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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, man, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Jacob Hornberger, the heroic Jacob Hornberger.
He is the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
And they got about 10 million articles there going back to, I think, 1989, by all of the greatest libertarians, staking out the most libertarian positions on every issue that has existed between that time and now.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jacob?
Good, I was wondering who you were introducing there when you said great and heroic.
I thought, man, there must be another Jacob Hornberger, but thank you very much for those nice words, Scott.
Yeah, no, you're the one.
Always good to be back with you.
You know what?
It's been a while since I said this.
There's an article by Murray Rothbard.
It's called, Do You Hate the State?
And I forget now whether he is specifically referring to you or not, or I just make the association in my head.
But basically what it's about is, it's about why are we here?
We want a little bit lower taxes for rich people?
Or we hate injustice.
That's why we're here.
It's not just that we love freedom.
We can't stand it when people are getting their freedom taken away from them for unjust cause.
And so that's why we're here fighting.
And he says, I'll take a radical minarchist over a conservative anarchist any day.
And I know you're a big US Constitution, George Washington kind of guy, but I also know that you just can't stand it.
All the stuff that's going wrong in this country and what this country is doing to the rest of the world.
And that's how you write too.
Mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore.
And it's always great stuff every single day.
It's great stuff at fff.org/blog.
So I mean what I say when I say the great and heroic Jacob Hornberger.
So how do you like that?
Well, you're a good man.
Thank you.
And of course, it's a mutual admiration society.
I feel the same way about you.
And yeah, there was a moral indignation that I think people should experience when they see what's going on here in this country.
This is our country.
And when you see things that are going bad and immoral and wrong, especially with respect to the welfare state and the warfare state and what the federal government is doing to destroy our country, how can you not get morally indignant about it?
As you point out, we wanna be free.
That's what distinguishes us libertarians.
But there's also that sense of moral indignancy of that our government's engaged in wrongdoing and there seems to be indifference or apathy or even support for it.
All right, now here's another thing I like about the way you write.
And I'm not exactly certain that you're right about this, but I think mostly you are.
You know, it's an opinion.
It's not a matter of hard fact.
But you really make the case that the world empire and the national security state as created after World War II or during World War II, maybe, that that is really alien to the American system.
That's not the final apogee of, since that's a vocabulary word today for everyone with a missile test in Korea.
It's not the end of where Manifest Destiny was already heading.
That this is something far and away different and destructive to the American system the way it is meant to be.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, a lot of people don't realize that we really are living under two fundamentally different systems.
Not just economically with the welfare state, which of course replaced the free market system that America was founded on, but on this national security warfare state, some people are now calling it the deep state.
And President Eisenhower himself made this observation in 1961, his farewell address.
He said, this is a new way of life for America.
Now, he said it's necessary because of the Cold War, the fight against godless communism.
I question that and I challenge it.
But what's important is that Eisenhower was acknowledging that this was a different way of life for the American people.
As you point out, it came into existence during World War II, but and then it just continued and it expanded and it converted America from a limited government republic, which was by and large transparent in all that it was doing.
I mean, there were no national security secrets and so forth.
There's fairly almost 100% transparency of what the government was doing in the 1800s.
It transformed into this national security state with a massive military complex, a CIA that has the power to assassinate people, kidnap people, affect coups and regime changes, an NSA that has the power to spy on the citizenry, keep files on them.
I mean, these are all the characteristics of a totalitarian regime.
For example, North Korea is a national security state, China is a national security state.
And so when you combine this new governmental structure with a foreign policy of foreign interventionism, you have the recipe for total disaster.
Now, you can be a national security state without having an interventionist foreign policy.
A good example is North Korea.
But here we have the worst of both things.
The foreign interventionist foreign policy and the national security state, which of course interrelate.
And then there are the seeds for the destruction of our own country and our own liberty and our own financial wellbeing.
Yeah, but I'm from here, so that can't be right because I'm on this team and you're saying that this team are the bad guys and I'm a good guy.
Yeah, that's a fascinating point is that Americans have been inculcated with the notion that whatever their government is doing must be good.
Well, let me tell you something, North Koreans are inculcated with the same notion.
I mean, you go into North Korea and they believe in their government, they believe in their regime, they believe that America's bad.
Well, it's the same thing that many Americans believe that's inculcated into their minds that the CIA is good, what the NSA does is good, it's necessary for their freedom, that the troops abroad are protecting their freedom.
What we have to do as Americans, and I know you were being facetious, is rise above that and make a critical examination into the structure of government.
Now, as you pointed out, I'm a minarchist, I do believe in limited government, but this is not limited government, this is the opposite, this is unlimited government.
It's got the power to assassinate even Americans, keep secret files on Americans.
You won't find that in the 1800s, except with a possible exception during the Civil War, but that was not America.
And the idea was, oh, we need to become like a totalitarian regime to fight totalitarianism, the Soviet Union during the Cold War and so forth.
That's nonsense.
You fight totalitarianism with freedom, not by establishing your own domestic versions of the Gestapo or the KGB.
So it was never necessary to establish this national security state.
But certainly, Scott, when the Cold War ended, which was the justification for this revolutionary change that Eisenhower talked about, then it should have been dismantled back in 1989, at the very least.
Yeah, well, you know what?
So here's the thing that, you know, I brought it up to, I forgot if it was Walter Jones, or I guess it was Walter Jones, not Duncan.
I've been interviewing a couple of anti-war Republican congressmen lately.
But anyway, I think it was Walter Jones, I asked him, because I think this really goes to the core of it.
This is why, you know, even though the United Nations One World Government conspiracy stuff that I used to believe in in the 1990s never really panned out, it does seem still, though, that at least half the John Birch argument about the United Nations is still correct.
And that is that it is the real writ for the American empire.
Because even though the UN Security Council and the UN Charter creates, you know, supposedly this system to outlaw war and to protect the sovereignty of nation states, there has to be a single world empire, or there has to be some kind of world army to enforce the world law.
And so that's us.
So then, just like George W. Bush said, we're invading Iraq to enforce these UN resolutions, which clearly he was taking advantage, he wanted to do that anyway.
But there were these UN resolutions.
And it seems like it's a mandate, it's a tripwire, that even, you know, the IAEA inspections regime and the Non-Proliferation Treaty, those things can be, even though they accomplish so much good, they could also be exploited and used as a tripwire for war.
If the accusation is that someone is outside of their safeguards agreement, that's how we got in this crisis with North Korea, right?
Was George Bush bullied them out of the NPT.
And so now that's the big crisis.
Anyway, so I just wonder what you think about that.
Can we have the United Nations in the UN Charter and the UN Security Council, should the United States participate in it at all?
And does it mean anything if the US Army is not the world army there to enforce its writs?
Yeah, I think that the United Nations is a disaster for the American people.
I mean, it really is composed of just a bunch of political and bureaucratic hacks, you know, all of which are working for their own interests or the interests of their own regime.
And the US uses it as a method of conveniently extending its power.
For example, when the US decided to intervene in the Korean Civil War back in the early 50s, they should have gone to Congress and gotten a declaration of war.
That's what the constitution requires.
And they instead use the United Nations as the means by which to say, oh, well, we got a Security Council resolution authorizing us to do this.
So they circumvented the constitution.
So they use the United Nations to conveniently do things that they otherwise would not be legally permitted to do.
But as you point out, when the United Nations Security Council is threatening to veto an action, they just ignore it anyway.
I mean, the US had no legal authority to enforce UN resolutions with respect to Iraq.
Only the UN has that power.
It's an independent organization.
And when they went to the UN and tried to get them to enforce their resolutions, they said, with like with an invasion, they said, no, we're conducting inspections.
We have not found any of these WMDs.
It's a good possibility they don't exist.
So Bush just says, well, we're going to ignore you and uses as the excuse to enforce the resolutions.
But the US never had that authority.
Only the UN had that authority.
So the US is gonna do whatever it wants to do to establish worldwide hegemony, the empire, putting people into public office in Iraq and Afghanistan that are pro-US and other countries.
I mean, this has been the modus of the national security state since the 1940s.
Removing people from office that are not sufficiently pro-US and putting in pro-US dictators, in large part to get their allegiance and their votes in the United Nations and to have them do as they're told.
I mean, that's the mindset of the empire.
Well, yeah.
Control.
Yeah, the United Nations is really sort of the perfect kind of picture example of the American empire and how it works and creating all these institutions basically to serve as fig leaves for American power.
And yet so, well, and also in setting the excuse that this is really all for your own good, rest of the world is because we're the ones at the end of history who figured out how to do this, as Bill Clinton calls it, free markets and democracy.
He doesn't mean what you mean, but he does mean more or less, you know, 21st century, what we call capitalism, state capitalism, and under these international institutions and this rule of law.
And after all, the UN Charter says that starting a war is illegal and the US is only here to enforce that law that if Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, nevermind if James Baker told him go ahead or not, but if Iraq invades Kuwait, America is there to say, no, the UN Charter outlaws aggressive war.
You're not gonna change your borders by starting a fight and we're gonna put them back again.
And so without that, we go back to the law of the jungle, Jacob, and without American leadership in the liberal world order, who's gonna rule, China or some free for all where everybody just starts invading and conquering and colonizing whatever they want again?
That's the line anyway, right?
Yeah, that's really the mindset.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head on the mindset of the person that believes in empire.
And these people in the national security establishment, the Pentagon, the military, the CIA, the NSA, I'd venture to say that most of them really believe they're doing the right thing.
I mean, they really are thinking that US troops are fighting for our freedom overseas.
It's the mindset of many people in churches across America.
They exhort people to pray for the troops who are defending our freedoms.
And of course, nobody can ever explain how they're defending our freedoms.
They're just convinced that it's happening.
So it's sort of proof that the man of good intentions that's serving in the government can be just as deadly and destructive as the man who has malevolent motives because the destruction of our country remains the same.
I mean, the founding fathers had it right.
The biggest threat to the freedom and wellbeing of the citizenry is their own government.
And this is what Americans of today have lost.
They've lost that conception.
They see the giant national security state as their friend, as their buddy, as their protector.
They don't realize when there's a terrorist attack here in the United States that it's a direct result of what the US government is doing to people overseas.
So the real solution to this is restructure government.
Jefferson said, we have that right in the declaration.
He says, when government becomes destructive of the legitimate ends of the people, which include liberty and prosperity, it is the right of the people to alter that government or even abolish it.
Well, we have a right to alter this government back and put it back in the shape and the structure on which it was founded, a constitutionally limited republic.
That means dismantling the CIA, getting rid of it.
This is a domestic Gestapo.
It's out assassinating people without due process of law.
It doesn't belong in a free society.
Neither does the NSA.
It's impossible to reconcile a spy organization with a free society.
And then of course, a giant military establishment that's going around stomping on people around the world, killing millions, none of whom ever has ever attacked the United States.
Of all the millions of people the US has killed since the 1940s, not one of them ever initiated any violence against the United States.
So this is why I keep emphasizing, Scott, that it's a structural problem.
It's not a person problem.
It's not Donald Trump's office or Hillary Clinton's office.
The problem Americans face is a structural problem.
Number one, with respect to foreign interventionism, we gotta stop that.
That was not the founding foreign policy of America.
Bring the troops home.
Abandon all the foreign military bases.
Discharge the troops.
And the same thing with the domestic military bases.
We don't need those.
Number two, dismantle the whole national security establishment.
And number three, of course, dismantle the whole drug war welfare state stuff.
That's the key to getting this country back on the right track.
Yeah, boy, good stuff.
So I got a lot of following up there to do.
First of all, so yeah, in regards to the millions of people there, there was a great piece by Andrew Bacevich that, I forget, he was critiquing someone who was shilling for this, you know, the liberal world order that America leads and all this.
And it was a whole great article.
And he says, you notice what's missing in there is Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and Somalia and Syria and Libya and all the damage that we've done.
Millions and millions and millions of people killed.
And so, oh yeah, look at the relative lowering of tariffs under the World Trade Organization.
Isn't it all worth it?
Well, yeah, I guess sure it is if you omit all the costs and consequences of the rest of the empire.
But when you look at what's going on here, you know, all morning long, been arguing on Twitter about the danger of Islam and how Islam has it in for Christians and all this because Donald Trump tweeted out some kook smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary, which probably wasn't about Mary, but was more about an idol, you know.
But anyway, so the president of the United States tweeted this out as though Muslims all hate the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus and all this stuff, which is just not true.
And so we've been arguing and arguing about this and about how, yeah, Christians aren't that safe in Muslim societies and all these things.
And yet, what are we missing?
Millions dead.
I mean, if Islam is why they hate us, then is Christianity why we hate them?
And who's zooming who here?
When we have Olympic sized swimming pools full of blood to wade in on the American side, and what do they got?
You know, they've taken out a total of less than 4,000 on our side, and that's defining they as broadly as possible in the 21st century.
I mean, give me a break.
Look at what we're talking about.
And as you said, none of these people, you know, there's actually one exception to what you said when you said none of these people did anything to us.
Well, about 200 or so Al-Qaeda guys were killed while the other 200 or so escaped in 2001.
So there are 200.
The other couple of million, or if you want to go back to the end of World War II and include Korea, Vietnam, include American support for both sides of the Iran-Iraq war, the sanctions during Iraq war one and a half in the 1990s.
And we're talking, you know, upwards of a Holocaust, 10 million people killed by the United States of America.
And yet, nah, again, that can't be right because what are you, some communist or something to sit around and think about it that way?
Well, yeah, well, even the 9-11 attacks, they didn't initiate violence against the United States.
That was retaliatory violence.
They made it very clear.
They were retaliating for what the U.S. had been doing, killing people in the Middle East, specifically like in Iraq with the sanctions.
Well, and of course they did target innocent Americans in those towers, but again, defining America, defining them broadly as the target.
Oh, yeah, but it was clearly, the motivation was retaliation for what the U.S. has been killing.
I mean, the U.S. was killing innocent children in Iraq with the sanctions.
I mean, there's that famous statement by Madeleine Albright that when they said, are the deaths of half a million Iraqi children worth it?
The sanctions and regime change was what they were referring to.
And she said, well, it's a tough issue, but it's worth it.
All I'm suggesting is, is that when they retaliate with respect to what happened on 9-11 against innocent people, or Detroit with the would-be bomber there, or Orlando, or San Bernardino, or Fort Hood, they make it very clear, we are retaliating for your initiation of force over there in the Middle East.
If there had been no sanctions and no aid to Israel and no stationing of troops near Mecca and Medina, the holy lands of the Muslim religion, no intervention in the Persian Gulf War, there wouldn't have been a 9-11.
There would never have been retaliatory terrorism.
Now, I don't think I answered your earlier question, though, that I think it's an important one, that if you stop the U.S. from intervening across the world, bad things happen.
I mean, but bad things are gonna happen regardless.
I mean, the problem is the U.S. makes things worse.
But let's say Korea.
I mean, let's say the U.S. brings all the troops home, which they should, because that's why North Korea is trying to get nuclear capability, is to defend against the U.S. attack and regime change operation.
And let's assume that war breaks out in Korea between South and North Korea.
Is that unfortunate?
Absolutely.
But does that mean that the U.S. should intervene?
Absolutely not.
A civil war in a foreign country, that's the problem of people in that country.
Now, if Americans voluntarily wanna go to South Korea and join up with the South Korean army, great, go for it.
But leave the U.S. government out of it.
Will bad things happen around the world?
Absolutely.
But this is what John Quincy Adams was talking about in his 4th of July address in 1821 to Congress.
America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
And that's really what should be our foreign policy.
We wish everyone well.
We know bad things are gonna happen.
There's dictatorships, there's civil wars, there's revolutions, there's wars between countries.
The U.S. government is gonna sit right here at home.
And if Americans wanna travel abroad and participate in those conflicts, be their guest to do so.
But leave the government out of it.
Work to establish a free society here at home, including open borders, which provides people suffering these vicissitudes of life overseas a sanctuary that they can come to if they want to.
All right, hang on just one second.
Hey guys, did you notice the new and improved show notes?
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So check out the links for all the information we talk about in these interviews.
You guys have been asking for that for a long time.
Well, we got it now.
Good show notes at ScottHorton.org, et cetera.
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All right, well, that's a whole other discussion.
Let me add it to the list, but it's gonna go lower down.
So listen, now here's the thing, though.
Everybody hates Congress and everybody hates every president, pretty much.
They usually have less than 50% approval ratings.
Congress is never above 25.
I don't even know if they ever break 20.
And yet everybody loves the military.
That's who you know you can trust if you're an American.
And I know, I mean, this is so powerful because this still works on me from when I was a kid.
Be all that you can be, get an edge on life in the Army.
I saw that every football game of my life from age zero through whenever I lost interest in football when I was like a young teenager, I guess.
And we all are so inculcated from birth with this militarism.
I mean, I don't know who taught me explicitly if they use these exact words, but basically there's a loophole in thou shalt not kill.
And the commandment from God to not kill people.
And that is, if the US government says it's okay and you're fighting for your country and you dress up in olive green, then it's fine.
Like that one time that we went and stopped Hitler.
And then, so that's it.
And that's a blank check forever.
And I mean, you talk about blasphemy.
Try, you know, go back to what you said about, yeah, no, we can just abolish the Pentagon.
We don't need the military.
We don't need this national security state at all.
Without that, what do we have?
That's all anybody in America believes in anymore.
Jacob.
I couldn't agree with you more.
And I mean, what I find fascinating, one of my hobbies is to see how people react in totalitarian countries like North Korea, China and Vietnam and so forth.
And there's a really fascinating op-ed in the New York Times this week where these two reporters went into the North Korea and people stole the military there.
They have military parades.
And all I'm thinking is, gosh, that's exactly how so many Americans see their military.
I mean, the flyovers at sporting events, those are no different from the parades in the Soviet Union where people would go gaga over the tanks.
They would roll down the streets.
And yet when you look at the mindset of the founding fathers of this country and our American ancestors who were living back in the 1780s, 1790s, they hated this military concept.
They hated standing armies.
You can see on our website, fff.org, just Google standing armies and you'll see a whole list of quotes.
I put them together on how the founding fathers perceived standing armies.
And I said, this has always been your grave threat because this is how dictatorships enforce their rules through the military.
But yet over here, everybody's been taught, oh, this is our friend, this is our protector.
It's going abroad to protect our rights.
This is all nonsense.
It's like that the emperor's new clothes that the possibility that US troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan protecting our freedoms is ridiculous.
It's been ridiculous from the beginning.
Why?
Because there's nobody over there attacking our freedoms.
Nobody over here is trying to take away our freedom.
And same with Vietnam, same with Korea.
This had nothing to do with the freedom of the American people.
And I think that's what's necessary is for Americans to finally realize this structure is very, very damaging to our country.
This great big national security establishment.
It's contrary to a limited government republic and it's contrary to the principles of freedom.
It's destroying our prosperity.
And it's really, I think at the core of what's going on in this America in terms of corruption, violence, including mass killings that seem to be random and unexplained, I don't think you can have a society based on a national security state like this which is killing people abroad on a daily basis without having truly dysfunctional consequences here at home.
Yeah, boy, and we're getting so used to it too.
I'll never forget somebody said to me, we had a war in Libya?
And I said, yeah, yeah, in 2011.
Remember the wacky Colonel Gaddafi that Ronald Reagan bombed him?
Yeah.
Yeah, Barack Obama, he overthrew him.
We had a war there, it lasted almost a whole year.
And then they found the guy in a tunnel under the street and they lynched him on the side of the road.
Shot him in the head.
And the guy said to me, huh.
That's really where we live now.
We got so many wars.
One war is a tragedy, nine is a statistic.
And it's up to wonks and kooks like you and me to even try to keep track, counting on our fingers of how many different countries we're bombing right now.
They could just go on like this.
I mean, we have people who are now full grown adults who we've been at war their entire lifetime.
I mean, I was a child in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s.
And those were both only pseudo peacetime, I know that.
But still, compared to this, where it's just like, oh yeah, you know, well, we're just bombing people all day long every day and God knows in which country and nobody cares.
They don't even know.
No, your point about Libya is so good.
I mean, I just read an article that the country is now engaged in slave trading.
I mean, it's just a total chaos there.
Perpetual crisis is one of the roots of the refugee crisis in Europe.
And so, yeah, it looks so easy.
Oh, a dictator in office, let's just remove him and we're gonna have a paradise now.
Same with Iraq, we remove Saddam, we'll have a paradise.
I mean, this is the whole history of foreign interventionism.
Look at wherever you go, Chile, where they oust Allende and put in this dictator Pinochet that ends up killing 3000 people and jailing tens of thousands more and torturing them.
This is the whole history of US interventionism abroad.
Horrific consequences.
And yet, where are the protests?
Where are the demonstrations?
Now, on the flip side of this, I should say there is a fascinating piece of positive news.
There was a great op-ed written in the LA Times about a year ago that I highly recommend everybody to read.
Just Google founding foreign policy America by Elizabeth Cobbs in the LA Times, who is a Texas A&M professor.
And she talks about the founding foreign policy of the United States.
And she cites a poll in there from the Pew Foundation that said in 2012, I think, 53% of the American people now felt it's time for America to mind its own business.
And that a year ago, this number had now risen to 57%.
Well, that's incredible, Scott.
In a sense, it's not too surprising, given the debacles in Libya and Syria and Iraq and, well, all the rest of them, Guatemala, Chile, and so forth.
But I think it's an incredibly positive piece of news as to the progress that libertarians are making under the radar screen.
When 57% of the American people say, it's time for the US to stay home and mind its own business and let the world figure out its own problems.
That is incredible and very positive.
Well, you know, I hate to say this because here I try to just stick to the facts and I interview the experts on this show all the time, people like yourself to explain all this stuff.
And yet at the end of the day, really it's social psychology that rules all.
It's the example set by somebody like you.
It's not the facts that you cite as much as the fact that you are who you are, that you're a constitutionalist, a capitalist, a libertarian, and not some kind of wimpy, liberal, hippie, you know, reminiscent of some Vietnam era kind of a thing.
You're not, well, and this goes for, and I don't even mean to call you a right winger, but I'm just calling you not a left winger.
And this goes for all of the not left wing anti-war movement is that this is what people need to hear and understand is that you don't, if you like, not to paraphrase Obama, the liar, but if you like your identity, you can keep it, right?
We're not, you don't have to become a hippie.
You don't have to be Susan Sarandon or Michael Moore or Sean Penn or some left wing Hollywood idiot to be anti-war.
You can be Jacob Hornberger.
You could be Ron Paul, you know, you could be Jacob Hornberger and understand the danger and the horrible consequences that come from this empire and make a value judgment and not have to feel like, oh, great, now I'm like those liberals or some kind of thing, because that is how people think.
And they would rather die than be identified in their own mind even with somebody like Michael Moore, right, big, fat, millionaire, communist, hypocrite, obvious glutton with his gigantic, you know, triple chin and whatever saying everybody else should starve and, you know, just people just hate that.
And so I always keep harping on this because I think, you know, especially libertarians, especially capitalists and also veterans, our combat vets and officers, first and foremost, taking more, you know, right wing or libertarian positions against war.
That's what really makes the difference.
No offense to you lefties.
It's just that everybody already assumes that you guys are anti-war and they don't care, you know.
So we gotta, like what Ron Paul did is he kind of confused the issue.
He said, I'm the only veteran up here and I'm more anti-war than anybody.
And people went, oh, the light bulb went off, you know.
Well, you know, the way I look at it, there's an old saying that nobody cares about what you know until they know you care.
And I think that's what really distinguishes the libertarian movement is that we really care about what's happening in our country and what's happening to people around the world and what the U.S. government's doing to destroy people, destroy our country.
And what we're really fighting for is not just for ourselves.
Yeah, we wanna live in a free society, a genuinely free society, not the foes free society that we've taught that we live in, but we really care.
We care about our country.
We care about our families.
We care about this.
And so we have a different vision than most people.
Now there's an overlap.
I mean, some leftists are very good on the anti-empire national security state issue.
We link to their articles periodically in our FFF daily publication.
There's people on the right that are good on certain issues, economic liberty, free markets, and so forth.
But it's really just the libertarians that have the consistency of philosophy.
I was just telling somebody last night, I said, you know, when I first discovered libertarianism, I was reading stuff from the National Review and the Birch Society, and I found it mildly attractive, but I realized that there's contradictions, there's inconsistencies in conservatism as well as liberalism.
And it's only libertarians that have this consistency.
And I think whose policies really reflect how much they care.
For example, you know, okay, I know we don't have time to get into the open borders position, but here liberals say, we love the poor, we love the needy.
And yet they have this immigration policies that jails people, that deports people who are just trying to work for a living.
Libertarians, our philosophy is consistent.
We care about people.
We care about people at the bottom of the economic ladder, and our position of open borders, for example, reflects that.
It's also reflected in our anti-interventionist position.
Now, how can you say you love the poor when you support a government that's out bombing and killing people, most of whom are poor?
I mean, most of the people in Iraq who were killed and had their homes bombed and destroyed were poor.
Those wedding parties that were bombed in Afghanistan repeatedly, where brides were killed and flower girls were killed, those are poor people.
That's where I think the libertarians are really, to me, the guiding light of this country, because our philosophy reflects our care, the way we care about people.
Yeah, we've been making fun on Twitter of liberals and progressives and leftists.
Hey guys, look, some of the people being genocided to death in Yemen right now are transsexual, and they're all people of color, and some of them are even gay.
And I heard somewhere that Trump called them a bad name while he was starving them to death, murdering them with cholera, helping the Saudis in a war that is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in this horrible war that he inherited from Obama.
But like, yeah, I heard he called someone the N-word while he was doing it.
What does it take to get you to care about this?
And honestly, I don't know what the, I mean, I do understand, as Dave Smith, the great comedian Dave Smith was saying, that if they attack Trump for the wars too much, then that really reflects bad on Obama, because Trump got all his wars from Obama.
And I understand that.
They were silent for eight years.
And I don't mean the leftists, but the progressives and the liberals were silent for eight years, so now they're kind of embarrassed.
They gotta slink back to the anti-war movement somehow.
And I understand that.
But seriously, right now, what's going on in Yemen, I mean, it's sort of like the thing in Libya.
Nobody even knows or cares, and yet in Libya, you didn't have these kind of casualties.
You didn't have a full-scale blockade for two and a half years like we've had against the people of Yemen, which at one time is the oldest society in the Middle East, 5,000 years old, unconquered, same civilization there, and then also is the poorest country in the Middle East, partially because of Western, European, and American intervention previously.
But, you know, yeah, talk about consistency.
The leftists are good on this.
The leftists hate the empire no matter what.
They're pro starvation, but not when it's America and Saudi doing it.
But nobody else seems to care.
The liberals don't seem to care, and the right-wingers don't seem to care at all.
No, I mean, your point is absolutely well taken.
I mean, Yemen, it's a horror story.
And all those people that are being killed and starved, they're poor people because everybody in Yemen's poor.
And yet there seems to be an indifference among the left and the right.
Where are the protests?
Where are the demonstrations?
You don't see them.
And I think your point's very well taken that they supported this under Obama.
The only reason they're upset with Trump is that he's getting to run their wars rather than Hillary Clinton running their wars.
But they're not questioning the paradigm itself, and that is the killing of these people through massive U.S. foreign interventionism.
And then, mark my words, the first time that there's a terrorist retaliatory strike from some Yemeni here in the United States that says, here, now take this, they're gonna say, oh, he's attacking because of our freedom and values.
Nobody's gonna wanna hear.
No, it's because the U.S. is directly involved in the massive killing of innocent people in Yemen.
I mean, and directly, of course, through the support of the Saudi dictatorship.
So it all's gotta just stop.
The support of the dictatorship, the stopping of the foreign aid.
Is it possible that Saudi Arabia might still be attacking Yemen?
Yeah, but at least our government wouldn't be part of it.
And that's the difference, is that you have a non-interventionist foreign policy and you have a government that lacks the means to engage in this foreign interventionism.
Well, and by the way, you mentioned earlier the attempted Detroit attack, the underpants bomber who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.
Well, that was six weeks after Obama started his drone war in Yemen.
And then they went, oh my God, now we have to begin intervening over there.
Well, no, Obama had already started bombing them at the beginning of November, 2009.
And so, yeah, anyway, if you read antiwar.com every day, you knew that, but otherwise, nope.
And so all of a sudden, oh my God, look, the Yemeni al-Qaeda attacked us for no reason on Christmas.
Boy, they must hate Jesus, which I have to go back to this.
I just, you know what, and I hate reacting to the Trump said something outrageous thing of the day because almost all of them are stupid and things like that just don't work on me.
You know, I just, I care about the issues and I got my priorities straight.
But his tweet today where he retweeted some kook smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary, which I didn't listen.
I don't even know if it had a translation on it, but I'm sure this one guy is just one guy anyway, whoever the hell he is.
And it's probably about idolatry and not about the Virgin Mary because as we know, Muslims believe in the same God of the Hebrews and of the Christians too.
And they revere not just Jesus as a prophet, but they revere his mother too.
And I think they even believe she was a virgin.
I'm not certain about that point.
But anyway, like they certainly are not blasphemous against Christianity.
And what Trump is doing there is just like Osama says to his people, he goes, they hate us because we're Muslims.
They wanna kill us because we're Muslims.
It's not just that they want the oil, it's that we have it and they hate us above all for what we believe, for our faith.
And that's what Donald Trump is doing, is telling the American people, they don't just hate you because you're free.
They hate you because you revere the Virgin Mary.
Ah, how do you like that?
And so, and there are a certain number of people as George W. Bush used to say, or at least said one time, you can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones you wanna concentrate on.
And that's what Donald Trump is doing with this.
And that to me is just so dangerous.
And you think about how bad it's been 16 years or 25 years of this, you know, terror war against the Middle East and how much worse it could get, you know, starting right now, in fact.
Oh yeah, there's nothing, I mean, Trump's leading toward war with Iran.
He's leading toward war with North Korea.
Things could get really, really bad.
And let's keep in mind, Scott, that this anti-Muslim mindset is a new phenomenon.
If you go back to 1989 and before, the official bugaboo was communists.
And you just substitute the word Muslim for communists and everybody was, oh, the communists are coming to get us.
The communists are godless.
The communists hate Christianity.
You always, the empire always needs an official enemy to get people riled up.
And you never heard a word about Muslims.
From 1945 to 1989, you never heard one single negative word about Muslims.
This is a new phenomenon.
They needed a new official enemy when communism semi-disappeared.
I mean, they still have Cuba and North Korea and so forth.
But like when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, who was combining with the radical extremist Muslim crowds to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan?
It was the U.S. government and the CIA with Osama bin Laden or at least his cohorts.
I mean, that was the seeds of Al-Qaeda, the U.S. support of these extremist groups.
And I think it was Brzezinski that, when they asked him, aren't you planting the seeds for extremist Muslims here by engaging in this war against the Soviet occupation?
And he said something like, oh, well, what do we worry about a few radical Muslims compared to giving the Soviets their own Vietnam here?
Well, I wonder what he thought on 9-11.
So yeah, there's absolutely no reason why Christians can't live with Muslims.
Look, here in the United States, Christians have lived with Muslims for, what, 300, 200 and something years.
It's the U.S. foreign policy that is the root of the problem.
When you go abroad and you start killing Muslim children, like in Iraq, there's a good possibility the people who retaliate against you are gonna be Muslims.
That's the root of the problem.
Not Muslim, U.S. interventionism.
All right, now, before I let you go, I wanna let you talk about this article here real quick.
It's a really great one.
What good are domestic military bases?
And let me just speak for everybody.
Jacob, if you close my military base that's near my town, it's gonna destroy my town.
And our economy depends on these military bases to funnel this federal money into our state.
And what would we ever do without them?
Okay, now, you go.
Yeah, that's the mindset, that they've become like welfare-dependent wards of the federal government, all these cities that feel like, oh, they're dependent on these military bases.
But look, we never asked, okay, if we dismantle the foreign military empire, it's a no-brainer.
You close all those bases, you abandon them, including Guantanamo, you just bring all the troops home.
And you discharge them.
You don't need them because you're not engaged in foreign interventionism anymore.
But then you gotta ask yourself, what do you need all these domestic military bases for?
I mean, to a large extent, they operate in support of the foreign military empire.
And so if you don't have the foreign military empire anymore, you can close all those bases.
And as you point out, there's the economic argument.
Oh, our city depends on this.
Well, it's actually a double positive effect by closing them in terms of society, because not only do Americans now can keep the money from being taken from them by the IRS that goes to fund these things, because that's how they get funded, through taxation.
So now you have Americans now being able to keep their own money, but you have the other doubly positive effect that all the soldiers are now no longer drainers on society.
They're in the private sector producing wealth.
So it's a doubly positive effect.
Now, could it impact a particular city?
Of course, but we're talking about what's in the interest of our country.
Now, let me give you a real life example of this phenomenon of being dependent on a military base.
I grew up in Laredo, Texas.
We had an Air Force base there, trained pilots.
As soon as they got out of ROTC, this was their first pilot training base that they would go to, one of them in the country.
And when Nixon got in, people were, they were closing some of the bases.
You know, Vietnam was winding down and they reminded him that Laredo had gone Democrat.
So he says, well, close the base there.
And there were all these predictions of, oh, Laredo's gonna die.
It's gonna be a catastrophe.
They closed the base, Scott, and within a very short period of time, Laredo became one of the most dynamically economic societies in the country.
And it's still going on to this day.
Dynamism, economy, prosperity, trade with Mexico and so forth.
The best thing that ever happened to Laredo was the closing of the base.
And I think this would happen all across America.
You've got all these bars that orient around deals, just seedy parts of town that orient around the soldiers.
I think you'd see a vitalization in this country that boggles the mind by closing the bases and terminating the taxes and discharging the soldiers into the private sector where they become productive members.
This is one of the keys to economic vitality and prosperity.
Yeah, you know what?
As far as all the seen and unseen and all the productivity, it's funny, because you think about the military, especially, it's all very able-bodied people, right?
It's not like they're all just gonna be bums.
They can find very productive things to do.
And especially think about all of the mental capital blown on designing weapons.
It sounds like a fantasy world to just think of America as a normal country in a normal time that recognizes that if you count all the continents on your fingers, we have no enemies anywhere in the world, and we could just be happy and as free as possible for as long as possible and make that our priority and everything would be great.
And think about all the nuclear weapons scientists and all of the howitzer designers and everybody in there spending all of their brains working on coming up with new and fancier and more expensive ways of killing people who could otherwise be on the market designing ways of distributing goods and services to people who need them.
And just, you know what I mean?
So it's not just that they're getting paid to do the wrong thing.
It's that we are being deprived of the benefits of all of the great work that they could be doing instead.
But people just can't imagine the gap between here and there.
I think I've asked you this before.
Okay, if I was the president and I just abolished the Pentagon and I had a bulletproof suit so no one could assassinate me or anything, and I just got rid of all of these bastards and told them get a real job, people would panic, right?
Everyone would say, and I probably would, I would cause a Great Depression, right?
The stock market would crash.
Lockheed would go bankrupt.
Everything would be horrible for how long?
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
For how long though?
I mean, you've told me before, now you don't think it'll be a problem, but wouldn't that cause a Great Depression?
It's the Great Deformation as David Stockman called it, right?
All this militarism, all of the, isn't it one big bubble in weapons development?
So what would happen if we had a real correction?
Well, there obviously would be a depression in the arms industry, but people shift.
I mean, this is the, whenever you have a society, even just a total free market society, you have businesses going out of business because consumer shifts taste shift.
And so people shift into new careers.
All those people in the armaments business, they would find jobs because there'd be all this economic opportunity from people now having to keep their own money and disposing of it the way they want.
That creates new job opportunities in sectors that didn't exist before.
The soldiers are now producing things.
That creates opportunities.
So it's an economically positive thing.
I mean, we noticed that after the wars that all of a sudden there's a huge dismantling of soldiers that are moved into the private sector.
It creates prosperity.
It's not a drain on prosperity.
In the time we have left, I would like to say something about your book because we're getting to review it.
Your book is fantastic, Fool's Aaron.
I would advise everybody to get it.
It's on the whole history of interventionism in Afghanistan.
It's a tour de force, and you've done a real credit to the movement.
And I just would be remiss if I didn't promote your book for you here on the air.
Well, thanks very much, Jacob.
I appreciate that.
So are you writing about it then?
Well, I've got a guy writing on it.
I'm not sure.
It's on my list of things to do.
It's just, I've got so many other things, projects I'm working on, but we have commissioned somebody to do a review for our publication, Future of Freedom, and I'm sure at some point I'm gonna get around to reviewing your book too.
Great, well, yeah.
I mean, there'll be plenty of bad news out of Afghanistan to cover and write about on your blog there.
Yeah, but what you've done is just a real service to America to put it all together here.
It's fantastic.
Awesome, well, thanks very much for saying so.
I appreciate that.
All right, welcome.
Thanks for having me on the show.
All right, you guys.
You heard him, that's the great Jacob Hornberger.
Appreciate it, man.
Hey, thank you, Scott.
See ya.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys, fff.org.
Fff.org/blog virtually every day.
I think he writes five, six times a week or something over there.
We run a hell of a lot of it at antiwar.com.
I know that for sure.
And at the Libertarian Institute as well.
Fff.org, the Libertarian, no, the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Hey, I can't keep things straight.
You know me.
ScottHorton.org, FoolsAaron.us for the book.
Buy my book.
And antiwar.com and LibertarianInstitute.org for the articles I want you to read.
Thanks, you guys.
