It's all about the empire, that's what I'm always trying to tell you, that's what Jacob Horenberger says.
You know Jacob, he used to be a lawyer, now he's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org, you can find the vast majority of what he writes at FFF.org/blog, I think, and he's great on every political issue.
Welcome to the show, Jacob, how's it going?
Hey, great, nice to see you back here, always an honor, Scott.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
There's a lot to talk about, I guess we got to start with the Libya war and the War Powers Act and these things, but then mostly I want to focus, as you did in another recent article, well in both of these, kind of, on the domestic consequences of our policy of global empire.
But first of all, what do you make of this whole War Powers Act deadline and, I mean, I think the War Powers Act says it has to be a defensive war anyway, it's not, it doesn't say you can launch an offensive war for 60 days, but anyway, it seems like they just kind of went ahead and broke the deadline and came up with a couple of funny legal theories about maybe why it was okay, but I guess the president can just declare war on a Friday afternoon and then that's it and just go on from there.
They don't care, Obama doesn't care, I mean, we've talked about this for many years with respect to the constitutional requirement that says you have to have a congressional declaration of war before you wage war.
The president just ignores it, just like the presidents before him did, and so if you're going to ignore the constitution, why not ignore an act of Congress?
And Obama himself, when he was running for office, said, oh no, it's the law, it's the law and the president has to comply with the law, but now that he's president, he's taking the same position, that he can ignore the law, he can ignore the constitution, it just goes to show you what kind of country we're heading in, in the direction of, a country where the ruler has powers that are omnipotent, he may be democratically elected, he may not be a self-appointed dictator, but he's wielding the kind of powers that are inherent to dictatorial regimes.
Yeah, well, you know, I talked with this guy from the ACLU on Friday about this new proposed authorization to use military force to replace the one from after September 11th, and basically in a nutshell, he said, you know, this is, includes all the language that Daschle and Leahy insisted be taken out, that this, you know, goes much, much further, it's a declaration of war against anyone that any president, anyone, any state that any president may choose from here on forever, if he just, you know, breathes the word Al Qaeda, you know, on TV or something, I guess would be good enough, and the way that the guy from the ACLU was interpreting it was, if this had been passed after September 11th, there would have been no need for Bush to go to Congress for the authorization to attack Iraq at all, and it was funny because, I mean, here Obama's, you wonder why they would even bother with this when Obama can just do basically the same thing as an Iraq attack in principle on Libya without any authorization whatsoever, without even, you know, while claiming he doesn't need it.
Well, that's essentially what Bush did, too.
Bush said he didn't need it, but he welcomed the Iraq resolution, it was not a declaration of war, as the Constitution requires, and he took the same position, I don't need it, but I'll welcome it, but you're right, this new resolution now on the so-called war on terrorism, it effectively lets the U.S. government, the President, the military, the CIA, go after anybody and anything that they suspect of being a terrorist, I mean, presumably after 9-11 they were limited to Al Qaeda or the people that were directly responsible for perpetrating the 9-11 attacks.
This new one says, we can go after all the bad people in the world, and of course the bad people are anybody that resists the empire, that opposes the empire, and yeah, it just effectively gives them the power to do whatever they want anywhere in the world, kidnap, rendition, torture, kill, execute, assassinate, it's really mind-boggling.
It's a night and day thing from the idea of having accountability and a rule of law at all to, you know, this far down the slippery slope, like if you think of it from a historical point of view in the future tense, you know, like from 50 years from now, looking back at the transition from at least the pretension of real law to where we are now, I think, you know, I forgot who it was, but when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, there was that one guy, Pompey, tried to stop him, right?
There was one last big battle, but here it all just went with a whimper.
Oh, right, but what's sad is that all too many Americans still consider this freedom.
I mean, this goes back to Goethe's great line, which really encapsulates the American people of today, where he says, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
And so you've got all these Americans walking around and humming, thank God I'm an American because at least I know I'm free, and they really believe it.
They believe they're free when their government's got the omnipotent power to do whatever it wants to them and to foreigners whenever it wants.
I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with this latest case that the Supreme Court just decided not to get involved in, the Jepson case versus Mohammed, Mohammed versus Jepson data.
These were the five guys that were kidnapped and renditioned and sent to foreign countries for the purpose of torture, and they were brutally tortured.
Mohammed was sent to Morocco, where he had his penis cut with a scalp and then had hot stinging liquid poured into the wound by these Moroccan government goons, and this was at the behest of the U.S. government to torture him.
And the Federal Court of Appeals threw the case out and said, no, state secrets doctrine, or we just have to keep these things secret because national security's at stake.
And the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
So now when you combine what we've been talking about with the fact that the victims of this junk cannot even sue in court, cannot sue for damages, redress of grievances and stuff, where does that leave the victims?
I mean, it leaves them in an angry, vengeful mode, and of course if they go out and seek vengeance with a terrorist strike, we're going to be told that, oh, it's all because they hate us for our freedom and values.
This is not what is consistent with a free country, and this is what all too many Americans have yet to discover.
Well, you know, it's funny, I remember like third or fourth grade learning really for the first time about the U.S. Senate as a chapter in class or whatever, and I remember even then thinking, wow, so that's, you know, in whatever language I thought it in, a real awesome responsibility that those senators must feel, having the weight of the world on their shoulders, the course of history determined by a room with a hundred men.
You know?
Wowee.
And yet it seems like, well, for example, Rand Paul, according to the Ross story, he was on Anderson Cooper on CNN, and said, we just sit there and do nothing in the Senate all week.
I want to return my paycheck.
This is ridiculous.
We don't debate anything.
We don't vote on anything.
We just sit here and watch history pass us by.
What the heck is going on?
And the other 99 just shrug.
Well, yeah, I mean, our founding fathers, the framers sort of warned us about this.
I mean, when they protect us from the Constitution, they were protecting us from people in Congress that they knew Congress would attract these kind of statist people that believe in this junk.
I mean, the First Amendment, don't forget, specifically mentioned Congress is the biggest threat to freedom of speech and freedom of religion and so forth.
So none of that's surprising.
Of course, you know, you needed a Supreme Court of Judiciary to declare laws and actions unconstitutional.
But now we've got a Supreme Court that's probably just as scared of the terrorists as the congressmen are and won't get involved, won't declare these things unconstitutional.
I mean, really, the final solution to this lies with the American people.
And we see good signs of this.
I mean, libertarianism has never been at an all time high as it is now in terms of interest and commitment, devotion.
More and more people are discovering it.
You got two libertarians running for president, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson.
That's sure to bring libertarianism up to the popular discussion arena again.
And so there's good signs in this.
But ultimately, that lies with people like what you and I are doing, you know, spreading the word and getting the American people riled up and saying, you know, this is not what this country is supposed to be all about.
And there's a way out of it.
I mean, that's the most important thing is we don't have to sit mired in all this statism stuff, the imperialism, the fascism, the interventionism, the socialism.
We can pull out of it.
And that's the power of ideas.
All right.
We'll be right back with more on that with Jacob after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
So we're on the phone with Jacob Hornberger, and he's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, where many excellent libertarian writers make a home.
James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Sheldon Richman.
And I'm sorry that I'm spacing on the other Richard Eveling.
And there's Andy Worthington, who's not exactly a libertarian, but good enough because he's the best on Guantanamo and the whole wide world.
And a great staple writers there, including Jacob himself.
And, you know, we're talking about the decline of even the pretense really of accountability or law as it is meant to determine the actions of our government.
And there's so many examples.
We could just keep going on and on.
There's one here about the FBI thinks that it can look up everybody's phone records and everybody's email records and Internet records.
And they also think that they don't have to explain to a court why they need to do that or how they think that they have the power to do that.
All that warrantless is what I meant to say there.
And anyway, there's 100 of those.
We could keep going on and on about the examples from the courts in the last few weeks, resisting arrest, even unlawful arrest in Indiana and cops going indoors without warrants.
They think they hear someone destroying evidence of something that they didn't have a warrant to look for in the first place.
And it's just it's crazy.
But now I say all that just to dispense with it.
And so I can ask Jacob this.
Tell me about.
Would you please, I guess, in the form of a question, would you please tell me more about this power ideas thing?
I've never heard of that.
And I was hoping you could explain how you think that we can actually change things that way.
Yeah, there's there's a reason why totalitarian dictatorships try to shut people like you and me down.
I mean, you and I could not get away with what we're doing now in China or North Korea or Syria or some of the U.S. supported dictatorships in the Middle East, you know, Egypt, Yemen and so forth, is that we'd be taken into custody, we'd be tortured and so forth, executed maybe.
Now why is that?
I mean, these people like, let's say, China or North Korea, the government has total control over everybody, everything.
Why would they worry about two or three people or a few people talking about the things that you and I are talking about?
Well, because they understand the power of ideas to influence people.
And they they have a tremendous fear that that those ideas will all of a sudden get into people's minds and then they start spreading.
They start sharing it.
And all of a sudden they sweep a country like wildfire where you have the entire society demanding fundamental change.
Well, they understand the power of ideas, that ideas can influence an entire society to say, we're not going to put up with this anymore.
And and so fortunately here in this country, to a large extent, we do still have freedom of speech.
Yeah, they go after people on the margins, IRS investigations and so forth.
But by and large, people like you and me, the libertarians are not being rounded up and put in jail.
And that gives us a tremendous opportunity to sway people to the benefits of libertarianism.
This is the the key to getting our country out of this aberrant, aberrational type of society in which we live, where, you know, the government's got all these powers to seize us, take us away, cart us away.
And the socialist welfare state, the Social Security, the Medicare, the Medicaid, all this is alien to America's founding principles.
But as I was saying earlier, a lot of Americans have been inculcated with the notion, mostly in public government schools, that this is freedom, that this free enterprise, that Americans have always held this kind of way of life.
Libertarianism is now breaking through to a lot of people and they're realizing they've been lied to and that there's a way out of this socialist interventionist, fascist, imperialist morass.
And that's with libertarianism.
So that that's the power of ideas, Scott.
Well, you know, I kind of wonder if there's something different about America from Egypt in the sense that our government, it seems like, well, like to paraphrase Emma Goldman, if free speech made a difference, they'd outlaw it.
Right.
Voting made a difference.
It outlawed, she said.
Maybe they just don't care what you and me say, because regardless, they're going to get to keep doing what they do anyway.
Well, there's a lot of truth to that.
I mean, we saw that in the buildup to the Iraq war invasion, where Americans were, you know, against that that war was a war of aggression and people weren't buying.
Many people weren't buying into this WMD nonsense.
And there was mass protests all over the world and they just did it anyway.
But, you know, you get to a certain critical mass in a society in which government officials start fearing the citizenry and they fear the reaction of the citizenry.
And I think we're a long way from that point here.
I think most people in America fear the government much more than the government fears the citizenry.
And when that happens, when people fear the government more, the government's going to run a rough shot over the rights and liberties of the people.
So I don't think we've reached a point yet where people are saying, you know, this is not going to happen in this country anymore.
You're not going to be kidnapping and renditioning and torturing people anymore.
We're not going to sacrifice the freedoms in which this country was founded for the pretense of keeping us safe.
And so, yeah, I do believe in the power of ideas.
And I think that even though they have an outlawed here in the United States, it's in large part maybe they don't recognize the value, the importance of what we're doing here.
And they've convinced people that this is all freedom.
So they don't worry about it because they figure they got most people bamboozled anyway.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, that's, of course, the difficulty of doing this kind of thing is not knowing whether it really makes a difference or not.
I mean, I can see how what we do makes a difference for individuals, you know, on the margin, as you say.
But as far as the way things are in general, I mean, look at the polls and people are against all cuts in any government spending of any kind except foreign aid because they're greedy and that's it.
You know, they don't understand any, you know, any principal reason for opposing foreign aid.
But Medicare, Medicaid, the Homeland Security state, all the rest of it, they're all opposing.
And this is like the Tea Partiers, too, is like 70 percent of the Tea Partiers are against any cuts in any entitlements.
What is this?
This is nonsense.
It's like the Muppet Show that they had there on Comedy Central where they're just making prank calls.
It's just nonsense.
It's ridiculous.
It counts for nothing.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and this is why they have a welfare state.
I mean, they keep people mollified and essentially drugged with this stuff.
They got so many people dependent on government largesse that they can get away with whatever they want to do in foreign affairs because the citizenry that are on the dole are not about to challenge government at a fundamental level because they may have their dole cut off from them.
I mean, we see this in those Middle East dictatorships, too, is that the first thing they started doing when people were protesting is offering increased welfare benefits, you know, drug them a little bit more.
But you know, it comes to a certain point where a large section of society can say enough is enough.
I mean, look with the drug war.
I mean, we're getting to a point where, you know, a large number of people don't buy into this thing anymore.
And that certainly could not have been the case 10 years ago or even 20 years ago when I started the Future of Freedom Foundation.
I mean, you know, people I'd say we need to legalize drugs and people look at me like I was crazy.
Well, now it's a legitimate position.
It's on the table.
And a lot of people are starting to realize, hey, libertarians were right.
That's the power of ideas.
Is it tougher on the welfare state?
Of course.
But if freedom were easy, Scott, everybody in history would have it.
Yeah.
It's a tough battle.
But that's what makes it worth fighting.
Wi-Fi battles you can win when you can take on the empire and know that they're the ones who deserve taking on the most at least.
And then as you say, like, hey, you never really know.
You might look back and say, wow, look, the drug issue is now legit in the center where it didn't used to be.
And you know, I don't think it's fair to even talk about all this progress as far as the evolution of the conversation in this country, without mention Ron Paul's last presidential campaign and his presence in the media ever since then.
And I mean, he's done so much when once he got famous, that did so much to make our entire movement famous.
You know what I mean?
Well, right.
And in our movement enabled him to become famous.
Right.
Exactly.
Because there's a libertarian on every block, one on every block.
Right.
And well, not only that, but just the idea is that we've been, you know, the movement's been building the foundation.
It's sort of like, you know, people working underground and everything, building this intellectual case.
And all of a sudden that sweeps him up to the surface.
And I mean, look how the Berlin Wall came down.
I mean, nobody could have predicted that or maybe just a few people did.
But all of a sudden it just happened.
It took the world by storm.
Soviet Union get dismantled.
That was all the ideas that were percolating under the surface that people really could not measure their significance.
My hunch is that's what's going to happen with libertarianism.
I mean, we libertarians have been working, what, for 50, 60 years now to reverse the welfare warfare state.
I got a hunch that when it finally surfaces, it's going to surface very suddenly and very quickly and catch a lot of people by surprise.
Yeah, I think you very well may be describing the next year and a half, too.
We'll see how it goes.
Thanks so much for your time, Jacob.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks so much.
As always.
All right, everybody.
That's Jacob Hornberger, FFF.org.
