Hey y'all, here's how to support the show.
First of all, check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
It's at foolserrand.us.
Sign up for the podcast feeds at scotthorton.org and check out scotthorton.org slash donate.
Anybody who donates $20 gets to the front of the list to get the audio book and it's really coming soon.
I'm done.
My audio mastering dude has it now and it's gonna be soon.
So $20 gets you to the front of the list for that donation of $50 to scotthorton.org slash donate.
Gets you a signed copy of the book.
$100 gets you a QR code commodity disc.
No face value.
You scan it with your phone and it tells you the instant spot price in real time.
It's the most brilliant invention ever.
And for a donation of $200 or more to The Scott Horton Show, you get a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think libertarian audiobooks at listenandthink.com.
And they're the ones putting out my book, my audio book too.
And I take all kinds of cryptocurrencies.
If you want to donate them, I'll accept them.
All that's at scotthorton.org slash donate.
Shop amazon.com by way of my link.
Leave me good reviews on iTunes, Stitcher and Amazon if you read the book.
And yeah, you know, invite me to give a speech to your group.
Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys introducing Kelly Vlahos.
She's the executive editor of the American Conservative Magazine.
That's at theamericanconservative.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Kelly, how are you?
Thanks, Scott.
I really appreciate you having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And you know what?
I got to say, you've just been doing a great job.
The whole crew over there at the American Conservative has been doing a great job, but you guys are running so much good stuff all the time.
Thank you.
First thing in the morning, I open up my Twitter and there's a brand new base of itch to be my spotlight on antiwar.com tomorrow.
You're just doing my work for me is what you're doing.
I appreciate that.
Well, I appreciate you saying that where you are working very hard.
And you know, I'm always on the lookout for new and exciting and informative writers and just kind of giving a space to people in this realm of anti-interventionism.
You know, it's just, there's a lot out there that, you know, between you and antiwar.com and a few other places, you know, that we're trying just to push out in the forefront, trying to squeeze past the sort of mainstream, lamestream, you know, blockade of informing the public.
But I think we're getting there.
Yeah, definitely.
And by the way, let me mention that Jason Ditz, our managing news editor at antiwar.com.
I hope you guys read Jason all day, every day, news.antiwar.com.
And he's got a great one in the American conservative right now about the army bringing back the Stinger missile.
I mean, just count the dead civilians already to start taking them off on your fingers.
Oh, these guys.
Anyway, yeah.
So there you go, everybody.
The American conservative magazine, if you're not familiar, it's the home of the anti-war right in the United States of America.
The American conservative.com.
All right.
And this one is called Neoconning the Trump White House.
It's by you.
Very good.
Very important one.
So not just hawks, but actual dyed-in-the-wool neocons are making a comeback inside the Trump government.
Is that correct?
Yes.
All right.
Short answer.
Name names.
Point fingers.
Well, you know, this is, you know, I had gotten, I kind of got the idea during the release of the National Security Strategy, which came out in December for people who are not familiar with this.
And there's really no reason you should be, because it is sort of like a standard Washington exercise.
But basically, the National Security Strategy is released every year per Congress by the National Security Council.
And it basically lays out, it's sort of a, it's a very broad roadmap of what the White House National Security Strategy is.
And it can be pretty broad, sometimes pretty politicized.
They don't vary very much from president to president.
They are pretty rudimentary.
But there's also some signifiers of what a, you know, the president's sort of worldview or his people's worldview is.
And this had been released to some, you know, nominal fanfare.
And it was mentioned in some of the reports that it had been led by Nadia Shadlow, who is becoming the new Deputy National Security Advisor, replacing Dina Powell, an Egyptian Coptic scholar and a long time, I guess, activist in that realm who had taken on the job when Trump became president.
So this means that Ms. Shadlow will be at the right, you know, basically at the right elbow of H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor.
So she was leading this charge now.
This had basically piqued my interest because I know Nadia Shadlow to be the head of Smith-Richardson, which is a major funder of universities, think tanks, and scholars in Washington, mostly with a neoconservative point of view.
And she has been throughout the entire War on Terror.
So if you take any think tank in Washington, you will likely find that there are some Smith-Richardson money behind it.
And this struck me as highly interesting because I had thought that most of these people were never Trumpers.
She is particularly close to Eliot Cohen, for example, who runs the very neoconservative National Security Studies program at Johns Hopkins, the SAIS program of international studies.
She's good friends with him.
She's good friends with a number of people that you've seen go in and out of the Bush administration, the Obama administration, all coming from neoconservative point of view, those people who had been involved in creating the surge.
The entire Kagan family, for example, Kimberly Kagan, who runs the Institute for the Study of War, they get a lot of Smith-Richardson money.
So I sort of kind of followed this down a little rabbit hole.
And what I had basically come up with the story is that although these never Trumpers who are very public about their point of view, like Eliot Cohen, like Bill Kristol, like Max Boo, there are a number of people who have been in and out of the government over the last 20 years who never publicly denounced Trump, who likely do not agree with him, but who are basically burrowing into the national security structure of this administration and are basically advancing their approach to foreign policy and national security as usual, as they did in the Obama administration and the Bush administration.
And we're starting to see signs of that.
And I use this national security release or the national security strategy as a sort of canary in a coal mine for what is going on.
Basically, if you had thought that Trump was going to come in and sort of exert a new, let's say, anti-interventionist but more realist foreign policy, scaling back some of our overseas adventures, so to speak, and the nation building and democracy promotion, think twice, because those same people are already on the scene.
And that's basically what I wanted to write about.
It's probably maybe the first in several stories where we, once we know these people and we can get some more intelligence on the ground that we'd like to bring to light.
And I guess there's really, in all of Washington, there's only so many right-wing wonks that can fit into your government.
I mean, he could go directly to the Cato Institute and hire Ted Carpenter and Doug Bandow.
Right.
But short of that, who else does he have to pick from other than a bunch of hawks, right?
Well, you know, and this has been an ongoing concern from the people that I work with and people in this realism and restraint realm that the American conservative and, you know, many of the cross-pollination with antiwar.com and Cato and other groups' national interest.
This is an ongoing concern that as much as we have the intellectual chops and we have the, you know, the sort of the means of making a strong case and working with people in the government to advance this, you know, reforms on this front, that we haven't been able to get people into the sort of advisory class or the advisor class of Washington.
Yeah, the closest we got was it wasn't us, right?
It was Stephen Bannon had some antiwar points of view.
He's also a hardcore hawk on a lot of things.
So he's not really any kind of paleocon.
He's a right-wing nationalist.
And listen, you'd have to be a damn fool to say, let's stay in Afghanistan, right?
You could have, you could come from a lot of point of views, a lot of different points of view and still come to that same conclusion, right?
But so that was what we had was Bannon at Trump's right hand saying that this is the wrong thing to do, but it was never his top priority in a Daniel Larison kind of a way, right?
It just doesn't, it doesn't count.
It would have taken, if not Trump really being a Ron Paul and really having a firm understanding and a firm conviction about what is to be done here, then at least you would need for Bannon to be someone who really understands this stuff and cares about it a lot.
And it was clearly just one of his priorities and not the main one.
And he's gone now anyway.
So, yeah.
And it's really difficult because it did seem like a lot of the people that Trump had been turning to at the early end, whether it be Sebastian Gorka or KT McFarlane or Mike Flynn, you know, these were all people on the edge and they were all either coming in from the sort of what we call conservative ink realm of sanctioned, conservative voices and talkers, or they were like you had mentioned out on this sort of like, more of a, I guess, nationalist fringe who may have had things in common with the anti-interventionist crowd, but intellectually were not in the same place about how to get those goals or get the means to the end were completely different.
And so there was no, there was sort of no room or there was room for, but there was just no access to the president.
You know, when you had to sort of like get by these other interests and groups and people who really didn't see us as, you know, viable, you know, options for this, you know, this burgeoning and advisory team.
So it's very frustrating and I get it.
And it just reminds people, you know, like us that there's just so much more to do.
And, you know, it's one thing to, to know that you're right about the issues, you know, and we have been since the, you know, since the, you know, the Iraq war invasion, when this, when our magazine was founded by Pat Buchanan, we know we've been right on the issues, but it's getting the influence on the ground in Washington.
And on one hand, that's a highly unpalatable, you know, thought like you have to like play the game.
And when we know the game is corrupt and there is filled with hypocrites and strivers, and we don't want to be part of that.
But on the other hand, if we want to actually have influence in how policy is reformed, we kind of have to get, we have to insinuate ourselves.
So I think, you know, these are conversations that people are smarter than me are having, but, you know.
I mean, so, so yeah.
And actually this is what I started to say, but I was sort of spaced out and lost my plot.
But what I was going to talk about was how Bannon would have had to make the choice during the transition, that we're going to go to the Koch brothers institutes, right?
We're going to go to Cato and we're going to go to defense priorities.
We're going to find Bacevich.
We're going to find all the anti-war right-wingers we can.
And the more right-wing and anti-war, the better.
And without that, and that could have been.
And there's probably, and, you know, I helped work on like a proposed list of people who really could be in the cabinet as, as National Security Council people and staffers and deputies and whatever, Bandao types, Bandao and Bacevich and them.
And, you know, there were enough that if the Trump administration had been full of them, it would have made a major difference.
But it's just, you know, there's none of that now.
And of course, Donald Trump has never heard of probably even the Cato Institute, or if he has, he thinks of it as, you know, a free market thing, but he doesn't know.
He doesn't, it's not like he reads Bandao and knows what the hell about even the arguments that are being made at the American Conservative Magazine or at Cato or at the National Interest Skeptics.
And I mean, and let's, let's be realistic.
I mean, if all of the elements in Washington are positioned towards keeping the war machine going, they're not, they're going to be very resistant to anybody like Doug Bandao coming in, who would be more inclined to say, let's bring troops back from here, from there, let's close this base, you know, I mean, they're going to, they're looking at dollar signs flying out windows when, when Doug Bandao walks in the door.
So remember that open C-SPAN footage where it was, the C-SPAN cameras just rolling and they were waiting for some, some defense department spokesman was going to get up there about something.
And a guy in the audience goes, boy, sure hope Ron Paul doesn't win.
We'll all have to get jobs.
It was like, yeah, I don't know.
But I think that should be a meme.
That should be a viral meme.
No, that really happened, really.
And it wasn't like an inside job where it was a Ron Pauly and, you know, making fun of them.
It was one of them for real said that.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, no, I'll find that for you somewhere.
But you know, that, that does everything right there.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
Hey guys, I got a new sponsor Zen Cash, a new digital currency, but it's got the great privacy protections built in.
And it's a messaging service and you can send documents and all kinds of things.
It's really great.
So check that out at ZenCash.io.
Also by the book, The War State by my friend, Mike Swanson.
It's a great history of the rise of the military industrial complex after World War Two.
You'll really enjoy it.
And check out his great investment advice at WallStreetWindow.com.
And when you follow his advice, you'll want to get at least some medals.
And you do that from Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.
And they've been around for 40 something years.
It's a great company.
They charge a very low premium to get you platinum, palladium, silver and gold and whatever you need there.
And when you buy in Bitcoin, there's no charge.
That's at rrbi.co, rrbi.co for your precious metals.
And get your anti-government propaganda from libertystickers.com.
If you want a brand new website for 2018, expanddesigns.com slash Scott will save you 500 bucks.
All right.
So tell me about, I like this sentence.
The foundation has a rich history cleaved to neoconservative pioneers, such as Irving Kristol, father of Bill.
So do tell more about the Smith Richardson Foundation, because I gotta tell you, I never heard of it.
Thank God I don't live in DC.
Well, yeah, that's the thing.
You never, it's one of those things where you say, oh, wow, this is, this is, this was one story you need to know.
This is one woman you need to know.
And people are going, I never heard of her, but she has more influence in this town than you would ever think.
And she was the senior program manager for Smith Richardson all through the war on terror.
But Smith Richardson itself has been around since, I want to say the 40s or 50s, started with Vicks chemical company money, you know, Vicks Vaporub medicines.
They use a conservative air.
He was able to bankroll a lot of the early neoconservative magazines that I mentioned, public interest commentary was on the ground level for a lot of the Cold War projects that neoconservatives who had, you know, been liberals, but had been disenchanted with the democratic foreign policy direction had shifted over the Republican party.
So they're very active in anti-communism and whether it be in media, you know, activism, you know, and, and think tanks.
And one of those think tanks is the American Enterprise Institute.
So you will see Smith Richardson money at the funding, at the, at the, the very sort of like seed corn level of a lot of these organizations, many that have come and gone.
But AEI is the most enduring.
And so let's see, they, through the years they've funded AEI and, and, you know, during the Reagan years, anti-communism, but then they started getting into this more then to the Iraq war and the Persian Gulf war.
And you find that many of the people who have worked with Smith Richardson or at the, at the patronage or by the patronage of a, of Smith Richardson have been involved in a lot of the regime change activities in Iraq and the project for a new American century, which I'm sure your listeners are very well aware of had been right there at the, at the elbow of Bill Clinton pressuring him to engage in regime change in Iraq.
And then finally got their way after 9-11 and literally invading Iraq, you know, Smith Richardson, one of their research directors left there to go head PNAC.
You know, a lot of the think tanks that they have funded and programs they have funded throughout Washington, you'll see a lot of their, their people have been signatories, like key signatories and participants in project for a new American century letters and reports.
It really is just a web.
And after the Iraq invasion, I had been at a conference in Vermont that had been sponsored in part by Smith Richardson.
And it was like, you know, like a, a hair's breadth away from the whole surge phenomenon.
It was at that period of time before the military wanted to publicly recognize that there was an insurgency on the ground and things weren't going very well.
And right before, you know, David Petraeus became our savior general and Smith Richardson was funding a lot of the counterinsurgency papers that had been floating around Washington and been behind people like David Kilcullen, for example, and that, and David Nagel and I mean, John Nagel, and, you know, sort of bringing those people together.
And then, and then you have the Kagan, Kim and Fred Kagan.
Fred Kagan is known as one of the surge architects.
So you find their hand behind a lot of what was going on in Washington.
And as you and I know, Scott, all of that energy shifted into the Obama administration when he became president, when all of a sudden Democrats are all on board with counterinsurgency and staying in Iraq and in Afghanistan until God knows when.
And so Smith Richardson was also funding Center for New American Security, which was started as a Democratic think tank.
They funded programs at Brookings and the Center for the CSIS.
And, you know, so it's not just neoconservative recipients that you're seeing here.
It is conventional Washington, you know, Yes, the entire center, right?
The right wing Democrats and the, and the liberal Republicans, their think tanks.
Right.
So there's really just like a sliver of difference between two.
So you have your, like, your, your liberal interventionist, and then you have your neocons, but really, they're, they're all going, they're all really swimming in the same direction.
And that is to, you know, increase our, you know, global influence, whether it be through democracy promotion on the left, or a more sort of like enforcing global hegemony on the right.
And for someone like, you know, Andrew Bacevich, or Doug Bandow, or, you know, Will Ruger, and any of these people to sort of, sort of squeeze in, it's very difficult, because their message is so diametrically opposed to this sort of like, Washington establishment worldview.
And it's, come on, it's all about supporting the war state.
I mean, aside from all these other things, like, yeah, so I mean, but they all work hand in glove.
They might not say, hey, I support the war state.
But really, that's, that's what happens.
And when there's so much money at stake in the defense industry, and so much money at stake on Capitol Hill, in terms of political contributions, there's just not a lot of sympathy for us, for our, not for us, but for what we're selling.
Yeah, exactly.
But I think it's important that people know that this is going on, so they don't get relaxed and say, well, you know, Trump's, Trump's not one of those.
He's not one of those neoconservatives.
He's not one of those war hawks.
Well, you know, if he keeps letting people worm in, like he has, it's not going to matter whether Trump is this or that, or the other thing, it's all going to go, it's going to be going on under the surface.
Yeah, I mean, he doesn't know enough to not be a hawk.
He, he, he saw the advantage in running against the entire status quo as a, as political shtick.
And, you know, it's true, I guess, that other than those few times that he attacked Assad's government, he at least temporarily called off CIA support for the jihadists in Syria.
But other than that, he's doubled and tripled every war.
He promised he was going to hunt down and murder the family members of anybody who opposes us.
He was an avowed war criminal before he ever won the election.
And, you know, in fact, Pompeo was on TV the other day, implying that they're bringing back torture.
Yeah, that's on my Twitter feed right now.
He brought that up in the campaign as well, Trump did, about torturing prisoners.
Now, at the same time, he did say that, look, we'd have been better off if we never went over there at all.
And we had just, you know, been at peace for the last 15 years and Bush and Obama just gone to the beach instead, which is a Lou Rockwell line, right, which is perfect.
And said, of course, he's foreign against everything.
So that doesn't mean anything at all.
Unless you're David Frum and you go, oh, no, he's going to abandon Israel because you're a damn fool and you really think that he thinks that.
Or if, well, I won't name names, but you're one of the damn fools on our side who thought, wowee, did you hear that?
He said he's going to give an even hand in Israel-Palestine.
Well, listen, to want to have an even hand in Israel-Palestine would mean you really favor the Palestinians and you're sick and tired of having a heavy hand weighted on the Israeli side.
And now you're going to stick it to them.
So what was the chances of that?
Less than zero.
Give me a break.
You know, Donald Trump, just think about looking at a Palestinian through Donald Trump's eyes.
They're brown.
That's it.
The Israeli Jews are whiter.
That's all he needs to know.
And he probably doesn't even know that.
Well, and, you know, we've seen it all borne out in recent days with Pence promising to have the embassy in Jerusalem built within a year.
We've seen it with the, you know, the aggressive talk about Iran getting out of the nuke deal.
We've seen it with, you know, arming the Ukrainians against the Russians.
There's something that they just could not get Obama to do.
And now the Trump administration is doing it.
So it's almost like, okay, well, where is this coming from?
Right.
Well, as you say here, it's the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Smith-Richardson Group.
This money is where it's coming from, because the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, their line on Iran, for example, is exactly the line of the Trump administration about all of their different propaganda about the nuclear deal, etc.
Yeah.
And it's very interesting that somehow that they get people like Defense of Democracies, as well as the Jamestown Foundation, as others get, they get McMaster as a keynote speaker.
It's like, you know, okay, we know what's going on here.
And like I said, it's difficult to penetrate.
But, you know, if we can identify what's going on and call it out when we see it, that's the, you know, that's, that's my mission.
You know, so I'm keeping my ear to the ground.
And, you know, when I hear people moving in or moving out or what have you, or their influence, you know, why are we seeing certain, these certain policies being advanced?
Why are we seeing Nikki Haley try to talk about how Iran is, is, is, is, is, is, is involved in, in, in Yemen and how that's why we need, we need to see what's going on under the surface.
And, and that's in part what I feel like is our mission of this magazine is to call the BS out when we see it.
Well, as Condoleezza Rice and Rahm Emanuel both said, never let a crisis go to waste.
So in a way, you know, crisis and opportunity and all that's the same word in Chinese.
Somebody told me, I don't know which kind of Chinese.
But yeah, I mean, you know what now should be the time for the anti-war right to really rise and, and take the lead.
I mean, the anti-war left is too busy fighting about microaggressions and nonsense.
And you know what, I know you saw the poll that just came out last week, right?
About how by and large the American people, left, right, center and nonpolitical, just regular folks are answering and now super majorities that they want at least less war.
They want Congress to take a front seat and deciding in other words, you know, they're reluctant and think that that would be a restraint.
I'm not so sure that's true, but you understand the point of view there.
Yeah.
So people are sick and tired of it.
The American people are sick and tired of it.
And so now really is our chance.
So anyway, I really appreciate the work that you do there.
And thank you very much, Scott.
And you know what, like, honestly, there's just not a lot of people who even know what a neocon really is, right?
People think that just means conservatives nowadays or hawks, right?
But they don't know about the axis of crystal, right?
And so for those who really have a comparative advantage on that subject of explaining who these guys are and how their think tanks interconnect and what they're all about, I mean, this is really, really the bottom line important stuff here.
So as you know.
Yeah, I agree.
And you know, these people, whether it be neocons or their compatriots on the democratic side, they're really responsible for the endless war that we, an endless war in the bleeding budget.
You know, the soldiers and Marines and contractors will come back all messed up, whether it be physically, mentally over the last 15 years, they are responsible for this.
And it's unconscionable that they'll be that they're worming their way in once again under the radar.
Are we surprised?
No.
But should we sit back and just say, oh, that's just Washington?
I don't think so.
I think there's got to be a check.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that's the great Kelly Vallejo.
She's at the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
Thank you again.
Thanks, Scott.
Oh, yeah.
And I meant to say to neoconning the Trump White House.
That's the most recent article here.
Neoconning the Trump White House.
And everybody check out the brand new base of it today, too.
It's so good.
All right.
You know me, I'm scotthorton.org for the shows.
I got 4,500 interviews for you there going back to 2003.
I got my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
That's at foolserrand.us and on amazon.com.
The audio book is coming out very, very, very, very soon.
Those who donate 20 bucks get it first at scothorton.org slash donate.
Read the articles I want you to read at antiwar.com and at libertarianinstitute.org, which, man, I need to update that page.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
