Hey guys, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party in Rhode Island on October the 27th and then November the 3rd with Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and a bunch of others down there in Lake Jackson.
Jeff Deist and all them, Mises Institute, are having me out to give a talk about media stuff.
And that's November the 3rd down there in Lake Jackson.
If you like Ron Paul events and you're nearby, I'll see you there.
Sorry I'm late!
I had to stop by the Whites 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 who's win.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw us.
He died.
We ain't killing they army.
We killing them.
We be on CNN.
Like, say our names.
Say it.
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, Friday morning, well, Friday lunchtime, time to talk to Sheldon Richmond.
Hey, Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Hey, you are the executive editor of the Libertarian Institute.
That's our institute, libertarianinstitute.org, and senior fellow and chair of the Trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, contributing editor at antiwar.com, former senior editor at Cato and the Institute for Humane Studies, former editor of The Freeman, published by Fee, and former vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, and you've written a whole bunch of books about guns and about homeschooling and about the income tax, and your latest is America's Counter-Revolution, The Constitution Revisited, where the Articles of Confederation were sort of all right, but the Constitution was the original Patriot Act right-wing counter-revolution against all the freedom gained in the revolution.
So that's what everybody needs to know about you, which I never do say, because it takes so long, but you're the greatest, man.
So yeah, I know, exactly.
So, hey, so, and one of the things I really like about you, too, is you really care about this Israel-Palestine issue, and you always write such insightful stuff about it, and I mean insightful in both senses of that term, I guess.
This one is called the— I do care about it.
Yeah, well, good.
Yeah, me too.
The insidious wiles—and you know what, I know a lot more about it because of you.
The insidious wiles of foreign influence, Trump, Bin Salman, and Netanyahu.
So of course, this is all—Saudi policy is all tied up with Israel policy, and all this and that.
So I guess you want to start with the apparent alleged—certainly the disappearance, the alleged murder of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudis, and I like how you compare it to the war in Yemen and the various levels of outrage there.
Yeah, that's the launching point.
I wish I could claim credit for that wonderful phrase, the insidious wiles of foreign influence, but as people read the article, they'll see that it was actually George Washington or whoever wrote Washington's farewell address.
I think Alexander Hamilton had a hand in it, so I can't say for sure whose phrase that is, but it's a great phrase, the insidious wiles of foreign influence.
Yes, the gruesome murder, as we're learning, of Jamal Khashoggi was my springboard, and I make an observation in the beginning, really, which has been made repeatedly now, it's hardly original with me, but that there's been a lot more outcry about the death of Mr. Khashoggi than there has been about the thousands of deaths and other suffering, at this point short of death, in Yemen, because of Saudi Arabia's, and I guess the United Arab Emirates is involved in this, all with the helping hand of Donald Trump, as it was with Barack Obama, of the war in Yemen, which is a horrible, I mean, wars are horrible, so every time I say horrible war, I always feel like, why do I have to put the word horrible in front of it?
But this, I mean, on a scale of wars, this is really incredibly horrible.
Well, it's the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet right now.
Yes, that's right.
Famine, outbreaks of cholera, which is taking the lives of children, it's already the poorest country in the Middle East, which is not exactly a place of teeming wealth, so it gives you some idea.
It's just unspeakably evil.
And the Saudis, the Crown Prince, I guess this was his first major project, was to launch this war a couple of years ago, I guess about three years ago now.
And the U.S. has been right in there involved, mid-air refueling of Saudi warplanes, and just terrible things, all justified by the devil Iran, because the Houthis allegedly, this faction in Yemen, allegedly are the agents of Iran, even though these are old local disputes involving the Houthis, there's been repeated conflict between the Houthis and the central government going back.
If anything, as I've been reminded by some people, Jonathan Marshall, for example, a great writer on foreign policy, the war has driven the Houthis closer to Iran, as you would expect, since if anybody's going to give them any help at all, it would be the Iranians.
And so it doesn't even seem to be very productive from the Saudi point of view, but it's horrible.
And there's just a disproportionality there, where Khashoggi, being a journalist, of course is upset journalists.
So the outcry has been deafening compared to what's been said about the war in Yemen.
Thomas Friedman, of course, has really disgraced himself.
He was a friend of Khashoggi's, and he even had the nerve to say, the murder of Khashoggi is worse in principle than the war in Yemen.
Now, you know, murdering a journalist is a horrible thing.
I mean, it's a terrible crime.
But to say that in principle, it's worse than what the Saudi Arabians are doing in Yemen.
I mean, that's obscene.
That was what Thomas Friedman said?
That was in a column, of course.
You know, it was just a New York elitist who was a friend of his and a columnist for the Washington Post.
And he just invokes Iran for that's his excuse for that?
Or what?
Yeah.
So he's playing up Mohamed bin Salman, the great reformer of the liberal.
We can look to bright days coming in Saudi Arabia.
So this is how he defends himself, is saying, who cares about Yemenis?
And yeah, now he's not happy that Khashoggi, he said this early on, I think before this evidence has began to really trickle out, although the suspicion was always on bin Salman.
But yeah, then he then he makes this remark, does a whole column and says that while the numbers, of course, are greater in Yemen, yeah, thousands and thousands versus one.
In principle, he said, this was a greater atrocity than the war in Yemen.
And that's, I mean, this guy should be laughed out of any, you know, any social occasion.
Which from an assassination.
Barack Obama can kill Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki there and nobody cares about that.
He should have had a better father, scoff.
That's fine.
Assassination.
That's the law of the jungle.
No problem.
We can hire mercenaries to do it or whoever else, right?
Right.
Right.
It reminds me of Stalin's famous, you know, famous remark, I guess, during World War Two, that one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
Right.
And, you know, there was a realism there, according to Stalin, in a sense, he was right about that.
We were joking.
I joked about that in the private Reddit group that, yeah, see, a million is a statistic.
One is a tragedy, especially rights for the Washington Post.
The truth in that is that, you know, a million is a big number that people can't really grasp and they're faceless people.
You know, name one Yemeni who was killed by bin Salman's war.
We can't do it.
But Khashoggi's face is all over the place now around the world.
And, you know, he was famous and and as kind of a part time dissident, really not a radical critic of the monarchy at all.
In fact, I read recently that he was he has even expressed sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood.
But there was an article about his background at ConsortiumNews.com, by the way, you know, armed with a laptop computer.
So, you know, he was not a threatening person in any kind of sense.
And so that's the tragedy.
And right.
You know, thousands and thousands of Yemenis and especially children are our statistics.
So it's terrible.
So as you said, though, this is just sort of the jumping off point for the piece, which is that Trump comes out here and goes, yeah, I don't know, maybe a rogue gang of killers somehow, you know, infiltrated the consulate, the Saudi consulate in Turkey to carry this out.
And he's just proving really doesn't matter if any of it makes sense.
This obviously doesn't make sense.
They're leaking days beforehand that like, well, they may end up claiming that it was an interrogation that went a little too far accidentally or, you know, they may just blame it on, you know, a rogue bodyguard of the crown prince or whatever it is.
Yeah.
And then, of course, I read in The Washington Post now that conservatives, friends of Trump, I guess, in Congress are, as the Post puts it, engaged in a whispering campaign, smearing Khashoggi.
So, of course, one way to preserve the relationship with Saudi Arabia, and bin Salman in particular, is to smear Khashoggi.
Because look, Trump is in a bind.
It's going to be very interesting just to spectators to see how this plays out.
You know, he's got to say some things that sound critical because it's just such an outrageous thing for bin Salman and his people to have done to this guy.
But on the other hand, he thinks at least he needs the Saudis.
And I guess from his point of view, he does need the Saudis.
First of all, he wants to sell arms.
He likes, he's our, what did I call him in the piece?
He's our arms trafficker in chief.
That's his job.
He thinks the key to the making the American economy great again is to sell a lot of weapons because he can brag that, oh, we have $110 billion deal with the Saudis.
It's actually not that much.
They're not committed to $110 billion.
Thank goodness it's not that much.
It's a smaller number.
But anyway, he likes to brag about that, just like he likes to brag about other things, about keeping jobs and then attracting foreign investment.
I guess the Saudis have made some kind of promise of investment in the United States.
So he wants to be able to say that to satisfy his base, to do the populist, you know, make the populist appeal that he's helping exports and bringing in jobs.
And on the other hand, then don't forget he's also, of course, he's extremely close to Netanyahu in Israel, and Israel and Netanyahu have this now informal, not so implicit alliance with the Saudis for the dual purpose of intimidating Iran.
They would say like putting Iran back in its bottle.
And we can talk about that, I'm sure, in a second.
And on the other hand, the second part of this whole program is to, is to shut the Palestinians up, to marginalize them, to throw them some crumbs and make them somehow satisfied with a few dollars in economic development or some jobs.
So they'll forget about other things like the theft of their land and the inability to return to their homes and, and, and actual freedom for the Palestinians in Gaza and the, and the West Bank and even internally in Israel itself.
So he, he thinks he needs Saudi Arabia.
And I guess from his point of view, he does need Saudi Arabia for this job.
I don't know what happens if, if Saudi Arabia were not available to him, I'm not sure what he'd be able to do.
And same with Netanyahu.
It's been pointed out, there's a link in my article, that Netanyahu has been completely quiet about the Khashoggi, obvious death, obviously death, disappearance, first of all, but then clearly death.
When at a former time, the Israeli officials would be, you know, bringing the world's attention to Arab atrocities and Arab crimes all over the place.
They're totally quiet about this.
Why?
Because bin Salman is Netanyahu's ally and friend.
So we get this triumvirate here, this trio, this vicious trio of Trump, bin Salman and Netanyahu.
That's trouble.
That's trouble for the world that wants to live in peace and see justice.
Hey, you guys, if you're good libertarians, go ahead and submit articles to the Libertarian Institute.
Maybe I'll run them.
You can find out all the submission guidelines there at libertarianinstitute.org.
So I did quit Twitter, not because they banned me for a week, but because I've been trying to quit anyway.
I've got a lot of book reading done and now I'm writing another one here.
And so I'm glad to be done with that.
But I am still on Reddit, but it's a private Reddit group.
Tom Woods convinced me to do it.
He wanted me to do Facebook, but it's on Reddit.
Anybody who donates more than $5 a month by way of PayPal or patreon.com slash Scott Horton show or whatever you want, send a check.
You get access to the private Reddit group at r slash Scott Horton show.
And we got about 90 something people in there now, and it's a good little group.
And so I spend some time in there if you want to check that out.
Well, you know, there's this article in the Jerusalem Post, I'm not sure if you saw it, the title was very misleading.
It was like Khashoggi or bin Salman and the Jewish question or something like that.
But from the point of view of a Likudnik, it wasn't like an anti-Semite being overly broad.
It was a Semite being overly broad and, you know, identifying Israel, you know, the right wing government of Israel's interests as the interests of all Jews everywhere, which it to me, it just is so off putting when it's obviously you'd be in such trouble if anyone used that exact phrasing in any other way as like an accusation or something.
It would be obviously wrong and it would certainly be the kind of thing that would get you, you know, tarred as an anti-Semite or something like that, you know, but anyway, that's beside the point.
It's just kind of interesting to mention.
But the way it phrases it is like, yeah, hey, we need this guy and it'll be a real shame if we can't do everything necessary to convince the Americans to not go too hard on them and all that kind of thing.
And then he says, but, you know, ironically, if the Saudi lobby ends up losing a lot of influence in DC, then that just means that we'll have to do all their lobbying for them.
And so that'll just draw us even closer together with them and put them even more at our service.
So this is really something else to read actually, just for how blatant it is.
I don't know if they put out, you know, the Jerusalem Post in an Arabic version or not, but.
There have been columns, I read a column in Aaretz, which is both sort of the, I don't know, left of center, New York Times of Israel, which has obviously very good people like Gideon Levy, who are, you know, totally critical of Netanyahu and the treatment of Palestinians, but others aren't so.
And they're kind of damning Ben Solomon for doing such a stupid thing because, you know, we need Israel, in other words, according to this author, his name is Daniel Shapiro.
It's not the American Daniel Shapiro I've known for a very long time.
He's a good guy, saying, you know, we need the Saudis to check Iranian aggression.
And so, you know, damn this Ben Solomon for messing things up.
You know, doesn't he know there are certain lines you don't cross?
And, you know, he quotes what was said about Napoleon after Napoleon had eliminated some opponent.
It's worse than a crime.
It's a mistake.
And this author adds, one might add a strategic mistake.
So their view is, yeah, this is really bad.
Why that idiot Ben Solomon do this?
Why isn't he looking at the big picture?
We need to be allied with him.
And it's going to be harder to be allied with him when the truth of this all comes out.
And so Trump is in the same boat.
And it's just going to be fascinating to see how Trump finesses this, if he possibly can.
He's not exactly a man of finesse.
Yeah, I mean, I think the finesse is just a matter of time.
We're going to let this thing just sort of go away.
They're going to blame somebody lower down, and then they're going to say to the rest of the establishment, come on, we're not throwing the Saudis overboard.
And so that's it.
And the rest of the establishment is going to get back on board eventually, because what are they going to do?
Tilt back to Iran?
Well, hopefully with enough prominent voices, it won't let them forget this.
We need to debunk what I try to do in my piece about the arms sales.
I mean, he's going to play big.
Remember, he said, listen, we can't let this arms deal, we can't let this interfere with the arms deal because they'll go to China or Russia instead.
Now, I don't know if that's actually a fact.
I mean, I was reading someone yesterday who said that wouldn't be easy for...
Yeah, Rand Paul said that, actually.
He goes, look, we spent decades building up their military and training them on our equipment and all of our NATO standard this and that.
There's no way they can just switch to Chinese armaments.
Well, that's what this person was saying too, but to me, that's not a good thing.
I would be very happy for them to not buy American arms.
Well, sure, but still it makes it an empty bluff in this context, though.
Yeah, it doesn't make me happy.
But my question is, if Trump is right that he needed to somehow work to get this deal because they could have gone elsewhere, then I want to know what did he throw in to sweeten the pot?
I asked this question in the piece.
Now, maybe it's a moot point.
Maybe he didn't really need to sweeten the pot, but if he did, what kind of promises did he make regarding this campaign against Iran and the alliance with Israel?
Did he agree to do something or not do something in order to keep Saudi Arabia on board?
So we don't know the answer to that.
Maybe they couldn't have gone anywhere, in which case Trump wouldn't have had to sweeten the deal.
Trump also, of course, said a couple of weeks ago that, I think he said something like, if we weren't backing the Saudis, their regime would fall within two weeks.
That might have been just typical Trump bravado, but I don't know either.
And the interesting question would be, what would happen after the fall of the monarchy?
Would we see Muslim Brotherhood or worse?
Muslim Brotherhood actually probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Those guys are, according to Richard Pipes, Daniel Pipes gave up, and who's a real neocon and pro-Israel guy, he pronounced that the Muslim Brotherhood had given up violence, renounced violence 55 years ago.
I'm not too worried about them, but there could be worse.
So it's just going to be real fascinating to see this played out, and we'll see how easy it is Trump has it in finessing it.
Maybe time won't be the cure, because this just might be so outrageous.
Don't forget, with it being a journalist who was killed, that means the media won't want to forget it so soon.
So we'll see what happens.
I don't know.
That sure was a big screw up for them to do.
I mean, yeah, they can kill whoever they want, but not a Washington Post writer.
That's the old cliche about never pick a fight with people who buy their ink by the barrel full.
And that was just talking about being snarky with the New York Times.
That wasn't talking about assassinating one of their writers.
Well, that's right.
The whole media world, at least in the West, is going to really pound away at this.
And, you know, Bin Laden, I mean, I call him Bin Laden, Bin Salman, Crown Prince, you know, might have played the wrong card.
I mean, it's possible that he's already on thin ice with the war in Yemen.
There got to be people around, even the royal family, that are much more pragmatic than this hothead.
Well, you know, I mean, here's the real point of your article, too, kind of from the larger picture is that our government is just at the mercy of whatever foreign powers, where this whole thing about the Constitutional Republic, like in your book, the constitution that replaced the Articles of Confederation, now that thing is long gone, too.
We simply have an imperial court and it's run by those who have the most at stake, foreign governments.
And so the American people are almost, we're just like props in this.
We only are here to pay taxes and suffer inflation so that these people can just buy up lobbyists and have these policies and kill whoever they want and do what they want.
Let's stay on the Saudi side for a minute, though, because I think there's an important point here.
It seems hard to believe that there aren't people in the royal family there, or a lot of them, don't forget, and who can't believe that Bin Salman is doing what he's been doing.
I'm not just talking about Khashoggi, that might be the last straw.
The war in Yemen, I'm sure, has upset some people saying, what the heck is he doing?
He's a hothead.
He's not very intelligent.
This is just going to create trouble for us, not the humanitarians that can be purely egoistic about this.
This is just not a good idea for us, for him to be doing this.
So would I be surprised if I woke up tomorrow morning and found out there'd been a coup, or at least some sort of quiet coup, where he just disappears, or it's announced he's no longer the crown prince?
I wouldn't be surprised by that.
There must be more realistic people around that court who think he was the wrong guy.
And of course, his father, the king, is at some stage of dementia, so I don't know what position he's in to call any shots.
So other things could happen on that side.
Now, you're certainly right about what you said about the influence of foreign powers, and that was the point of my quoting the great paragraph, probably the best paragraph in Washington's farewell address, where he warns about this.
It was such a great warning about how you don't want to have either excessive regard for any power, excessive partiality, he says, or excessive dislike.
He covers both sides of it, right?
You don't want to be too attached to any country, because it's going to be bad for liberty.
And so we have it in both cases.
We have this excessive partiality for both Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the successive dislike, which I don't understand, for Iran.
Iran is no threat.
We know from our friend Gareth Porter, his great, well-documented book, that they don't aspire to have nuclear weapons.
They never were building nuclear weapons.
And so they're not a threat.
They have never threatened the United States, despite what people think.
They've not threatened to nuke Israel.
And so if anybody's going to be, I mean, I'm against alliances, but if anybody's going to be an ally in the Middle East or the United States, I choose Iran.
As I put in there, you know, if you're standing in downtown Riyadh and standing in downtown Tehran, guess which is the shorter walk to the nearest synagogue.
It's in Tehran.
There are no synagogues in Riyadh.
There are synagogues in Tehran in an ancient Jewish community.
Even when Ahmadinejad was saying there was no Holocaust, when one of the leaders of the Jewish community said, you're wrong about that, nothing happened to the guy.
He didn't disappear in the middle of the night.
The Iranian government, not that I'm in favor of subsidies, the Iranian government, even under Ahmadinejad, continued to subsidize the Jewish community and the big Jewish hospital in Tehran, which doesn't only serve Jews and doesn't only employ Jews, but it's called a Jewish hospital.
Subsidies continue to flow, just like it flows to other hospitals.
Nothing happened when this guy spoke up and said, you're wrong about the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad.
So there's a big difference there.
So if one of those had to be our friends, I pick Iran.
Now, you know, and I addressed the point, which you've many times addressed and had guests addressing, about this alleged advance, the march, you know, march to world domination that Iran is allegedly undergoing in the Middle East.
It's a total joke.
What you can point to is all product of U.S. policy, namely the invasion of Iraq, the turning the heat up on Assad, Libya, all that stuff.
And then, and so it's not that Iran is on some sort of march.
They don't have any design on the world, much less the entire Middle East.
It's just a manufactured crisis, to take Gareth's title and broaden it beyond the nuclear issue.
Yeah.
And now, yeah, so on the foreign lobbies there, Saudi, Israel and whoever else, yeah, I'm reminded of Walton Mearsheimer's book about the Israel lobby, where they are at great pains to say, hey, this is the game of democracy.
Squeaky wheel gets the grease.
These guys are expert squeakers, and never mind all Grant's work on all the laws they bend and break, but just in terms of lobbying power, whether they're Americans or even foreigners, I guess, as long as they register as agents of a foreign power, or if they're just Americans, they have every right to participate in the system and to try to get Congress to do what they want.
It's up to everybody else to disagree and win out.
But the real point there is that it's the power to abuse.
If America wasn't the world empire, then what would Saudi or Israel care what the policy was?
Because either way, we're not doing your dirty work for you.
You're going to have to take care of your own problems.
And so having the power to abuse there just means that it's open season on getting control of those levers, which apparently is really cheap.
You know, I interviewed this guy, Ben Freeman, who wrote the thing about the Saudi lobby for Tom Dispatch last week, where he talks about this lobbyist, calls up a congressman and says, hey, I don't think you mean it about these arms sales to Saudi, with a phone call.
And then later that day, the lobbyist himself, obviously on behalf of Saudi, contributes two measly thousand dollars to this congressman's campaign.
And then, blam, all of a sudden his vote changes and he's pro-selling more bombs to Saudi.
And that's it.
I mean, you can't beat a deal like that.
These guys are so easy.
And there's no way around it, right?
You're never going to have a Congress full of Ron Pauls who just absolutely refuse to participate in that kind of thing.
As long as the government itself has enough power and authority to carry out Saudi's will, they're going to continue to do everything they can to influence it.
And one difference is the Saudis, of course, are registered as agents of a foreign government.
The Israeli agents are not.
I mean, AIPAC is not considered a foreign lobby, although it's a de facto foreign lobby.
And of course, it's AIPAC that has the famous anecdote, which I think they themselves brag about, about the day that one of the AIPAC people was sitting at lunch with some, I don't know, friends or fellow lobbyists, and he pushed this blank napkin in front of the others and said, I could have 70 senators names on this by the end of the day.
Yeah, you know what it was?
It was Rosen, the guy who later got busted for spying for Israel.
And he bragged it to Jeffrey Goldberg, who was then writing for the New Yorker.
And then, and he also said, a lobby is like a night flower.
You have to keep it out of the sunlight, something like that.
Yeah, so it's a rotten system.
And you're right.
If the US were just a normal country, yeah, who'd care?
They don't do this in Switzerland, do they?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, the Swiss, they're isolationists.
It's funny how you never hear that.
But I guess that must be what they are.
Even though I guess they trade with everyone and have entangling alliances with none.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, we need to deconstruct that word isolationism, because it's often combined with things that good classical liberals, good free market liberals, oppose, namely.
Talk to me about this.
You know, my next interview canceled, unfortunately.
It's late in Beirut.
So I'm going to have to catch up with her tomorrow.
But so as long as I got you here, let's talk about how Donald Trump is a rich businessman.
And I know that that's not the same thing as being an Austrian school economist.
And yet, come on, I mean, any idiot could tell you that even if he was right that it was $110 billion, which he must know he's embellishing on that.
But even if he's right, I mean, that doesn't mean anything.
That's hardly anything compared to the gross domestic product.
And that's even if you have no understanding of the unseen at all and opportunity costs at all.
But then he must have some idea of opportunity costs and understand that if these guys weren't making planes and bombs to sell the Saudis, they could have real jobs, I don't know, building skyscrapers that people could use to base their businesses in at a later time.
Something like that.
Something useful and productive for the rest of the economy.
So you know, I always like to call Trump stupid because I think he is stupid.
But then I think he's not altogether ignorant.
I mean, he's lived this life.
He's made money and lost a hell of a lot of it.
He knows a lot of things I don't about that kind of world.
So what the hell, Sheldon, does he really believe at all that, that what, even that Texas voting Republican next time is dependent on a few Lockheed jobs in Fort Worth?
Because that just ain't so, right?
I mean, what is it?
What the hell does he think he has to lose, really?
Well, you know, far be it from me to try to delve into the psyche of Donald Trump.
Oh, come on.
Read his mind, Sheldon.
Read it.
It's like a labyrinth you would never get out of, you would never find a way out of.
So I'm afraid of that, even trying that.
Look, people are very capable of having what the clear principles that they know are basically overwhelmed by passions.
So he's a nationalist.
He's also a militarist.
He loves the military.
And you know, his religion is nationalism.
Well, it's Trumpism first, but nationalism second.
And so the idea of selling arms to foreign governments and having these big price tags attached to them must put him in ecstasy.
It's like both of his things all together.
Look what I'm doing for America, and look what I'm doing for the military, because we're building up our arms, our arms makers, and giving, you know, getting arms to our allies.
So that's one way to explain it.
You're right.
Look, anybody is capable of understanding opportunity cost.
Every one of us every day realizes if I, if I, you know, undertake action A, I can't undertake action B, at least not at that time, because my time is limited.
My body is limited, my resources are limited.
So it doesn't take a, you know, a Wharton school degree, or even the single economics course to understand that.
I can't explain it.
I mean, why is any, I don't know why anybody's a protectionist, or anybody wants to channel the course of, I mean, he doesn't obviously have confidence in the marketplace if he thought about it, because he, because otherwise, he wouldn't be trying to interfere with the flow of resources.
He wants them to flow to the arms makers, and to whoever else he's giving benefits to in the form of tariffs and whatnot.
So he doesn't have confidence, you know, he's not Hayekian.
Hey, they are reliable donors, I guess, a big part of it.
They are donors.
But, you know, to state the truism that would hardly need any justification, he doesn't understand anything, you know, about sort of Hayek or Mises's approach, that the market, when I say the market, what I mean is you and me, or everybody should be directing the flow of resources and machines and technology into areas that consumers think are best.
With entrepreneurship, you know, entrepreneurs being sort of the midwives of this process, he doesn't- You know, it seems like militarism is especially wasteful in that sense, because you're talking about a lot of very highly skilled and highly educated engineers and scientists and people who could really be inventing great things for people if they weren't wasting all their time digging a hole that is the F-35, or the Bradley fighting vehicle, or some ridiculous thing where their talents are wasted on this kind of destruction.
You know, I think he thinks there's some prestige there in having a- just like, you know, people have traditionally thought, you're not a real country unless you have a major auto industry and a major steel industry.
He no doubt believes you have to have a major arms industry.
And so government help in, you know, to whatever extent it's giving help in gaining sales, he believes is good.
It's good for the prestige of the United States and his own prestige.
It's what the great development economist Peter Bauer called conspicuous production, as opposed to conspicuous consumption.
You want to be able to brag.
You know, he wants to be able to brag that, look at our arms industry.
It's the best in the world.
Look at our auto industry.
It's the best in the world.
Look at our steel industry.
The best in the world.
And that's why these people never- don't tend to like services.
When services become a bigger part of the economy than manufacturing, they think, we're smaller than, you know, we used to be.
We're not as prestigious.
They, you know, they denigrate services.
They want heavy production.
And that's part of it too.
I mean, there's all kinds of things mixing in there, but I don't know how Trump sorts them out.
I don't know.
I don't know how he thinks, but then again, I don't know if he thinks.
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Well, it's funny because, you know, you can see the idea that like, well, we can't just let, we can't be entirely dependent on foreign steel because what if we had to make our own tanks out of our own steel and we outsource?
But then you look at the stats and it's like, no, that's not it.
You know, there's a tiny percentage of steel.
The Pentagon blasted that out of the water.
When he invoked national security for tariffs on aluminum and steel, the Pentagon itself said that's ridiculous.
Yeah, that they're just not dependent on foreigners for those supplies whatsoever.
Right, that's that's a bogus thing.
You can always say, you know, Khrushchev once said the most important strategic good are buttons because buttons keep the soldier's pants from falling down.
So you can defend anything on national security grounds and get all kinds of government intervention in the name of national security.
Yeah, and you don't have suspenders over there.
What the hell?
Khrushchev did have a sense of humor.
Yeah, and he was better than Stalin.
Well, you know what?
It's a sliding scale when it comes to Soviet dictators.
If you follow Stalin, almost anybody's going to look good, right?
Yeah, very good.
He could have been worse.
Listen, we could have gone to war over Cuba and he's one of the reasons we didn't.
So that's I'm not totally down on Khrushchev, believe me.
Man, gotta admit.
All right, so I don't know, I guess that's it.
Oh, you know what?
Here's the interesting thing to talk about.
You've been following this story at all.
This American girl who was trying to go study in Israel and she was arrested and detained for what, like a week and a half or something until they forced her to renounce BDS to let her into the country.
I've been sort of following it.
I thought she was beginning to prevail in the courts.
They wanted her to, you're right, renounce BDS.
They would let they would let her leave to go back wherever where she started, I guess America.
But they wouldn't let her go.
You know, they only they only kept one door unlocked, the one out of the country, but not the one into the country.
So they were holding her.
I thought I saw a headline yesterday, which I didn't have time to follow, saying she's gotten somewhat per maybe some preliminary favorable favorable result from the courts.
So I thought things were looking up.
So I don't know if there's anything new on that yet.
You know, honestly, I hadn't read either.
But yesterday, Eric Gares told me that she had given in and denounced BDS.
And so they let her in.
Oh, I didn't talk to him about that, but I'm actually looking at it until we're calm right now.
And I don't see it in the top section.
Maybe she figured no one's going to believe me.
I just said it to get in.
And so it really doesn't matter.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
Man, what a page on antiwar.com today, by the way.
Jeez.
And and you know what?
I'm going to try to get Danny Sherson on.
But did you see what happened in Afghanistan?
No, what happened?
So you might remember from the book, this warlord from Kandahar province, Abdul Razik, who was Petraeus's buddy and a heroin dealer and a criminal warlord, murderer type.
And so he was meeting with General Scott Miller, the new commander of the war over there in Kandahar City.
I think it was at a base near Kandahar City.
And there was an insider attack.
A guy in army uniform is the way they put it.
Maybe an army member pulled out his AK-47 and he waxed Abdul Razik and he wounded four Americans.
And the Scott Miller, the general, got away and was unharmed.
But four Americans were hurt.
And I think four or five Afghans were killed, including this bloody warlord.
And so it's funny to hear them talk about, you know, in the news like, oh, the death of this really, really bad guy that America was foisting on the people of Kandahar.
That was this horrible criminal.
And yeah, friend of David Petraeus and puppet of American power there is, you know, brutal criminal.
And so anyway, it's and I saw I don't know if you saw this, but someone in the Reddit group posted a piece from Thomas Jocelyn at the Small Wars Journal or from from the Small Wars Journal, which is the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.
He's very right wing guys.
But Jocelyn and Rogio are both kind of experts on Afghanistan, I think.
And Jocelyn wrote a thing for the Weekly Standard saying, that's it.
The war is over.
We lost.
And he doesn't say like, you know, good, just call it quits.
He seems to imply that Obama could have won it or some crap.
But he is certainly saying the game is up over there.
Absolutely.
By now that the Taliban are not going to settle for a continued presence of American troops.
And apparently America is not willing to fight them over it anymore.
So what are we doing?
Which I'll take it.
You know what?
They could have declared victory and left a year and a half ago.
Should have tried that.
But.
Yeah, and, you know, we know, I guess, from what we know from Gareth Porter's reporting and Woodward, that Trump, you know, seems skeptical about it, but then ended up acquiescing and increasing the number of troops.
And I don't know.
That just shows you, you know, he's he's not he's not even what he himself, you know, says he is in among the more believable things.
Among the more believable things, he's not a very good closer.
Right.
You said it before.
Instead of just saying to those military people, look, end this war or go home, quit and I'll find people who will.
Why doesn't he do that?
There's nothing to stop.
I mean, here's the thing, too.
This is one of the biggest revelations in the new Woodward book is that it wasn't just Bannon.
It wasn't like he, you know, what's he going to do, make Bannon the national security adviser or something?
He had General Kellogg, who was a three star general, who his name was floated very publicly and no one criticized his name, you know, as any controversial person or whatever in the mainstream media or the establishment at the time, who has floated to possibly be the national security adviser to replace Mike Flynn back then.
And when they all went to Camp David and ganged up on him and made him do the surge in August of last year, Kellogg gave the no, let's just leave presentation and took that side.
And then it's interesting in the anecdote, the middle ground presentation, you know how there's always three choices.
Well, the middle ground presentation was expand the CIA's death squads there.
But the CIA didn't want the responsibility to do it.
So they basically didn't put on a presentation.
They just sat there.
And so then there were only two choices, leave or do the surge.
And so they did the surge.
But my point being that you're right, that he could have just said, you're all fired except General Kellogg.
That's it.
Like, General, and have I want to have your personal guys guard us on the way back to the White House from the deep in the forest to where they got our asses here.
When he was running for president, he said he'd fire the generals and bring in ones.
Right.
Everybody laughed at him and bring in ones who were more to his liking.
So why did he forget his campaign?
You know, I'm not vouching for this guy, Kellogg.
I don't know anything else about him.
He may want to nuke Moscow or who knows what.
I'm just saying, according to this story, Trump had plenty of real cover to to choose that angle.
You know, it sounded like to me, even in a room full of 10 guys, at least one.
I mean, he's got a two or three star general, whoever this guy is with him.
That's good enough.
Could have been.
By the way, to jump back to the previous story we were talking about, I'm looking at a Yahoo News story, it's an AFP story saying Israel's Supreme Court on Thursday overturned the entry ban on the on the student, on Lyra Elkesson, and yeah, in fact, said that it was not within the bounds of reason and is revoked.
Doesn't say anything about her having to recant anything.
Oh, that's interesting.
Well, I wish I'd known what I was talking about when I said that I was just passing on some hearsay there that I'm hell, I may have misunderstood.
But anyway.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Well, I'm done complaining about stuff.
I have to think I'm going to spend the next couple of minutes rereading this great article about Sheldon Adelson by Justin Elliott.
I got him coming up to interview in a few minutes.
Oh, that's really good.
Did you read this?
It's familiar.
Oh, here it is.
Trump's patron in chief.
It's at ProPublica.
Trump's patron in chief.
And yeah, I'll put it in the Skype message thingy for you there or something or I'll just email it to you.
OK, great.
All right.
Well, thanks, Sheldon.
You're the best, man.
Thank you very much.
No, you are.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Sheldon Richman, everybody.
He's at Libertarian Institute dot org.
And this will be running at antiwar dot com on Monday.
The insidious wiles of foreign influence.
Trump, bin Salman and Netanyahu.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
