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 hoodwinked.
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, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying 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 y'all, introducing the great Sheldon Richman, my partner at the Libertarian Institute and author of his weekly column, TGIF.
The goal is freedom.
This one is called gassing migrants.
Welcome to the show, Sheldon.
How you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for having me back.
Great to talk to you.
I like how you say in here.
So how come all Trump's fans don't love Barack Obama?
I know because every time Trump does something bad, at least a lot of people think is bad.
The Trump people consistently say, and even people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders say, well, Obama did the same thing.
So he should be just the kind of guy they like.
Right.
And not that that's the proof that it's horrible if it's the same thing Obama did.
Yeah.
All right.
We just say, well, you and I would say, well, we don't like Obama either.
Right.
I mean, yeah.
And exactly.
I mean, or if you're a Trump fan, that should be your excuse that, oh man, Trump did another thing the same as Obama did.
That's not an excuse.
Well, you got to go either one way or the other.
I guess so.
If you don't like Obama and you like Trump, then you either have to say, Trump shouldn't do things Obama does, or you should say, I got to change my mind about Obama.
Right.
Or you can just keep having it both ways if you want.
Well, that's right.
It's total cynical politics.
So I'm not really looking for logic.
I know.
It's fun to make fun of them, though.
Yeah.
I remember when there was no better proof that George Bush is telling the truth about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction than the fact that former President Bill Clinton and his senator wife both say it's true, too.
Even though we already knew that the definition of a lie was a thing that Bill Clinton said.
That was the most famous thing about him, was that everything out of his mouth was some lawyerly spin at best.
But, oh, hey, if Bill Clinton says that George Bush is telling the truth, that's how you know it's true.
Anyway.
Exactly.
I'm stuck in the past, man.
I'm never going to get over that Iraq war, too, I tell you.
All right.
So now listen here.
What about gassing migrants?
Obama said it was cool.
So what's your problem?
Well, I guess the improvement with Trump, as I point out in the piece, is that he's gassing families while they're intact.
He's not separating the kids first and gassing them.
Very progressive.
That's progress, right?
Absolutely, yeah.
Well, you know.
First of all, the news is there are a bunch of migrants.
The group from Honduras, they showed up in Baja, California, right?
Tijuana.
And then what happened?
Yeah, San Ysidro, near San Diego, which is, I guess, apparently the busiest entry point into the U.S.
And the funny thing is, they were being peaceful, perfectly orderly, and they were chanting something like, you know, we are peaceful, we work hard, or something like that.
We're hard workers.
And then the Mexican cops got in the way with the riot gear and the shields, you know.
They got in the way.
Why, I don't know, but they did.
And that pissed off the migrants heading north from horrible conditions that the U.S. helped to create in Honduras.
And then they got mad, and they started to head toward the entryway, and I guess a couple rocks were thrown.
And then, so the border guys ended up unleashing the tear gas, and I understand rubber bullets, too.
Which, you know, they're only rubber bullets, so don't worry.
It's like shooting Nerf guns at kids, you know, no big deal.
Yeah, rubber-coated bullets, it should be.
Oh, did I get that wrong?
I'm sorry, I thought they were Nerf bullets.
Well, no, I mean, that's what they're...
I just think if they're careful, they're going to pull out the super soakers, and then, you know, all hell breaks loose.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
The rubber bullets, they sure sound like, I don't know, maybe they're made out of eraser rubber or something like that.
But yeah, no, it's a lot worse than that.
Yeah.
So, you know, it seems so unnecessary, because even if we don't talk at the moment about our views on immigration law in general, which you and I have plenty to say about, but even if we just put that aside, you know, the Trump administration, had he been a different person and a different attitude about human beings and individual rights, you know, they could have worked things out with the Mexicans.
Just let us have an orderly way for people to come in and apply for asylum, which is what they want to do, and which the U.S. is obligated to do under, you know, the 1951 U.N.
Convention that says people have a right to apply for asylum.
And on top of that, as I mentioned, the U.S. helped to create the terrible conditions in Honduras, which goes back to Reagan's, you know, wars in Latin America against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, drug war, and then, what is it, Obama and Hillary Clinton presided over a coup in Honduras, and she openly backed the, you know, the new coup rulers.
The place is torn by violence, gang warfare, you know, all kinds of bad stuff that comes out of black markets and drugs.
And so people are fleeing because they don't want their children shot in the street or impressed into gangs or stuff like that.
So they're just bringing them north, and here's, you know, the cruel, callous Trump saying, hell no, this is an invasion.
He doesn't know the difference between, you know, an army armed and entering a peaceful country and a group of people pleading for asylum.
He can't tell the difference, but so what else is new?
Yeah, well, and I mean, even all other things being equal, why do they got to use tear gas on them?
I mean, they have a gate there, right?
It's not like they were otherwise free to walk across.
Well, you know, they're claiming they stormed the gate.
They stormed the gates.
Of course, you know, this is – don't forget there are kids there.
It's not just adults.
That's bad enough, gassing adults.
But, you know, it's kids, which they're going to be especially vulnerable.
And it seems to me that would be a highly traumatic event psychologically, even apart from the physical problems to the eyes.
Well, you know, Tom Knapp points out, as we all know from Waco, that the CS gas they used on the Branch Davidians is banned under international law for use in warfare or for use in any kind of interstate exchange and, you know, international exchange.
And that's exactly what was going on here, is this gas was being fired across the border into Mexico, which is violation of the Geneva Convention.
Good point.
Yeah, so it's just – I mean, it's just a continuation of intolerable – of an intolerable policy.
And, you know, the spotlight ought to be on Trump, but that doesn't mean we have to overlook the fact that Obama did something similar.
But the thing is, he's not in office.
Obama – you know, he should have been called on it if the media were soft on Obama.
I mean, in a lot of ways they were, of course.
Well, that's – that shouldn't have happened, but that's – we can't do anything about the past.
We can do something about the immediate future and the longer-term future.
And so all fire has to be directed at Trump.
And, you know, it doesn't matter that it was done in the past.
You know, look, the U.S. has treated potential migrants, would-be migrants, pretty badly for a very long time, especially coming up from – you know, through the border there with Mexico.
And in a way that's not new.
Although I was reminded that in the 1980 Republican presidential primary campaign, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan kind of vied with each other over who was the most open to immigration and inviting people to come in and, you know, live and work.
They actually tried to outbid each other in the other direction from what the Republicans, you know, do today.
A lot's changed since 1980.
But a lot of people are saying, sorry about what Hillary Clinton did to you, but you're going to completely change our nation, our culture, our way of life when you have not individual asylum seekers, but mass immigration.
Just like voting.
Your vote doesn't mean a thing.
But when everybody goes out and votes, at the end of the day, there's a margin there where this or that side gets to have the power for a little while, and it does make a difference, marginally speaking.
And so isn't there kind of a fair case that these people, all of them, if they are to come to the United States, well, they should get Hillary Clinton's property, and they should get Joe Biden's property, and they should get John McCain's property.
Because those are the people who destroyed Latin America through their support for all this militarism and coups and secret wars, and especially the war on drugs, which just creates these massive criminal cartels the size of true global corporations that operate purely through violence in the black market.
Why should those who object have to be the ones who have so many people moving into their side of town now that it's a different town than it was before, even if you can't isolate a specific act of violence and violation of their rights?
Well, if you're going to go after property, then you can't limit it to just Clinton and Obama and Biden and Kerry and those people, because it's – like I said, it goes back – I mean I said it goes back to Reagan, but it goes well before that.
The U.S. has been mucking around in Latin America for a very long time.
When Spedley Butler wrote War is a Racket, he specifically referred to his long years of quote-unquote service to United Fruit in Latin America.
Yeah, plus Syrian refugees already have dibs on McCain's ranch, I think.
Yeah, so – yeah, I don't think that's going to go anywhere.
Look, this has been said about every immigrant group that has come in in any kind of substantial numbers throughout American history, particularly in the 19th century, later 19th century and into the 20th century.
It's said about the Irish.
It's said about the Polish.
They're going to change everything.
It's said about the Germans.
They're going to keep to themselves.
They're going to speak their own language.
They're going to have their own schools, blah, blah, blah.
All those fears melt away with a generation or so.
Look, the natural incentive – if you move to the United States, there's a natural incentive – I'm not saying this ought to happen, I'm just saying it does tend to happen – that the kids of the first generation to come here are drawn more into the mainstream of American life.
There's an interest in learning the language, and you just – you adopt lots of the elements of the surrounding culture.
You're watching TV.
You're going to movies.
You're hearing music.
I mean, that's just – it's one of those bogus fears that people worry about.
Will things be precisely the same?
Of course not, and that's a good thing.
Hell, we'll get more restaurants of different kinds, a variety of restaurants.
Lots of people think that's a great idea.
And look, besides, you can't freeze things anyway.
I mean, this is an old fear that people have, that if only – I don't know.
Every generation, I guess, picks a different past point, saying things were perfect right back then.
Everything went downhill since 1955, 1965, 1975, whatever the current generation wants to pick.
And that's just nonsense, because things were different then, and back then people were fretting, oh my gosh, things are different from 1945, 1935.
It's just an old, old phenomenon, and it's more a feature of people's personal psychology, not of anything that they objectively have to worry about.
Change is the rule.
I mean, you could ask for an all-powerful government to make sure nothing changes, but that would be a hell of a place to live, and it wouldn't work anyway because things would still change.
In fact, it would change for the worst if you gave government that kind of power.
So we've got to get over this, and we tend to get over it when people feel secure, I guess, economically.
I think it's part of it.
If they are nervous, then they look for scapegoats.
So one way to kind of make sure this doesn't get out of hand is to get the government out of the way of our economic activity so we have lots of economic growth and people are feeling sort of better and more secure about themselves.
It's not an absolute guarantee they won't be worried about some other who's messing things up, but I think it does reduce that.
So there's an additional reason to want laissez-faire because we don't want barriers, government impediments to economic progress because it undermines people's sense of security, financial security.
So we have to have perspective.
Fear was expressed about every group that came in, and when Jews were coming into Ellis Island, they said they were low IQ.
Now, some might believe they're so smart they can't be trusted.
So there's always something.
Hey guys, check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan by me, Scott Horton.
It's about a year old now.
The audio book is out, too, if you're interested in that, and a lot of people seem to like it.
It's got all good reviews on Amazon.com and that kind of thing.
Check it out.
And guess what?
I'm writing a new book.
I know I told you I didn't want to, but I got away with not doing it.
It's a transcript of a presentation I gave.
So the whole first draft is really done for me.
I just have to edit it 100,000 times until it's good enough to put out as a book.
And it's going to be basically one chapter on each of the terror wars of the 21st century, to get everybody caught up there.
So look forward to that.
And help support the effort, if you like, at scotthorton.org slash donate at patreon.com slash scotthortonshow.
Stuff like that.
I read a thing by Nick Gillespie where he says that his grandfather came to America and dug basements with a shovel to provide for his son and ultimately for his grandson so that they would have a better life.
And he says, I just regret that he never learned English so I could tell him how anti-American he was, or how un-American he was.
Which is, you know, this hilarious play on the fact that his grandfather was doing exactly what he wanted to do, the very best thing he could for his own family.
And that was what was great about living here was even if you were just digging a basement with a shovel, you got to keep the money at the end of the day.
You know, that kind of thing for what it was worth.
There's nothing more American than that.
But now, so two other things that you mentioned there that came up in this that are really important, I think, and are worth dwelling on is, well, let's start with the last thing first is about the free economy or the lack thereof.
And it seems to me that second only to the worst that the biggest issue in America is the boom and bust cycle created by the expansion of bank credit backed by the U.S. government and how every 10 or so years we have this massive bust and massive correction from the giant bubble of hot air of trillions of new dollars created and put into circulation by the banks.
And the government in concert with each other and that this is really the root of everybody's PTSD around here, man, is that nobody can get even a bit ahead without at least being afraid that it's all going to collapse from some unknown power.
Some unknown force of nature is just going to completely destroy the economy and their business that depends on it.
And then they're going to have to start all over again.
And this happens to everybody.
It happens roughly every 10 or 12 years.
And this is a huge part to do.
I mean, the prosperity, not just the prosperity, but you have these huge bubbles in housing where you have a massive demand for labor that's hard and skilled work, but without formal reading and writing education required.
It's perfect for migrants and for black market labor, in fact.
And so, that really helps to cause waves of immigration forward and back and helps to add to the anxiety and the competition for wages at the low end, right at the time when people are finally starting to do good.
And I've heard it said, and it's a fair complaint, that like, hey, I can't get a job on a road crew because I don't speak Spanish.
The whole crew, they're all Mexicans.
And so, in a sense, American white guys are excluded from building roads in their own state.
You know, this, that, because the workforce has changed so much.
And that's all in part, at least, due to this boom and bust.
Not the free economy, but it's like a junkie economy, right?
Shot up with a bunch of meth and then it crashes.
Yeah, but you know, even one of the most critical economists regarding immigration and the effect on labor, a labor economist, I think it's at Harvard, actually, or possibly Princeton, in his studies, he shows that Americans who are high school dropouts, and this is the worst, other people benefit from the influx of unskilled labor.
But there's a relatively small group of people who have dropped out of high school.
But even there, the decline is not very large.
It's a couple percentage points.
It's not huge.
So this idea that there's some massive, I mean, to hear Bernie Sanders talk about it, you'd think there's this massive drop in incomes because of unskilled labor.
Well, it's not just the competition for wages, too, though, but it's just the sheer numbers of people moving in where, you know, people, I think people who are not like, you know, born racist or whatever, just say, wow, this used to be a middle class or upper middle class white neighborhood.
And then all these foreign immigrants moved in and all the property values went way down.
And now I'm kind of a stranger around all my neighbors.
I don't even speak the same language as them.
And I got to go.
When I was first, it happens a lot.
Right.
That's what people are complaining about.
Listen to a moving target.
I mean, you brought up wages.
So I trust wages.
And I said, well, I brought them.
I brought that up, too, though, the massive influx of and the change of culture.
I'm a man of many tangents, Sheldon, many tangents.
Which makes housing artificially expensive in the places where there's the most economic growth, you know, the most dynamic places.
It's very hard for people to move to to get to those new opportunities because housing is so expensive.
And it's not because of any natural market, you know, phenomenon.
It's purely land intervention by government, by local governments and state governments regarding land use and zoning and things like that.
So add to that also occupational licensing and various kinds of permitting rules on starting businesses.
Then you've clogged up the channels that used to allow for maximum mobility.
All that aggravates this.
And then people look for scapegoats.
They don't understand that process.
But it's easy to say, ah, it's all those Mexicans coming in.
That's a very visible change.
So you can blame that.
So once again, the government, I'm not saying it intended this effect.
We could say it's an unintended consequence.
But the government creates these negative effects by, you know, even if we want to assume they're well-intentioned, by putting these kinds of measures in place.
And it has these very bad spillover effects where people begin to be antagonistic to other people that they regard as different from them, where that need not happen.
Like I said, immigrants, large numbers of immigrants as a percentage of the population were absorbed economically in the U.S. in earlier times, even though there were fears expressed.
But those fears weren't borne out.
And the same thing would be true today.
So, you know, other people say, well, we've got a welfare state, and they like to misleadingly quote Milton Friedman on it.
As long as we have a welfare state, we can't have free immigration.
Well, he didn't quite say that.
And my point on that issue is that we don't want to save the wealth.
Let's say it's even true, although the numbers, you know, Cato has had plenty of studies, other groups have had studies about how immigrants don't cost the taxpayers a disproportionate low amount is the burden, if you want to call it that.
In other words, they're less likely to go on public assistance and all that.
Plus, immigrants are barred from most public assistance anyway.
But anyway, even if you assume that they're going on welfare, they're both taking jobs and going on welfare, we don't want to save the welfare state from all the stresses and strain.
Let's never get rid of it if we save the welfare state from the stresses.
Let's use that to say, okay, let's scale back the welfare state or let's get rid of the welfare state.
Not let's keep out immigrants.
And I agree with Brian Kaplan.
We need to have priorities.
These people have rights.
They have rights to escape these horrible conditions and make better lives.
They're not coming here to steal people's houses, right?
They're coming here and people will be willing to rent them apartments and put them up one way or another, either for business reasons because they'll employ them or there are organizations that help them, private organizations that are interested in helping newcomers.
It's right wingers making the same mistake that communists make that, yeah, well, what we're going to do is we're going to preserve this dictatorship in the name of saving the minarchy so that one day we'll have an anarchy or some kind of thing.
I'm trying to wither the state away around here.
Would you guys quit coming up with things for it to do?
It's our fault for having a welfare state.
We should get rid of that.
It's the same excuse you could use for completely controlling people's healthcare.
You could have all your prescriptions have to be laundered through the local bureaucracy because after all, if you're not taking your medicine right, then that could cost our socialist healthcare system.
And so that's why you have to wear a bicycle helmet.
That's why you have to do everything they say is in the name of the public cost.
Well, get rid of the public cost then.
You can sign up the fiscal conservatives, the fiscal hawks on the side of totalitarian control because that way you'll minimize government expenditures.
Like you said, with helmets and this other stuff, you can say, well, it's not that we want to intrude on personal conduct, but we have to control the deficit.
So we're doing it in the name, not of controlling people, but of controlling the deficit.
So it ends up being the same thing.
So that's right.
The fact that there's a welfare state is not a good justification for violating individual rights.
And people have a right to move and they have a right to get out of dangerous places.
And even if it wasn't a dangerous place, they have a right to do it.
Right.
Well, let's talk about Ronald Reagan and the death squads in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the civil war in Guatemala that lasted for 30 years.
It was the Cold War.
Nicaragua was in the hands of, I forget his name now, Daniel Ortega, was it?
Yeah.
Who I say was a Marxist.
He was actually a Marxist.
I don't know.
He wasn't a good guy, I guess.
He still isn't.
He's still around.
And so the U.S. saw – it was like with Cuba.
They saw Latin America as a place to engage in proxy war with the Soviet Union.
And of course the Soviet Union was interested and didn't mind having influence and limiting the U.S. and tweaking the U.S. when it could.
So the U.S. then was funding next door in El Salvador and also the Contras in Nicaragua, sending them arms and stuff.
And I think there was a lot of drug trading going on involving the CIA and others to come up with the cash.
And there were death squads that were killing people, labor people and other people, similar to what was going on in Chile once Pinochet staged his coup.
They were killing labor organizers and anybody that was seen as not loyal and an enemy of the regime.
And it was very bloody.
I remember those days.
Every day you would hear reports of the body counts building up, and it just tore that place apart.
And there's been a long-lasting legacy from all that.
Those societies have never really kind of settled down, become normal societies.
Add on top of that the drug war.
I guess when the U.S. government's involved in the drug trade, it really doesn't like competition.
And then these days, every time some Latin American leader or maybe a retired Latin American leader says, you know what, maybe we ought to stop this drug war.
Maybe prohibition is just not worth it.
The U.S. government lays down the law, quickly sends the message, don't you even think about it.
So it has a stake in continuing the drug war, no matter how many innocent people have died because of it.
You know what the problem is with the drug war thing is just, I guess, for regular people, unless they really have it hammered home by someone they really respect or whatever, why it doesn't work, they can't figure it out.
It's sort of like Algebra 2 or whatever.
You have to be able to think in an economic way about the different causes and effects.
That the best way to punish a global cocaine kingpin is to legalize his trade.
There's a Hillary Clinton quote.
I'm being charitable in my interpretation of what she meant, but I do think this is what she meant.
She goes, there's just too much money in it.
We can't legalize the drugs because there's just too much money in it.
Apparently what she meant by that was that the people who now are the black market kingpins, these terrible evil people, that they will then be in the position to make even more money and all the money from now on.
Because she can only think in a bureaucratic regulatory kind of way.
She can't imagine that just if you had an open market in it, then you'd have perfectly nice cocaine salesmen and perfectly decent open market businesses that operate among the normal rules of trade and would obviate the need for all these armed groups committing such crimes against each other all the time.
It's a huge failure of imagination basically.
You have to have somebody hold your hand through it and say, this is why legalizing heroin is smart.
Otherwise, it just sounds too nuts to people, I guess.
Well, that's right.
Even if they have a glimmer of the economics, which may not be the case, but even if they do, they've been so filled with propaganda about the moral aspect of the drug war.
That there's no way we can entertain the idea of legal drugs.
So even if they sense what you're saying about the economics of it, I think that just gets overwhelmed by, oh my gosh, no, we can't have that stuff.
We can't in effect give a nod of approval.
That's another thing you hear.
If we legalize it, that's like we're saying we approve of it.
Well, it isn't saying that.
Lots of things are legal today.
Well, fewer things, I guess, all the time maybe.
But lots of, well, pot's getting, is being legalized all over the place, so I shouldn't say that.
The fact that something's legal doesn't mean it's getting any kind of official approval.
I mean, that's not the way it's supposed to work in a free society.
The fact that you're allowed to do something, you're free to do something, doesn't mean you ought to do that or that authorities are saying, yes, do that.
Come on, that's what it means to be an adult, to know that you don't do everything you're free to do.
It may not be a good idea.
Well, and you know, there's a huge blackout in terms of the cause and effect in the media.
I mean, there's a huge lack of explanation about the cause and effect of the way the drug wars fought in the United States, but then especially in Latin America.
And maybe for the foremost reason above all of the language barrier and just the lack of Latin American news in certainly in real context in American mass media.
So people might not know that tens of thousands of people have died in the Mexican militarized drug war since the George W. Bush years, when America helped to instigate that entire new program.
And the rise of the Zetas and then CIA support for the Sinaloas and all these guys killing each other, tens of thousands of people beheadings like it's the Islamic State.
Only they're just fighting over drug trafficking territory.
And it's because of the clampdown, not in spite of it, because of the militarization of the drug war.
And frankly, with the USA's gun to the Mexican government's head, making them do it.
Right.
And this all goes back, I think, to Manifest Destiny and America's the chosen nation and indispensable nation.
What we say goes, as George H. W. Bush put it after Iraq invaded or Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
What we say goes, and that was especially true, has been especially true for the Western Hemisphere, right?
This is our hemisphere.
That was kind of one of the points of the Monroe Doctrine, although we didn't mind getting involved in places in the other hemisphere.
But anyway, this is our hemisphere.
This is our backyard, as we put it.
So we get to ultimately determine what goes on.
And U.S. rulers have tried to do that continuously from the very beginning.
I mean, from the very beginning.
Gosh, I think thinking like this dates back before the American Revolution.
This is not a product of post-World War II national security state.
That's way older than that.
They coveted Cuba for a very long time, and they didn't want other countries having influence in Mexico and further south.
Not because we wanted them to be autonomous and free, but because we wanted to call the shots.
That was true of most presidents and most foreign policy thinkers for a very long time, hence Smedley Butler's complaint.
How many times have we invaded Nicaragua or had troops in Nicaragua over many years and overthrew rulers?
This is an old story.
So that's the mentality of anybody who rises to power in the United States.
They don't want to give that up.
If you give it up, it's like, oh my God, you don't want your peers at the cocktail parties saying, what were you thinking?
We've always done this.
How dare you let it go and acknowledge that people have a right to set their own course?
So you've got that inertia, plus you have all the economic interests, not just corporate, but the military likes having spheres of influence.
It gives them plenty to do, big budgets, lots of staff, new weapons.
So you've got all this stuff going, and then you have all the military-industrial complex profiting off it.
So you have all these big interests who want to see things go the way they've been, and they're not going to be open to change.
Then the influence, the foreign policy pundits, Tom Friedman and all these people.
From there, it filters down to the general public, the anchor people on TV.
And we all get this implicit message, sometimes explicit, that no, this is the right way.
There'll be chaos if the government is not the big traffic cop of the world.
Ignore that chaos you see all around you, but believe me, there'll be chaos if the U.S. government's not the world's policeman.
But it's not a disinterested policeman.
It's not the model of the policeman who's just directing traffic fairly.
It's a policeman who's got a huge amount of interest behind him, and that's how he's directing traffic.
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I hate to do this to you, Sheldon, but speaking of which, Trump says, well, I guess we have to stay in Afghanistan because, quote, every expert that I have and speak to says if we don't go there, they're going to be fighting over here.
And I've heard it over and over again.
The safe haven myth.
That's bizarre because he used to claim he knew more than anybody.
So what do you mean I don't have an expert who tells me otherwise?
I thought he's the expert.
I thought he was going to tell them.
Remember he said I know more about this stuff than the generals.
Well, I mean, he's sure right that the safe haven myth is the underlying claim.
In fact, you know, in the Woodward book, Mattis says, I'm going to blame it on you.
And I'm going to tell everyone that I warned you if anything bad happens after we go.
I was really kind of extortioned.
It wasn't just, you know, I disagree with this decision.
I really would urge you to reconsider.
It's more like, listen, you have no choice here.
I'm going to hang your ass out to dry, Mr. President, big time.
And that's the kind of threat that Trump, just like Obama, gave right into.
Yeah, but he was supposed to be the non-wimp, remember?
People said, oh, Obama.
Well, you know what, like on a personal level, you would think that unlike Obama, that Trump would feel a little bit more confident standing up to the generals.
In fact, they say in the anecdotes that he screams at them and cusses at them.
And he says, this is all your fault.
And he gets really mad.
He's willing to pull rank on them in a way that Obama wouldn't dare.
And yet, no, they still push him around at the end of the day.
He's one of the biggest frauds, you know, and that's saying something.
You know, in American politics ever.
That is really saying something.
He presented himself as this, you know, he's outside.
He's not a politician.
He's the outsider.
He's the maverick.
He's going to bring fresh thinking.
I know this stuff firsthand.
I don't need to rely on these experts who have gotten us into such a mess.
That was one of his big appeals during the primaries and then during the campaign.
Precisely because I'm from outside and I don't trust those people.
I'll hire new generals if I don't like what they're doing.
And then he gets in and he's a total, you know, I don't know what he really believes.
Maybe he knew he was lying the whole time or maybe he just got bowled over by these guys.
I mean, he does love the military.
He called himself the most militarist person.
So I guess when he sees a guy in uniform, he melts.
And so here you go.
If he can't get out of Afghanistan, what, you know, what the hell was he even there for?
I mean, come on.
He was saying these endless wars have got to stop.
And he's saying we can't get out now.
It's unbelievable.
And it was so obvious.
It really was.
You know, no apologies for anybody who fell for it because they had no right to fall for it.
Any more than they had the right to fall for Obama is going to give you peace either.
I mean, especially in Trump's situation.
No part of the establishment took his side except some Marine Corps generals were willing to stand next to him.
And Army generals were willing to stand next to him and say, nah, he's all right.
No one else would back him up.
So it was obvious.
And also it's obvious that he didn't know how to read.
So when the CIA and the military come to him and say, you have to do something, he doesn't know how to stand up to them on anything.
He doesn't have the knowledge or the ideology to put up a fight worth a damn on anything important.
And that was obvious in 2015.
Give me a break.
Yeah, right.
But it's such a flagrant, I mean, for the people that did believe it, I mean, they should never believe anybody again, you know, who's got anything to do with running for office.
Because, you know, here's a guy they were willing to bet on.
He was going to, he's really different.
This guy is really different.
Other people have said some things in the past that, you know, sounded different.
But, you know, we saw that they were fakes, but no, not Donald Trump.
Hey man, I have a funny anecdote.
The first time I met you was 10 years ago, 10 and a half, at the Restoring the Republic conference put on by Jacob Hornberger and the Future Freedom Foundation.
And it was there, probably the same day that I first met you there.
They had the party in the hotel room at the top of the hotel later on, kind of thing.
And I went up there, it's 08, right?
It's the spring of 08.
I go up there, and there's Raimondo and Greenwald arguing.
And I walk up, and they're arguing about Obama.
And Raimondo's saying, oh, I love him, I think he's great, and I totally believe in him, and he's going to end all the wars, and it's going to be awesome.
And Greenwald is saying, well, I don't know, maybe.
I sure am hopeful, but I guess it remains to be seen.
And I just ended up running.
I was like, no, no, no.
What in the hell discussion is this?
He's Bill Clinton.
For God's sake, snap out of it, both of you.
And I started yelling at them, as though you can't tell that on one side of the stage, there's Kucinich and Gravel, human beings.
And on the other side of the stage is Hillary Obama and Edwards, who clearly are robots from beyond the moon sent here by the establishment to lie to your ass.
How in the world could they believe in Barack Obama in the slightest way?
And that was the first time I met either of those guys in person.
I was just laughing my ass off.
And it's the same thing now.
And honestly, I saw this happen in 1993.
I saw my leftist high school teachers all so disappointed.
It turns out Bill Clinton was no liberal after all.
Like, you thought he was whatever you are?
This guy?
Come on.
People are such ridiculous people.
People do that.
I believed in Ron Paul because he was giving a speaking tour on behalf of my ideology.
I never thought he would make a good president.
I mean, he certainly would be better than these guys, but he sure wouldn't have an easy time of it, I know that.
People look at candidates like Rorschach tests.
They read onto them what they want.
If they find some vague reason for liking the person or thinking it's the best of the alternatives, then they impose all kinds of their own views on the person.
They twist the words so they can say, well, yeah, he's really saying what I'm saying.
It may not really sound like it, but he's saying what I'm saying.
Well, in this business about if we don't fight him over there, we're going to fight him over here, you literally wrote the book on that.
And I believe you also, didn't you break out a section of your book and have it in the American Conservative on this very point?
This safe haven for- War without a rationale is what they called it.
It falls apart at the least casual look at it.
Because look, people can plan, if people want to attack Americans in the United States or anywhere else, they can plan that anywhere.
We know that 9-11 was planned in what, California and Florida and what is it, Hamburg and- And Madrid and Kuala Lumpur and all over that place.
It makes no sense.
Especially these days with- What about the real reason though, Sheldon?
What about we got to block China from building the highway through there?
Is that the American people's interest?
Through Afghanistan?
Is that where they want to build a highway?
Yeah, they want to build a highway to Lisbon eventually.
I mean, it sounds like a magic dream for a hundred years from now to me, but I don't know.
What do I care?
What's Pat Buchanan today say about Kirch?
What do we care who controls Kirch?
I mean, seriously, I- I think if you started off with the conviction that as soon as they have a highway, the Chinese are going to invade and conquer all of Eurasia because you just know that that's how them yellow bastards are or whatever it is, then, you know, I guess.
But if you don't start with that conclusion and you go, well, actually, you know, the Chinese haven't been very expansionist in a very long time.
And, you know, maybe they'd expand into Siberia or something.
But it seems like, again, anyone with a basic economic understanding would just immediately see dollar signs and see a highway across Eurasia, railway and fiber optic and whatever from Lisbon to Shanghai.
I mean, that's like finding the fount of youth or finding the lost city of Atlantis.
I mean, that's incredible, right?
That'd be the best thing that ever happened if we had that.
It'd be the most important invention since the piston or something, right?
To have that.
I can't imagine power abusing something like that, infrastructure like that.
But for the most part, it just seems like the ultimate promise of mankind, the ultimate following of Bastiat's advice, right, to let goods cross borders and let people trade and have mutually beneficial exchanges of wealth in common with each other to help to keep the peace and for the greater prospering of mankind.
Well, I agree.
If we want to shrink our case a little bit without going all that way, and I agree with you, but we could say it's certainly not worth killing more Afghans.
After all, we've killed since 2001 and sending Americans to die as well.
I mean, come on.
This is what he's saying we need to keep doing.
We need to keep killing and Americans need to keep dying because, what, China is going to build a road across Afghanistan to Lisbon or some such thing?
Gosh, imagine if they announced they were going to build a stairway to heaven.
What would we do then?
H-bombs in the sky, baby.
They got plenty, too.
Yeah.
Now, here's one thing.
Your article before last was about Trump and his horrifying foreign policy, and he really has absolutely escalated, especially the drone wars and the anti-Sunni jihadist type wars.
He's staying in Syria in the name of Iran and, of course, Afghanistan, as we talked about, but I think he's selling short on Korea, or at least you don't explain.
You just say, don't make me laugh, but it seems to me like the Korea thing and Trump's position on Korea, while not perfect, is like a shining light in the dark here.
Well, you know, what I was...
I kind of lost my train of thought there.
What I was saying in that last article was that Trump's article, foreign policy keeps hurting Americans.
Of course, it hurts foreigners even more because they're killing so many people, but it just goes back to our theme.
He's a big fraud.
Why did anybody believe him?
But even if they believed him at first, why is anybody sticking with him two years later?
Sorry if I missed your point there.
Like I said, my mind wandered for a second.
Oh, no, it's all right.
Let's...
Well, I guess here, let me actually put a question on the end of that and then you can answer it better.
So what do you think?
I mean, it really...
Bush and Obama would always refuse to let the South Koreans make this kind of progress and he's doing it for his own selfish reasons, I'm sure, but it's really pretty good, right?
Yeah.
That's about the only exception I see at the moment.
And I can't explain it because I refuse to even try to get into the guy's head.
It'd be a scary thing to do.
I'm glad he's doing that.
He seems to be sticking with it.
And of course, one thing you have going on there is that the South seems pretty hell-bent on reconciling and creating a better situation with North Korea.
And that kind of, in a way, takes it out of Trump's hands.
I guess if he wanted to be a son of a gun, he could put the screws to them.
But for some reason, he doesn't want to.
So let's be thankful for that.
I don't quite get it, but I'm glad for it.
But, you know, that doesn't cancel out.
I know some people will point to that.
Somebody you mentioned earlier in this interview that we both know and love will point that out and play that card every week almost.
But look at all he's doing everywhere else.
That's...
Yeah, and he really has escalated.
And, you know, I hate to say the Daily Beast, but they had a recent piece about how the drone wars against...
Now, some of our wars, you know, in Yemen, for example, we have two wars, one for and one against al-Qaeda.
But also in Somalia, they're attacking al-Shabaab.
And in Syria, they're on both sides still.
And, well, I guess they're only on one side still in Syria now.
But they're escalating the drone war.
I guess he says in Pakistan.
I know I've seen at least one report of Trump bombing Pakistan.
And I think the Daily Beast report, I don't think they knew.
I don't think they could differentiate between Afghanistan, or no, it was Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
I think they had the totals, but they weren't sure how many.
I don't think they said explicitly how many different ones were in Somalia.
I know there's been at least one in Pakistan.
And I know that the rules of engagement and the authority devolution, those rules have all been loosened.
So that, you know, the captains instead of the colonels can call the shots in and that kind of thing, you know.
And based on not immediate defense, but go ahead and target whoever you think you need to.
They even changed the official designation of Somalia into a war zone in a way to loosen the rules of engagement there.
So I don't think we really know, but I think we know it's more certainly than Obama's last couple of years.
And that's in all of the anti-jihadist wars, never even mind the escalations in the pro-al-Qaeda war in Yemen, for example.
He did, Trump did call off CIA support for al-Qaeda in Syria, though.
And I should give him credit for that too, because that was over the rest of the establishment's dead body, even though it was way too late for their stupid, horrible plan anyway.
So they are not actively going after Assad now, is that right?
Yeah, I don't think they are.
I think, you know, they're still embedded with the Syrians in the name of the Irani- I mean, with the Syrian Kurds in the name of the Iranians.
But they are not targeting the Assad.
And I believe it's apparently, you know, that Washington Post story, I haven't seen anything contradict it, and I've seen plenty of confirmation of it, that the Timber Sycamore program was just canceled.
Pompeo canceled it.
Trump and Pompeo canceled it in the first- Good to hear.
It was in the summer, June or July of 2017.
What still, you know, worries me is that he's got to be in his bonnet about Iran, and Assad is, you know, an ally of Iran.
That's right.
I mean, why are they backing al-Qaeda there in the first place?
That's the same reason they're staying there now, is in the name of Iranians.
Iran has forces in Syria at the invitation of Assad.
So, I mean, isn't it very possible that Trump could, you know, turn around anytime and say, we've got to get rid of Assad now because he's helping out Iran and we hate Iran.
And don't forget, let's not forget what our BFF Israel is doing in Syria.
I think, yes, he could do that.
I mean, I don't see any indications of that so far.
He seemed to want to leave and then was talked in again to staying in the name of Iran's more powerful there than ever before because of the backfiring nature of Obama's policy and supporting the jihadists.
So, you know, this is part of what got Tillerson fired, I think, was Trump said, we're leaving, as soon as we're done with ISIS, we're leaving Syria.
And Tillerson came out and said, belay that order.
Forget that.
That's not true.
That's not true to him.
And it was really ugly and blatant kind of thing.
And then, but I think that Tillerson went out on the policy and there's this guy, James Jeffries, who wrote in the Washington Post all about how, forget all of that.
We're not leaving.
We're there for Iran.
Same reason they backed the rise of Islamic State against him in the first place.
And so, but then the other problem is that we're embedded with and therefore are empowering the YPG Syrian Kurds, which puts us at odds with our allies, the Turks.
And the obvious solution to that is for the Kurds and the Syrian central state to come to a new agreement that is satisfactory to the Turks that the Syrian national government will have control over that territory.
They'll have a sufficient amount of autonomy, but will not be armed in a way that would serve as a pretext for Turkish intervention against them.
And then America could go.
Because see, in the whole so-called civil war, the Kurds already had a lot of autonomy and they sort of declared independence, but they never declared war on the central state or fought against the central state.
They had jihadist enemies in common with the central state.
And so there's plenty of room for reconciliation between those two, it seems like.
And the Americans are standing in the way of that now, it looks like to me, but I don't know.
Anyway.
I think this is all a plot to get libertarians so enmeshed in the weeds that we lose sight of the big picture, which I'm not saying you do, because you're able, you're one of those rare people who can have all those details at your fingertips and know the players, you got the scorecard, while seeing the big picture.
But for most of us, if we spent our days trying to keep all these players straight, like I say, the larger story.
So I think that's part of their thinking.
And by the way, speaking of the larger story, I mean, Trump told the Washington Post, he's like, so why are we even over there?
I don't know.
I mean, Israel, because we don't need the oil no more and all this would do.
I got the quote here.
He says, now, are we going to stay in that part of the world?
One reason too is Israel, for whatever reason, because we're producing more oil now than we've ever produced.
So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don't have to stay there.
And how true that is.
What other interest do we have over there?
And in what ways is Israel in America's interest anyway?
What do they ever do to get us into trouble?
Well, you know, I was wondering about that business about oil because the other day you came on the show and said, bring it down even more.
And I was thinking, I thought we don't worry about that stuff anymore.
We're the exporter now.
Well, whatever.
All things are true if he needs them to be whenever he needs them.
And we thought he wasn't a politician.
All right.
Hey, man, I should let you go because I'm late for interviewing David Vine all about America's thousand military bases that dominate the world.
I'll be listening for that one.
My pleasure.
Talk to you soon.
