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Alright, well picking up with this interview right where we left off with the last one.
It's Ben Swan from benswan.com and the Truth in Media Project.
Welcome to the show, how are you doing?
I'm great, how are you doing Scott?
I'm doing great, I sure appreciate you joining us today.
Absolutely.
Okay, well so, I'm not sure why I've never interviewed you before.
I should have gotten around to it at some point, but I've said numerous times that you must be the greatest local TV newsman ever, ever.
Certainly my favorite.
And if there's one particular thing about you that you've done that puts you over the top, I can't think of anybody in competition with you honestly, but it would be this clip of you questioning Barack Obama.
Actually, you're not even in this.
This is Barack Obama's answer to your question about his backing of the rebels in Syria.
And then we can talk about the background to it when we get right back from this.
It's about half a minute long I think.
I share that concern, and so what we've done is to say we will provide non-lethal assistance to Syrian opposition leadership that are committed to a political transition, committed to an observance of human rights.
We're not going to just dive in and get involved with a civil war that in fact involves some elements of people who are genuinely trying to get a better life, but also involve some folks who would over the long term do the United States harm.
Okay, and so the importance of that clip obviously being that they're the President of the United States.
First of all, you have the courage to ask a question about who is it that you're backing in Syria, sir, to the President like that, which is really something when no one else would.
But then secondly, his answer is that he acknowledges that there are some wrong hands out there, that these weapons, and those are McCain's words, actually, that these weapons can and will end up in the hands of where he just sent them, and that's why he's being so careful to not send them.
It's that now we know he's been sent them all along, Ben.
Yeah, I mean, the reality of it is that what's happening in Syria, right, on that question, by the way, was asked almost a full year ago, and nothing's changed in terms of U.S. policy.
We keep talking about this red line that Syria may be about to cross, and, you know, we have to take a look at what's happening there right now.
We look at John McCain going over there over, I believe it was Memorial Day weekend, claiming that the important thing there was that he did, you know, the United States provide serious support in a serious manner to the FSA and the Free Syrian Army.
But at the end of the day, look, anyone who's logical and looks at this situation acknowledges that al-Nusra Front is the force that right now is attempting to take over Syria, and without question, al-Nusra Front has been deemed a terror organization by our own government, and it has been declared the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
So there's no question that you have al-Qaeda forces who are working actively to take over Syria, and we are supporting that.
Yeah, and now here, the headline on AntiWar.com today is, Desperate Measures Syrian Rebels Vow Suicide Bombings Amid Losses in Homs.
So it's not just that Obama says that they're terrorists at the same time he's arming them.
Oh, yeah, they do suicide bombings against women and children, and they cut their prisoners' heads off, and they're the bad guys, all right.
Yeah, I mean, look, what we're seeing happening over there right now is so incredible, and national media is not covering the story at all, and that's part of the problem here.
80% of the people, there's a poll that came out recently that shows 80% of Americans are saying, do not arm the rebels in Syria, but we continue to arm them.
We're providing all kinds of funding to them.
There's no question who these guys are and what ultimately happens here.
I got an interesting question from someone the other day who says, I feel like I've really been able to support your work for a lot of years, and they say, and now I have some questions, I feel like you're leading us on, because you're saying that there's al-Qaeda in Iraq, and I thought that was the whole point, but al-Qaeda wasn't in Iraq during the Iraq war, and so are you misleading people, and can you clear that up?
And the answer to that, unfortunately, is tragically simple, in that there was no al-Qaeda until the United States went into Iraq.
They were not there.
Saddam Hussein was not connected to al-Qaeda.
He had no connection to them on any friendly level.
In fact, Saddam Hussein was a huge source for the United States in terms of gathering information on terrorists around the world.
That was part of his deal with Washington.
But by removing Hussein and creating the situation that we did in Iraq, we have created a place where al-Qaeda is growing and thriving in Iraq right now, and we're trying to do the same thing in Syria.
Al-Qaeda is not a powerful force in Syria.
Syria is not a country where you have those elements right now, and yet over the last few years, the United States has done everything in its power to help sow those seeds.
And that's where, look, Scott, at the end of the day, Americans need to stand up and say, wait a minute, we are spending literally trillions of dollars on these foreign wars between Iraq and Afghanistan and ongoing situations in Pakistan and Yemen, Somalia, where we have drone strikes happening.
The United States is engaged in all of this right now.
And as we're engaged in all of that, we're losing American soldiers.
We're losing American lives.
We're spending American treasure to keep fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
We have the NDAA that says anybody who supports al-Qaeda or the Taliban or an associated force can be held in this country and be indefinitely detained.
And yet at the same time, Washington is sending money, and they're sending weapons to fund al-Qaeda forces in Syria.
Does any of that make sense to any logical person?
Right.
It's incredible.
And as you said, in the media, there's this awkward silence because they will talk about suicide attacks from time to time.
They'll talk about al-Nusra Front has been labeled a terrorist group.
Certainly in the newspapers they'll discuss that.
And so it is kind of conventional wisdom.
Again, you provoke the president into admitting this.
Hillary Clinton, back when she was the secretary of state at the same time, also confirmed.
Now John McCain is basically conceding that, yes, there are wrong hands, al-Nusra and associated groups that these weapons could fall in the hands of.
That's why we have to vet them so carefully.
There's a little bit of that.
But most of the time, the cognitive dissidents, they win out by just remaining silent on that point.
And they just say, well, we've got to back the rebels, and no discussion of the rebels.
Or if there is a discussion of who these rebels are and how well can we vet them, that was back in the first segment of the show.
Now in the second segment of the show, we're going to pretend like we didn't just learn anything we learned about who these guys are, and we're just going to talk as though what we're trying to do is save the poor civilians of Syria from their tyranny.
And it's the government versus the people of Syria, and we're going to save them.
And that's how they get past the dissidents, is they just lie by omission and blatantly, too.
Well, sure.
And what they do is ignore all the video out there, all the stories out there.
I mean, if you go to YouTube, you can get a better education as to what's happening in Syria than you can by watching any network news in America right now.
And that's a sad truth.
Go to YouTube and type in Syrian Army or FSA or al-Nusra Front, and you're going to get all these videos that demonstrate a lot of the violence that's taking place there.
And I would say, Scott, the majority of Americans right now have no clue how many people are dying, being beheaded, dying horrible deaths, the religious intolerance that's taking place there, the genocide of groups that are Christians and Jews and Alawites, even Shiites and Sunni Muslims who are being killed over there.
It's incredible.
And what I think most people would say if you said sum up this situation in one sentence and the word Syria, they would say the president of Syria is killing his own people because they have absolutely no point of reference at all as to what's actually happening there.
And really it's a crime against the American people in that what journalism is failing to do here is tell people what the ramifications of our foreign policy currently are to the people of Syria, but they will be moving forward.
How many people will die?
Listen, if we allow al-Nusra Front to take over in Syria and allow al-Assad to be removed from power, there are going to be literally millions of people in Syria who are killed as a result of what al-Nusra Front is attempting to do there.
And they say so all the time.
They make it very clear how they're going to kill Alawite police, they're going to kill Jews and Christians, anyone who sides with the government whatsoever.
And what's fascinating if you talk to people in Syria is that all of the folks who are really truly Syrian and from these different kind of religious minorities have all coalesced into one group that supports al-Assad.
So how strange that in the West, where we pride ourselves on being this Christian American culture, that we are actually siding against the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims and the Alawites in Syria.
It's actually American Christians against Syrian Christians in terms of support on this.
It's kind of an interesting way of looking at it if you really weigh what's happened.
Right.
And then as you said, even with the ignorance because of the media blackout on this stuff, the lack of context and explanation, you still have 80% of the people who are opposed to it because they're just, you know what, we don't want any more Middle Eastern wars at all.
We're under the impression that Syria is over there where Arabs live and we just don't want anything like that.
That's basically their answer.
And then I saw where Bill Clinton was in fact citing those numbers and saying, well, you know, the American people by their super majorities are opposed to this.
So that's why Obama needs to explain the policy better as he goes forward.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I think there is a very, you're making a very good point there, which is that a lot of people are tired of these wars.
Because I think the other thing that's happened is the majority of people, regardless of whether or not they're engaged, just do not trust the war rhetoric anymore.
Look, the Iraq war was an absolutely devastating thing to the Republican Party in this country.
So a lot of neocons, a lot of Republicans who sided with it and went along with it, I think the vast majority of them in private conversation, they may not even say so publicly, but in private conversation would say, number one, we never should have gone in the first place.
Number two, it was not worth the cost.
And that's without even knowing really what the cost actually was, especially for the half million Iraqis who were killed.
But you say, you know, it wasn't worth the cost.
It wasn't worth the treasure.
It wasn't worth the debt.
There was no al Qaeda there.
There was no weapons of mass destruction.
We created this mess of a nation there.
Afghanistan, same type of thing.
We've gone there, we've gotten ourselves entrenched in this long war.
Like you said, there is this fatigue with dealing with the Middle East.
But the other part of it is, I think a lot of people are saying, you know what?
I just don't trust this government.
And I don't mean a Barack Obama administration.
I mean the rhetoric coming from Washington.
I do not trust when they say there is an enemy over here and we've got to go confront it.
Because look what happened in Libya.
Same type of thing.
We have to go into Libya and we have to get rid of Gaddafi.
He's a terrorist and we've got to remove him.
This guy had given up his weapons.
He did not have weapons of mass destruction.
He had played nice with the West.
But unfortunately he wanted to unhinge the dollar from petroleum and back it with gold.
And so he became an enemy of the United States.
And we suddenly decided we had to remove him.
We decided there was this, you know, grassroots opposition to him, which there wasn't.
And we turned Libya over to al Qaeda.
And then we have four Americans killed over there at an embassy and people are saying, wait a minute.
I thought a bunch of Western-loving, NATO-loving freedom fighters took over in Libya and they've seen kind of the blowback of those decisions.
And I think people are no longer, they're just not buying it anymore.
Even if they're disengaged, they're just not buying it.
Right.
Well, and especially in that one where Benghazi is the limited hangout for the entire Libya war, which is one big Benghazi scandal.
But the Benghazi thing, I guess it's really bad enough, or at least on the right, it's really captured people's imaginations of, it's like a Ronald Reagan kind of, you know, real bad criminally negligent homicide kind of a screw-up, right, where you put a base full of Marines in enemy territory without force protection.
And so, you know, they're caught up.
But why is it enemy territory?
Because we just won the war for our enemies.
That's why.
That's right.
And that's what I'm saying.
I think most people, even disengaged people, they're just not going to continue to believe when John McCain stands up and says, we've got to intervene, we've got to do something right now.
I don't think people are buying it.
They're saying, you know what, we've heard this before, and we relied to on so many levels in so many nations.
And even people who are disengaged I think are coming around to the idea that even like these drone strike policies, they don't like them.
You know, they're not believing that we're now able to, look, we can cut down on the casualty of war by doing this.
I think people are beginning to recognize the level to which innocent people are being killed, being referred to only as collateral damage.
I think more and more people are just saying, you know what, I'm not going to do this anymore.
And so the idea that 80% of the population, 80% of the American population being polled is saying, do not back the Syrian rebels, that's pretty astounding.
It's pretty remarkable.
Yeah, I think so too.
And really the amount of just, you know, knees jerk, immediate reactions, first impressions over Ed Snowden, you're for him, you're against him.
I think it was pretty clear that at least, I'll take it, even if it's a bare minority or just a bare majority of people are pro-Snowden, that's way more than I could have hoped for.
And I think it's probably a lot better even than that.
Well, you've got to believe that five years ago, maybe even a little longer than that, go back 10 years just after 9-11 to someone like Snowden and that would not have been the case.
You're not going to get a majority of people at that time.
And that's another thing that's interesting.
I was watching the newsroom last night.
You know, they're replaying these episodes on HBO before they get around to the new season, which starts next week.
That's my commercial for HBO.
But in one of these episodes, they had a guy who was supposed to be an NSA leaker who's sharing information about a program where the NSA is grabbing up all this metadata and listening in on phone calls and reading people's emails.
What they had done at the time is they had pegged it to the whole Daily Mirror, the Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch phone hacking scandal.
They had linked it to that to make it relevant.
But there's all this mention of the NSA being involved in this phone hacking and email hacking and reading all these people's emails from American citizens.
And it was interesting to watch it in the context a year later from when it first aired, a year later, knowing what we know now, and saying, you know what, I told my wife, I said, a year ago, most Americans would have just glazed over at that conversation these two guys are having in the show.
And today, not so much.
So I think we've also hit that point where people are saying, you know what, I'm not sure that when the NSA says they're doing this in order to protect us or that this must happen or that we have to release all of this privacy in order to be safe.
And that's not to say everyone's there.
They're not.
There are a lot of people who still buy it.
But there is a growing number of people who are rejecting that idea.
And that gives me hope.
That's why I go around saying liberty is rising because I think we're at a very interesting point in American history where people are beginning to say, no, I don't believe all of it anymore.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, at the end of the interview, at the bottom of the hour, I want to give you time to talk about your new project and your Kickstarter and all of that.
But before that, I was hoping I could get about five minutes from you on another very uncovered subject in America, something that is really, you know, all other things being equal, this would be the most important story in the whole world.
And it's as important as it is ignored, really, and that is America's drug war in Mexico and the militarization of the drug war in Mexico and the consequences for the civilians of that society.
Talk about a media blackout.
And yet I was reading in your bio that this is something that you worked on for a long, long time before moving to Cincinnati.
So I was hoping you could tell the people what do they need to know about, you know, because, hey, they don't want to send the wrong message to kids like it's okay for them to do drugs.
Right.
Well, a couple of things on this.
First of all, let me preface by saying that I don't use drugs.
I've never smoked pot in my life, and I really have no desire to.
However, simply put, if you want to eliminate the drug war with Mexico, the way you do that is to legalize pot.
And that's not just out of a desire to get more users or trying to make it easy for people to access it.
We're just talking about national security, which, again, our government has spent so much time and our media has spent so much time throwing around the term national security, and this has to be done for national security purposes.
If you want to talk about real national security, legalize pot, because the greatest threat to Americans and to our national security right now, it's not al Qaeda, it's not the Taliban, it's not radical Islam in the Middle East.
Without question, the greatest threat to America are Mexican drug cartels.
We have a 2,000-mile-long land border with Mexico, and the Mexican government has no control over it, and the American government has no control over it.
It is completely controlled by drug cartels.
They're incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy.
The United States is this enormous consumer nation of illegal drugs, and it's all coming up through Mexico.
The problem that we see in Mexico today is pretty simple.
You have – Mexico was broken.
At least it was, say, let's say five, six years ago.
Mexico was broken up into different territories based on which cartel was running which territory.
That's how they operated.
They were not all connected to each other, but they all coexisted with each other, and everybody had their own space.
Sometimes you'd have flare-ups, you'd have cartel-on-cartel violence, but it wasn't very common.
You'd stay in your region and someone else would stay in their region.
And what happened was around 2005, 2006, all of a sudden you had this guy named Chapo Guzman who was in prison.
He was the head of the Sinaloa cartel.
He gets out of prison, and he starts basically trying to take over all these different cartel territories.
You also had President Felipe Calderón who became president of Mexico and declared war on the cartels at the same time.
The reason all that's important is because what media is never going to tell you is that if you study what was happening in Mexico, and I covered it for years, what was actually happening there was that every place where the Mexican military would go to take on a cartel, they would only fight one side.
They would never fight the Sinaloa side.
They would fight the Carrillo Fuentes cartel.
If it was Los Zetas, wherever they would go, they would fight.
Beltrán-Leyva, they would fight the cartels in those regions, but not the Sinaloa, and the Sinaloa would move in.
So people who were on the inside would tell you, yes, Sinaloa is taking over the whole country.
What was essentially happening was the Mexican government and the Mexican military was helping to create a cartel, a super cartel, that would run everything in Mexico.
That's what was really happening.
The U.S. government, through Fast and Furious, was sending guns into Mexico, but also supporting, and we understand this from testimony from guys who have been arrested and were on trial in Chicago who were connected directly to some of these cartels, including the Sinaloa cartel.
They have testified that the U.S. government was helping to take out cartels who were rivals of the Sinaloa cartel.
And so, again, you had the same thing happening.
The U.S. government was helping in it.
The Mexican government was helping in it, and they were creating a cartel super state in Mexico.
That was what was happening.
It continues to happen now.
And some of these smaller cartels they thought would roll over didn't roll over, and that's why it's been so violent and so bloody.
But step away from that and say, as U.S. citizens, if we're looking at how to combat drugs, 70% of all the money made by drug cartels comes through marijuana.
70% of it is.
Now, consider for a minute any Fortune 500 company in the United States.
If you said to any Fortune 500 company, whatever product you make, we're going to remove 70% of your bottom line from you, they'd go bankrupt immediately, couldn't continue to function.
That's what would happen if you legalized pot, because you wouldn't have to put it in this country where, you know, it's hard to access or it has to be grown in special places.
People could grow it in their own homes.
They could grow it on farms, wherever.
And you would essentially weaken and collapse the structure built around these Mexican drug cartels.
So, you know, when I hear people give all these different reasons, oh, you can tax it or, you know, legalize it, because they have all these different reasons for it, I would say if you want to just go with the national security one, NSA wants to read my e-mails and listen to my phone calls.
They don't believe that I have the right to be able to have privacy because it's so important they know what's going on, and yet we can't legalize marijuana, and that really is the issue of national security.
That's a long answer.
I apologize if that was too long.
No, no, it was not too long.
It's, you know, obviously it's very important.
So, first thing, most important, what you're saying is you don't want to surrender to the drug cartels.
This is the knife in their back.
This is the best way to destroy them, turn this drug market over to legitimate open market companies, not to legalize the Sinaloa cartel, which, by the way, America has been, I don't know if you said behind, but certainly has been helping all along.
So my question there is to what end?
I mean, was the Sinaloa cartel just the sock puppets of the CIA making money, retirement programs and golden parachutes for everybody at the agency, or they thought, well, these are the nicest drug dealers in Mexico, so we'll just help them get rid of the really mean ones, or did they have an excuse for their policy, or can you explain what was going on?
Well, I can't explain that because there's information that I have, but a lot of it is based on conjecture, and I haven't been able to prove a lot of it, but I can tell you this.
There is a lot of conjecture of relational connections between the higher-ups in these cartels and high government figures on the Mexican side, and I think the Mexican government has created the collusion between the U.S. government and Sinaloa.
That's where the collusion, I think, comes in.
I don't think the U.S. government has dealt as closely with them as they have with the Mexican government.
Having said that, but, yeah, it is a knife in the back.
The Sinaloa cartel or Cadeo Fuentes, whoever it is that is running along the border, when you live on the border, and I grew up on the border, when you live down there, you know that the majority of the wealth, the power, the influence, all of it comes from organized crime.
What we have created in Mexico by allowing this to continue is far worse than what was taking place in Chicago under prohibition, and America looks back on that and says, you know, we created the mafia, we allowed these really powerful organized crime groups to kind of sprout up during prohibition that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Well, we've done the same thing with these drug cartels, but on an even larger scale.
Well, right, but you're saying we're helping the Sinaloa cartel try to take over the whole country, and that's where the real battles came from, not just from the militarization cracking down on the different cartels, but in the support for this one in particular.
That's right, well, because it's too powerful of an organization, and I think you probably have this argument made that those who are in power here in government would say, listen, we can't eliminate them completely, but if we can get it down to just one group that we can help control, then it makes us safer, but that's not true.
I mean, absolutely untrue.
Right, they just provoke worse battles all over the place.
You absolutely do, and look, it's too much money.
I can't believe that the idea was that these groups in Mexico would just cave.
I mean, we're talking about literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of drugs crossing that border every single year.
Why would these groups just simply walk away and say, oh, you know what?
You guys are dangerous and you're powerful, and we'll hand it over?
And that's what's resulted in this incredibly violent, incredibly violent drug war that's taken place there.
And the stuff that was happening, look, in Juarez, right across the river from El Paso, Texas, and this was stuff I was going over into Mexico to cover, and it was worse than what was happening in Iraq at the height of the Iraq war.
We're talking about people's bodies being hung from overpasses in the morning, people's faces literally cut off and sewn onto soccer balls.
It's that kind of violence that was taking place there.
I mean, to the level that you can't make this stuff up.
Yeah, tens of thousands.
How many tens of thousands of people were killed so far or have been killed?
I believe that just as a result of the drug violence itself, the number is somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 people.
And that's going back how many years?
I want to say four, four or five years.
All right, now listen.
Those numbers might even be a little bit dated.
Okay, now if it's okay, I want to hold you through this break, and then when we come back I want to give you a minute to talk about your new project.
Is that all right?
Yeah.
All right, hang on right there.
Everybody, it's Ben Swan from benswan.com, my favorite local TV newsman ever.
If you're not familiar, go and look him up on YouTube and find out where to look him up right after this.
All right, well, one commercial played twice and the song didn't play at all.
I think I need to go back and double check how I got that set.
What do you think, guys?
All right, well, anyway.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the show.
Hopefully the light's still green over here.
Oh, good.
Okay, we got Ben Swan on the line.
Thanks for holding through that catastrophe, Ben.
I appreciate it.
Hey, that was a great commercial.
I got to hear it twice.
It was excellent.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, well, I like giving speeches every day.
All right, so benswan.com, the Truth in Media Project.
What's that?
Yeah, so the idea here is that we have been doing these reality check pieces for a local Fox Cincinnati station now for two and a half years, and in May I had the opportunity to go ahead and leave the station.
And I decided to exercise that option and leave in order to launch an independent media project that I really believe in.
It's called the Truth in Media Project, and the idea is to start covering through broadcast TV journalism a lot of these issues.
The issues you're talking about all the time, Scott, stuff we've been talking about here today that national media just isn't going to tell folks.
And so we put this on Kickstarter.
It's a project that we think we can get great support for.
And what we want to do is create these five- to six-minute-long digital cinema episodes of a show called Benswan Full Disclosure that will cover a lot of these issues.
In fact, if folks, your listeners go to my website, benswan.com, right now you can see a piece that we did that's kind of like a sample piece, but one of them about al-Qaeda in Syria and the fact that we're funding al-Qaeda in Syria.
That's the subject that we started talking about at the beginning here.
And they can check out a clip there to show them kind of what these things will look like, what they consist of.
I'm very proud of the work that we've put together so far, and I think it's going to be something really exciting.
Hey, listen, well, quite unlike me, you've put on a real professional show here, and I think you don't need praise from me.
The only thing is if anybody's never heard of you before, then they need to hear from me, maybe, that they need to go and check you out on YouTube and check you out at benswan.com.
But look at the archives of the work that you've done for the Cincinnati Station and the other things that you've done.
I think it's pretty clear that you are capable, and you're worth what you're asking for here.
There's every reason to believe that you can deliver exactly what you're promising for the money, and this is exactly what we need.
I mean, this is the real mainstream, not even necessarily of libertarian ideas as much as just the libertarian perspective on the news, the real nonpartisan but also nonstatist perspective on what's going on in the world.
Of course, that entails a lot of disbelief in what they're peddling, and you just do such a great job at that.
I know everybody who's ever heard of you before.
I saw on my Facebook page everybody was excited to see.
They're all retweeting right now that you're on the show with me right now.
So everybody who knows you already has a ton of confidence in you and every reason to believe in you, and so maybe they just didn't know that there's a Kickstarter.
So how do they find you at Kickstarter, and how do they participate in helping you out here?
What you can do is you can go over to, like I said, BenSwan.com.
At the top, we have something called Truth in Media Project.
If you click on that, it'll take you directly to Kickstarter, and there you can pledge.
And the way it works with Kickstarter is that you get backers, and those backers contribute.
So our goal is to raise $1.25 million by July 26th.
We've raised almost $250,000.
So let me just say real quick, Scott, we understand that we're probably not going to hit that goal, but that's okay.
We don't have to hit that goal.
So what I want people to do is go there, and if you bracket $10, $20, whatever it is, throw that into it and support us, and then what we'll be doing is explaining over the next two weeks how we're going to make the project work even if we don't hit that goal.
So we don't have to get there in order to make something happen.
So I don't want people to see that number and be discouraged and say, ah, well, what's the point?
Listen, the point is that if you really want to stand by getting truth into media and certainly into broadcast because there's a lot of radio stuff out there and stuff that you're doing, Scott, it's tremendous.
We want to help to augment that by providing content on a different kind of level.
And certainly through broadcast and through television journalism, we think that we can really impact a different segment of the population and help to wake some people up.
That's what this project is about, waking people up and helping them to say, you know what?
I've been getting really either the wrong information or a lack of information for too long, and I'm tired of it.
And so we want to get people energized.
We want to get them involved.
So go to benswan.com, click on Truth in Media Project, and there you can back the project, and we'll make it happen.
Right on.
That's free speech, free press in action for you there, folks, benswan.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Scott, thanks for having me on, buddy.
All right.
There you have it.
This is your host and producer, the Truth in Media Project, benswan.com.
Visit their site at councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights.
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet.
And it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's securityedition.com.
And don't forget their great Fourth Amendment socks.
Hey, guys, I got his laptop.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new project.
Listen and Think Audio at listenandthink.com.
They've got two new audio books read by the deepest voice in libertarianism.
The great historian Jeff Riggenbach.
Our Last Hope, Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty by Michael Meharry of the Tenth Amendment Center is available now.
And Beyond Democracy, co-authored by Frank Karsten of the Mises Institute Netherlands and journalist Carl Beckman, will be released this month.
And they're only just getting started.
So check out listenandthink.com.
You may be able to get your first audio book absolutely free.
That's Listen and Think Audio at listenandthink.com.
Hey, all.
Scott here hawking stickers for the back of your truck.
They've got some great ones at libertystickers.com.
Get Your Son Killed, Jeb Bush 2016.
FDR, No Longer the Worst President in American History.
The National Security Agency, Blackmailing Your Congressmen Since 1952.
And USA, Sometimes We Back Al Qaeda, Sometimes We Don't.
And there's over a thousand other great ones on the wars, police, state, elections, the Federal Reserve and more at libertystickers.com.
They'll take care of all your custom printing for your bandier business at thebumpersticker.com.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
I think you ought to consider subscribing to the Future of Freedom.
The Journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation, in print or online.
The Future of Freedom features the best writers in the libertarian movement.
The fearless Jacob Hornberger, individualist anarchist Sheldon Richman, and crusading journalist Jim Bovard.
Along with Anthony Gregory, Winnie McElroy, Tim Kelly, Richard Ebling, and many more.
And the July issue features one by your favorite radio host on America's Middle East policy, entitled Stupidity or the Plan.
So head on over to fff.org/subscribe and sign up for the Future of Freedom in print or online.
That's fff.org/subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
