All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey guys, on the line, I've got Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, man?
Great, man.
Good to be here.
Hey, I'm happy to talk with you again.
What's the Tenth Amendment say again?
It's that one that says the federal government is only authorized to do a certain amount of stuff and everything else, the most difficult, divisive, contentious issues are all left to the people of the several states to determine in their own area.
I believe really when you have a country so large and with such a wide range of religious, economic, and political viewpoints, it's the only way that you can keep people living together in peace.
People in California don't necessarily have to live the way that people in South Carolina do and vice versa.
Yeah, man.
It seems like things just go the other way where power gets more and more and more centralized and so there's so much at stake.
That's why everybody fights so badly over the power.
You know, our buddy Tom Woods used to refer to it, he probably still does, as the centralization of power causes a low-grade civil war every couple of years because everyone wants to control the entire situation, but I don't think really anybody gets what they want except maybe the neocons.
Yeah, exactly.
I saw a thing, I read a quote of Bill Maher saying, who's the centrist, liberal-type Democrat, saying that he used to think the anti-intellectualism of the right was because of stupidity, but now he realizes it's hatred and that, hey, all of a sudden I looked at it from the other guy's point of view and they look at it like if they lose, they lose everything, just the same way that our side does, huh?
Fancy that?
Easy.
Of course, ignoring the real reason, the core reason that so much is at stake when it comes to the question of who controls the Supreme Court, who controls the presidency and the two houses of Congress.
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, they claim the power to tell us what kind of plants we can grow in our backyard, how we can exercise our right to keep and bear arms when we have to go off and fight and die for them.
They control everything, what kind of light bulbs, the size of our toilet.
Literally, the size of our toilet is a federal regulation, so when you're talking about the nitty-gritty of your home life like that, of course, power corrupts and it attracts people that want to exercise that power.
Yeah, speaking of which, the PATRIOT Act, which stands for keeping you very, very safe.
What's your problem, Michael, anyway?
I think the short version is when they tell you it's for your safety, they're really saying, so we can control you.
So H.R.
3055 was passed by the House and Senate this week and the House was more of a kind of a partisan vote, 230-ish to 190-ish in the Senate.
It went through 74-20 and it was signed by President Trump last night, Thursday night.
And really, it was the PATRIOT Act.
This isn't a PATRIOT Act piece of legislation.
Of course, what they do is they take one of these must-pass, and I put must-pass in quotes because it's one of these things that they're trying to avert one of these so-called government shutdowns.
So they have this spending legislation that you really know it's going to pass.
And in the process, Pelosi and company, and I don't want to be one of those people that's saying, oh, it's the Democrats, because this is a bipartisan problem since day one.
But Pelosi on the House side, they snuck in on page 25 of a 26-page piece of legislation, a section on sunsets.
And the PATRIOT Act is supposed to, well, sections of it, were supposed to sunset a number of times over the years since it first passed.
And what they did was they just amended that.
It was, get this, the latest sunset was supposed to be on December 15th, 2019.
That's Bill of Rights Day, how appropriate.
And they extended it for a clean extension with no debate for another three months.
My view really is that they're just kind of kicking the can down the road, and they really aren't going to do anything about it.
We can't trust these people.
But again, no real opposition, very little opposition on expanding or continuing things like Section 215, which is the CDR, the Call Detail Record Program, the Business Records Authority, where they can require third parties to hand over any records or what they call tangible things that are, quote, relevant to an international terrorism investigation.
So anything that they determine is relevant.
And as an example, in 2017 or so, the ACLU had a FOIA request where they found that calls based on only 40 targets swept up 500 million records.
So it's insane what they claim is relevant to a terrorism investigation.
And then, so, is that just what the two and the three hop rule and mathematics multiplication tables equals, 500 million?
Five, 534 million if we really want to be close on that one.
Of course, you go with the conservative estimate there.
Yes, half a million, not too bad.
It's kind of like what Albright had to say about starving people in Iraq some years ago.
Yeah, the price is worth it.
Well, so, yeah, that sure sounds like a lot of records.
And you know, we just had a guy on, I'm sorry, I forget the journalist's name off the top of my head, just a couple of weeks ago about how the, I forget, I'm sorry if it was an inspector general report or what it was, where the FBI essentially were forced to admit that they had been trolling through the NSA's database of intercepts of American calls far beyond what they were allowed to do and far beyond what they had ever admitted to previously.
Yeah, and that one's huge because in essence, some of the arguments against our concerns that they shouldn't be collecting all of this stuff without a warrant based on probable cause, that old school Fourth Amendment stuff was, yeah, you know, they're collecting so much information.
They're never going to use it on average American people.
This is just going to be, they're going to have the data there.
And when something crazy is going on, this is a safety valve and they'll be able to stop terrorists from nuking with a suitcase, noose, whatever.
So we found it was actually from a U.S. District Court judge, 130 some page opinion, James, I can't think of the guy's name off the top of my head.
But basically, it turned out that the FBI has been, you know, going through all of this database.
Supposedly the FBI wasn't going to have access to it in the first place.
But this is really just what we should expect soon as they have access to this kind of information.
Someone is going to use it and they're going to use it in ways that you certainly don't like.
Yeah.
Now, so talk about that third party doctrine a little bit more because that predates the Patriot Act, right?
Yeah, that, you know, and this is one of these things and Brett Kavanaugh's actually really bad on this.
When he was they were actually, you know, interviewing him and talking to him, it came out that, you know, Kavanaugh is clearly in favor of being able to do this type of mass surveillance.
He says collecting this information based on a previous court ruling.
We're talking about 1979, I believe the Supreme Court held that they could just collect this information.
You don't really have a right to privacy.
It's not considered a search.
And so therefore, he said, based on the doctrine of precedent and the country is, you know, run on the doctrine of precedent.
So even if they got it wrong, this is the the situation.
He didn't say even if they got it wrong, though, but this is what it is now.
And this is not a search under the Fourth Amendment.
So they can do it as much as they want.
That's such a funny thing.
I mean, what a loophole to invent that, hey, as long as there is a record on paper of any deal between any two parties, then that is no longer privileged.
And now the government has the opportunity to get in there.
If you didn't want your records taken, well, you should have never created any with the phone company or anyone else you might be doing business with.
Mind you, on top of it, even in areas.
So they did try to kind of limit this whole call data records for details records program with this thing called the USA Freedom Act in 2015.
And even after that, they were still collecting hundreds of millions of records all the time.
And in 2018 or so, it just became kind of a logistic nightmare for the NSA.
And so they they've told us they're not really using this, but they still want it extended.
I think they actually want to have a debate on this.
They actually want new legislation coming through and they want it tweaked a little bit so they can actually find the legal loopholes so they can actually just resume it in full force.
But that remains to be seen.
That's just my conspiracy side coming out.
But I don't expect any of it to stop.
Now, mind you, the what was supposed to expire is only a small part of the Patriot Act.
There's tons of sections that are permanent.
We're talking about an expansion of national security letters, defining domestic terrorism as anything that is dangerous to human life that involves a violation of state or federal law.
I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that is totally permanent.
Sneak and peek, delayed search warrants.
I mean, this is a small part of the whole thing, but it's still very important to put it to an end.
Well, now, so how about those slippery slope arguments from 2001 and 2002 that, hey, this law goes too far and this stuff will really be abused?
Library records and sneaks and peeks and all these things.
Are they just keeping us safe?
Are they really looking after whoever might be stepping out of line politically, for example?
Well, let's think about what's also come out of the Patriot Act.
We also have the Homeland Security Act of 2002, plus the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.
And one piece of that, no one's talking about this, but one piece of that actually was due to sunset in this that they extended in this spending bill as well.
This is the lone wolf provision.
You don't have to be tied to a government.
You just get a secret warrant from a FISA court to monitor somebody, and they don't have to show that the person is really an agent of foreign power.
This is not a huge part of it, but out of that particular act in 2004, we got the Director of National Intelligence, fusion centers, the Real ID Act, TSA expansion of screening process, the National Counterterrorism Center, like all kinds of insane data sharing between the feds, states and locals.
And we've seen, I think it was muck rock sometime last year.
They actually did some work and they found that these ALPRs, automated license plate readers, like if you live in Boise, Idaho, I'm not picking on Boise, for example, but if you go through one of these things with a red light camera that has a license plate reader on it, they collect that information.
Then that's uploaded either through a fusion center or through ISC information sharing environment, which came out of the Patriot Act.
And then every law enforcement agency in the country has access to a travel record of where you're going.
And we know that they collected two and a half billion of these records over a two year period.
And this is only out of a few hundred law enforcement agencies.
They didn't even get records on everybody, two and a half billion and less than a percent of them were ever even a suspect of criminal activity.
So that's the type of thing that we see happening.
If you want an example of whether or not they're protecting us, obviously I think they're just monitoring us and building profiles on everybody's activity.
Yeah.
You know, I'll never forget in 1999, 2000, the huge controversy over the new know your customer regulations.
And it was the Wall Street Journal and, you know, I guess big business overall that led the campaign against it and said that, hey, whatever, you had, you know, Arlen Specter and all these Republicans in the Senate saying, oh, this is just going too far.
Well, I don't want to give him credit that he's not due.
I think it was.
You had people like him taking the right position on this.
And yet those know your customer regulations, which essentially just meant that the banks ought to be turning over everything they've got on everyone all the time.
That that is just one small aspect of the Patriot Act as you're talking about.
That's just one subsection of one thing where this goes all the way across the board, this huge revolution in police power, essentially just a couple of years later.
And of course, championed by the very same Wall Street Journal and all the very same people who had opposed it a couple of years before under Bill Clinton.
Yeah.
And if you've seen reports on DHS implementing facial recognition at airports, they want they're primarily doing it for international travel now.
And a couple of airports, well, a bunch of them are putting in pilot programs.
They want to have facial recognition at airports everywhere, all the time, pervasive surveillance.
This also comes out of the Patriot Act and the 2000 Intelligence Reform Act.
It required DHS to implement biometric systems in airports.
And that's why we're starting to see facial recognition pop up so much.
And now from there, we've got Amazon creating the the product for them.
It's called recognition with a K.
They're really pushing this on governments.
And they're also adding facial recognition to their ring program, that doorbell kind of home security thing.
And they've partnered with five, 600 police departments.
Now, this isn't direct to the Patriot Act.
But I think like you're saying, really, it's creating this system where everything is part of the national surveillance state by forcing this information sharing through fusion centers and ISC.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what's crazy, right?
The idea you would have everybody's front door camera, not just that people have their own surveillance systems, but they're all somehow centrally wired into the National Police Force Intelligence Services servers and everything.
And it's Amazon who hosts the cloud server action for the CIA already.
I didn't know that.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they have huge contracts.
And this is the whole controversy over Jeff Bezos, the richest individual, supposedly, on paper, at least, in the world, and owner of the Washington Post, a massive CIA contractor.
I had no idea.
I know they were pushing for some Pentagon-like drone bombing contracts, but I did not realize that they were a CIA contractor, too.
Oh, yeah.
Unsurprising.
It's the cloud hosting.
Oh, man.
Providing server space for them.
And who knows what.
Hey, there's a whole other subject for you to investigate and me to interview you about.
Yeah.
Thanks, man.
Now I got more stuff to do.
Great.
Hey, guys.
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Listen, you mentioned the 2015 semi-sort-of-kind-of-reform act in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.
Did that really do anything to roll these powers back in any meaningful way, Michael?
Well, I mean, we are where we are today.
But mind you, that was in 2015, and I was mentioning before as well that the ACLU, even despite those restrictions from the USA Freedom Act, found that those 40 phone calls gave them 534 million records.
They were collecting less at the time, rather than billions.
We're talking hundreds of millions.
So obviously, it reduced their ability, and then it made some legal difficulties and logistic difficulties.
So I guess at the time, I really was very, I was not positive about the thing at all.
But I think four years later, I would say things are less bad than they were on this particular thing.
But then again, if we're only focusing on Section 215 with the business records and the call detail records, we're missing the bigger picture of the entire surveillance state anyways.
Right.
Well, and a big part of that, right, is just the overlapping authorities.
So there's Executive Order 1033, right?
10233.
10-2-triple-3.
Oh, that's right.
See, 1033 is the Militarize the Police program.
Oh, yes.
I forget all of my government news.
Yeah.
There also is another program other than 1033 where they're handing over all the military equipment to the states and local law enforcement.
One is a Pentagon program.
The other is the Department of Homeland Security.
Yes.
They're also doing, have a similar program, I can't think of the name of it off the top of my head, where they do the same thing with surveillance equipment.
So like Houston, Texas, when they get a surveillance drone that they ring up at like $500,000, whatever, that's coming from the FBI or Department of Justice, for example, as well.
Yeah, man.
Oh, and so that's a third track altogether then from not just the Pentagon and DHS, but from the DOJ too.
Oh, yeah.
The JAG grant program is one of them where they're literally handing out millions and millions of dollars worth of gear, whether it's for drones with cameras that can now be equipped with facial recognition and other biometrics to these so-called stingray devices.
That's really a brand name from the Harris Corporation.
It's a small portable box that a cop can carry around.
And what it does is it tricks every cell phone within the range of a tower to first connect to the stingray device or cell site simulator, simulator is the real term, before that passes the information along seamlessly to the cell tower.
So you don't even know that all of your information, your location, your communications are being swept up.
And they're actually saying that everyone who happens to have a phone that's in a certain area somehow fits under the ability to be able to collect all their data.
And again, this type of granular surveillance, I think in many ways can be even more dangerous.
Yeah.
What's funny about that, right, is you just have to assume that that's never happening in your area.
Probably, you hope.
Right.
And yet, why not?
And it's such a cool thing.
It sounds like something out of a TV show.
You got to admire them a little bit just for making it work that they can drive around and impersonate a cell phone tower and intercept everybody's everything.
That's brilliant.
You know?
I've seen it in TV shows.
I forget some kind of cop show or something that I was watching Showtime or something like that.
They're like, they mentioned, oh, well, we better take the stingray.
And I'm like, holy crap.
I can't believe this was just in a TV show.
It sounds like the kind of thing that wouldn't really work well or something, but apparently it does.
Oh, no, it's really, really good.
And those ALPRs can get hundreds of license plates, pictures of them snapped per minute.
Like, it's astounding how fast and how accurate they are.
And now, even now, if you see some of these in larger cities, like I live in downtown Los Angeles and we have these smart LED telephone poles, they're starting to test those with cameras and microphones.
In San Diego, for example, they're putting microphones in these.
And of course, as soon as they collect that information, it goes over the internet to be passed along to whatever location the information is shared.
And again, building these profiles, all this data on people.
And even if someone were to believe like, oh, OK, well, they're just keeping us safe.
They're never going to use it against me.
Eventually, someone's going to be drooling over all that data and all the power in Washington, D.C. and in your local governments and say, man, I want to get my hands on that.
And how is someone going to do?
What is someone going to do with that?
Harry Brown once warned us, of course, that the great libertarian presidential candidate from years ago, he said, the power that you give government today to do something that you're OK with, eventually someone in the future is going to use that power against you.
Right.
Yeah.
And partisanship plays into that in the worst ways, where whenever the left or the right switch sides of power, now it's just time for revenge.
And the power that you used against us last time, now we get to use it against you instead of having the principle that, hey, nobody should be abusing these intercepts or FBI files or IRS records or whichever it is for partisan reasons.
That's third world dictatorship stuff, man, you know.
But instead, it's like, all right, now who's got the Patriot Act?
Now we're going to see.
And you see that, you hear that from both sides all the time whenever they switch.
You know, and talking about partisanship, it's really interesting because about a month ago, sometime in October, there were 15 known Democrats that signed a letter saying that they would specifically they specifically said they would not support any legislation that extended Section 215, the sunset for the Patriot Act, if it did not have reforms included 15 of them.
And from my count, only five of them voted no on the legislation.
So even when they're out there making promises, very specific promises, these people cannot be trusted.
Bobby Rush is one guy who voted yes on the legislation.
But people like a AOC, Omar voted no.
So there are a handful that actually said they were going to oppose whatever legislation.
And at least on this, I would certainly applaud them for following through, especially when it's so common and so easy for them to not.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen, let's back up a little bit from the surveillance state.
Back to the question of the 10th Amendment and y'all's mission at the 10th Amendment Center.
I see on the front page there, you have a piece from a week or so ago about the Kentucky resolution.
And I know this has been a real important thing to you guys is the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions by Jefferson and Madison.
Well, way back then, I guess, were they both in 1798?
What's the importance of that?
Would you explain that, please?
Well, they're really establishing the principle and Jefferson was a little bit more forceful in the resolution he drafted in secret for Kentucky in 1798.
Mind you, just a quick kind of point here.
These were in response to something known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.
These were a series of acts passed in the summer of that year of 1798, signed by President John Adams.
One thing, for example, that they include in there is an aggressive attack on freedom of speech.
For example, they said you could not bring any member of the federal government into ill repute.
So someone was actually, I believe, charged under the act for saying that President John Adams had a big, fat arse.
So literally just calling people out and muckraking, they were making it illegal.
Now, the sitting vice president, they did not run as a team back then.
The runner-up was the VP back then, and Jefferson was part of the opposing party, so he was the vice president.
And in that legislation, they had an exemption for the vice president.
So they specifically said you can't talk bad about anybody in Washington, but you certainly can talk poorly about Thomas Jefferson.
That's funny.
I didn't know that part of it.
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
So Jefferson thought saying that people couldn't talk about government, even if it was a negative ways, was probably a bad thing.
So he wrote these resolutions that established the—well, it didn't really establish it.
It was just formalizing a principle that when the federal government violates the limits put on it in the Constitution, someone has to do something about it.
Because if you rely on even the federal courts, you're basically saying federal government, you limit your own power.
Because the federal courts are part of the federal government, and going to the federal government to fix problems created by the federal government is really just kind of bad strategy.
I would argue it's a pretty dangerous one.
It never works.
And that is the reason that government is so insane.
I mean, literally, we're talking the largest empire in the history of the world, $23 trillion in debt.
This is an insane situation here.
So Jefferson said, you know, someone's got to step up.
It should be the states, because everyone in government, whatever level, they're taking an oath to the Constitution.
So if you feel, if let's say you're an elected governor or a state representative, whatever it may be, if you feel that the Patriot Act, for example, is a violation of the Constitution, you don't just sit around and wait for the federal government to be like, OK, well, that was wrong.
We'll stop.
You have to come up with a system in your own area to try to render it null and void and unenforceable in your own area.
And James Madison drafted and passed very similar resolutions in Virginia in that same year.
It passed, I think, December 20th.
Jefferson's was November 10th, where it first passed the House, and it was off to the governor by the end of that week.
Yeah, but, you know, I think all the Democrat government teachers in the audience are saying, yeah, but that's all arcane old nonsense that just has been rendered irrelevant by history a long, long time ago.
And it's not really the Constitution isn't really explicit that the states have this kind of power to push back against the federal government that they had agreed to create here.
And so defend that.
Well, let's say they're right.
I'm going to hand them, you know, they're 100 percent right.
I mean, we could have a whole discussion about that.
But the fact of the matter is today, right now, this type of thing is happening.
Let's look at that plant called cannabis.
The federal government at every level says marijuana is 100 percent illegal.
They don't allow it for medical use.
They don't allow it for scientific research.
They don't allow it for recreational use at all, period, no matter what.
They don't care if a state says that you can use it.
They don't care if you have a tumor in your brain the size of a baseball.
They don't.
It doesn't matter.
It's all illegal.
Even the Supreme Court in the famous 2005 Gonzalez versus Raich case sided with the federal government, saying that it doesn't matter if states legalize.
But still, today, we're talking about 33 states that are doing it and getting away with it.
And the reason is because I believe when enough people, enough localities, and enough states tell the feds to shove off, there's not much that Washington, D.C. can do about it.
We're seeing it play out before our very eyes on that.
And we can also talk about immigration sanctuary cities, too.
It's the same type of thing.
All right.
Well, so do talk about that and any other important examples.
And I like the way you pick examples that appeal to the left in some circumstances.
But you also talk a lot about gun rights and that kind of thing.
It's the same libertarian principle that applies on these issues that might appeal to one side or another.
Well, I mean, primarily that argument that you brought up does come from the progressive end of the spectrum.
But when you start pointing out to them, like, look, there are 300 of these so-called immigration sanctuary cities.
They are actively having policies on the books that say, we will not participate in the enforcement of federal immigration law.
And whether you agree with that as a policy or not, it doesn't matter.
What's happening is what's happening.
And there are 300 cities currently doing this, getting away with it.
The Trump administration might be the one in modern times that is most aggressive against these.
We're talking about going back decades.
San Francisco first passed their sanctuary city of refuge ordinance or whatever it was called back in 1989.
So it's been on the books for decades.
And people have tried to stop this, but none as aggressively as the Trump administration.
And the Trump administration is really just getting smoked on this, both in court and in practice.
He's not been able to stop them at all.
The reports from ICE year in and year out reference the fact that they really do heavily rely on cooperation from local and state jurisdictions to be able to get their job done.
And this is having a significant impact on that, I guess, for my conservative friends who I know just absolutely can't stand this thing.
They just hate it.
What I would point out to them is like, look, man, you can disagree with this.
But like you were saying, Scott, why not look at what they're doing, how they're actually, quote, getting away with it, what type of effect they're having, and try to apply it to something that's important to you.
And we're starting to see some things pop up in that direction.
We've been pushing here at 10th Amendment Center for a number of years for gun rights supporters to create a gun rights sanctuary city movement.
We're starting to see that pop up.
It's not really.
There's been a lot of reports about localities doing this.
They're not really doing it yet.
But I'm glad to see that some people are catching on and saying, you know what, why are we enforcing federal gun control laws if they're not enforcing immigration laws?
I mean, I wish they didn't need that as a justification.
They shouldn't be participating in this in the first place.
But whatever motivates them, I think, is a step forward.
Yeah, seeing sheriffs declare, and I don't even think they're acting on behalf of the county court or anything like that.
They're just saying, I'm not going to enforce these kind of laws.
Some of these Colorado sheriffs are.
What do you think about that?
That's your same principle from even a lower level, right?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, I'm kind of pro and con on this.
I like when they say they're not going to enforce it.
But the fact of the matter is, is I'm not seeing yet any strong movement to actually stop enforcement.
It's kind of like if you really kind of dig in and you find a sheriff that's talking tough.
There's a guy, some county down in Texas, Sheriff Deeds, he was pushing for a sanctuary or Hood County, Texas, it was.
And he was pushing for one of these sanctuary ordinances to pass.
And he said, you know, we're just not going to have this kind of gun control happen here.
And then they pass a resolution which doesn't have a binding effect in law.
And then when pressed on the issue, he says, well, we'll just kind of see how things play out if they actually try to violate our gun rights.
You know, we'll look at it at that point.
And a lot of times it's just tough talk.
That's why I think looking at, for example, the San Francisco Immigration Sanctuary Ordinance is very instructive.
It specifically bans the use of personnel or resources, basically material support or resources if we're using Patriot Act language here.
And for the enforcement of federal immigration laws.
And I think they should do the exact same thing in Hood County, Texas, in Colorado and in every jurisdiction that wants to protect the right to keep and bear arms from federal gun control measures like the National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 68, the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, the Bumpstock Ban of 2018 and on and on.
Yeah, well, so here to me is one of the most important phenomenons going on right now in this country, and that is the movement in the state legislatures by all Republicans from state houses and state senates across this country.
I think the numbers are growing.
I don't want to give anything away, but it's the movement to defend the guard.
Tell us everything in the world that you know and have to say about that, Michael Bolden, please.
I agree with you on that.
Absolutely.
This is incredibly important.
I know you've covered this on the show a few times over the years.
I'm sure you and you even interviewed me on this a few years ago.
But we actually got the idea from this from some Green Party activists in Wisconsin, I believe, like 2008, 2009 Liberty Tree Foundation.
Cindy Sheehan was supporting the effort.
Basically, it's saying, you know, without a declaration of war from that constitution thing, they're not allowed to be putting National Guard troops in overseas conflicts.
So it's up to the states to say, you know what?
If you guys aren't going to follow the constitution in the first place, we're not going to release our guard troops to federal service.
And we're just going to resist that.
We're not going to deploy any more in the future.
And we're going to withdraw any that have been activated at that time or already.
And so we're expecting there's a group I know you just interviewed.
Was it Dan McKnight?
Is that right?
You interviewed Dan from Bring Our Troops Home.us recently.
And so they just did this event in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club.
And they announced there that they expect 20 to 22 states to consider this legislation for the 2020 legislative session, which generally runs from around January in most states to around April or so.
The first piece of legislation was already filed in South Carolina by a new representative, Stuart Jones.
The South Carolina Defend the Guard Act was just filed on the 20th, I think.
So just a couple of days ago.
And so when the session starts there, it's going to go into committee, get some hearings and votes.
And we'll, well, hopefully we'll see.
And then, of course, we are also expected in Wyoming, in Idaho, in West Virginia and a number of other states that I'm not at liberty to say yet.
But 20 states, I think, can draw a lot of attention to this issue.
And, you know, if you really think about it, people have been protesting wars for decades and decades.
They've been voting bums out for decades and decades.
They've been voting in peace candidates or people calling for a more humble foreign policy for decades and decades.
And yet we still have the largest empire in the history of the world.
I believe that the only way to turn this around personally is some form of resistance, not like this fake resistance in Washington, D.C. that's happening to the Trump administration, but actual resistance, a refusal to participate in the empire going forward.
And this is a small but important part of it.
Pat McGeehan from West Virginia, the delegate that's really championing this in his state for a number of years now, he pointed out to me recently that guard troops at one point after the surge, and maybe you know about this better than I do, he said that he had seen that guard troops made up up to 40 percent of forces at one point in Iraq.
So even if it isn't that high, it certainly can have a significant impact if states refuse to hand over these troops for foreign occupations.
Yeah.
Now, I don't know about those percentages, but it was way too high.
And famously, the Louisiana National Guard was nowhere to be found during Hurricane Katrina because they were in Mesopotamia.
Oh, right.
In fact, I think they were on their way home, but they were just in no position to do anything to help.
And and I think same for neighboring states, too.
They were just they were otherwise occupied right when they were needed the most.
Two thousand something people drowned in Katrina there in New Orleans.
And so, you know, anyway, I think you're right.
And I think, first of all, the number is even higher than 20.
That's my impression.
And we're going to see how this goes.
And you know what?
I don't know if it's going to pass in a single state.
I think it might.
But I think that this is just the most important PR stunt in the world other than other great ones going on right now.
But as far as if anything, we're going to draw a lot of attention to all Republicans.
It's all Ron Paul and Republicans introducing these bills, which just you're the one who coined the phrase who coined the term the Horton rule of attack the right from the right.
Essentially, nobody wants to hear this from Cindy Sheehan, except me and you.
I love her.
She's so wonderful.
But the right wing, they can't hear it from her, but they can hear it from Dan McKnight and they can hear it from Pat McGeehan.
And that's what makes the difference.
And it could really change the entire narrative in American political culture that, well, geez, I thought right wingers all liked the war, but apparently they're the ones who are getting sick and tired of it more than the left now.
Yeah, and at that press club conference that they held last week, Pat McGeehan was talking about his experience on this, and he had tried for a few years to get the bill moving.
He finally got it out through a parliamentary procedure.
He got an actual up or down vote on the House floor this last session earlier here in 2019.
It was a procedural move and it passed by a pretty good number.
But then what happened?
Literally, a colonel from the West Virginia National Guard showed up and talked to the speaker of the House and said, you do not let that bill get a final vote, whatever you need to do.
And that's the way Pat's basically describing it.
And it never got the final vote.
It was definitely held up, held up.
They did some procedural moves to make sure it would not get a third vote and pass the House.
There was still not no time to get it past the Senate.
But Pat really wanted to push and just get it on the record that the bill is moving forward.
He did just not as far as he wanted.
And his view was like, man, this is huge because this bill, if they're sending a colonel down to warn us against this threatening BRAC closures, they're going to close all of our guard bases in West Virginia if we pass this piece of legislation.
That means they're afraid of it.
And to me, that should be a huge green light to push full force on this every single place possible.
Absolutely right.
Well, listen, for people who are interested in this, bringourtroopshome.us, it's not just bring them home.
It's bringourtroopshome.us and also Young Americans for Liberty is doing a lot of work on this.
I think they're working together on this.
I think it's okay to say that.
Yeah, yeah.
That's really good to hear.
Yeah.
And listen, I mean, this is just, it's the biggest thing in the world and it's the same thing.
You know, I would, I have tried to pass some talking points to Tulsa and Gavin.
I'll try to do my very best to talk with the bringourtroopshome guys and the 10th Amendment.
I mean the Young Americans for Liberty guys, and I'm doing everything I can to try to advise Jacob Hornberger.
And if I could get anybody in the Trump administration to listen to me, I'd talk to them too.
I think it'd be great.
Wouldn't it be great if the whole, just over the dead body of the legacy media, just the American people insisted and forced it to be true that the major political issue of the 2020 campaign is war and peace.
And everyone just having a big fight over who's more anti-war and who's more sick of it than the other, and who's willing to take a brave stand against it once and for all.
Yes, I'll meet the Ayatollah.
There, I said it.
That's what I want is a big fight over who is best on this stuff and let them all make their claims and, but let that be the contest.
And I think that's where we really can move the margin.
We don't have billions of dollars and, and, and giant corporations and lobbyists and all these things, but we do have some real people power where it counts.
And if we use it wisely and right here, there's just so many great opportunities.
And this is a huge, obvious example of them, of one, you know, this defend the guard thing and think how powerful that can be in the narrative that really takes off that.
Wow.
In 20 or 30 out of 50 States, this is going on in these Republican controlled legislatures and this kind of thing.
I mean, man, wow.
So I'm excited, especially with so many of them being introduced by veterans.
I think, I mean, I don't think that can be hammered home.
And I know you're really pushing that message as well, Scott, but like the, it's not bold in doing it.
He's, you know, he's a squish.
He never signed up.
He's not defending his country.
And it's not all Vietnam era, new left.
No, no, no.
These are young guys, Iraq war veterans, uh, they, their current, and they're saying in my experience, what we're doing with these troops is wrong.
And even if it's literally follow the constitution, the most basic thing, literally just declare war and then you can use them.
And I don't, that's obviously you and I want to see the wars and whether they want to declare it or not.
But this creates a whole different scenario for what's going on, going forward.
Should it just goes to show?
Yeah.
How far outside of the constitution they are, that essentially we have a constant state of war.
It would be the exception if it ever stopped instead of the way, uh, the constitution, you know, proceed.
I'm sure you probably got the Madison quotes where they tell you that of course, peacetime is the standard and war is the exception, the dreaded exception only when absolutely necessary.
That's supposed to be the rules anyway.
War is the parent of armies and armies leads to debts and taxes and armies and debts and taxes are the known instruments Madison said for putting the many under the domination of the few.
And if that's not what we live under today, we're pretty damn close.
Yeah.
And he knew it cause he got us into a war with England.
Oh yeah.
They all do, right?
Um, yeah, man.
All right.
Well, listen, I so much appreciate your time on the show and I hope everyone will go and look at 10th amendment center.com all spelled out there without digits.
It's 10th amendment center.com and I don't know, you probably got the other one at forwards too, right?
Yeah.
You mentioned it to me on a interview like eight years ago and I'm like, I gotta get that.
I should double check to make sure I do still.
Well, I had forgotten that, but it doesn't surprise me that I agree with myself cause I really am right about everything.
Pretty much.
You rule, man.
I appreciate you having me on.
Thanks very much, Michael.
Appreciate you.
All right, you guys.
That's Michael Bolden.
Check him out.
And Michael Meharry and the great writings over at 10th amendment center.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org at scotthorton.org antiwar.com and reddit.com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh yeah.
And read my book fool's errand timed and the war in Afghanistan at fool's errand.us
