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.
All right you guys, introducing Dan McKnight from bringourtroopshome.us and defendtheguard, I think also .us, and he's a former Marine, former Army, and former National Guard if I remember that right, and he's trying to prevent, well, no, he's trying to encourage the states to prevent the federal government from nationalizing and misusing the National Guard, and from what I gather, you've been making some real progress lately.
Welcome back to the show, Dan, how you doing?
Good, Scott, it's good to talk to you.
What's the latest, man?
Oh, man, last year I think we hit, you know, in the mid-30s for a number of states that had sponsors for our bill, Defend the Guard, and we're excited to announce that we just hit our 44th state yesterday for this legislative session, and we have a hearing in Kansas House and Kansas Senate next week.
We've got endorsements from national figures like Justin Amash and Don Huffines in Texas and Joe Kent in Washington.
We're making some real progress, and I feel like we're going to actually get something pushed through this year that's our third year trying, and I think we're going to get it done.
All right, now, so you mentioned a couple of important characters there, Joe Kent, Don Huffines.
I don't know what the polls look like.
I know he's running to the right of Greg Abbott in the primaries here in Texas.
How serious are these guys about supporting your position, do you think?
So Huffines put out a full press release about supporting Defend the Guard and reclaiming the state's rights and control over their own militia, so I would take that as a pretty serious statement, and we know in Texas the Republican Party has a plank in their platform that says that they support Defend the Guard and that the National Guard should never be deployed to combat absent a declaration of war from Congress, and so if the party says it, and a candidate from the Republican Party puts it out in an official press release, and another candidate, Allen West, who's a Republican, also says the same thing, that if you don't support the platform, you're not a Republican, I feel like that's a pretty strong endorsement from those that are running against Abbott, and like you said, they're running to the right of Abbott, both West and Don Huffines.
Great.
So I actually just pulled up a poll here.
Oh, there's a guy named Ricky Perry who's running.
That ought to help.
Huffines has 5% support so far.
Yeah, we know he's running in third place, but any news is good news, right?
Any attention?
Absolutely, and obviously Abbott is a pretty popular Republican incumbent governor, and Allen West, of course, whatever you think about him, is a famous character from TV and all that.
Huffines is coming from pretty much the starting position here, but as you say, it's important that both of them, obviously Huffines more so than West, but they both have essentially come out in support of this, which in the state of Texas especially, that sets a real important example for the rest of them, I think, should.
Absolutely, and Abbott hasn't been terrible on the National Guard issue.
He did call the Texas National Guard home from DC because he felt they were being misused, and he has threatened to use the National Guard for border security in the southern part of Texas.
So he's not terrible on the National Guard issue, he just hasn't opined yet on Defend the Guard, and we're still working to get an official statement from his office.
I don't know if we'll get it or not, but we're trying.
And now our same guy that introduced the bill last year promises to do so again.
Well, I mean, actually the legislature's only every two years in Texas.
Yep, so yeah, Representative Brian Slayton from the Texas First Legislative District, he has already committed to bring it back next year.
He's already building a coalition of co-sponsors, and he's become real aggressive in the state of Texas for a freshman legislator.
He's doing a really good job.
And he got kind of hoodwinked in the process last year, you remember that, we were there testifying and the committee chairman swapped his bill out in place for a garbage bill and put it in his place.
Instead of Defend the Guard, he changed it to Notify the Guard, and basically said that National Guard enlistees would have to sign a piece of paper that acknowledges that they may, that they do have to swear an oath to the Constitution, and then they may have to fight for wars that are unconstitutional, which, you know, it was like the hoodwink of the century.
You know, he went to go buy a Cadillac and ended up with a Datsun.
Hey man, ain't nothing wrong with a Datsun.
I love the old Datsuns.
I mean, mine's a Nissan, but that's the same thing as the Datsun, really, isn't it?
As an old skater, you probably ran around with guys that had the old Datsun pickups, right?
Yep, D21, man, 1995.
That'll be my truck till the wheels fall off, and they're not ever going to fall off, so.
Nope.
All right, now, so that's pretty good, and I, you know, I know we got to wait a year in Texas, and I'm glad that the legislature is only in section every two years here.
That should also set a great example for the rest of them, but so that's, you know, essentially on hold, although it's still some pretty good publicity from some Republican congressmen there.
And so, I guess, give us some more examples, but also kind of, I want to hear from you about, you know, how you measure the mood here on the right in the Republican Party at the state level and compared to the federal level and or what, because obviously there's very mixed messages on the right these days, whether it's just the toughest SOBs under the sun or whether, actually, that's all Democratic recklessness, and we want an America-first foreign policy.
Sure, yeah, that's, there's a lot to unpack there, so let's talk about the right.
Are they the toughest SOBs on the block, or are they going to follow the Constitution, right?
Well, you look at Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney and Dan Crenshaw and even Lindsey Graham, and they're beating that war drum.
You know, they're beating it strong that we should be, we should be amping up our forces in Ukraine, that we should be doing anything we can to deter Russia, and we should be heading, headstrong into this conflict.
That's one faction of the Republican Party.
There's a faction of the Democratic Party that's saying the same thing.
We have to be tough.
We have to be strong.
Our poll numbers are in the tank, so what do we do?
We wag the dog and we create our own war.
Nobody changes presidents in the middle of a war, and so there's two factions of both the left and the right that are beating that same drum.
But then you see more principled people in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party alike that are saying, hey, slow and reasoned discourse.
We have a chance to back away from this thing without looking weak, and we can do it by following our own constitutional principles and requiring that Congress declares war before we ever get into this conflict in Ukraine.
And so there's two distinct flavors in Washington, D.C. right now, but I'll tell you the one that's the most prevalent is in the states.
We're finding that states are open and eager to reclaim their authority over their militia, over their people, over their rights from the federal government.
And in Kansas, near neighbor, two states to the north, they're about to have this bill in a hearing in the Senate and the House next week, and they've added a little bit of language into their bill that it doesn't just deal with war deployments for the National Guard, but it also deals with federal vaccine mandates for the COVID-19 vaccine that the state of Kansas will determine what's best for their National Guard, not the federal government.
And so that Tenth Amendment fight is really kind of burning heavy right now across the states.
Nobody wants the federal government telling us what to do with our people, what to do with our bodies or what to do with our militia.
Yeah.
And by the way, would you clarify a thing for me here?
I've seen a liberal Democrat saying, it's called the National Guard, dude.
Get it through your thick skull, bro.
And that kind of thing.
And so, but then it is true, right?
That ever since the New Deal era, that they really changed the state militias to the National Guard.
In most cases, I think in Texas, we have both, right?
A state guard and a National Guard with some kind of legal, you know, separation between them.
I'm not exactly sure what the different circumstances for their deployments are, but most states, I think, don't have both.
They just have National Guards.
And how different is that from a state militia?
You want to call it one, but is it really a national kind of government project in the first place?
And what difference does it really make, Dan?
Yeah, I think from a pure constitutional standpoint, there's no one that would argue that the militia that's referred to in the Constitution is the National Guard.
However, in 1904, the Modernization of Defense Act codified the National Guard as the militia of the state, but didn't do anything to take control of that militia away from the states.
It just changed the name.
And so the National Guard is under state control, and the disciplining and the training of the members of the National Guard or the militia falls on the state and the legislatures, believe it or not.
But the equipping of the National Guard comes from the federal government.
The federal government supplies the tanks and the helicopters and the trucks and the guns.
And so the equipment comes from the federal government.
But the National Guard, as you know, the militia has three missions that are laid out very clearly in the Constitution.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15 says that the National Guard or the militia shall be called into federal service to put down an insurrection, to put down an invasion, or to enforce the laws of the Union.
And absent a declaration of war, fighting overseas combat is not any of those three missions.
Now, a declaration of war changes everything because that does become the law of the Union and the state militia then can be federalized to fight offensively or defensively for the United States of America.
And so that that's kind of the role of the National Guard.
It's a state entity funded by the federal government, but under state control.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group, and I'm going to start posting stuff over there more.
That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
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See, that way it says on your shirt why you're so smart.
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This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years, and I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called Why the Vietnam War, Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974.
But how did we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in Why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson, available now.
I mean, I was brought up to believe, I guess, more from just the TV ads in government school or I don't know, and maybe just from kind of hearsay in the neighborhood where essentially the job of the National Guard is sandbags in the event of a flood, right?
Or if you're like an earthquake-prone state, maybe evacuations from neighborhoods that get hit really hard and, you know, natural disaster like that, tornadoes, something like that.
Or, you know, in the event of a Red Dawn scenario, right?
They're the National Guard.
They're here to defend the country from which, of course, there are no powers anywhere in the world that could ever invade this country in a million years.
But anyway, I mean, that's what they're essentially supposed to do is sit around waiting for a day that never comes ever anyway.
But the idea was, isn't it two weeks a month or two weeks a year, one weekend a month?
And the rest of time, you're essentially just drinking beers and hanging out with your friends and nobody told you you're going to go patrol the Helmand province.
Sure.
You know, it's been one of the greatest marketing campaigns of all time.
You'll serve your country, serve your state with nothing more than one weekend a month and two weeks in the year or in the summer.
And the National Guard, though, it has been a bit of a misnomer.
The National Guard doesn't train to fill sandbags.
We train for war.
The National Guard's job is to defend the nation.
The ancillary benefit of the National Guard is that they are there in a ready force that's available to participate in floods and hurricanes and fires and pandemics.
But they train every time they put their uniform on, they are training for combat, for defense of America.
And so we all think of the National Guard as the sandbag fillers or the weekend warriors.
But I'll tell you right now, the National Guard is one of the most well-trained and well-equipped fighting forces in this world.
I mean, they're as good as any active duty military in the United States.
And so it is a bit of a misnomer, but their job is to guard the nation.
It's in their name.
It's in their creed.
It's in their title.
And so if there is a war that's worth fighting, that's so important to America, that America's national interests are threatened and we have to commit our sons and daughters and our treasure to defend that Americanism, the National Guard should go fight that war, but only if it's done the right way.
And that's where we differ from the National Guard Bureau, the Department of Defense, the Warhawks, all the people that are beating the drum.
They feel that the National Guard should be able to go and fight a war just because the president says so.
And as you know, our organization absolutely opposes that point of view.
If we were to fight in Ukraine right now, you don't see anybody talking about, well, we better assemble the Congress and have a debate over whether to declare war on Russia or not, or any of these things.
The question is, what's Biden going to do?
What's Biden going to do?
And then how's Biden going to respond?
Yep.
And we see what Biden's going to do.
He's going to write a letter and put his thoughts down, you know, in some beautiful penmanship.
You know, so.
That's good.
You're right.
No one's going to call for it.
I hope he'll leave it at that.
It would be nice, but we know that's not going to happen.
He is going to make himself, he's going to peacock a little bit.
We all know it.
But you're right.
No one is calling for the Congress to reassemble and to debate this because, one, Congress doesn't want it on their shoulders, right?
They don't want to have to go home and look at their constituents and explain why little Johnny and little Susie are going off to fight in a war in Ukraine.
You know, that all of a sudden American security interests are 3,000 miles to the east of the Elbe River, where it's always been.
That's been our line in the sand, right?
And now we're saying it's all the way over there.
And so Congress is never going to take that rollback unless we force them to do it.
And that's our goal here, is to force Congress to reclaim that authority to declare war, to take it back from the president.
And if they want to go fight these endless wars and misadventures all over the world, and they want to take the National Guard to do it, then Congress has to do their job first.
And we know that that hurdle, that obstacle, is going to create two things, pause, right, and make people actually come together and discuss it.
And two, a little bit of time for the president or the secretary of state or the diplomats for cooler heads to prevail.
Yeah.
Well, and you're right to do that.
You know what?
Let's just say for the sake of example, never mind that I'm anti-war.com guy here, but let's say maybe we would need to have a war.
Congress still needs to take their responsibility for it, as you said, even if they are going to have one.
I would prefer to emphasize your points about, well, give them time to cool it off and maybe force them to take responsibility will mean they won't do it then if they'll have to take responsibility for it.
But if they do have to do it, then they better take responsibility too.
You know, it's a huge point here.
Absolutely.
And I think that's a big portion of our organization is we have a lot of us that are adamantly anti-war because once you've seen war, you can never truly be pro-war.
And then there's a part of our organization that is purely constitutional and they say, hey, you know what?
We'll fight a war if we need to.
We're warriors.
That's our job.
But let's do it the right way.
You know, if I swear an oath to defend the Constitution, then you should use that same Constitution to give me the legal authority to go to war, kick the crap out of somebody and come back home.
Don't make me stay there forever.
And you know what?
I got to be honest too, as much as I resented them at the time, it was my seventh grade social studies teacher who taught us not just that this was the American system, but that there was a real reason why Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and all of them agreed that the war power should be separate and divided like this.
And that the House of Representatives of the people that's accountable to the people every two years for re-election would be the ones to decide whether we get into a war or not.
They would be in on it.
And we could not have a war without them.
Correct.
Yeah.
You're right.
It's the age or the department of the government that most likely and most eager to go to war is the executive branch.
And we all know that.
And that's why that power has been taken away for has been vested in the people's house.
And so, yeah.
No, you're right.
You're absolutely right on that.
Yeah.
Let me ask you this.
What's the 10-7 club?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, our organization Bring Our Troops Home and we're a nonprofit veterans organization.
And we spend a lot of time in the states lobbying and trying to affect change.
Right.
We have people on the road.
We have advocates that we send out.
We make phone calls, flyers, mailers.
None of that's cheap.
Right.
So, the 10-7 club is just our supporters club.
People that want to donate and be and help the cause.
So, it's 10-7 T-E-N-S-E-V-E-N club dot com.
The 10-7 is the date, October 7th, that the United States began our endless and illegal war in Afghanistan.
That's the day the first boots hit the ground.
And so, we never wanted to forget that date.
That was kind of the beginning of the modern veterans fight to return to constitutional principles.
So, the 10-7 club, it's a place where people can go.
They can sign up for the newsletter there and they can make a monthly contribution as little as $10 or one-time contributions.
Whatever they feel that they can handle.
And we do some fun things there.
For all the members, every couple months, we do giveaways.
We've given away some custom-built AR-15s.
We're getting ready to give away a concealed carry sidearm.
We do some fun things for our members, but most of the money, almost every penny of it, goes to support the Defend the Guard efforts and Bring Our Troops Home dot US.
That's great.
How many members do you have now of your organization and what percentage of them are actual combat veterans of the wars like yourself?
I don't have a hard number for you, but I think including our followers on social media, our members of the 10-7, those that subscribe to our newsletters, and those that are on our email list, it's over 100,000.
And I'd bet 75 or 80% are Global War on Terror veterans.
Yeah.
Man, doesn't that say something right there?
It's a place for veterans to come, man.
This is a place for veterans who have seen their friends' lives wasted, for veterans who have come back from their third or fourth deployment to a broken home or a broken marriage.
It's a place for us to come together and say, not again.
Not again for another generation.
You know, World War I veterans, they did a really good job of coming home and taking care of the World War II veterans, right?
They set up things.
They set up benefits.
They set up, you know, the Smedley-Butler led them on their pay strike.
You know, they did things to help the next generation of veterans.
World War II came home and set some things in place for the Vietnam veterans, right?
The Vietnam veterans came home and did a good job of starting this peace movement and built up a little bit of an organization for the Desert Storm veterans.
And it's kind of died from that point.
And we want to create this legacy for the next generation of veterans to say that we did something we weren't proud of.
We fought in unconstitutional, undeclared wars, and we don't want anybody ever to have to do that again.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So now if somebody listening to this wanted to join, first of all, they don't have to be a combat vet, right?
But secondly, how do they join?
Sure.
My first thing to do is I would send them to bringourtroopshome.us and just sign up for the newsletter.
That way you'll start getting our regular emails and things like that.
And then go to 107club.com.
Sign up for the 10-7 club.
You don't even have to give a penny.
You don't have to do anything.
If you just sign up for the 10-7 club newsletter, you're going to be thrown into a hopper for our regular giveaways, like a range bag and some other stuff.
And you'll get messages, emails, social media posts, and things like that.
There's going to come a time when we're going to reach out to you if you've signed up, and we're going to ask you to maybe write a letter or make a phone call or testify in a hearing.
We're creating this network.
But don't let that be a deterrent.
We are going to tap you at some point.
But join us.
Get our regular updates.
And as you see fit, you can jump in the fight.
But 107club.com.
Click on the sign up for newsletter.
If you want to become a reoccurring donor for $10 a month, you'll automatically be entered to win the guns and things like that.
But just get your name in our list so you can start getting our regular updates.
Great.
Well, as you know, man, I think this is the most important project in America other than and maybe even including that is bringourtroopshome.us, defendtheguard.us, and 107club.com.
That's all spelled out, right?
Yep.
T-E-N-S-E-V-E-N-C-L-U-B.com.
Yeah.
Listen, it's not just the work you're doing, but it's the example that you're setting here that is so important, Dan.
And so the best of luck to you, and thank you so much for what you're doing here, man.
You bet.
Thanks.
Thanks, Scott.
Anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
