09/10/14 – Adam Kokesh – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com Alright you guys, welcome back to my show.
Hey, guess what?
I got Adam Kokesh online from Adam vs.
The Man.
And Adam won.
Really?
Sort of, kind of, sounds like it.
Hey man, how are you doing?
Outstanding yourself.
I'm doing great.
So, yeah, I saw the good news in the Washington Post.
Adam Kokesh walks out of there on his own two feet.
Pretty good, huh?
Yeah, no, and it's been a long time coming and getting past this is the last significant legal hurdle coming out of what happened on Independence Day last year, making the video with the shotgun in D.C. and the raid on my home and everything attached to that.
And it's a huge relief to be past this.
It hasn't even sunk in yet.
And I do want to share something though with your audience, if I may, aside from just the good news and how this went down, which was that the judge really did a total, it seemed like an absolute reversal in her attitude from the plea hearing three months ago.
And I can only hope that she spent some of that time watching old YouTube videos of mine or reading the news coverage.
But I really, at one point during the hearing, I really felt like I was talking to a fan.
I mean, she was, you know, really being as supportive as possible.
And even articulated that the idea of someone who's like an activist like myself would be more harmed from having a felony on the record.
And that was she mentioned voting.
And of course, as you know, I'm not against voting, but I engage in principled non-voting most of the time.
And but just to hear the way she said it and then the way she kind of made it, I don't want maybe it's too strong a word, but a snide remark about what the government of D.C. had done in this case.
It was like I had to bite my lip to stop from laughing.
It was it was really a fun scene in court.
But I've learned a lot from this.
And guys, you know, I wrote a book that I started writing while I was in jail.
And I released it for free in every digital format possible.
I killed the brand Adam versus the man to really just focus on the book and be about the message of freedom.
And I've been developing these thoughts for a while.
I've got a big announcement coming up on the 15th here, but I really decided to make sure that, well, I thought for a long time, you know, building an audience is great, but it doesn't essentially change anything necessarily.
You know, civil disobedience can win headlines, but it doesn't win converts.
And there's a lot of resistance that we engage in that is unproductive.
And I think if we really care about achieving the alleged goals of the movement and no one's really talked about it in these terms, except in the big abstract of achieving a voluntary society, we have to be absolutely ruthless in looking at the efficiency of what we are doing in terms of does it fundamentally change the way people think.
And I've made a lot of changes as a result of that.
And the main thing for me is focusing on the book.
But I would hope that people in the movement realize how far behind we are and that we have to find ways to snap out of the insular conversation within the movement and really get out and share the beauty of this message with people.
Yeah, well, you know, I've really been thinking about that a lot this week as these poll numbers come out and have super majorities of the American people for going back to war with Iraq after.
Boy, have I been pissing in the wind.
Yeah, I mean, I've been doing nothing but cover Iraq this whole time.
And as far as the measurable difference it's made in society, there ain't one.
I mean, I certainly have gotten emails from people who say, hey, thanks for setting me straight and that kind of thing.
I value that a lot.
I know individuals value it, but man, it should be a little bit harder to convince Americans to go to war right now than it is.
I think, you know, yeah, I can't help but feel like, well, maybe I need to maybe there is no efficient way for me to do what I do.
But I don't know.
Well, I still think there's a great value in, you know, all the activism that I've done and all that's being done in the movement.
But I know that when I took a look at this principle, all I'm doing is just, you know, my approach and my attitude.
But, you know, the thing that I've been the most satisfied of in my activism so far has been from the kind of feedback I get from people who say, wow, Adam, you changed my perspective.
And I get that from people who say they were listening to my show for six months and then it kind of sunk in, you know, they were kind of ready to hear it.
And one of the things that's been surprising is, like, I've heard people who said that the Jefferson Dance Party video from 2011 of me getting body slammed with a group of activists at the Jefferson Memorial dancing in civil disobedience, that was the thing that was a catalyst for someone and got them thinking.
But I just I'm really excited to know that what I'm doing with this book is the most that I can do to grow the movement.
Yeah.
And the book is Freedom.
And here it is at Amazon.com.
And I guess don't go to Amazon just to leave reviews.
The very first line in the description, Amazon says you can get this book for free in every digital format here.
Oh, right.
Really cool to be in a position to give this away.
And just, you know, we're hoping to make some money from what we're doing to support ourselves from the merchandise associated with this is a badass logo.
But we are not making money off the book.
We're selling them online.
And the URL is Adam versus the man slash dot com slash not anymore.
Not anymore.
Oh, that's what it says here in that first line of the description.
First of all, let's go to get the free stuff.
Yeah, you know, I should probably change that now, but we're in the process of switching over to our new website, which is the Freedom line dot com.
The Freedom line.
Yep.
OK, cool.
The Freedom line dot com, that's the new and people can go there already right now and get the book in its different formats there.
Yeah.
We're selling a hundred packs for one hundred and thirty nine dollars.
We're selling singles.
I think we got we got the price on the four dollars now each delivered to most of the prices and most of the cost is in the shipping.
But this is a this is a tool we want people to use it.
And what you're saying is you think that from all the different projects that you've been involved in, you seem to be getting more bang for your buck for this book than anything else.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
And what I'm really looking forward to and we're picking up the first round of print copies here on Friday and then we're having a party.
Too bad you're not in L.A., but on the 20th, we're having part of the announcement is going to be that I'm moving out of the home here and we're going to have a party to celebrate on September 20th and be giving away free books to anybody who wants to show up.
Cool.
Yeah, I miss L.A. every day, man.
A little bit at least.
Well, L.A. misses you, too.
Well, tell everybody I said, what's up, anyway?
All right.
So now, as far as the judge, I wanted to go back to that for just a second.
You thought it was notable to bring up there.
And I agree with you.
It is kind of a fascinating thing to see a judge who's it sounds like and I'm extrapolating quite a bit here, I guess.
But I've met people like this in my life being a cab driver.
I talk to a lot of these type people.
And there are some lawyers who really, really believe in the law.
It's like their faith.
And the prosecutor was terrible.
But I'll go ahead.
I'll tell you why.
Don't you?
Well, yeah.
And I just mean like kind of in the very best way.
We're like they don't just believe in the law because they want to prosecute the hell out of you.
But they believe in in really in the spirit of the Enlightenment era in which our Constitution was ratified.
And that, you know, the whole idea of there really is a difference between menacing people with a shotgun and being a political activist who makes a dang video because he's trying to get to people's minds.
And it's it's I'm not saying it legitimizes the judiciary in any sense, really.
But it is nice to hear an anecdote of a judge who I think you're probably right.
Saw some of your videos and realize that like, hey, man, this is a guy who's fighting for my Bill of Rights, too.
I like him, you know, that's pretty cool.
Oh, crap.
And now the music's playing.
We got to go to break at him.
So hold that thought.
And we're going to take this break and then we're going to come back.
That cool.
Let's do it.
All right.
It's Adam Kokesh.
And he is at the freedom line dot com.
You can get his book Freedom there for free right now.
The freedom line dot com.
Back in a sec.
Hey, all Scott Horton here for Wall Street Window dot com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all the stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at Wall Street Window dot com and get real time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Wall Street Window dot com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with Adam Kokesh.
From the freedom line dot com, and he's got this new book, Freedom.
And in case you missed the the lead here at the top of the show, he was played something like no contest and got a suspended sentence and was allowed to go free after his civil disobedience and then SWAT raid madness.
Which is all great news and glad to know libertarian movement can have you back full time.
So tell me a little bit about this book, then.
Well, before I do that, actually, I was in a spot.
Yeah, sorry.
And I remember at least two of them.
One was about you.
You had a question about the judge.
But if I may, about the prosecutor first, there really is this feature of the paradigm and a lot of libertarians try to deny it.
And there are a lot more people on our side that are open.
But it's only like, you know, maybe 20 percent of the population that when they read this book, they'll just go, OK, I get it.
And that's what I found so far.
You know, there's maybe 20 percent that'll read it.
And then they'll you know, they'll they'll have some objection that'll take them a few years or a few months to overcome.
And then there's, you know, the 30 percent of people who are the half of the people that vote in presidential elections very enthusiastically.
And they're going to resist it.
And they're going to be the ones dragged kicking and screaming and screaming and then into a nonviolent society.
And then there's the 30 percent that just sort of go along with whatever the dominant paradigm is.
And, you know, this book is not for everyone, because out of that 30 percent that really drives statism, there are drug warriors.
There are people who really believe that punishment is a good paradigm.
And I'm very happy with how the book makes a distinction between just punishment, one being legitimate and the other not.
Punishing in and of itself is really a criminal act and not effective, not efficient and has nothing to do with achieving justice or a safe or a free society.
So being able to make that distinction was really cool and draw attention to that with my one quote in the paper from the last hearing at night, which my lawyer almost strenuously objected to.
But she was very much looking out for the for the case and did a great job.
But the prosecutor here is one of these people.
He's a drug warrior and he really is of that mentality.
And he really did a reversal as well and was very non combative at all and went along with the suggestions at the sentencing hearing.
But at the previous hearing, he was, you know, fire breathing drug warrior who just wants to put everybody in jail.
And I try to talk to him.
He said, well, no, I'll only talk to your lawyer.
And, you know, I understand what he was.
He was kind of he was kind of awkward about it.
I don't want to say his name because you might be getting a little personal, but he kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
And I just but with this new attitude that I've taken on and this is part of what I'm part of my epiphany from being in solitary confinement was that, you know, the only proper attitude towards someone like that is empathy, pity and, you know, to attempt to lift them up.
And in this case, you know, being combative was certainly not helpful or would not have helped the situation.
But the judge herself as well.
I mean, I wouldn't have been surprised if she spent part of the last three months since the last hearing watching YouTube videos.
And I can only hope.
But I told the reporter at the hearing that one of the greatest values of this kind of civil disobedience is taking the message to people who would otherwise never hear it.
And I told every single guard that I came into contact with, at least you're a free, beautiful, independent human being.
You should never let anyone tell you otherwise.
And then when possibly use as a springboard into a broader discussion of the issues of freedom.
And I really think the judge at least was somehow affected by that.
Yeah, no, that's really good, man.
I'm really happy to hear that and especially the results.
But, you know, you really prove your point, though, about just how easy it can be to reach people sometimes.
The problem is, of course, this is what we're talking about with the polls this week again, is the consistency.
I mean, you could, you know, I think I could probably tell someone how they lied us into every single war America has ever been in.
And then they'll still believe the next believe in the next one, too.
And the polls right now have super majorities of people say that not just Iraq, but even Afghanistan was a mistake, even though they're correct to believe that's where Osama was after 9-11.
And they'd be wrong if they if they thought that the Taliban didn't offer to hand them over.
They did.
But anyway, the point being that that one at least started off with a very plausible excuse for it.
Right.
But they even think that one is a mistake.
But then the next three or four or five.
Yeah.
You know, intervene in Libya.
Why not?
Yeah.
Go back to war in Iraq.
Sure.
Seventy four percent in the CNN poll say sure, bomb Iraq.
Why not?
That's the part that gets me.
What's a conversion when all it takes is just the last argument they heard, really, you know?
Well, you know, and just again, I put this in perspective and why I'm putting the book front and center is like these are these are all valuable things for getting people to think.
But when when people answer those polls and when people vote, they're just they're generally not thinking.
And, you know, I mean, you know that, oh, someone calls, hey, do you support this?
What have you heard about this in the news?
Oh, well, then that's your opinion because you're not trained.
You haven't trained yourself to see through that, to look at the world the way that a libertarian would.
And what we are asking people to do, and I think as a movement, at least the way I think of it, you know, and I don't want to speak on anyone else's behalf, but is to recognize that we are asking people to think, you know, you're not going to win them over by, you know, making just the 30 second entertaining version.
You're not going to win them over by making a headline.
We are asking them to think in the book is the easiest, most concise way to get someone to do that, to really consider the message.
And there are lots of other ways out there.
And I'm not demeaning anything else or any of the other work that I've done.
But I think this represents a shift that I would hope other people consider.
And if they see this book and they don't think it's an effective tool for this, that they write their own or they make their own or they come up with something that is, you know, about what is, you know, at least they consider their own activism in terms of is this what I can be doing that is the most efficient way for me to change the paradigm at a fundamental level in America and in the world.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I mean, there's just no denying that libertarianism, a great part due to Ron Paul, but in great part due to everybody who rallied around him and to presidential campaigns and all the work that came with that, too.
But, you know, all in all, still just compare libertarian thought in America now to where we were 10 or 14 years ago, something like that at the turn of the century.
And I don't know exactly the proportions and the numbers, but it sure seems like we've gone leaps and bounds since then.
Oh, absolutely.
Although there you might say that in a way we've we've stalled, I don't think we've stalled, but I think there was a trajectory of I don't think we're our highest growth rate in our history.
And maybe you could attribute that to the period of Ron Paul bringing people in with his campaigns.
But one of the things we found out is that a lot of those people were, you know, and this is this is part of the beauty of Ron Paul's outreach effort in a sense of effectiveness and outreach, that it brought in a lot of people who weren't already thinking in volunteerism or in freedom.
And they liked Ron Paul because of his integrity or the Constitution.
And it was a lot of conservatives, a lot of mainstream people.
And I think in a way, what we need to do now is bring those people to a deeper way of thinking.
You know, and a lot of them are these a lot of these are a lot of people that, you know, were asked during the campaign and then, you know, kind of just gave up and they're like waiting for the next candidate to come along.
And it's you know, I don't think we can afford to wait.
And I know that you would not think this hyperbolic language to say that lives are at stake.
Yeah.
Well, listen, we are absolutely on the cusp of well, I don't know.
I guess I've thought this for a long, long time, but I don't know what they're waiting for anymore for full scale lawless fascism where they just, you know, like Operation Garden Plot or whatever, where they go ahead and just suspend the Constitution and just say, no, look, there is no Constitution.
There is our power and you'll do what you're told.
That's you know, we're based at de facto right now.
And I don't think it's a stretch to say the next big terrorist attack in America and that'll be the end of our Bill of Rights, the end of the pretense of our Bill of Rights in this country.
Well, I am certainly afraid of something being.
Deliberately brought to our shores, let's just put it that way around, you know, in the name of ISIS and the implications for that would be quite scary, I think, whatever is it's going to come next is going to be to justify the militarization of police and then it's not going to come in leaps and bounds.
But I'm much more optimistic, especially in the long term.
And this is, by the way, Chapter 10, Section 4, talking about localization.
But I think people are waking up and in many ways putting a check on government power in terms of the scale of what they can get away with.
Like in a lot of other countries, when they get the militarized police out there, they're killing people like people die on a regular basis.
That didn't really happen around the protests in Ferguson, as gross a display as it was.
You look at Obama's attempt to get boots on the ground in Syria.
I think the anti-Iraq war movement deserves a lot of credit for inspiring resistance in the military.
And from my work with the Rocks Veterans Against War, I'd like to take some small credit for that as part of that much, much larger effort.
But I think people are still, if you don't change the way they think, they're not capable of admitting mistakes while they're being made, but they can learn the lessons from them.
Right.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it, for sure.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry we're already over time and we got to go.
But I appreciate your time.
It sure is good to talk to you.
It sure is good to know that you're free.
I was worried that they were going to lock you in.
Free-ish.
Thanks for plugging the website, too, Scott.
It's good to talk to you, brother.
Thefreedomline.com, we'll see you all there.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Thanks, Adam.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers or warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around, I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are.
There's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right.
Libertarian empire.
Police state founders quote central banking.
Yes.
Bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or peacenik live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world.
Iran, central banking, political realignment and well, you know, everything.
I can teach markets to liberals and peace to the right.
Just watch me.
Check out Scott Horton dot org slash speeches for some examples and email me Scott at Scott Horton dot org for more information.
See you there.
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.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.