09/09/14 – Jeffrey Tucker – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Here live weekdays at noon on the Liberty Radio Network.
Our first guest on the show today, oh, well it looks like our only guest on the show today.
That's alright.
It's Jeff Tucker.
He is the Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me.
Which you can sign up for at Liberty.me.
Yes.
And he is also a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
Fine.
You know that I'm actually speaking to you from the offices of FEE in Atlanta right now?
I did not know that.
Yeah, I know.
It's a true story.
Oh, whoops.
So, yeah.
So it's exciting to be here in both places, like online and offline.
Right.
Well, good deal.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
And you know, I've been talking about, well, not so much you, but this article that you wrote.
I've been mentioning it on the show.
The state is just not that into you.
It was one particular point that I picked up on that I've been repeating was about what you say about the Oklahoma City bombing in here.
But we could get to that in a moment.
But so, yeah, what a great article.
And it reminded me, George Carlin said it in a lot more emphatic way that they don't care about you.
They really don't.
And the thing is, is it's so drummed into us that they do care about us.
That's their very reason for being in this state at all is because of how much they care about us.
Yeah.
It really needs that kind of debunking all the time, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So here's the thing, though.
In my own living memory, before 1995, maybe in the 1980s, there was a kind of plausibility to the idea that the public sector was kind of more or less working for the people.
There wasn't such a huge fissure, a vast chasm that separated the state from the people.
Maybe that was an illusion in some sense, and I'm willing to grant that.
But things have changed just dramatically.
In that article, what I did was I kind of reconstructed the modern history of how all this kind of came to being, starting with the Oklahoma bombing, which actually you can't really think about that subject without thinking about Waco, too.
So those are kind of linked together.
But it's just been straight sort of downhill.
And what you have, and I don't know if you want to go into the details of things, but the theory is that, my idea here is that the Oklahoma bombing inspired a kind of paranoia among the public employees, that they began to kind of look at the rest of the population as their enemy, like people out to get them, you know?
But that wasn't really true before, and so you began to kind of be treated like an enemy combatant or something, you know, when you go into a government building.
And it was after that bombing that that happened.
And then the second great, of course, moment was 9-11.
It was like, okay, so we're paranoid, but now the threat is real and everywhere and heavily militarized.
And then my third great event was the financial crisis of 2008, where the state at all levels began to use its sort of paranoia and its newly militarized power to kind of extract revenue from the population that was otherwise being denied them, thanks to the recession.
So those are the great three stages that have created our current situation, where, I mean, there's kind of an ongoing Cold War between government and the people that's alive today.
And we all sense that, and we know it.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, what a great article.
And it's at liberty.me.
The title is The State Is Just Not That Into You.
And I think, you know, it's really important, those three points that you hit on there.
And, you know, it's funny about the Oklahoma bombing.
I don't know if you know, but I'm a total kook on the issue.
And I think there was a massive cover up.
In fact, I know there was a massive cover up of all of McVeigh's friends, because at the very least, they were all state's witnesses or flipped informants, you know, these type of people who, they compromised the federal cops as much as the federal cops had compromised them.
And so there's a massive cover up.
They blamed it on just the two guys.
And so, and then again, it could have been worse than that.
It could have actually been a sting operation.
But the point that I wanted to make about it was, regardless of whether you think McVeigh did it, you know, for only his reasons, and that's what counts, or if you think Andre Strassmeier put him up to it and all of that, either way, the point is that the purpose of it was to alienate the people from the government.
From McVeigh's point of view, being a neo-Nazi type fighting against the Zionist occupied government and whatever crap, he thought, look, the government is the enemy of the people, but they don't see that.
So if I can make them really mad and get them to freak out and overreact and clamp down harder on people, then that's going to cause a war.
That's the whole point of it.
You're trying to act out the Turner Diaries and all that.
If the government will go out now and attack a bunch of Nazi and militia groups, then they'll all fight back and it'll be a revolution.
That's what he was going for.
It happened in much more minor, or much like on a lower level, kind of.
But that's the point of terrorism, is to provoke that exact reaction that we got.
So I'm a little bit stunned, actually, Scott, that you know so much about this topic.
I mean, I hadn't heard that name, Andre Strassmeier, in so many years.
But yeah, I mean, maybe you need to actually explain who he is.
I mean, he was like a German national or something, and an actual neo-Nazi who was hanging around the US.
Have I read about this?
But there's like a good chance that he was an agent provocateur, like actually on the payroll of the FBI.
And then he vanished soon after the bombing, never to be heard from again.
But he was all over.
Tucker knows the story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Am I right?
Yeah.
In fact, let me go ahead and add this, just because it's a great and recent footnote.
There's a new book out called Oklahoma City, and it's published by a major publisher and it's written by a major British reporter named Andrew Gumbel.
And it's absolutely meticulous.
There's nothing conspiracy theory about it.
They did, you can watch on YouTube, they did a big seminar with Peter Bergen, the terrorism expert there at the New America Foundation.
And it's approached from that kind of liberal, democratic, very paranoid about the radical right point of view, which makes it acceptable in the mainstream that let's take a little bit deeper look at who all McVeigh was working with on this thing.
And almost uniformly, they were flip states witnesses or undercover.
You know, if not provocateurs, at least agents that made the government look really bad for this happening right under their nose kind of thing.
Can I ask you something, Scott?
Have you actually read the Turner Diaries?
No, I have not.
I know of it, but I have not read the book.
I'm just going to admit to you that I have.
And it was, and I, look, I do not recommend that anybody read this book, okay?
So I think it's a ghastly and terrifying book.
And it's a harrowing experience to read it, really.
And I wish I'd never had.
But I must say that that book gives you an insight into a kind of ideological structure that's alive, not just here in the US, but in Europe, too, which is a kind of national socialist, you know, sort of neo-Nazi, neo-fascist ideological vision that's not left socialist.
It's really right socialist.
And it's murderous and genocidal and totalitarian and absolutely frightening at every level.
That book gave me an insight into something I wasn't entirely sure I understood.
But after reading it, I now see it and I recognize it as an actual danger, you know, and not so much from the private militia groups, you know, that's an issue.
But, you know, states that adopt this sort of Turner Diaries ideology can also be enormously dangerous.
I mean, it's an important book to read.
It's very appealing to people.
It always has been.
It is.
You know, you're so right about that, Scott.
And you're right that the guy, I know, I used to hear the author of the Turner Diaries, Pierce was his name, used to buy Radio Time here in Austin.
And yeah, boy, talk about demented and and hateful.
And yet you could see how it's, you know, has a certain sound of credibility to it.
It's got that that kind of unified field theory explanation of everything to it that makes it sound very true to the simple mind.
Anyway, hang on one second.
We're talking with the great Jeff Tucker.
Liberty dot me.
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The state is just not that into you.
And then also related fascism is real and alive.
We're talking about that, too.
And so three big bullet points again for review here real quick on the first article.
Kind of.
It's a chronology.
The Oklahoma bombing that made the government fear the American people in such a crazy way helped help really alienate our society from government society in this country.
And then September 11th made Americans love them a thousand percent, no matter what, no matter how much they hate us, you know, on the on the occasion of the government's greatest failure ever, their approval ratings and conviction ratings and every other kind of getting laid at the bar at night ratings and everything else went absolutely through the roof and only just now finally beginning to come down from that, if at all.
And then the 08 crash, very important, left the states desperate for what the people had left because they had built up their budget so big and then without all the property tax revenue and sales tax revenue from the bubble coming in, they just decided to send out all their officers to eat out our substance, you know, just about to death, which is, I guess, why they think they need those MRAP because they figure at some point we're going to get pissed off, although I don't know whether that's really true or not, but that seems to be the assumption there.
But so that really brings us to the real point about fascism, because this is something that, you know, Charles Goyette wrote a whole book like this, Jeff, which is that, hey, when the real crash comes, the dollar crash and we have the kind of financial crisis in America that makes 2008 look like a warm up exercise kind of a thing.
That's when we need desperately the ideology of freedom, because when times are that uncertain and scary and hungry, people turn to demagogues.
They turn to easy, violent answers.
They turn to the right or the left either way to the doom of our society.
You know, if we can't get it together, that what screwed everything up here was abandoning, you know, old little liberalism, not the fact that we ever had it, you know.
Yeah, we think I think it's completely right, I've actually speculated in that article on fascism that that sort of fascist ideology, which is really it's not just a curse word.
Right.
And this is the real deal.
It's a systematic way of thinking.
Well, it's not so systematic, but it's a it's a kind of a coherent collection of biases and impulses.
I think it's probably a greater threat to the US today than than anything that comes from the left and the left as a threat.
But, you know, the bourgeoisie are drawn to fascism.
They always have been.
And I think it's I think it's pretty darn scary.
And what's strange is that we don't have a nose for fascism, really.
We don't we don't really recognize when it's our myths because we don't we don't talk about it as a as a living ideology.
That's why, you know, earlier in the last segment, we were talking about Turner Diaries.
That's why I guess I'm kind of glad I read it, because it just gives you it gives you an insight into this into this mindset.
It really is not a left wing kind of ideology.
It's really right wing at its at its core in some ways.
Fascism is a strange ideology because it's not revolutionary like like like socialism, like left socialism.
It leaves the institutions of the bourgeoisie really like in place, like private property, your clerical class is asked to participate in the grand status project.
You know, there's no real fundamental attack on the family or sort of traditional values or anything like that.
What it does is that just it it it it reaches into the organic matter of the prevailing society and sort of centralizes it, militarizes it and puts it under a sort of a top down control.
You know, I mean, that's that's essentially the fascistic impulse.
And I think I think as we've seen the rise of the total state in the US, that's that's sort of the form it's taken, you know?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm not sure whether to believe the poll, really, but I guess so.
I take it at face value for argument's sake anyway, that you got super majorities of Americans who are willing to go back to war right now in Iraq.
And they got to know on some level that it's the US, the last war there that made the mess that now supposedly we got to go clean up, but fine.
Give them a couple of beheadings on TV, don't even need to attack our towers anymore.
Hell, in Libya, they threatened that there was going to be a massacre, right?
Then not even that there was a massacre, a genocide that had to be stopped, but just that there could be if we don't intervene.
And at this point, the American people, you know, they're as for it as the Pentagon.
Jeff, what what's your read?
Scott, you follow this stuff so closely.
I'm just really curious about that.
What's your read on on mainstream conservative opinion about this proposed war on ISIS?
Well, they want to blow up everything.
I mean, they don't trust Obama to do a violent enough job of it.
But for them, you know, conservatives for pacifism here, right?
I'm sorry.
Obama's being criticized for being a pacifist, a secret pacifist.
Is that right?
Yeah, he's he's dithering when what he needs to do is just carpet bomb them all off the face of the earth and this kind of thing.
And then, you know, it's sort of like what you were saying about we don't have an honest discussion of fascism.
We don't have an honest discussion of Iraq.
We don't have anybody saying that, you know, our army and Marine Corps fought these guys toe to toe on the ground with machine guns for five years and they didn't eradicate them.
They didn't eradicate them.
At some point, they were able to bribe the locals to marginalize them.
But then they came right back again.
And then Obama helped them in Syria and turn this thing into a thousand times the crisis it had to be.
But if they if they had to use that as the premise for every discussion of going back to Iraq, we might have a little bit of a different poll.
But instead, even after all this history just started yesterday and some bad people took over part of Iraq and we got to go stop them.
Everybody has to be heading, you know?
Yes.
And people just respond with emotion to some extent.
I wonder if this is a kind of a leftover from from there's there's never been a consensus in this country about what happened in Vietnam, for example.
I mean, you've got you've got everybody kind of agrees it was a disaster.
But on the on the right, you have this opinion of the disaster because we didn't just lay waste to the place.
They stabbed in the back.
Right.
You know.
And then on the left, it's like, well, we never should have been been a war in the first place.
So, yeah, you sort of have the same feeling now brewing about Iraq.
It's like, well, this is just proof that we didn't use enough state power.
There's never enough state power.
You know, this is there's certain people who just think that that's that's the answer to everything.
Anything goes wrong in the world.
We just have to have to unleash hell.
Is it your sense that Obama is being like more cautious than what public opinion would would enable him to to be?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, are you happy about that?
Well, well, look, no, I wouldn't be happy unless he gave a big speech where he just said, look, you know what?
The truth is, this is all American foreign policy's fault.
And if we intervene now, all we can do is distort the local market for power even more and lead to more backlash and more consequences, just like when we gave Baghdad to the Shia for crying out loud over the last decade.
And so now at this point, it's time to back off and let things settle out a little bit and see how they are.
And the truth is, these guys in ISIS are as bad as they say.
It's probably the first time our enemy has been as bad as they say, you know, this whole time.
But that's why the locals hate them, too.
That's why everybody hates them.
And that's why they're completely surrounded by enemies on all sides.
They have more than half a dozen enemy groups all around them.
And plus, they're ruling over people who they are totalitarians.
And so the locals, they've rejected them before.
There's every reason to believe they they'd reject them in the past and that the local solution would be the one that could be permanent, right, rather than something that Uncle Sam rigs that has to fall apart again, just like the Maliki government just fell apart, just like all the last schemes of the last decade fell apart.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
It's your interview.
But well, listen, you know, this stuff goes really back 25 years.
You know, I mean, this whole Iraq nonsense began, you know, very soon after the Cold War ended.
And when with Bush Bush Bush Bush war on Iraq over that over that Kuwait oil business.
So, you know, if the U.S. doesn't bear some responsibility for this, then it doesn't bear any responsibility for anything.
So you're exactly right about that.
This is this is a quarter century now we're going on here of this of this nonsense.
Right.
Yeah.
No lead up in the Clinton years.
People might be under that illusion.
I know you're not, but just I like pointing that out.
No, that's right.
It was going to continue on continuing sanctions and bombings and all the rest of it.
And look, you know, it's also important to remember that ISIS, these kinds of people just in general, these are the successors to our allies in the later years of the Cold War.
You know, so, you know, this is this is the the Islamic radicals that were fighting that were fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
And and the U.S. at the time was saying these are our friends.
You know, they're in favor of traditional values.
Yeah.
Hey, they're people of the book, man.
That's what they call the book.
Hey, listen, is it OK if I keep you one more segment, Jeff?
You got to run or what?
Yeah, yeah.
No, we just started.
All right.
Well, it's a long break.
So put the phone down.
We'll be back at six after Jeff Tucker from Liberty dot me.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Hey, we've got an extra segment with Jeff Tucker.
He's at Liberty dot me, of course, and so am I, actually.
My profile is Liberty dot me slash members slash Scott Horton show.
Or I think there's another one is Scott Horton dot.
Yeah, Scott Horton dot Liberty dot me.
That's the other one.
That's the publishing site.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, Jeff Tucker, he writes things.
And in this case, the state is just not that into you with a funny picture of a crying girl at a bar there from apparently a movie I've never seen.
And I think I've heard of that, though.
And then this other great article, fascism is real and alive.
And in fact, I think your picture at the top here kind of with all the people saluting there at some giant stadium.
Oh, I guess that must be the the Olympics in Nazi Germany there.
So, yeah, probably was that nineteen thirty.
What?
Thirty five.
Yeah, that to me is the perfect explanation of what you said earlier, why Americans.
I think you said we just don't have a nose for it.
We don't know fascism when we're looking right at it.
Of course, partly that's because the term is just so overused.
But also it's because all the pictures of fascism are in black and white and everybody has a weird salute that's different than our salute.
And, you know, in fact, I was going to say, you know, we don't have the jackboots necessarily marching up and down the street.
But, yeah, we do.
Although they're not in black and white footage, though, there is.
Well, so I think the reason I mean, this is a very interesting question.
Like, why don't we use the word fascism?
So why don't we why don't we why don't we use this word in a sort of normal way, you know, to describe an actual ideology and almost dispassionate?
I think we should be able to use it.
I think it's because of this impression that somehow we vanquished fascism from the world of World War Two.
You know, so that so because we won the war, fascism is gone.
You know, right.
And that's the impression that people have.
And so we don't have to worry about it anymore.
But it's crazy because because they're basically two branches of authoritarian status in the world, the left and the right.
And if we're only able to recognize one of those, you know, that's a that's actually a serious problem.
Well, actually, as you mentioned in here, too, though, part of the confusion is because it's not exclusively a right wing phenomenon, as some usually right leaning libertarians like to say.
It's national socialism.
So it's really a left wing thing.
And there is a little something to that fact.
There's a little truth to that.
Jonah Goldberg, the neocon, wrote an article about how liberalism is fascism.
Yeah, OK, so so here's the thing, Scott.
I mean, this is this is complicated.
And actually, you can read about a lot of this in Mises' great book, 1920, a 22 book socialism.
So even though it was written before national socialism became a threat to Europe, he actually mentions it in passing.
But here's the thing, like Mussolini is, of course, the founder of fascism, as we once knew it.
And he grew out of a syndicalist tradition.
But the critical thing to understand about fascism is that it made it a name for itself and and became a powerful force in world politics, not as somehow an extension of Marxism, but as a opposition to it.
So fascism has always been anti-communist, for example.
I know that and people turn to fascism to save themselves from communism in the same sense that they turn to the New Deal to save us from from socialism.
And people turn to, you know, to Hitler to save themselves from, you know, Jewish communism, you know, in Germany.
So it's always kind of positioned itself as an anti left.
Ideology, even though it kind of, yeah, I guess at its roots kind of grows out of a syndicalist, syndicalist ideological firmament.
So it's a complicated relationship.
But there wouldn't be fascism.
Fascism never would have taken hold of the world were it not for the the the threat of communism, it's always been supported by people as a kind of an anti leftist position that that's where it comes from.
So and it's true in the US, too, I would say, you know, when the US is variously in postwar period embraced fascistic ideology, it's always been done by the bourgeoisie as a kind of a means by which we fight the bad guys on the left.
You know, we have to sort of have a centrally planned authoritarian structure to be back at worst threat.
It's always it's always the worst threat.
You know, the people embrace the total state for fear of something worse.
That's always the way it turns out in history.
So what do you think then about like Gabriel Coco's conclusion, then, that progressivism ultimately 20th century progressivism is sort of the the trick of the conservatives.
It's it's their maneuver to fool liberals into or the left.
It may be more generally into embracing especially the national state in order to carry out their liberal goals.
Right.
So you have you have all these big institutions, but basically a big corporatist style, you know, planning coming into place in the progressive era, embraced by the the then liberals, which was which is really catastrophic.
But then after after the war, there was a kind of a reassertion of old fashioned liberalism.
And, you know, you had in that mix in the 1920s, you know, figures like, you know, John T. John T. Flynn and Gary Garrett and Albert J.
Knock and these kinds of these kinds of people, what became the watershed, of course, was a new deal, because now here you have really a systematic sort of planning mechanism, central planning, a kind of outright population control, you know, by the central state imported directly from from Italy and even in some cases, even even Russia and in the case of agriculture.
And so now you had the liberalism having to choose, you know, are we going to favor are we going to favor liberty?
Are we just going to go all in with this with this corporate state?
And of course, we know we know what happened.
Right.
You know, I followed the career of Henry Hazlitt very carefully.
He was writing for The Nation magazine.
His views never really changed, but he was writing for The Nation, you know, in like 1931.
And he was driven out because he didn't support the New Deal.
But then but then after World War Two, you know, you really do have this kind of left right split.
And it's very it's very interesting how essentially every election ever since has been, you know, they don't advertise it this way, but it is basically being given a choice between, you know, between a socialist style of politics and a fascist style of politics.
That's that's essentially the choice we're being given.
And I say that not as an insult, but really as a kind of just an observation.
I think that's that's essentially what we're doing here.
We don't we're not really given any kind of libertarian alternatives.
And now I'm sure you've noticed this, Scott.
Now that you see the sort of rising coherence and prominence of a sort of a consistent liberty minded political impulse in the land, we're getting ever more attacks on on libertarianism as an ideology.
Have you noticed this?
Yeah, like every every few days, you know, Salon has a big, you know, ridiculing article.
Oh, stupid libertarians.
Aren't they ridiculous?
Well, but, you know, what you're saying before that, though, I think is really what's most important, because I mean, the truth is, well, I don't know, a lot of it is up to us to try to do something.
But libertarianism is so marginal.
And I think it's it's really it's true in a very important sense.
But on the other hand, when when liberals are are just commies and conservatives are just fascists, then that means war.
That means no more even, you know, pretended, you know, peaceful transfers of power and just everybody vote and maybe better luck next time or anything.
And now I'm not saying that's the ideal system, the American democracy, such as it's been.
But, you know, like in Ukraine right now, when the toughs meet in the street and fight, they are Nazis and commies really fighting it out over there, in some cases anyway.
And the other thing is that they both agree on the need to go to war.
Yeah, yeah.
With each other and then abroad.
Right.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, we've got to stop and take another break.
But you want to say one more segment?
Because there's more here to talk about.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's do it.
OK, great.
Hey, it's Jeff Tucker.
Liberty dot me.
Go sign up for it.
All right, good.
Hey, I'll sky here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Jeff Tucker.
We're talking about fascism in America.
And in my Twitter feed, the Austin cops just killed some guy, just shot an unarmed guy to death.
The woman who was in the SUV with him during police shooting claims victim was not armed and never got out.
God must have seen something.
No, I don't know.
Anyway, so Jeff Tucker's on the line.
We're talking about fascism.
And right before the break, we're talking about this kind of partisanship.
And I think what I wanted to say, Jeff, was something along the lines of it seems to me like it's really fake, actually, all the name calling fascists and and socialists like on one hand.
Yeah, we do live in a in a Nazi commie government run society.
There's no doubt about it.
Ask all the dead Iraqis, their piles of skulls will tell you just how fascist they really are.
They're hardcore.
On the other hand, we really are ruled from the political center.
It's the conservative Democrats like Barack Obama and the liberal Republicans and liberal Republicans like John McCain and and George W.
Bush, who really are the extremists that rule American society.
And the broad consensus among the American people is that they still want to have their regular elections.
They don't like Congress or the president or whatever.
But they're not really, you know, revolutionary, that kind of thing.
It seems like most of the partisanship, you know, from the birtherism to the, you know, salon dot com style.
All right wingers are are evil enemies who want to destroy America.
All that is mostly just kind of fake and for marketing purposes by the political parties.
But, you know, really, Americans aren't that bad politically.
It's their leaders who are who are that bad.
Although the consequences could be pretty severe if, you know, like I was mentioning before, we have another and maybe much worse financial crisis where then people start believing this nonsense.
That really has been nonsense up to that point.
Well, you know, the other thing, Scott, is there's a sense in which we're still are in a financial crisis.
We're kind of getting used to it because it's now six years going.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply everything's fine.
No, no, no.
But, you know, this is an important point.
I think, you know, the economy is radically underperforming, you know, by any measure, and I don't even know what you can trust those crazy measures.
You know, that we're this we use the same method for calculating GDP that the Soviets did in the 1960s and the 1950s when they concluded that they were about to take over capitalism as the dominant, you know, because they were going at like 12 percent or something.
But anyway, who knows about GDP figures?
But the point is that, you know, new graduates from college are having a hard time getting jobs and certainly not jobs that that have anything like the promise that they once did.
People are generally poorer now than they were 10 years ago.
Opportunities are just gradually sort of dying.
And other economies around the world are growing.
So, you know, you've got you've got a kind of a slow grinding great recession still in place.
I think I think the first quarter of this year, even the GDP growth registered absolutely zero.
So now what is it?
What's the point of this?
Here's the thing.
This sort of socialist fascist system that we have is not performing anymore.
It's redistributing wealth, but mostly just from the people to the to the elites.
Right.
And what worries me about this is that, you know, the way all the story of these kind of slow burn, long running recessions work, the way it turns out is basically you end up in a war.
I mean, that's that's what happened in the New Deal.
You know, basically the elites turned to war to kind of whip up the population.
We're seeing more disgruntlement with government than we've ever seen, like ever on record.
And and every leader has always known that the best way to kind of deal with this is to is to get a war going.
So this is what concerns me so much about all this.
This stuff and and Iraq is that it's going to whip up the population into a kind of nationalist frenzy, turn their attention from the real enemies, which are in Washington, D.C., and, you know, get all in a frenzied state of frothy nationalism, fighting the bad guys abroad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I'm really worried.
This could be the this could be the end game.
You know, I mean, this is this is it.
And maybe it's not maybe it's not this year, maybe it's not next year.
But, you know, at some point, these kind of bad systems like we have in place right now that are unable to produce rising prosperity for their people ultimately turn to war as a way of managing and manipulating the the the public of which they're living as as parasites.
You know what I wonder about?
Mises talks about that.
Yeah, go ahead.
I wonder.
I mean, it's certainly there's there's no question about what you're saying being historically true.
And like I was mentioning earlier on in this interview, the Gallup poll shows that the American people will believe whatever the hell they're told about who to be afraid of and want to kill.
Apparently, if if the consensus on TV is we got to do this thing, he's a Hitler and all of that, then they'll do it.
However.
It seems like that kind of thing is got to be paper thin compared to, say, 2002 or 2003, where, you know, we've been through this.
It's we didn't see this movie before, like Vietnam, where Vietnam ended a good 15, 16, 17 years before the start of Gulf War one.
You know what I mean?
We've just been through this.
Who was I reading where they said all the Hawks on TV on CNN are interrupted by commercials for the Wounded Warrior Project, where you two can donate to help this poor guy with no legs, you know, and and how, you know, I just see.
And I look at how just unanimous the opposition was against the war, against Bashar al-Assad in Syria a year ago.
And I wonder whether technology now, too.
Right.
You know, you mentioned earlier that you were just looking at your Twitter feed and saw somebody killed in Austin 10 years, 10 years ago.
There's no way you would have even known that.
Right.
So we've got this kind of outpouring of information and we've yet to see a test of our new technologies in wartime.
And it's going to be very interesting to see, you know, whether or not the elites can kind of hold it together when faced with this this massive.
Hey, look at Gaza, man.
I mean, Gaza, this is everyone agrees across the board, no matter whose side they're on, that everything was different in the media this time.
Really?
Yeah.
And I think it's because of Twitter, because Twitter is such a great equalizer between the consumers and the producers of news that, you know, when they are called out, it's not like they're not horrible, but it's just such a powerful check and balance on them.
That is so interesting.
You've seen comments to this effect about the Gaza situation.
Yeah, sure.
Because, you know, I'm following and she's got a million followers or something.
This 16 year old girl from Gaza who's lived through three wars now and who's got these gigantic eyes like some Disney cartoon and is sad all the time because there's a freaking war going on all the time.
And that's in my living room and yours and everybody's right now.
And that is what they would never let me see before.
A young girl in Gaza was something to say.
I wonder whether or not this is part of what's contributing to the Obama administration's reticence, you know, in the case of Iraq right now.
I mean, things have changed even in just the last few years.
Yeah.
I mean, this Iraq war will be way different in terms of the real time flow of information coming.
I've heard speculation in the past.
I'm going to talk about this Thursday.
I'm giving a class, not so much class, but I'm kind of leading a retrospective seminar on 9-11.
Oh, real quick now.
We're almost out of time now.
Yeah, yeah.
But right.
I mean, you know, if 9-11 happened today, we would we would know a lot more about the facts on the ground than we were given access to at the time.
Yeah.
Just because of the state of information.
Yeah.
Well, let's hope it can make a difference.
You know, I don't know exactly what can be done.
I guess calling a congressman couldn't hurt.
Very well.
Hey, listen, if you're around, I would love to see you Thursday night.
And I'll put you on.
I'll put you on camera.
We can we can continue this.
I would love to see you.
It's going to be a kind of an exciting class.
Yeah, that should be OK.
Yeah.
Email me.
I'd love to.
I'd love to have you, Scott.
My goodness.
That'd be amazing.
Hey, the great Jeff Tucker, everybody.
Liberty dot me.
Thanks, Jeff.
Good to see you.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
Coming up this October 18th at Columbia University in New York.
The Future Freedom Foundation is hosting a conference titled Stop the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism featuring Glenn Greenwald, Radley Balco, Jeremy Scahill, Eugene Jarecki, Jonathan Turley and others.
The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Just head over to FFF dot org to sign up.
That's the Stop the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism Conference Saturday, October 18th, 2014 at Columbia University.
Sponsored by the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF dot org.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for Wall Street Window dot com.
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