbers.
A lot of those zip codes flipped.
There's a great political scientist at Boston University, Doug Greiner, who has written an article about this that's very persuasive, that these states flipped to Trump because of what he said about the Iraq war and his skepticism about it.
So I think, you know, public opinion can make change.
And that's all we can do.
Am I optimistic?
I'm not terribly, but, you know, people have free will and you can always change things.
And I think politics is hard to predict.
Yep.
And that sure is true.
I mean, we see how quickly things can change and change back again.
And, you know, even Trump looks like he really is trying to get out of Afghanistan now.
And he's appointed a couple of good anti-war conservatives to a couple of places lately.
And so maybe too late, too little too late.
I guess we'll see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if the Senate is going to confirm Doug and Will, but I hope they can get off the dime.
You know, I'm not I'm a little skeptical about congressional Republicans generally on these issues.
If you, you know, if you go to OpenSecrets.com where you see political contributions, just take a look at the political contributions to Republicans on the Armed Services Committee.
I mean, it's it's it's something to see.
And you know why they're they're skeptical about pulling out of Afghanistan.
And they haven't always supported Trump when he wants to restrain and pull back.
And they're very much a part of the military industrial complex.
Not all of them, but a lot of them.
Yeah.
Certainly they control the margin for now.
But you're right that it's not a hopeless case, just a real tough one.
It is a tough, tough one.
But then again, you know, our side is right.
And so, you know, if you want to save the Bill of Rights, seems like that could be a priority we could rally around, you know, who would thought who would have thought we've had a Republican nominee who said the Iraq war is a disaster?
And who would have thought that the Democrats would have a presidential candidate like Tulsi Gabbard?
So, you know, you have to there's there's small baby steps, but you've got to you've got to take some solace in them.
Right.
In fact, it's worth mentioning the miracle again, this is the most important development of our current era, really, is that because Trump needed that especially to stomp Jeb with, he really helped to, you know, he made it OK.
He provided the escape hatch for the American right tea party, Republican voter population of America to say, OK, yeah, we shouldn't have done all that with the Bush wars and let all that go, which they if it had been Jeb and then Rubio and then whoever as a leading Republican politicians like this, they might have never let it go.
But Donald Trump said, yeah, forget all that.
That was stupid.
That was the stupidest thing that ever was stupid.
And they go, OK, yep.
And I mean, there's no magic spell you could have ever done.
There's no psychological operation you could have ever done to help the right to be good on war more effective than Donald Trump shugging, shrugging his shoulders and saying, I don't believe in it.
Yes.
I don't agree with Trump on a lot of things.
But I think that took a lot of courage because they're what the 13 or 14 candidates, I forget, you know, every single one was supportive of the Iraq war and wouldn't have said anything critical of George W. Bush.
And here he steps into the breach and says, no, this was a disaster.
And you had veterans that maybe lost a leg in Afghanistan or Iraq cheering and saying, yep, that's right.
And a lot of people stood up and said, that's right.
But it took it took him to do it.
It's all, you know, social psychology, essentially.
That was what was so important about Ron Paul was he was the only veteran in the race.
He was a Republican from Texas.
And so it wasn't a matter of him being a wimp.
It was just a matter of him being smart and saying that you don't have to identify with Michael Moore and you don't have to identify with Janine Garofalo to be antiwar.
You could identify with me.
In other words, you don't have to change your identity at all.
You can just be smart on this issue now.
And then people went it was like to a magic spell.
You know, like a curse had been broken, really.
And people snapped out of it and said, oh, OK, I can still be me and be antiwar.
That's easy, then.
And sign right up.
That group thing can be a terrible thing.
It can be a terrible thing.
And it can help a lot, too.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen.
So this is the this is the narrative right here is what I've been trying to tell you guys for 20 years.
And here this guy says so, too.
So I must be right.
The empire is destroying the American Republic.
And here it is at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Responsible Statecraft dot org.
And we ran it, I think, yesterday or the day before at antiwar dot com as well.
You can find it there.
Thank you very much for your time, William.
My pleasure.
Scott.
Thank you for having me.
William Smith.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
