01/07/16 – Daniel McAdams – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, listen, next up is our friend Dan McAdams.
He is the leader – I forgot the exact name of it – director, I guess, of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Welcome back to the show, Dan.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
How are you doing?
It's great to be with you.
Good, good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And I always love reading you attack the neocons because you're good at it and they're horrible and really deserve it.
This one is called Neocons at National Review.
Stop calling us neocons.
Quite an apt paraphrase there of this piece.
And there's been a few like this.
I think we talked about this on the show.
I certainly was tweeting about this back a few weeks ago.
Some lady wrote one a lot like this.
This one is Jonah Goldberg himself, the editor.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
He is the editor of National Review, right?
I believe he is indeed, one of the editors.
And he's written this piece.
The term neocon has run its course.
All kinds of stuff in this pretty brief article.
He just goes – is very well organized just from one excuse to the next.
Why, I think as you put it, there's nothing to see here.
Why don't you take us through it?
Well, yeah, it was – I mean I was inspired to write it because my old colleague Jeff Dice at the Mises Institute now had a little tweet saying, hey, no, you guys are not going to get away with this one.
And I thought it would be kind of funny to expand on what Jonah wrote.
But it's just hilarious.
It's like a kid who breaks something and then mom comes in.
He says, don't blame me.
I didn't do it.
He goes through, as you point out, point after point after point to try to painstakingly tell us how the neocons aren't responsible.
They're not interested in foreign policy anyway.
It's not their fault the Iraq war went bad and so on and so on.
And by the way, if you insist on calling us that, you're actually just a bunch of antisemites anyway.
So that's how it ended up.
So it was just a little bit of fun to take that apart and actually a little bit melancholy because I'll make a confession here.
Back in the 90s, I used to read National Review and whether I agreed with everything or not, at least things were solidly put together.
They were well argued.
There was some erudition.
There were some people that had some good educations and great writers.
And when you look at something like that today, it's just a shame how far it's fallen.
Yeah.
I mean, this is more or less a listicle of all the reasons why leave me alone or something like that.
But and OK, so we should say for everybody who's not in the know about this, the National Review, of course, their primary sin above all sins is their hectoring of America into the Iraq war.
I mean, outside of actual power, but in terms of media power, there was no force stronger than the National Review in corralling the entire conservative movement.
And in fact, explicitly attacking anyone who dared to call themselves a conservative and oppose so-called preemptive aggressive invasion of Iraq back in 2002 and 2003.
I remember that terrific.
Was it a I think it was a cover story where they read all of these people out of the conservative movement.
Justin Raimondo, Lou Rockwell, everyone.
It was a it was a classic Stalinist purge that they tried to pull off because they weren't enthusiastic about this Iraq war.
And then when it went sour, this is what Jonah wrote in his piece.
Hey, guys, it's not fair just because we supported it.
A lot of other people supported it, too.
We're just getting the blame because they turned against it before we did or they turned against it and we did it.
So which is such a lie.
I mean, you could only get away with telling a millennial that or something because he's got to rely on secondhand sources.
But for anybody who was around then, the march to war in Iraq was led by the president, the vice president and the neocon fifth column inside the Defense Department, State Department and the National Review.
I mean, that was they led the parade.
They caught everybody else kind of unaware.
People looking around, shrugging and going, well, OK, I guess we're climbing on board for this.
That was the rest of the conservative movement.
You know, Dan, I always think I'm talking over your interview.
But I always think of that one valuable clip probably out of all of Fahrenheit 9-11 where there's this kind of low level state level Republican Party.
Nobody saying, yeah, this is going to be really good for business and all that.
And the way more spun it was that this was what was behind the war.
But to me, it couldn't be a clearer example of the Republican rank and file, all the country club guys, all the guys who are members of the local parties and whatever across the country just trying to figure out what's going on here and how can they get in on it.
But the idea that it was their consensus that pushed the thing forward.
Come on.
Well, as you know, you know, Scott, and I'm sure all your listeners know that these plans work.
They had them in their back pocket for four years and years before then.
They had it in their back pocket probably since 1991 when Papa Bush didn't go into Baghdad.
This was all planned.
They were just looking for an example or an opportunity, which they've already admitted they needed a Pearl Harbor like event.
And they were also looking for a basically a simpleton in office that they could railroad into doing this.
And I think they've probably found that in George W. Bush.
I think in Cheney, too.
Cheney.
You know, he's such a son of a bitch that people assume he's smart, but those things don't necessarily go together.
No, ruthless, I think, would be more like it.
And look, his evil spawn still is infiltrated the government.
Look at people like Victoria Nuland, who used to work for him in the Bush administration.
Now she's a big shot covering Europe for the State Department in the Obama administration.
How do these people survive in these positions when supposedly we changed governments and changed foreign policy to the Nobel Peace Prize foreign policy?
Yeah, it was Hillary who kept her and left her to us.
And how clever are they, too, with things like this John Hay initiative and others?
They set up these organizations that help school the candidates who are otherwise pretty dumb in foreign policy.
They don't have a lot of experience.
And so they'll say, hey, guys, we've got a whole coterie of experts.
We're going to tell you we're going to school you in all this stuff.
And these are the facts.
And you look and it's chock full of neocons.
And, you know, they're still considered experts.
That's what I find so puzzling, Scott.
You know, you and Lou Rockwell, Raimondo, everyone, we've got all of these things right over the years.
And yet somehow the guys who get it wrong are the experts.
Can you imagine?
In what other field could you be wrong all the time and still be considered an expert?
Yeah.
I mean, well, the problem is, is the only people really interested in foreign policy, other than the few of us who are obsessed with opposing it all day, every day.
The only other people who are interested are people who have a stake in the game.
And if they have a quibble, it's that they want to bomb this country.
Not that one or not that one yet.
Not until they bomb this one first or whatever.
So there's not much of a place for a hearing for people who are saying just knock it off.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's where the big bucks are.
You know, we scramble at the Institute for a couple of dollars.
I know you all scramble.
There's just not people writing multibillion dollar checks for people opposing war.
All the money is in war.
All the think tanks are so well funded by Lockheed Martin and all the war machine.
You know, there's huge profit in it.
So that's where they go.
All right.
Now.
And so as far as the neocons and what made them special, it was it was the Iraq War.
I mean, they're part of the conservative movement.
And as you say, they had a history of reading people out of it.
Not just not just right before the Iraq War, but previous to that as well.
But, you know, they were the champions of the Iraq War above, you know, even the president or any other faction in the country.
And, you know, they were the ones who sold every different point from the bogus weapons and the bogus connections to Osama bin Laden, as well as all the, you know, fantastic democracy and, you know, regional transformation that was going to take place and all these kinds of things.
And there's just no denying that it was the neocon think tanks.
And then, you know, in the publications, the National Review, the Weekly Standard.
And, of course, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages that that led this march.
And they've been identified as such for so long.
I can see why, especially with all the current events, why Jonah Goldberg wants out from under this label.
But we're not going to let him out from under this label.
Dan McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
More after this.
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Hey, all Scott here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
I swear to God right now, I'm discussing Star Wars on Twitter with Richard Nixon.
What a great life I have.
I'm talking with the great Dan McAdams.
Speaking of greatness, Dan McAdams and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
There's a think tank I can get behind.
Ron Paul Institute and hit the wrong button there.
We're talking about this great thing that he wrote for I don't know who all I'm sure the Ron Paul Institute site.
It's also running today as a viewpoint and on the blog at antiwar dot com.
Neocons at National Review.
Stop calling us neocons.
And yeah, well, the guilty don't like being guilty.
But yeah, you're right.
It's a funny kind of thing, because everybody who's really good on everything they're bad on and also really good on how bad they are, are people who are, even if we were really trying, completely excluded from the discussion.
And so who's there to talk about the wars every week, week after week?
It's just Bill Crystal and all his doppelgangers at National Review, which is the same thing as a weekly standard anyway.
And and these same clowns and it's, you know, the question, what are they going to do?
Have Eric Margulies on every Sunday morning on these shows or whatever?
They can't do that.
That's way too far off the narrative.
And so the very same people who got every single thing wrong are still the very same people in charge of the entire debate.
And all of them, I mean, Elliot Ambrams and all of them, the ones in the government and out the neocons.
Yeah, they still they still run things out.
Now, Scott, you mentioned earlier the Iraq war, and I'm sure you could go people could go as far back as they wanted to talk about neocons.
But I really like to think about the beginning of neocon power is in the early part of the Reagan administration, where he agreed to allow the neocons around him to form the National Endowment for Democracy to, as all your listeners know, to do in the open what the CIA once did in secret, i.e. overthrow governments and regime change.
And of course, this was all offered under the guise of the great struggle against the Soviet Union and the red menace.
We've got to overthrow regimes.
We've got to support democracy movements overseas.
But what it really was was is a sort of a Trotskyite inversion of the red menace.
You know, the idea that there is an end all there is an exceptional nation that must push its ideology on the rest of the world.
And it's not surprising that after the Soviet Union is over, the NED people, the regime changers are stronger than ever.
And they have sort of become the new USSR.
You've got to – you've got to abide by our standards of democracy or we will overthrow you, blow up your country and kill all your people.
This is the real decay of – that the neocons have caused in the world and has destroyed any moral standing we would have.
The rest of the world thinks we're a bunch of hypocrites and they're right.
Yeah.
Well, and even according to their idealistic version, yeah, they're the reds with their own domino theory about how once they fix everything here, it's going to spread those positive changes elsewhere as we export world revolution.
There's a great clip somewhere.
I don't think I have it queued up anywhere.
But it's from a movie called World War IV that was made by a guy who had helped Bush run for president the first time back in 2000.
And he interviewed Michael Ledeen and he says, well, I don't understand then how come you guys are called conservatives since you're revolutionaries?
And Ledeen says, yeah, I know.
I don't see what's conservative about it whatsoever.
Yeah, I want to turn the entire world upside down.
That's right.
But faster please is his motto, isn't it?
Yeah, the boiling cauldron too.
But, you know, the other thing that Jonah does in his piece, which is I think is so tired and overdone is this whole idea.
And he likes to make a joke out of it.
But really, it's his detractors.
Those that do not approve of this policy of neoconservatism are actually that's just cover for their antisemitism.
You know, he even uses, I think, an offensive word, suspiciously Hebraic super hawks.
You know, and it seems to me that the neoconservatives are more obsessed with this Jewish question than the critics of neoconservatism.
You know, the some of the strongest neoconservatives are Catholics or Protestants or others, you know, or Muslims, what have you.
You know, but there's this obsession.
It's I guess it's a way to silence dissent.
Well, and so many of their strongest critics are Jews.
I mean, look at Jim Loeb and Phil Weiss and a million others like that, too.
Absolutely.
And the real obsession with Israel, I would argue, probably is not among American Jews who probably by and large are pretty apathetic, but really is among the Christian Zionists and the whole evangelical movement.
So is it antisemitic to criticize Christian Zionists?
You know, it's it's it becomes actually quite humorous.
Yeah, well, and it's true that Jewishness has something to do with the neoconservative movement in the same way it has a lot to do with the libertarian movement, too, which is that a lot of Catholics and Jews, middle class and upper middle class intellectual Catholics and Jews who were not welcome in the old halls of WASP power challenged it.
And they're kind of, you know, Angela Keaton has taught me a lot about this, how back in the 1970s, the libertarian movement and the neocons were kind of, you know, evil twins of each other sort of a thing where they agreed on welfare reform and some of these things and found some common cause.
But the the neoconservatives, of course, were obsessed with power and the libertarians were obsessed with destroying it, or at least certainly not in participating in it.
So, of course, they got the upper hand.
But the fact that the identity of the people involved were Catholics and Jews was, you know, part of the story.
It was part of the story of why they hadn't been allowed into power previously.
But it doesn't mean that, oh, therefore, the pope tells them what to do or it's all about Zionism necessarily, et cetera.
It's like, as Dr. Paul says, you know, this obsession with seeing people as groups rather than as individuals.
You know, and it's I guess there's some they seek safety in some of that.
But it's it's it's a pretty intellectually vapid argument, I think.
And now, on the other hand, you call yourself a libertarian or you call yourself a neocon and you join up a group in a real way, then that's different.
And so for somebody like Jonah Goldberg to deny there's such a thing when in the same, as you point out in your piece here, he even says, hey, other neocons, stop calling us that.
At the same time, he's saying you must be an anti-Semite, McAdams, for calling them that.
Yeah, I know.
And the thing that I thought was particularly hilarious is is how he closes it.
The right is having a long overdue and valuable argument about how to conduct foreign policy.
Keep it going.
Just leave neoconservatism out of it.
And it reminds me of the way the U.S. government negotiates overseas.
Let's sit down and have a diplomatic talk.
OK, here are the things you have to accept as best.
You know, before we can even sit down, you've got to you've got to step down from power.
You got to do this.
You got to do that.
It sort of reminds me of how the U.S. does it.
So we have to accept all the precepts of neoconservatism before we can start a debate.
Right.
Yeah.
And never even bother asking why or why the people promoting any particular policy would do so.
Even though, of course, all of these things are based on the consensus of different interest groups and factions coming together to make them happen.
I mean, that's politics.
What are we talking about here?
And sadly, you do have to, to a degree, blame some of the braindead Americans who get their news exclusively from the television or the newspapers.
And, you know, you mentioned earlier, you know, having Eric Margulies on one of the main shows.
I think that would be terrific.
Sadly, though, Americans have been so attuned to the idea that you have to have a soundbite and something particularly masculine and aggressive that when Eric started giving you some rich history of an area, I'm afraid most Americans would start texting or God knows what they'd be doing.
So they sort of reached a point where people don't even want to know these details.
They just want to bomb places.
Yeah, no, it's true.
I mean, and I've been complaining about this.
It's worth bringing up on the show.
This is the reaction of a lot of regular Joe's serious people, not all Trump voters, just regular people's reaction to the Paris attack was, well, man, maybe we do just have to kill all of them.
Because apparently this just isn't going to stop until we do that.
And they have no room in their imagination to come up with other explanations for what might be the problem, other than who they are and or what could be done about it other than just kill them.
Because on the face of it, hey, look, here we are years into this and the problem is still there.
And I'm tired of still having the problem.
And that's what they're left to believe.
Right.
That's what George Carlin would say.
These are the kinds of conclusions people are left to make from the information they're given.
Exactly.
And remember when we everyone said we have to we have to go to war against ISIS, the worst threat in the history of the world.
And so many people said, hey, Ron Paul, I'm with you on this, this thing.
But this is an exception.
We've got to go and take them out.
And look, a year later, there's more of them than ever.
Nobody wants to question what what inspires them, what causes them to swell their ranks.
You know, the idea that you can use bombs to solve what were created by bombs in the first place is just so absurd.
But, you know, hopefully people will start listening to your show and others and start waking up a little more.
Well, I think they are noticing that it's the Kagan's and it's, you know, Bill Kristol and it's the neocons.
The very same neocons are the ones for ground troops and reinvasion.
And even Cruz is smart enough to directly label him neocons and distance himself from their insanity.
So there is progress being made here.
And no small part.
Thanks to you, Dan.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you.
That's the great Dan McAdams, y'all.
Ron Paul Institute.
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