10/08/15 – Jason Stapleton – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'll check out the audiobook of Lou Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton, at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty.
From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our statist enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes, and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
Capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audiobook.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes, or just click in the right margin of my website at scotthorton.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right, our next guest today is Jason Stapleton.
He is a nationally syndicated libertarian radio show host, host of the Jason Stapleton Program.
His website is jasonstapleton.com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me, man.
Happy to have you here.
So it was a Twitter friend of both of ours, I guess a listener to both of our shows, who said that, well, at least one of us ought to interview the other here.
So it seemed like a pretty good idea to me.
And you had sent me a link to, I guess, a clip from your radio show, but it's a video clip from your radio show where you're explaining why it sounds like when it comes to the war on terrorism, you're over it and let's give do nothing a chance there.
You want to try to start with that and make that case there?
Well, yeah, I just think it's a strategy we haven't tried yet.
I have somewhat of a unique position and unique experience of it because I spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I worked for the State Department or as a contractor for the State Department for several years and also for various other government entities in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
I lived there off and on for about five years, both on the street in places like Kurdistan and also in compounds and on forward operating bases in places like Mosul.
So I've seen it firsthand, and I disagree entirely with the way it's being handled and the way it's being managed and why we went to war.
I know what your show is about, and I agree with virtually everything that you talk about on the show, but I'm not anti-war.
It's not that I don't believe that there are times when we need to go to war, but I just simply believe that war should be a last resort that we use only to protect our individual liberty and our sovereignty.
There are so rare an occasion when that is actually necessary that we end up fighting what is most considered perpetual war.
And I just say it's done nothing but destabilize the region.
It hasn't made us safer.
It hasn't decreased the amount of death and violence in the Middle East.
It's only increased.
And so how about we try the exact opposite of what created that death and that violence?
And that's pretty much the position that you heard me take.
All right, well, so now, I mean, it seems like a pretty obvious rejoinder to that is, you know, Obama.
All we need is, you know, competent neocons to go in there, and, you know, Obama shouldn't have pulled out of Iraq and all those kind of conservative talking point arguments.
If only we'd stayed.
If only we had backed the rebels more.
If only, if only, if only, then everything would be fine right now.
It's the leading from behind and refusal to dominate effectively that's led us into the current crisis.
Well, that shows an ignorance beyond the pale, and it's one that you constantly hear Republicans and neocons make, is that, well, we just don't have the right people in charge.
It's kind of like the way Democrats talk about the reason government needs to be bigger and the reason we haven't been successful is we just don't have the right people in charge.
And if we just have the right people making the right policies, then suddenly we'll become the saviors of the world and we'll clean up the whole mess.
But that wasn't true.
It wasn't true when George Bush took us into Iraq.
It wasn't true when we fought the war in Afghanistan.
Keep in mind, I've actually been in the region.
I was there during the time in 2005, 2006 in Iraq, and during what was supposed to be the rebuilding phase, I've seen the way the State Department operates.
Those things just simply aren't true.
It's not that you don't have the right people driving the bus.
It's that you got the bus headed in the wrong direction.
All right, so now here's another argument, then.
Whoever's fault it is, there are now more al-Qaeda guys than ever.
On September 11th, there were a couple hundred.
By October 11th, there were about a couple of dozen.
And then now there are at least a couple of few ten thousand spread across North Africa, the Middle East.
Call it Bush and Obama's fault.
How about this?
I'll call it Bush and Obama's fault.
But so now what?
I think a lot of people on the right are going to say, okay, maybe we can't rely on competency to do it, but maybe if we could just somebody hammer out the right strategy, something.
How can we do nothing in the face of what Hosni Mubarak, our loyal sock puppet in Egypt, predicted, ten thousand bin Ladins if you invade Iraq?
Well, I think that, first of all, there is a misconception about what al-Qaeda is and what ISIS is and all these groups.
There's some misconception that these are somehow large organizations that have been constructed out of nothing.
These all interrelate.
Al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, ISIS, Hezbollah.
Well, Hezbollah is really different, but these particular groups are connected together.
That's what Al-Qaeda really is.
It's just a network of people who are communicating and sharing information.
And the idea that, well, now we've got even more.
So we've made bad decisions.
It's taken us into places where we shouldn't have gone to stir up a hornet's nest.
And what we've ended up doing is creating more bad guys than we had before.
So now the answer is to continue the same process that brought us to where we are today in hopes that somehow, again, a change in strategy is going to allow us to be more successful.
I don't think it's going to work, and I just don't think that Americans are set up.
I don't think that the government really wants it to work.
I think what the government really wants to do is they want to create an avenue through which they can funnel money from the taxpayer into a military-industrial complex that includes places like the State Department for humanitarian projects and that they can create greater bureaucracy, greater infrastructure with which to utilize money that they're stealing or printing or borrowing for the purpose of growing government.
And, I mean, that's what I saw when I worked with the State Department.
You have these massive number of bureaucrats who really didn't do anything except just create new projects.
And then once it got big enough, you needed people to manage the projects that were being created, and then you need people to oversee them.
And it just turns into a huge process of people trying to justify their existence and justify their jobs.
And so I think that the war piece of it, the war component, is just one small piece of a much larger organizational structure just designed to transfer wealth and reduce liberty.
All right, now, just real quick at the end of this segment here, I'm interested.
Are you as flabbergasted as me when you hear the people on TV crying that Russia promised to only bomb ISIS, and now they're bombing al-Nusra, too, and that's not fair?
Well, I don't understand why anybody thought that.
It seemed that this came as a shock to some people, that at some point Russia was going to step in and it was going to take over, and that it was sending planes and troops over there, that somehow it wasn't going to get involved in a ground campaign.
I mean, it's pretty bad.
I mean, when you think about it, let me put it to you like this.
Vladimir Putin is very much a statist.
He believes in a strong state, and so he is trying to create stability by reinforcing the state, which is run by Assad in Syria.
And he probably thinks that in so doing, he can also solidify his country and himself as someone who could actually accomplish the mission of reducing or pushing back terrorism or this guerrilla war that's happening there.
The issue with that, the problem with it is that you can't ever really get rid of that.
It's one of the things people don't understand about guerrilla war, is that you can destroy the army, but the people simply kind of fade away into the population.
And they stay there, and they'll stay there until you eventually leave.
And so what he's trying to do in Syria is he's trying to backbone Assad so that he can create stability by maintaining the state.
And so no, it doesn't come as a shock to me that people don't understand that, because very few people really understand foreign policy.
Very few people really understand what's happening in the Middle East.
Well, it seems to me like they've got this kind of half-truth that has a little something to it, but it's out of context, that ISIS is too brutal even for al-Qaeda, they've said for a couple of years now.
And now they've perfectly segued that into meaning that, you know, al-Nusra, which is just al-Qaeda in Syria, still loyal to Zawahiri, the butcher in New York, they're the moderates compared to the Islamic State.
And it really is just that easy.
A couple of turns of phrase, and you'll have Americans outright aligning with the only real enemies the American people have in the world.
But now we've got to take this break.
But then when we come back, we're going to talk more with Jason Stapleton about the terror war.
JasonStapleton.com.
Check out his radio show and archives there.
And so much more.
And Jeffrey Tucker and I are starting a new monthly show at Liberty.me.
Eye on the Empire.
It's just $4 a month if you use promo code Scott when you sign up.
And hey, once you do, add me as a friend on there at ScottHorton.
Liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
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 and 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.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with Jason Stapleton.
He's also a libertarian radio show host.
We're talking about the wars and things.
All right, now, Jason says in your bio here you're a former force recon, and you mentioned you're a contractor there working for the State Department.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your time inside the National Security State?
Yeah, you want to know about the military or about my contracting work?
Well, which was worse?
Well, when I was in the military, I had a much different mentality about it.
I really believe I joined the military because, whether you think it's naive or not, I joined the military because I genuinely wanted to defend liberty and defend freedom, and I bought into this idea that that's what I was doing when I joined the service.
I think that there are different people.
Dave Grossman wrote a book called On Killing, and in the book he talks and divides people up into three different categories.
You're wolves, sheep, and sheepdog, or sheepdogs.
And I always considered myself a sheepdog, and I said there are people who need to stand up for those who can't defend themselves, and those of us who can and are willing to should do it.
And that's why I joined, and I started out in a basic infantry unit.
I said if we need to go to war and my country needs me, I will go, and I swallowed that pill hook, line, and sinker.
And I ended up joining a sniper team.
I spent a year with snipers before I went over to 5th Force Reconnaissance Battalion in Okinawa, where I did counterterrorism, hostage rescue, explosive breaching, and the like.
And then after I got out of the service, I joined Blackwater, which is a private military organization that I'm sure your listeners are familiar with.
If not, you can Google them.
There's plenty have been written about them.
And I worked with them in the State Department, with the State Department, and with other government and independent agencies to provide security to diplomats and ambassadors and politicians who needed to move in and around those countries.
And so that's my experience with the military and with war.
I was in, as I said, in Mosul in 2005, which is one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq still to this day.
Spent a great deal of time in Kurdistan up in the north.
Spent a lot of time in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for the U.S. ambassador there as part of his detail.
And so I've seen it all, everything from provincial reconstruction, building roads and water and stuff like that to how we dealt with the Afghan president and providing for the safety and security of their country.
And so I've had a chance to sit in on a lot of meetings.
And just because I'm a fly on the wall.
And so that's how I come at these things.
It's not that I come at them from a position of guessing or what I think.
It's what I sat through, what I lived through.
And really, while I was in Afghanistan, I started asking a lot of questions about why am I here?
What are we doing here?
Because the line I've been fed for years that says I'm here to defend liberty against tyranny just really isn't true.
This is just a bunch of people CYN and trying to grab as much free money as they can from our government.
And I started reading a little bit, and I read Ron Paul's book, The Revolution.
And it was like, man, it was eye-opening to me.
It was like, well, everything I believe but I didn't know how to express was in that book.
And he explained it so clearly and so articulately and so simply that it was just undeniable.
And that was kind of how my track began, and I just continued down that trail to this day.
And that's really great to hear, and I'm absolutely in agreement with you that that's Ron's best book, and I've read all of them.
But it really is something, and it is – if people ask me, that's the one I would definitely have them read.
And I know that there are, who knows, uncounted stories that are just like yours where they read that.
And I think there probably must be a word for that in German or something where you always thought something, but you never quite heard anybody say it in English all the way to the end before or whatever.
But then once you do, you go, ah, exactly, yeah, that.
Well, no, because you've got the two different camps, right?
And you think, well, I don't belong there and I don't belong there, so I must be somewhere in the middle.
I must be an independent.
And what I realized in reading that book was, no, there's a name for what I believe.
It's a libertarian.
That's what I am.
I'm a very extreme limited government kind of guy.
I'm not an anarchist.
I'm just a very, very limited government person.
And that's one of the things that I try and do on my show is just kind of give people evidence for that.
And I'm looking for people.
I'm not trying to preach to the choir.
I'm not trying to surround myself with yes-men who agree with everything that I have to say.
But what I'm looking for are those people who feel disenfranchised, like they don't fit in a community.
And their beliefs aren't really being represented.
And I just want to say to them, hey, have you tried this?
And here are some examples of what libertarianism looks like in the real world.
And to try and pull some of those people over, because I think if we can start getting more people to identify as libertarians rather than independents or republicans or democrats, that that's how you really begin to spark a movement.
And that ultimately is what I'm trying to do.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the thing, especially people who don't really have a specific political identity at all or people who were liberals until they saw just how crummy the liberals are or vice versa on the republican side.
Then it's our chance to try to get those who wash out of those other political movements and try to show them.
I'm reminded of a guy that rode in my cab one time.
He said, well, I agree with the left on some things and the right on some things.
I said, oh, you might be a libertarian.
He said, yeah, I think we need a lot of regulation in a big welfare state, but I also think that we need to take the fight to them damn Arabs and bomb the whole Middle East.
I said, yeah, no, you're not a libertarian.
No, you're not a libertarian.
You're what we call a moderate.
You're almost there.
But, you know, and one thing I try to do, Matt Kibbe wrote a decent book called Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff.
And I found that that is just one of the simplest ways to start a conversation about libertarianism.
And they say, hey, what do you believe?
What is this libertarian thing?
Well, I say we believe two basic things.
We don't hurt people and we don't take their stuff.
Is that something that you believe in?
And without fail, every single person says, yeah, yeah, I don't believe it's right to hurt people.
I don't believe it's right to steal.
Well, that's a framework with which to start a conversation.
I try and break things down to really not the lowest common denominator.
But I don't try and start off with man, economy and state.
I don't try and hit them with Bastiat in our first conversation about liberty.
I just talk to them about, hey, here are the principles that I believe in.
And I think they're things that everybody can surround themselves with and support.
And although we may not agree on everything, that if we can start there, now I've got a way to work on them.
Well, you know, I think it's really important to have your voice as an anti-war voice out there because, you know, social psychology is such an important thing.
And we saw this with Ron Paul probably better than anyone else on my issue on war, where there's just this idea that you have to either be a completely ignorant, jobless, patchouli-stinking hippie or a big fat commie hypocrite millionaire like Michael Moore to be anti-war or some, you know, Hollywood actress or something.
Who's anti-war except a bunch of contemptible people that, you know, the country music side of American culture just cannot identify with?
Well, Ron Paul comes out and says, oh, no, you could be, you know, a white Protestant conservative Republican from Texas and be anti-war as hell.
Look at me.
And everybody went, wow.
OK, great.
So I don't have to change anything else about what I believe about myself in order to change my opinion about this important thing, which I kind of have been dying to change for a while now, you know.
And so he was sort of writing them a doctor's prescription or a permission slip that it's OK for you to be anti-war now.
You can be an anti-war Republican like me.
So I think, you know, on these issues, us libertarians, we got to always outflank the right on the right and the left on the left on the things that they're good on.
And and then take them back to, like you said, that consistency, that all we're saying is don't hurt people and take their stuff on this issue or this issue.
You know?
No.
And I think you hit the nail on the head.
I think one of the biggest problems in America is that if you are in your, as you say, anti-war, you're labeled as someone who is siding with the enemy, someone who is who is who doesn't believe in supporting our troops, who doesn't believe in the flag in America and who's weak and cowardly.
And none of those things are true.
What you're simply saying is, hey, I believe in violence only to defend myself and those I love from the imminent threat of violence.
And I don't support going around the world and defending every single person who has something bad or empire building or whatever else.
And and that doesn't mean that I don't love freedom and that I don't love my country.
It just means that I'm unwilling to sacrifice somebody else's life for the sake of a third party.
There you go.
Simple as that.
All right.
Listen, I accidentally kept you over time a little bit here.
But thanks very much for coming on the show, Jason.
Good to talk to you.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it, Scott.
All right.
So that is Jason Stapleton.
Check him out at Jason Stapleton dot com.
And, hey, you know, I don't know, possibly on the radio in your town.
We'll be right back.
Hey, I'll Scott here for Samurai Tech Academy at Master Samurai Tech dot com.
Modern appliance repair requires true technicians who can troubleshoot their high tech electronics.
If you're young and looking to make some real money or you've been at it a while and just need to keep your skills up to date.
Samurai Tech Academy teaches it all.
And they'll also show you the business, how to own and run your own.
Take a free sample course to see how easily you can learn appliance repair from Master Samurai Tech dot com.
Use coupon code Scott Horton for 10 percent off any course or set of courses at Master Samurai Tech dot com.
Hey, I'll 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.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for MPV Engineering.
This isn't for all of you, but for high end contractors specializing in industrial construction and end users who own and operate industrial equipment.
MPV offers licensed professional consulting on chemical and mechanical engineering for your projects.
Tanks, pressure vessels, piping, heat exchangers, HVAC equipment, chemical reactors for oil companies or manufacturing facilities, as well as project management support and troubleshooting for those implementing designs.
MPV will get your industrial project up and running.
Head over to MPV Engineering dot com.