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.
All right, you guys, introducing Jeff Deist.
He is the Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Mises Institute for Austrian Economics there.
Welcome back to the show.
Scott, I'm doing great.
Haven't spoken to you in a while.
Yeah, man.
I've missed you.
Listen, oh, I meant to say in your bio there that you used to be the Chief of Staff for the great Ron Paul in his Washington, D.C.
Congressional office.
Boy, I had to get you drunk and ask you to tell me some stories sometime.
I think you're the one who got drunk and told me some stories, though, last time, so I'm not sure how that works.
You just start drinking.
I would probably feel a lot better about some stuff.
Hey, listen, I poached your article from the Mises Institute, and I'm running it at the Libertarian Institute as well.
Hope you don't sue me for copyright infringement or anything.
It's called, When Will Americans Realize They Aren't, Quote, One Nation?
And I really like this article, because you wrote down all this same stuff that I think.
Why don't you tell us about it here?
Yeah, it's a tough question.
You know, secession is not something that people are inclined to believe in in this country, because, first of all, any kind of breakup, whether it's just a form of aggressive federalism or, you know, an outright separation of political entities into some new political entities, has a lot of baggage, because America had a particular civil war.
So a lot of people, any sort of appeal to the Tenth Amendment or secessionary impulses, it brings up the Confederacy and slavery and states' rights and this sort of thing.
So we have that sort of psychological baggage in this country because of our history.
So on top of that, America's always been an expansionist power.
We had Westward Ho, Manifest Destiny, and we ended up with 50 states.
Absurdly, we ended up with Alaska and Hawaii, which have no business being U.S. states, of course.
But nonetheless, 50 is a nice round number, and a lot of Americans tend to think that our size is a strength.
They tend to think that we are the world's greatest superpower.
I think that's coming into serious question.
And they tend to imagine that political arrangements last forever, because they've managed to last for the duration of our lives and our parents' lives and our grandparents' lives.
But historically, of course, 200-odd years is a very young country.
In fact, the Chinese look at us as the startup.
They still wonder if we're going to make it.
So, you know, political arrangements exist to serve us, not the other way around.
And I really hate this sort of glib talk about civil war in this country.
You know, we're not the people who fought World War I or even World War II.
We haven't survived the Great Depression or anything like that.
Our population is aging.
The amount of people over 65 is set to double in the next 30 years.
We're a little overweight, we're a little soft, we're a little diabetic, we're a little addicted to social media and other soft forms of entertainment.
And now we're even sitting at home with COVID lockdowns, eating barbecue Doritos or whatever, and not going to work sometimes.
So this idea that we are going to have some sort of hot civil war is, I think, as fantastical as it is unpleasant, because any sort of violence or killing a revolution ought to be abhorrent to most of our sensibilities.
I hope they are.
So, you know, the solution staring us in the face to all this political strife is some sort of subsidiarity or decentralization or secession.
And I, you know, it troubles me that we can't sort of actually discuss this.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, it's so funny.
I've noticed this, too, where people say all the time about this.
You know, obviously, the context here is the election.
And if one side or the other steals it and then the other side doesn't accept it and what's going to happen.
And then the term civil war, like I bet if you did a Google analytics or whatever for that search or for how often that term has come up under news sources or whatever in the last year or two is just completely out of control.
And just like you're saying here, they don't stop halfway anywhere and say, well, maybe we could find some solutions where nobody has to shoot anybody.
But maybe we'll just I don't know.
I mean, if people have even a passing familiarity with the U.S.
Constitution, it actually describes a federal republic.
Well, it is it's sad because there's a lot of things that we could do better to act as a safety valve on a lot of these social or cultural issues.
The difference in actual policy prescriptions, I hate to even use that term, but between the two supposed parties is not so great.
You know that the two parties would would more or less maintain similar foreign policy.
Trump may be a little outside of that.
They would keep Social Security and Medicare and all kinds of things, the federal highway system, all kinds of things we get to sort of take as part of the landscape.
So this is more of a cultural problem in our country.
And the way to alleviate that is, of course, to allow a lot more to be decided at the state and local level.
It might not be the perfect solution that you and I would choose, but it would be better.
I mean, I don't I think this idea that red states and blue states ought to be mocking each other and at each other's throats is because so much is decided in Washington, D.C. amongst a few thousand, a few hundred people, sometimes in the Supreme Court case, four or five people.
You know, if you look to the old pre-EU Europe, there was always a little tension, obviously, coming out of two world wars between this country.
There was always a little tension, a little mockery, a little derision between, let's say, the Germans and the French, you know, or the Germans, the Italians, the Italians think Germans are uptight and the Germans think the Italians are lazy or something.
But but nonetheless, there was a level of respect where you can look at Germans and say, oh, my gosh, they they engineer beautiful cars or whatever it might be in Italy, has so much beauty and grace and food.
And because they were not yoked under any sort of EU state superstructure, you could kind of leave it at that and say, you know, viva la default, let us visit each other and enjoy each other's cultures.
And so in the United States, you could have, I think, something very similar where, you know, there's no reason that Alabama has to hate California.
That's absurd on its face.
They both have their charms and and they both appeal to very different kinds of people in terms of lifestyle.
And that's fine.
So so where the hatred and division comes in is in the fact that whomever Alabama and California send to the U.S. Senate, for example, end up having an impact on on that other state and on far too many things.
So, you know, all of this is just a symptom.
It's a symptom of the federal cancer that grew and grew and grew throughout the whole 20th century.
And then on top of that, it's a symptom of the of the really sick unitary executive, the growth in the administrative power of the presidency and what we call, you know, the deep state, the administrative agencies vis-a-vis Congress and the Supreme Court.
So it's it's a real mess.
And, you know, what it's going to take to make a snap out of it, I don't know, maybe it takes some sort of real economic privation.
I hope that's not the case, but maybe that's what it takes.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, I like the way you say in your article that maybe we're going through what it takes right now where, you know, the Democrats didn't get the repudiation they wanted as of this recording, by the way.
I don't know if this is the latest headlines where where you are, but latest latest I see here, it looks like Biden is going to take it.
I think, as you said in your piece, even if so, just barely, you know, they didn't get the the big repudiation that they were seeking.
And there are such hard feelings here that, you know, why not let them go?
Right.
Just like when the northern states wanted to secede from the union to get away from them, nasty slave owners.
So different narrative, sort of an opposite narrative.
And we see, you know, Michael Bolden loves to emphasize this, all the ways that liberals and leftists and Democrats use state interposition and nullification against federal laws that they don't like, most obviously on drugs, but also on immigration, their sanctuary cities and stuff like that.
And he says, oh, right wing audiences, oh, they get mad at me when I say that.
But I only have one point.
It works.
Nobody has stopped them yet from doing it.
And so follow their same example on guns or whatever it is.
You know, of course, Tom Woods wrote a whole book about this nullification that.
And, you know, what's good about this is that you really can have actual humans, not just interest groups, but actual people from the states, from the bottom up pressuring their government that essentially write just to to get them to stop allowing the federal government to do this or that.
Right.
You can't really get them to, you know, probably institute a new policy over the federal government's dead body.
Right.
But get them to stop something that the feds are doing, like, say, persecuting marijuana businesses or, you know, whatever it is, gun owners.
Then, yeah, that's doable.
And it's the kind of thing that real grassroots people power type stuff can accomplish on the margin.
Right.
Well, it turns out that neither the the W.
Bush administration nor the Obama administration were willing or capable of sending in the feds to aggressively enforce federal drug laws to decriminalize marijuana.
Now, there's a lot of conflict between federal law and state law in this area, and the general doctrine, which unfortunately has arisen in positive law, is that federal preemption prevails over states by preemption.
I mean, where there's a field or an area of law where the federal body of law sort of addresses the same subject matter, let's say pot.
But, you know, states just started to say, cry uncle, you know, Atlas shrugged.
We we can't afford to have all of our cops and all of our incarceration dollars wrapped up on these endless little drug busts when people get pulled over.
And, you know, we're essentially paying our state incarceration systems.
And some states spend up to seventy thousand dollars per year per inmate.
OK, in their state system, the states were basically forced to enact an unfunded federal mandate.
So the feds say, no, no pot is schedule whatever.
And this is the legality of it.
So they just said, no, no mosque.
And they moved towards, you know, Colorado was one of the first.
California was one of the first.
And so they moved in that direction.
And there's just not enough fed.
There's there's three million odd feds, let's say.
So you get a situation where they just can't, as a practical matter, overcome the public's desire to move in a new direction, as expressed by states.
You know, so it was really fascinating to watch because, you know, medical marijuana, which was the starting point, you know, people were arguing about the health benefits for pain, for nausea, for glaucoma, et cetera, you know, morphed into something wider, which is that a lot of people like to use marijuana just for relaxation or enjoyment.
Like people like to have a beer and it does alter your mental and physical consciousness a bit.
And that's OK.
So, you know, it's interesting to watch how that evolved and how the feds were either impotent or just sort of willing to go along with it.
And there's so many areas of life where you could see that, you know, you could say, what if you know, what if Alabama just wants to have prayer at a football game at high school?
It's public, you know.
You're going to send in the Calvary.
I mean, there's a million permutations that have this, but but marijuana is such a fascinating case study for us because it's real.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Well, you know, here's another major thing about this, too, right, is well, and I'm from Texas, so maybe.
Well, I think this is pretty much the same everywhere, right?
That the divide is not between red states and blue states.
The divide is between town and country.
And so Austin and Dallas and San Antonio or I don't know about San Antonio, but Austin, Dallas and Houston vote Democrat and everybody else in Texas votes Republican.
And it seems like that's really the divide, you know, around the country.
So people want to talk about civil war.
That's a real squiggly battle line, you know, trying to figure out who's supposed to be on whose side there, you know?
It's very, very difficult.
I mean, you have to look at the really what a lot of people consider the really red mega states, the Southeast, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama.
But, you know, now Georgia has changed radically because of the size and growth in Atlanta has turned that into a blue or at least a purple state.
Nashville in Tennessee is becoming the next Atlanta.
So even if you think, oh, my gosh, Florida is Trump country.
There are millions and millions and millions who are not in, you know, supporters of Trump by any means.
And they are there.
There's millions of them in Orlando, over in Tampa.
So if there are no neat geographical lines and that's what makes this whole thing so damning.
And that's why I think we have to say, hey, look, you know, maybe given that reality, given the reality of federal land, given the reality of the U.S. federal military, given these federal entitlement benefits, which are absolutely relied upon by millions of older Americans.
You know, there's some dicey problems here.
We can't kid ourselves.
But there's an awful lot that could be done short of outright or real complete secession.
There's there's an awful lot that could be done in these intractable problems, which we're never going to solve.
You know, abortion.
Well, why are we trying to beat each other over the head about abortion?
You know, gun control.
Why do we have to have gun control laws set by the Supreme Court?
You know, maybe maybe it's a little absurd to walk down the street in Manhattan with an Uzi, but maybe it's perfectly fine to be in Jalopnik with one.
I mean, you know, there's just it's a big, diverse country.
And what we're finding, and this is a whole new field of happiness.
The West is so rich, we sit around and study happiness, is that smaller countries tend to report an overall general sense of well-being.
You know, the Lichtensteins in Norway and Switzerland.
So whatever that number is, I think 330 million is North.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so here's the thing, man.
The proponents of Leviathan like to point out, and possibly with some accuracy, that this overwhelming federal power centered in Washington, D.C., maybe they might concede, I don't know, that that helped cause the terrible Civil War, but it's kept the peace between the states ever since then.
And that's a lot of peace over a very large area over a very long period of time, which has been so conducive to the ability of so many different people to save up capital and reinvest it and to build this country up into the powerhouse that it's been.
And I don't mean in relation to other countries, but I mean, the ability of the average schmuck to get a loan at a recent rate to improve their business and improve their life.
And so maybe if we had, you know, more and more decentralized power that would then lead to more fights over, you know, whatever resources or whatever it is between the states, if you didn't have a power strong enough to stop them.
Of course, that's the same argument for a world government, I guess.
But yeah, that was Hamilton and Madison's argument for creating this government in the first place, right?
Federalists tend to keep down the mischief of factions so that we can keep the peace over the long term.
Yeah, and that's got a lot of emotional appeal to it, I think, but, you know, again, as you just said, why doesn't that mean then we have to annex Mexico and Canada?
Because clearly we're in some sort of impermissible state of anarchic relations with them because they have coal and they have shale and they have timber and they have water and riparian that would make America richer a little bit.
So it's not so easy.
But but look, it's not about what might be optimal anymore.
A lot of that growth in capital and the tremendous mess after the Civil War under one national government is absolutely true.
But I would argue that especially since the 1970s, a lot of it is smoke and mirrors.
A lot of it is built on financial engineering and unsustainable levels of debt and unpayable levels of entitlement promises to future generations.
And so, you know, I I would argue we're up against it a little bit.
And I would rather that we be thinking about solutions ahead of time rather than needing to get to some sort of actual breakdown before we do.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like there's a certain heroic congressman's son who really dropped the ball here, man.
We had one really, really, really great national leader for the libertarian ideology, which I believe is synonymous with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
I mean, from my point of view, anything right or left of libertarianism is a deviation from the true American way.
And we had one really, really great congressman.
I know that, you know, who was teaching the people that and then he went to pass the baton and the baton receiver guy decided to throw it down instead and run as Jeb Bush and run to Mitch McConnell.
And I guess I can't blame him because I'm stuck behind my own eyeballs, too.
And so I guess I probably don't make the best decisions that where other people might have better insight into what I'm doing as possible.
But because this certain congressman's son didn't do the job, nobody was there to do the job.
And so here we're right at the era.
I mean, think as 2012 era, right when everyone has absolutely had it with the Bush, Clinton slash Obama, same difference, centrist consensus, right?
The conservative Democrats, the liberal Republicans and their agreement on everything.
John McCain world.
Everybody hated it.
They're so sick and tired of it.
And then as the right is looking for an answer, they find kind of more populist nationalism rather than libertarianism because there's nobody there holding up the light for libertarianism where they can see it.
And then the same thing with the left.
They move more toward Bernie and more toward socialism because there's nobody there saying that.
Look, of course, the centrist moderate extremist consensus has failed.
It was always based on a bunch of wrong premises.
But it's liberty.
That's the solution for the American people.
And we just haven't had anybody saying that really at all in a way that people can hear it.
And that, you know, obviously coincides with an argument for decentralization as well.
But it means first and foremost, it means prioritizing, stopping the federal government from doing all of the worst things that it's doing.
Right.
The wars overseas, the bailouts for bankers and the subsidy for the police state all across the country.
You know, I mean, that federal one to the FBI police state, but also all the federal dollars behind all of the drug wars and all the prisons and all the militarization of the cops and all of the four F asset forfeiture programs and all of these things that was all we needed was for someone to say, listen, we don't have to hate each other so much if we could just agree to stop supporting the worst things.
Right.
We don't need a bunch of new programs and forge consensus over a bunch of new projects.
But can we at least agree to call off the drug war and will at least agree to it?
You know what I mean?
And obviously bailouts for bankers.
You could get ninety nine percent of the American people to agree to outlaw bailouts for bankers forever if you could ever get some leadership saying that, yes, that in fact is our highest priority.
You know, well, that's a process problem.
It's not an ideological problem.
I would wager that 75 percent Americans would support with some rapidity getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen right now.
So the reason that can't happen is because of all the self-perpetuating, you know, bad incentives of a political system in Washington, D.C. and the power concentrated there and the interest, the small interest there, which are adverse to the general population's interest.
So that's that's sort of a process question.
But, you know, when you say there's no standard bearer in Congress, the problem is, is that, you know, millions and millions of Americans don't believe in in liberty, as you and I would define it.
It's just that simple.
I mean, we have to acknowledge that.
We have to say that it's not that there is some quiet, secret libertarian majority out there that just simply isn't given the choice.
No, that's true.
But I mean, but this is what I guess I'm saying, right, is is that as everyone's giving up on the John McCain consensus, what's next?
And then at that point, this was the point right when Ron Paul was becoming a superstar, when he ran for president in 08 and 12.
And it was frankly like it was the first chance that people had ever had to hear that kind of thing.
And he won over millions of people right away.
And it wasn't enough to like win over the whole country.
But you and me and the whole audience knows that if Ron Paul had been 20 years younger in 2008 and was still up there absolutely rocking it at that level right now.
Oh, my God.
Right.
That's all I'm saying.
I'm not saying he I'm not saying we would have won, but I'm saying you'd had a real argument for a consensus about everybody back off.
Right.
Which is like you're pushing here.
Yeah, I think there's probably goods on 10 percent of the country that would have been absolutely united behind that.
Yeah.
Well, and and that could have been enough.
You know what I mean?
Like, yes, the right and the left, they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Not like Ron Paul does.
You know what I mean?
Well, like the libertarian.
Yeah.
I mean, let's not forget that the cost neither the Constitution nor the the Revolutionary War were majority supported at all.
Yeah.
I mean, these things are always about a vanguard and we don't like that language, but that's what it is.
Yeah.
And the best of the left and the right do agree with us on the things that they're best on.
Right.
There's plenty of common ground there.
Right.
We say all of our best stuff about the war on drugs.
Well, the best of the left agrees with that.
We say all of our best stuff about guns and the best of the right agrees with that.
We say all of our best stuff about hanging bankers from ropes.
And everybody on the right and the left agrees with that.
Who's, you know, makes less than a billion a year or whatever is the standard there.
Well, I mean, let's just say let's give Scott Horton a choice, you know, what if we could take five trillion dollars away from what we spent in the Middle East and not have spent that.
But that five trillion would have spent here would have been spent here domestically on creating some creaky, bureaucratic, socialized Medicare for all system.
I think you would take that, wouldn't you?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Over a mass murder campaign.
But I would also be opposed to that, too, though.
But yeah.
But I mean, if that's the reality of if that were the nature of political compromise, then I think we'd be a lot better off.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't know the numbers exactly, but I think if they hadn't have blown all that money in the Middle East, right, because it's not just all the money they blew, but it's the fact that none of that was invested in anything worthwhile at all.
So the opportunity costs there, I don't know if there's some kind of standard multiplier for if you waste eight trillion dollars, you really wasted 80 or something like that.
But I bet it's something like that if that money had been, you know, put into productive uses and reinvested over and over again in productive uses in this country over the last 20 years.
I think that it's possible.
It's possible that you and I would be looking at the surplus and saying, you know what, they could buy every bum a house for chump change.
It wouldn't even make a difference.
Right.
If we're not that you and I would support communism in any way, but if you could really buy every bum in America a house for like, say, 100 billion dollars and we didn't have a 30 trillion dollar deficit hanging over our head and all of this, you know, all this mass destruction.
But instead that would, you know, just in the scheme of things, compared to a balanced budget, that would be chump change.
You know, to do something like that is the kind of thing that I wouldn't support.
But like you're saying, would I compromise and settle for that compared to, you know, enriching Lockheed and Boeing only at the expense of the people of Iraq and all of this?
Take it in a heartbeat, you know?
Right.
And now cronyism just gets mostly a lot of financialization in the investment banking sector, and it gets us a lot of war in the defense contracting sector.
I'd rather have the cronyism of 100 years ago or 75 years ago, where at least you got something like the Hoover Dam out of it.
You know, a bridge to somewhere, a bridge to nowhere.
I mean, anything would be I think would be preferable to this.
And look, America is at its end with these wars.
We you know, it is time to bring them to a close.
And that's the one thing, the one glimmer of hope, I think, where, you know, maybe maybe we can maybe the whole country can sort of shrug and have some influence on this by the administration.
Yeah, I really hope you're right about that.
I mean, honestly, I think Biden is absolutely horrible and I absolutely blame him for Iraq War II.
I was just telling an Australian interviewer a minute ago about how other than Cheney and Wolfowitz and Bush himself and maybe even more than Wolfowitz, Biden was the most responsible American for launching Iraq War II as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He could have stopped that war.
But not only that, he cheered for it.
He demanded the other Democrats support it in the Senate and all of that.
And so he bears so much responsibility for that.
But and, you know, I like talking about the history of this stuff, like the counterfactual, this to what if Ron Paul had won in 88, Harry Brown in 96 and the whole end of the Cold War era, you didn't have George W.H.W. Bush and the New World Order, what we say goes.
Instead, you had humble little old Ron, the country doctor, said time to abolish NATO, bring all our troops home from everywhere, cash that peace dividend.
Generals, you're fired.
Lockheed, come up with something productive to do.
This is over.
And then and then what it would have been like the last 30 years since the end of the Cold War, if it had gotten started off on that foot instead of H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and George W.and Obama and Trump to just doubling and tripling down on this absolute chaos over there that have we gotten anything out of it all?
I'm such a critic.
I know I sometimes wonder, am I blind to like the one benefit we got out of that?
The only thing I can think of is really high tech fake appendages.
You know what I mean?
New new arms and legs.
New artificial hip joints for the wounded.
Well, you know, it's it's necessities, the mother of invention.
And so what really changed in that second generation Iraq war was all the IEDs and IEDs took out a lot of lower limbs.
And so I guess that forced manufacturers and and doctors to come up with a lot of incredible new prosthetics.
And now they're even building A.I. into them and and, you know, allowing your brain, your brain to fire the fire, the electronic fingers move or whatever.
But but, God, I wish those could have been developed just for people with car accidents or something.
But here we are.
Yeah, seriously.
And then that's it, though.
Right.
Is there anything else on the list?
I guess specific Americans who benefited from the inflation, I guess, could say, well, I benefited from all the inflation from the war.
Well, you know, go take a drive through Great Falls, Virginia or Potomac, Maryland, and you will see some of the largesse from our military endeavors in the form of some gigantic houses.
Could you elaborate about that a little bit?
There really was sort of a change in the generation since W.
Bush and the terror war there.
Am I right?
Yeah, I think things got a lot more out in the open, people who old timers who were in D.C. before Watergate will tell you that that was really the big change when everything got sort of mercenary and, you know, grafty.
The idea that there was actually a dedicated cadre of public servants in places like the Pentagon started to unravel at that point.
And, you know, my time in D.C. was the early 2000s and there was an awful lot of cover.
There was an awful lot of cover given to that whole industry because 9-1-1, 9-11 gave us this noble justification to remake the Middle East and to connect all these unconnected dots between supposed terror groups and connect all these unconnected dots between various countries.
And, you know, I think because of 9-11 and the TV images, I think that created about like a 10 year, five or 10 year path on unquestioning this stuff in the American public.
And now, of course, 20 years later, almost 20 years later since the invasion of Iraq or two, you have a significant, I don't know, majority, whatever, but a significant portion of U.S. public and even people in Washington will say that that war was a mistake.
Yeah, it's funny because they never did say that.
You know, you guys were right.
And by the way, for the young who maybe just had never heard of this or know this policy, Dr. Ron Paul was absolutely heroic during that time.
And while you were at his side during that, and can you talk a little bit about that, the pressure on him to be bad on Iraq when, man, I mean, he was just killed.
I remember this day that 30 questions that won't be asked about Iraq, I mean, never has a war been so soundly refuted as just that simple speech.
Well, I mean, you got to understand, this was when Texas was really ascendant in Washington, D.C., because George W.
Bush was president, you know, Karl Rove was the chief of staff, Tom DeLay was the majority whip.
There was a big Republican delegation in the House from Texas, and they were all very, very, very rah-rah with respect to the Iraq war.
And so the situation created a lot of heat for Ron Paul in his district, which was South Texas, South of Houston, certainly sort of patriotic, pro-Second Amendment, pro-Bible folks for the most part, the kind of folks who support the troops.
But the way he was able to sort of get around that and deflect that a bit was through his argument, well, you know, you're supposed to declare war.
You're supposed to have a defined purpose.
You're supposed to have some metrics for victory.
You're supposed to go quickly and win it.
You're supposed to have also one thing he very bravely and boldly said was you're supposed to have a just war rationale for entering it.
And we don't have that for Iraq.
You know, nothing about 9-11 implicates Saddam Hussein.
And this yellow cake uranium stuff is nonsense.
And, you know, what made that survivable for Ron politically was that he had some years beforehand casting unpopular votes that from his perspective were based on principle.
And so his district was a little more used to that.
So instead of just jumping down his throat, like a lot of Texas would have instead, why aren't you supporting the war?
Why are you supporting the troops?
George W. Bush, our president, they sort of, you know, pause for a second, said, well, I don't like this, but what's Ron Paul's reason?
So that that was something.
And then, of course, as time went by, he looked he looked dead on.
Yeah, I saw him at one of the birthday barbecues in I'm going to I think it was 05.
It might have been 04.
I think, well, I went to both of them.
I think it was 04 where he says to the whole room full of and this is, you know, of course, before he ran for president.
So there were some libertarians from around the country, but just a handful.
Right.
It was almost all just his local constituents were there.
And he got up there and he goes, look, I mean, I know that a lot of you guys support the president and support the war.
And I'm a Republican from Texas, too.
And believe me, I understand.
But you got to understand, here's the deal.
And he starts explaining to them about Robert Pape and how suicide terrorism is a reaction to foreign occupation and how, man, we just aren't supposed to be over there at all.
None of this would have happened.
And Iraq didn't have anything to do with it.
And just like you're saying, they sat there and listened to him and they respected him, whether they agree with him or not.
I'm sure that the majority did not, but they didn't care.
They didn't hold it against him.
They were like, you know what?
Obviously, he's a good man.
He knows what he's talking about.
He's got at least from his own point of view, what he's got to say is sound.
And he's a proud American patriot and Air Force veteran and all this.
Nobody thinks he's Jane Fonda betraying us.
He just, you know, has this different attitude and they accepted it at least.
And I think he might even change some minds because, you know, and this was this whole thing when he ran for president.
This was the most important.
There's so many important things.
But the most important thing about his run for president was that he was passing out permission slips.
Right.
He was saying, it's OK for you to feel this way.
If you like your identity, you can keep it.
It's fine.
You are who you are.
I'm a Republican, too.
Look at me.
I'm just like George Bush.
Same party from Texas, all of the same things.
But I'm way more anti-war than Michael Moore, man.
And here's why.
And it and then a lot of people had their doubts.
But who couldn't possibly be anti-war because that would put them on the left.
They went, oh, OK, I can be anti-war and I can be like Ron.
I can be myself and be anti-war because Ron says it's OK to.
And that was what he was doing was letting them know that forget all the pressure.
You're feeling it.
I'm feeling it, too.
But I'm just going to stand up against it because it's not going to work on me.
And it doesn't have to work on you either.
You know, and people responded to that.
I mean, you know better than me.
People responded to that.
I mean, it's just amazing to go back and just to think for a minute about the effect that that run had, especially the 08 run there in the in the fight with Giuliani about what all this is about and what that did for people, you know.
Well, Glenn Greenwald talks about this just recently, that the Code Pink, the anti-war coalition that was, you know, somewhat energized during W's administration really fizzled out under Obama.
And then when Trump came along, the whole focus was on get Trump.
And so now under a Biden administration, you know, will we see a new emergence of sort of a Tulsi Gabbard, Jimmy Dore, Jimmy Duncan, Thomas Massey, you know, sort of coalition that says, hey, it is time to scale back at least or or will it just be full steam ahead, neocon?
Right.
You know what?
That's a good question.
And I'll tell you what, I mean, whether I knew that I've been saying this all year, whether it's Trump again or not, that 2020 is a huge milestone here.
It really matters.
The odometer turning over here to one solid generation into the new century and and how we've handled it and what we're doing, where we've been and where we're going and what the hell.
It's a break between the previous era, which has now come to a close and the next move forward here and are well into into time forward.
I mean, it only in the most strict sense, you understand, but just into this new era, apparently now under Joe Biden, I guess.
And so you're right.
I mean, it's it'll be a great clarifier and we'll get to see who's going to finally maybe get their priorities straight and start to put anti-imperialism back at the top of their agenda.
You know, we need all the help we can get.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, thanks so much for your time.
This has been great talking to you, Jeff.
All right.
Good to hear from you, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Jeff Diest.
He is at the Mises Institute.
This one is called What Will It Take for Americans to Consider Breaking Up?
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, anti-war dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
