All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey, you guys, I got Dan McAdams on the line.
He is the Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and he's a significant part of the reason why Ron Paul has been so good on everything this whole century long.
Of course, Ron Paul's principles are great, and he reads a lot and knows everything, but also he's had Dan as his foreign policy advisor in his congressional office for all through the Bush and Obama years and all of that, and then, of course, his right-hand man on The Liberty Report, their great show on YouTube every day and at ronpaullibertyreport.com, the wonderful and excellent and awesome and banned from Twitter, Danny McAdams.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, sir?
Hi, Scott.
It's great to be back with you.
Very happy to have you here, as always, and, you know, so I saw a thing, which was an interview of you on, I forget now, maybe it was on RT or something, and the bottom line of it was, when it comes to all the scaremongering about China and the rise of their power in the world, you are unimpressed, and I wonder why that's so.
Well, I mean, we went through 20 years of the war on terror, and you knew from the beginning, and we knew that it was all BS.
It was all an excuse for Washington to continue milking the rest of the country so it can live better than the rest of us underlings, and that started to peter out, so we went back to a few years ago, we went back to, oh, well, China and Russia actually are our big enemies now.
We're going to do something different.
We're going to keep the money flowing.
We're going to keep building those mansions in McLean, you know, suck it up, America, and that's why it's completely bogus.
That's one of them, because we know who's behind it.
We know what's going on with them.
We know what their motivations are, and the other is that if you look at China, it doesn't behave the way the China hawks in the U.S. claim it does.
That's not its modus operandi, and, you know, they always get it wrong, and they get it wrong again.
Yeah, but red flag, CCP, evil, commie, dictatorship, so how can we expect anything less than the absolute worst, Dan?
And you forgot virus exporters, right?
The CCP virus.
There you go.
That's what the Epoch Times calls it, you know, and of course, you know, there is something really sick in the psychology of Americans, many Americans, not all Americans, but they have this sort of victimhood mentality, because we are the one indispensable nation, as Madeleine Albright would say.
We always have to have terrible enemies, Dr. Evils out there who want to vanquish us, and so we have to always be on our guard, and we have to always make sure that the military is topped up and tapped up, and we have to always continue spending $300 million a day in Afghanistan.
Oh, wait, that's over.
We got to do something else and find somewhere else to dump our money into, and it's just round and round it goes, and it's, you know, we've been beating our heads against the wall for so long on this, and I don't know what it'll take to wake Americans up, because we keep seeing failed, failure after failure until you start realizing that actually failure is a success.
You know, as Dylan said, there's no success like failure, and failure is no success at all.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I swear, at this point I'm kind of afraid to move a muscle, because, you know, we agitate for so long about pulling out of Afghanistan, and we finally, this argument finally gains some purchase inside the foreign policy establishment, and yet, I know you've seen it a hundred times as much as me, in every article where they're taking our side on Afghanistan, it ends with, that way we can focus more on the pivot to China, the real enemy.
And not that I would say it's fair to sacrifice innocent Afghans just to keep our army busy, but it might be, you know, if it comes down to a real war between America and China, then god dang, man, we might have made a real mistake doing the right thing here, Dan.
Yeah, and I think, you know, the danger always is the case of Washington believing its own mythology, and that's what we saw for 20 years in Afghanistan.
Washington believed the lies it told itself and convinced itself, and I think you handled this on The Kennedy Show not long ago, if I'm not mistaken, including the idea that we've trained 300,000 expert Afghan soldiers, and that was, I think, the basis upon which the entire evacuation, the entire disengagement was formed.
The lies that the generals told, they must have known better, they had to know better.
We know the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction had been telling us for years that this thing was bogus, but Washington continues, it believes its mythology, and I think that's the danger of a war with China, is that there's no clear thinking, there's no clear heads.
It's all about, you know, putting down a mythology, believing the mythology, you know, it's like a religion.
Yeah.
Honestly, man, I think that's such an important point about, in a way, the decentralized sort of ad hoc bumbling nature of the empire there, not in the sense that it makes them innocent of anything, but just that it's sort of such an unorganized kind of chaos, the empire, just because its size, if nothing else, that it really makes it unpredictable in a lot of ways.
I used to, when I was much more of a conspiracy kook in the 1990s, I would always really resent it as patronizing, you know, kind of BS when people would say, well, you know, people who believe that the Council on Foreign Relations controls everything, essentially, that's to make them feel better, like somebody's in control of the thing.
And nobody really is.
And now I realize, well, not now, but about 20 years ago, I realized that that really is right, that, you know what, I would feel better if there was some former secretary of state or something at the head of some secret table who had some kind of veto power over the way this goes.
I know it's supposed to be the president, but it ain't him.
So who's in charge?
Who's driving this aircraft carrier?
And a lot of different people.
And who knows what they might do, you know?
That's a good point.
And you also make a good point about the danger.
And I think there is a danger right now because we've seen the mask slip a bit from the foreign policy establishment and the entire foreign policy ethos of Washington.
We've seen that despite spending a trillion dollars a year on the military, despite, you know, saturating the entire culture and population with military worship, when it comes time to actually do something, they're not very good at it.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment, the military, the entire edifice upon which, you know, the modern empire, the U.S. empire is built, is actually very rickety and can't do simple things like evacuate people properly, like, you know, like doing basic things that it should do.
And I think that's dangerous because I think when that mask slips, as you say, the internal chaos that the whole thing is built on is looking for a way to reinforce that, oh, yes, we can do things.
And I think that's the danger that we're facing right now.
Yeah, seriously.
All right.
But so, you know, seriously, as a devil's advocate argument, though, what about that?
It is the evil communist dictatorship there in Beijing and that they must be as greedy and ruthless as any collection of government runners anywhere in the world.
And so what is stopping them from attacking all of their neighbors and all of our friends and eventually coming here?
Yeah.
Why haven't they done anything yet like that?
That's the thing.
We've been demonstrating that that's our method of operation for decades.
The Chinese haven't done that.
They do go overseas, but they go with with business contracts.
You know, they go to Africa and say, hey, we want to buy some of your stuff.
We want to you know, maybe they're ruthless in the way they drive their deals.
OK, that's not that's not illegal.
Maybe they're unethical.
OK, that's questionable.
But they don't go to Africa with bombers.
They go with, say, we need some rare earth.
You know, we need whatever.
And they do that.
They go to South America.
They make deals.
So the whole idea that they're ruthless commies, ironically, and I've said this before, Scott, ironically, the things that I think really are bad and dangerous about China are the very things that we're importing here into the U.S., which is the social credit system.
If you happen to be a political dissident, i.e. you have any you have any question at all about the ruling class, then you're a terrorist and you need to prove your loyalty.
All of the bad things about China we're importing and all of the good things about China we're condemning.
You know, it's business ethos.
The idea that, you know, a building of doing business of, you know, really the state getting out of the way, which it does more in China, I would bet and I don't have the data in front of me, Scott, but I would bet it's a hell of a lot easier to start a business in China than it is here in the U.S.
So, yes, there are problems there.
But those are the problems we're emulating rather than the positive aspects of China.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I know that you guys are big David Stockman fans over there at the Ron Paul Institute, and I try to read him as much as I can, but he's so prolific.
I can't quite get out.
But I know that his description of China's economy is don't bother me with your predictions of their, you know, imminent takeover of anything, you know, for a minute.
He's so cynical about he calls the whole country the China Ponzi, like it's not even a nation state.
It's a giant Greenspan bubble and it's ready to pop at any time.
And I know he's always saying that every bubble is ready to pop at any time.
But then again, usually he's right.
Yeah.
And so I don't know when it's coming, but it seems like that's the libertarian insight that conservatives lack.
You know, this is, in fact, even in the famous Ron Paul piece, well, I'm sorry now I forget if it's in wars, war, peace and.
The state or if it's in Chapter 14, war and foreign policy from the Libertarian Manifesto, but in one of the other of those, it begins with why would the conservatives think that time is on the communist side?
If you know anything about capitalism, then you know why it works and why communism doesn't work and can't work.
And so time's on our side.
We should just strengthen capitalism here and not turn our country into a total state in the name of protecting ourselves from the communists when, you know, as libertarians especially understand that.
Well, I don't know, man.
This is my point of view.
I guess it's really essentially like the Austrian school's point of view.
Right, Dan?
Is that essentially any government intervention in the market is a distortion that's going to cause ripple effects and whatever.
Maybe you think it's worth it.
Maybe they get it.
You don't.
It's not.
But you have what would be all of the things equal in the free market.
And then you have government intervention distorting that.
Well, if that's true, it sure seems like it from here in this country.
Then think about the real ramshackle nature of the political economy in China, where all these decisions are made by, well, I don't know, all of them.
Many of these decisions are made by bureaucrats, all of them in cooperation and consultation with bureaucrats in a way that probably blows American interventionism away, you know?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know that that's the case.
I mean, I, you know, I suspect, you know, from my experience following China and I did take a two week trip to China when I was in Congress with Dr. Paul.
And of course, you know, those can be dog and pony shows.
I understand that.
But everything that I heard from from business and from government was that government likes to get out of the way.
And I'm not praising China because you're probably right.
The whole world is based on a huge bubble.
You know, but I think I think there's this tendency of seeing of seeing the the splinter in someone else's eye rather than the log in your own.
So, you know, in a sense, it's irrelevant whether China is practicing better capitalism than we are or not, because I think especially as foreign policy practitioners are, especially as non-interventionist foreign policy practitioners, are our whole, you know, reason for being is to blunt the China hawks in any way we can.
Wow.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
All right.
Well, so, geez, I guess I'd ask you about different countries in the Middle East and, you know, what's going on there and what people need to be concerned or not about.
I mean, especially in terms of Iraq and Syria, where we still have forces and.
What exactly are they doing in Syria, Dan?
Well, didn't you hear the president?
He said we don't have any troops there.
Did he say that?
Yeah, he did.
He said we don't have any troops in Syria.
Well, I wonder if they told him that or he's just that stupid or if they told him.
Yeah, that was the that was the famous Stephanopoulos interview.
Oh, see, I didn't see that.
I need to.
Well, yeah, I mean, I didn't watch the whole thing, but there's been a lot written about it.
Apparently, ABC left out a lot of the more embarrassing things that he said that were just completely gone and completely off base.
But, you know, hey, I mean, it's a it's a complicated world out there.
And the idea that one president, you know, can can, you know, immediately talk about every hotspot, you know, that's that's kind of ridiculous.
But when you see more and more of these gaffes, then you start to wonder.
And the other thing that he said in going back to China is he said that the U.S. would respond if Taiwan was invaded.
And that's not been our policy.
It's always been, as you know, strategic ambiguity.
And so he was corrected by his staff again.
So so it's a long sort of joking answer, but he's getting a lot of these things wrong.
So it's probably good that he is on vacation again this week.
But I'll tell you what, this is the problem of having such a senile president.
But I think they all kind of make that gaffe over Taiwan and walk it back, don't they?
I think Bush and Trump did the same thing.
Yeah, I mean, well, I know you're you're the expert everywhere, but I'm not.
I'm sure I'd make a hell of a lot of gas if I was if I was in there, too.
But but, yeah, it's starting to get to be a little bit difficult to ignore.
But yeah, what are we doing in Syria?
What are we doing in Iraq?
Is it just inertia?
I mean, how much did inertia drive our endless occupation of of Afghanistan?
You know, I mean, there's just there's just no will.
I mean, what about getting what about dealing with the Iranians?
What about the JCPOA talks?
You know, it's just I don't know how you feel, Scott.
But I have a sense that there's absolutely no vision of the U.S. role in the world with the current people in charge of the State Department, you know, and and the and the Pentagon.
I mean, previously, we've had that idea, that idea of a worldview.
And a lot of it was, again, mythology, the mythology of the Obama era versus the reality of droning Americans overseas.
You know, the the Bush era of, you know, the global war on terror.
But I don't know.
I mean, I try to put my finger on someone like Lincoln and I just don't I just don't get anything.
It's like it's like Kierkegaard said about existence.
It smells of nothing, right?
You know?
Yeah.
I think that really does seem to be right that they don't they don't really know what they're doing.
They're scrambling to hold things together.
But then they don't even know what that means.
I this is the part that I never understand, really, especially well, like for W. Bush, forget it.
He was doing exactly what he wanted and things like that.
But for Obama, I know.
And not that I'm saying he's a good person or anything, but just he's smart enough and well-informed enough to know better than a lot of the things that he did.
And he's also smart enough to be, you know, probably unlike W. Bush.
I think he's smart enough to spend time thinking, damn, I had eight years.
It's already over.
And what I have to show for it, what I really do, what I what could I have stopped that I didn't or whatever, you know, I hope he beats himself up over that stuff.
But I just think like because it's so obvious, right?
They tell us all in school that any of us could grow up to be the president.
So you think about it.
Well, if I was the president, I would make it worth it for whatever it took for me to become the president.
I would, you know, be in trouble every single day for eight years, you know, and yeah, or maybe less.
But but yeah, I just can't think of like imagine being the national security advisor.
And being like, well, I don't know.
I don't know.
Yeah.
You're right.
I totally agree with you.
They don't know what in the hell to do.
Yeah.
The thing about the thing that we've seen, though, you know, and this is not an excuse for the person, but I think it's an insight into how the establishment works, is that even when you had a president who wanted to do something, the whole thing about the whole thing about Ukraine policy, the whole first impeachment of Trump was that he did not follow the consensus of the community.
You know, I mean, that was literally what they said.
That's literally what Vindman said.
And that's literally why he was impeached.
So there is the idea of how much power does a president actually have?
Right.
Hey, I'm so glad that you said that, because out of all of that testimony and all of that hype, you just picked the most important sentence out of that whole thing, which I think is exactly right, which is when Vindman says that, look, the president was changing the policy.
But we at the interagency, we had already decided what the policy was.
And then he was going to make it different.
I mean, that's illegal.
You can't do that.
And that was the thing.
I don't remember the exact quote, but that was exactly what it was.
And that was why, in this guy's mind, he really thought that what right does the president have to decide foreign policy when the interagency, which what does that even mean exactly?
That just means like a meeting of the deputies committee or what?
You know, I don't know.
It was really incredible insight, and he was the main one, but it was really a procession of people trotted out that said exactly the same thing.
As you say, yeah, the interagency, it went against the interagency's, you know, consolidated view and what have you, and over and over.
And that, I think, was a real eye opener.
And I think, you know, Trump brought a lot of that on himself because of his style.
He had a polarizing style.
I think, obviously, Obama was more effective because he didn't have that polarizing style.
But I mean, Obama got a couple of really good things done on foreign policy.
Trump, even the stuff that he was screwed on, he was not able to do anything about really, you know, dealing with Russia, getting out of Afghanistan, getting out of Syria.
But yeah, it is a real eye opener.
And then when you step back and you look at these agencies and their budgets and the personnel, you know, imagine the biggest pain in the ass you've ever known, who's always bothering you, who just never can chill out, and multiply that by tens of thousands.
And that's Washington, D.C.
You know, I just finished reprinting a piece that Jim Bovard did.
I think you guys ran it yesterday on antiwar.com.
It's one of the most profound things I've ever read.
It's just simply Jim Bovard sitting at the towpath and one of the typical Washington foreign policy establishment person comes in there and just happens to be getting ready to go for a jog.
And Jim engages her in conversation.
The way he describes it is exactly as I remember my 13 years in Washington dealing with these people.
He's captured it exactly.
And that's exactly the problem with all these people.
They all consider themselves way smarter than us, way better than us, and way more accomplished than us.
And they don't.
The last thing they want to do is have to listen to us.
Yep.
And they don't.
It's amazing.
They'll never get fired.
You know, we can't even find them.
They're all hidden.
Hey, y'all, check out our great stuff at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
First of all, we've published No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg, our institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us.
Our whole movement, I mean.
And No Quarter will leave his mark on you, no question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Both are instant classics.
I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics, and everything else.
You'll absolutely love it.
Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
You know, back when Twitter was a little bit newer, I got a response one time, I forgot what he said now.
I did get a little bit of engagement from Jake Tapper one or two times.
And I'm pretty sure one of them was when I said to him about the Syrian war in 2013, that he was phrasing it, I forgot who now who he was interviewing, but he was saying, what can you say to convince the American people to support this?
It was, of course, after the Turkish and Al Qaeda false flag in eastern Damascus there.
And that was the whole frame.
And then so I sent a tweet to him.
Hey, man, how come it has to be the frame of what can we do to get the American people on board for this thing instead of don't you have to not do this because the American people don't want you to do it?
It seems like that would at least be just as fair of a way to approach it.
You know what I mean?
But then so I saw him interviewing McMaster and McMaster saying, oh, yeah, this is all everybody's fault, but mine and all this kind of thing.
And Tapper outright says to him, he goes, look, I mean, we can't ignore this.
This is right after Biden's speech on Monday.
We can't ignore that a supermajority of the American people say the war is not worth fighting.
And you know, here we're saying this war is to create a democracy in in Afghanistan.
The democracy here is saying that we want to quit.
So what would you say about that?
You know, they're all idiots.
Yeah.
And in fact, even it's better than that, because he even says I'm paraphrasing here, but he makes it pretty explicit that, like, look, McMaster, I'm with you, OK?
Your job and my job here is to convince the American people to love this stuff.
Nobody's disputing that.
However, I have to play devil's advocate here, if only to set you up, to give you a chance to explain why we should ignore the supermajority public opinion of the people, you know, essentially is the way the thing was phrased.
So he's just totally admitting that he's on Team McMaster here.
Nobody's questioning that.
Everybody can tell.
Every watching knows that.
But still, don't we kind of owe an answer for that?
And then McMaster's answer, of course, is, well, Biden should lead.
And just do what I say instead, you know, and just ignore that.
We got to go create a democracy in Afghanistan by ignoring the one that we got here, supposedly, you know.
But so, yeah, Tapper's just making it clear whose side he's on and speaking for all of the rest of them, too, that, hey, you know, this is our business is making you guys love war.
The funny thing is they make it so obvious that that really is their primary concern.
You know, Dave Smith said that on The Kennedy Show last night, like, you notice they only get all human rightsy and really upset when we leave a war.
I mean, come on.
We've been killing people over there all this time.
Now you're upset that people are dying.
Come on, dude.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's it's frustrating.
But, you know, he's got his he's got the bully pulpit and we're you know, we're basically banging on the doors on the outside trying to get someone to listen to us.
You know, what's what's ironic is how how ill informed the Washington foreign policy establishment is.
You know, the experts are they all read the same things.
They all you know, like McMaster, I bet, you know, he's they never expose themselves to anything that questions a preconceived view.
And so ironically, the people who think they're so smart are actually among the worst informed people in the country.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thomas Johnson used to say that Thomas Johnson used to say, man, I used to write the morning brief for the CIA.
I used to be part of that and I read them all the time to because he was a contractor.
I guess with CIA USC professor and he goes anti war dot com is better than any CIA brief in terms of just like information about what you want to know going on in the world.
It's just because Eric Garris' taste in news items and the order he puts them in, and letting you know was the deal.
You know what I mean?
It's all there.
You might know a secret if you have the access, but you're much more likely to have the wisdom of who's who and what's really going on around here if you read in open source stuff from wide and varied sources, you know?
Exactly.
But then you're not in the club, you know?
I mean, strangely enough, I mean, I did have access once, and I did write for the Secretary of State's morning summary on several occasions when I was at the State Department.
And I can say, you know, if I had my classified and my unclassified stacked side by side, the classified was no great shakes, right?
The other was much more helpful and much more useful.
And you're right.
I mean, just the average person reading antiwar, I remember when I worked for Dr. Paul on the Hill, I would always show up to the hearings, you know, especially when he was, he was higher up.
And so I was sitting in the back behind him and I would sit next to my colleagues.
And I know I've told the story before, but I would go there with my stack stuff to read while I was waiting.
And I was reading antiwar.com and Lou Rockwell, you know, and counterpunch and all this stuff.
And I look around and every single other staffer was reading Washington Post, New York Times, the same crap warmed over.
And I'm thinking, you guys are foreign policy people.
You should get past this boilerplate stuff and really try to get a good, decent knowledge of it.
And if you really wanted that, that's no way to get your career move forward.
Isn't that funny?
Just stick with that point real quick there.
So if, if I was a staffer for a congressman and I decided like you that, Hey, I want to learn a thing or two about the war that we're in right now, that that's no way to advance your career.
That'll make you, that'll make you a dork and a nerd and not one of the cool kids right away.
Is that it?
You might start questioning things.
You know, you might say something that, uh, that, uh, you know, others don't want to hear your boss is only there for two year intervals.
You can be there for life if you play your cards right, you know, and, and, and if you're really smart, you'll be in there for a few years and then you move over to the quote private sector where you start really making the big bucks, you know, which is, you know, flipping your Rolodex and doing lobbying.
And then you go back in at a private sector.
How dare they call it that?
I know it's, um, but we know, I mean, in fact, I was just chatting with Norman Singleton, my old colleague in Dr. Paul's office the other day, and we were going over some of the people that we knew from the old day, uh, the old days who've just done that exact thing.
And, you know, they just go back and forth, back and forth, up the ladder, up the ladder.
Next thing you know, you've got a mansion in McLean, you know, and you're doing, you're doing well.
You're eating at the Capitol grill and you know, it's a, it's a good life if you can get it.
Yeah.
That doesn't sound so good to me, but I see what you mean about how much they think that that's the pinnacle and all that.
Um, yeah.
So now here's the thing I want to talk to you about.
I actually just got off the line with Trita Parsi right before I got on the line with you.
And of course he's a formerly at the National Iranian American Council and now is the co-founder and the muckety muck over there at the Quincy Institute with Bacevich and them.
And you had written this great article about the bad guys attacking them over the loss of that, of Afghanistan.
Was that Kelly Vlahos and Eli Clifton caused America to lose the Afghan war?
Did I read that right, Dan?
It's all Kelly's fault.
Man, shame on her.
Oh wait, no, she was the one, the one who warned us all along on the specific topic of the implementation of the counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan in 2009.
Other than Matthew Ho, she wears the crown for told you so that year.
Guaranteed.
Exactly.
You know, that's why we had her back several times to Dr. Paul's famous Thursday lunches on the hill because she was so good.
She was such a great dog and reporter and she really dug into the counterinsurgency doctrine and really exposed it for the mindless rot that it was.
Absolutely.
All right.
So anyway, so who are these goons and what are they doing messing with my friend?
Yeah, well, you know, it's a Washington free beacon and they were upset.
They wanted to blame someone and they blamed Quincy because of course it's their fault that getting out wasn't orderly.
It's never, it's never the, the, the free beacons fault that 20 years of wasted lives and wasted money.
You know, that's never their fault.
It's only that getting out wasn't perfectly executed, you know, so, and if you read the piece that they wrote, it's amazingly void of anything specific, uh, you know, so it's kind of depressing.
I thought they'd be better at that, at attacking poor old Kelly, but no, it was pretty, pretty empty.
Yeah.
I love the way you say always.
This is the way it begins.
I admit, I've always had a soft spot for the Washington free beacon, not because I am attracted to their pure content, mind you, but because I've always associated the name free beacon with free bacon, a proposition I believe every American could get behind.
And I think that is totally right, man.
I wish I had thought of that myself because I also like bacon.
You know, I kind of stole that from Lou Rockwell too, anyway, I should have mentioned that, but I probably stole that a little bit from him subconsciously.
That's good.
I borrow a couple of his lines from time to time myself.
Um, all right, man.
So, um, now, yeah, here's something that's important that you bring up in your piece that's worth talking about with you.
Is all the Ron Paul rights trending on social media and all that?
Ron Paul was right, is what I'm going to say.
Trending on social media and repeats of his speeches about Afghanistan and all that going on this week.
What do you think of that?
I think it was great.
You know, I mean, it was, it was good for nostalgia.
It's good.
It's good that it broke through to the mainstream.
It's good.
I think Newsweek ran a piece based on the trending, uh, just like it's good.
I mean, yeah, they, they ran a pretty good piece on how it was trending.
Ron Paul was right.
It was trending and, you know, when these things do happen and, you know, I think we talked about this, um, offline is that we, we do feel like we're pounding our heads against the wall.
And when something like this does happen, I mean, Scott Horton gets on Kennedy.
Uh, people are listening to what you have to say.
They're talking about your book.
They're talking about Ron Paul.
So it's an opportunity for us to, you know, to get in a couple of licks before they turn their heads away again.
And that's the real benefit, the benefit of it.
You know?
I mean, and, you know, it sucks that this is the conversation we're having in 2021, but you do get the idea that, and this is a lot of this, of course, first and foremost is because of Dr. Paul, but then also because of Trump.
I mean, only Trump could go on Sean Hannity show and say essentially to his face, this is all your fault.
Dumb, dumb.
And it's all wrong.
And we should have never done this.
Only he says Bush, but he could have said Hannity too.
Um, and, and tell the whole right wing that, Hey, we don't have to be married to Bush's legacy anymore.
Screw them Bush's, you know, and the right wing really, really, really, really, really needed to hear that from somebody that they can look up to.
And so, and when Ron did it, I mean, Bush was still in the chair when Ron started running against him in 2008, you know, put him in a very difficult position to do that.
And you know, 12 had it's all its own dynamics.
It was still a great success of a campaign anyway.
Um, and it's in all its own ways, but, um, but it does seem like, you know, when I go on the Kennedy show, it isn't just that they're saying, okay, now that it's too late, we're willing to hear you out.
It's not just that, but it's now that it's too late.
We all really agree with you that like, yeah, we probably shouldn't have done that.
And, and you know, nation building, yeah, no nation building, isn't a good idea.
We shouldn't be doing nation building and you know, I'll take it.
They could just be saying that, well, we lost this one, but shut up about it or where they, but they are sort of at least all going along with, I guess, sort of the, um, the transformation that Tucker Carlson made back 10 years ago that like, yeah, no, we shouldn't be doing this.
I don't know.
That, that may be too strong of a way to put it, but it just seemed like that's the idea kind of.
And the same thing happened after it was plainly obvious that Iraq was an absolute debacle and disaster.
You know, the problem is in the interim between them doing this and then finding out it was a crap idea.
So many people suffer and die.
So much money is lost and wasted and so many evil people get ahead.
And that's what really bothers me too.
People that serve the system, that serve the regime and profit off of it.
But in between those intervals, you have all this bad stuff.
I just wish we could make the intervals, you know, closer together, but, um, but we can only do what we, what we can, you know, and I get, I'm, I'm sure you do too, Scott.
I get very frustrated.
Why is it that we're, you know, we're screaming in the wilderness.
Why can't we seem to get very much traction on this?
And, but I, at the same time, I'm grateful for when we do get some traction, which we are getting a little traction now with the Afghanistan thing.
Yeah.
You know, look, I mean, the reality is almost everybody's interested in foreign policy has got something at stake and has a conflict of interest and a reason why they have a think tank.
They got money from somebody who's trying to sell helicopters to the Pentagon.
You know, that's just how business is done.
The private sector, they call it, as you were referring to earlier, right?
So then the only other people who are interested in foreign policy are people like us who are terribly against it and want the whole thing to stop for moral reasons and for, you know, the consequences for our own country reasons and all these kinds of things.
How to get, and look at the polls say the super majorities agree with us again.
How do you like that McMaster?
But the problem is how do you get them to prioritize?
It's also far away, which is one of the reasons why that just proves we shouldn't be doing this.
Right?
We're supposed to be.
That's one of the biggest, best things about being in America is we can mind our own business and be free and live our own lives.
But our government is making East Africa our business.
It is our business.
We're the ones doing it to them.
So what the hell?
You know, we got to, I'm not saying we should intervene different, better.
I'm saying it's up to us to stop it, but it's hard to get that message through to people when people have no idea that George W. Bush started a war against Somalia also 20 years ago.
Yeah.
You know, that's only a war that's younger than our Afghan war only by three months, you know?
Yeah.
And heating up again.
Yeah.
Tom Luongo wrote a piece a couple of days ago reminding me how great Justin Raimondo was and remains, quoting Justin, who said, you know, foreign policy is just war by other means and, and that's, that's classic Raimondo.
And that's absolutely true.
You know, in a sense, our enemy is foreign policy, foreign policy itself.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Yes.
So, gosh, you know, I, I think about Justin a lot, you know, and I talk about a serious blow to our movement.
I mean, it's terrible.
Yeah.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because, uh, you know, sometimes I forget this doing this show, but there's new people listening all the time and it's been two years since he died.
And there are a lot of young people who, you know, they lived through that whole time, way too young to have known anything about Raimondo, man, never heard of Raimondo.
So I mean, I mean, a Raimondo column where all of the cylinders were firing is like, it was like the equivalent of a, you like a nuclear war against the bad guys, you know?
I mean, it was just, there was nothing like it, 2000 words of just, you know, I mean, just incredible.
And it's, uh, the loss is just, there's, you know, and now Bob Wenzel, who was so great has gone to, it's, it's tough to, it's tough to see our side, the ranks thinning out.
I hope some younger folks are going to come up through the ranks, you know, pretty soon as well.
Yeah.
Mark Perry just died too, man.
Yeah.
Mark Perry.
Yeah, exactly.
So sorry to get all maudlin on you, but I just couldn't help thinking about Justin.
Yeah, no, that's true.
And listen, I'm glad that you brought it up because I like to say, and I do believe there's no question about this, that during the W. Bush years, he was the most important writer in America.
Oh yeah.
Bar none.
And by a lot.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And there was, his reading Romano is absolutely essential.
If you weren't reading him then, then you didn't know what the fuck was really going on.
You just didn't know.
That was how you know what's going on for real.
And, and, and through, through Obama too, um, he started trailing off and getting lazy in late Obama, I guess.
But during, during Bush and early Obama, I mean, that's, that stuff will go down in history forever, man.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I don't think I've ever in my life anticipated a column like I did his Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
I just couldn't wait to turn it out, get on the bus, get to work, read it all the way to work.
And even when he was wrong, I disagreed with him a lot and I think he was wrong.
It didn't matter because it was still, as you say, great and important writing.
Yeah.
I'm the kook who put all those links in there.
You wonder why I know all this stuff?
Oh my God.
Wow.
I didn't know that.
How do you know all this stuff?
Well, three days a week, I'd spend three hours filling a Raimondo column with proof that he was right about everything, which was easy to do because he always was.
And if he wasn't, then I'd fix it.
Whoa, that's a revelation.
I didn't know that.
Oh yeah.
In fact, some people who are actually really good people, they didn't like Raimondo's columns because there was too many links in it.
They couldn't follow them all.
That's my fault.
It was too much of an endeavor.
That was my fault.
They were helpful.
You know what?
I have a disorder like this, right, ever since I was a little kid and my mom would watch Perry Mason and Matlock and all that, and even Perry Mason first, that the first time I learned about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that anything less is cheating.
You gotta tell them everything, so now I'm stuck like this.
Those links were important because you could also go off and do some of your own research on it.
I mean, it was, that's amazing.
I didn't realize that.
Those links were critical, I think.
Wow.
Yeah, so the way I looked at it was any assertion of fact of any kind has to be proven.
So I don't think anyone else was doing it like that back then.
I think, you know, you guys were the only ones.
Yeah, there were links here and there, but that was just, you know, nonstop.
Yeah, so that was me from like, what, 2004 through, I finally quit doing it by late Obama, I guess.
Uh-huh.
Wow.
But yeah, that was a good time.
And you know, of course, I interview a lot of great people like you and learn a lot of great stuff this way too, but that certainly has helped with doing all of that work.
Seriously, like, you know, for you young'uns, take a rainy Saturday or Sunday sometime, take an afternoon and go back and just plow through those old Raimondo columns.
Just start in 99 with the War Diary on Kosovo and then just go through 2000 through 2001.
And some of them, you'll be able to just skim right through and go, okay, he's just fighting with, you know, some ridiculous, you know, off-brand neocon that you don't need to worry about.
But other times, you'll know, you'll, you'll see what I mean, what we mean about the greatness in there, man.
It's, you know.
And there's plenty of laughs packed in when he goes after Tom Palmer, you can't help but laugh because he knows, he knows where to apply the ice pick.
Yeah.
You know, actually when I, now that I'm talking about it, I wish I hadn't been in such a hurry to get the book out, you know, because that would have really been a smart thing to do would have been to go and do that myself, take a Saturday or a Sunday and just go and jam through as many Raimondo columns as I can, looking for little things I might've forgotten that belong in there, you know?
Yeah.
That might be a great project for anti-war.com, you know, the collected works of Justin Raimondo.
Well, see, that's the problem, right?
If we're going to do that, I gotta do it and I just can't do it.
I can't even answer my emails.
Yeah, I know, it's tough.
You know, there's, there was even a guy actually put together a PDF file of, oh, cause after he died, I did Tom Wood's show and talked all about, and I picked out like, here's some of my favorite articles by Justin.
So then this guy went and made a cool PDF version of that to print out as a book.
But even then the amount of production and the time and the editing and the, all the different things that would have to go into it, I just don't have time to do, I just put it on the back burner and maybe I'll get to it someday, you know, I don't know.
That would be great though.
You know, we call it something about bizarro world would have to be in the title, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Oh man.
I was always mad at him cause I used to say that on pirate radio in the nineties before I ever even read him.
And then he made such good use of that term, I was like, okay, well I guess I can't say that anymore.
All right.
Anyway, listen man, you're great.
I love hanging out with you and talking with you, Dan, and I appreciate you coming on the show.
Thanks, Scott.
It's always great to talk to you.
All right, you guys, that is Dan McAdams.
He's at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and read his funny takedown of the Washington free beacon guys, Washington free beacons, hilarious meltdown over Afghanistan.
The Scott Horton show and anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, war.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
