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 scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got Dan McKnight from bringourtroopshome.us.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Dan?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Very happy to have you here.
We've got a lot in the news, but first and foremost would be the Afghanistan peace deal or withdrawal deal, I don't know if there's any peace to be had, some kind of deal.
And you guys put this press release out, we republished it at the antiwar.com blog, Veterans Group praises Trump peace agreement chides Chicken Hawk Cheney.
So first of all, let's talk about the peace deal, the agreement as signed by the Americans and the Taliban and what you think of it there.
Sure.
I'm excited about it.
It's fragile.
I understand that.
And it's precarious at best, but it gives a little bit of hope.
It's nice to see a president not cut and run on the agreement when the first little wrinkle happened in the last 48 hours when some Taliban forces attacked some Afghan nationals and we were called in with air support to aid the Afghan nationals.
That could have been the end of the deal right there.
But I think President Trump once again showed restraint and a true desire to get out of Afghanistan by saying, get back to the table.
The deal is still on.
We're not going to let this one incident, incident kill the deal.
Yeah, he even, I guess, had an hour long or what, 35 minute long conversation with one of the Taliban leaders and said it was great.
And I saw where people criticize him for that.
It's sort of like when they criticize him for playing down the TBI or the guys that, you know, from the Iranian missile strike in Iraq, and it's like, well, it's better than playing it up.
You know what I mean?
And then, you know, being painting himself into a corner where now he has to fight more.
So in this case, he's playing it down.
But what would you rather have him do?
Kill the deal?
Let him play it down.
Right?
Imagine if we would have had a commander in chief back in 2001, who would have sat down with the leaders of the Taliban when they first came to us and offered us Osama bin Laden in exchange for us not attacking their country.
We could have avoided 19 years of war if an executive would have showed a little bit of restraint and not hid behind the mantra that we do not negotiate with terrorists.
Well, if you don't negotiate with your enemies, who the hell do you negotiate with?
Yeah.
You can't negotiate peace with with your allies.
That's not how it works.
I mean, even if they had done the original war, but just after the first couple of months, they had accepted the Taliban surrender because they did surrender.
They couldn't negotiate it then.
I think that's such an important point, too.
And I'm really not being selfish about this.
It's for the larger public that if it's right to go ahead and end the war now without having defeated the Taliban and remade Afghanistan the way that we wanted, then it was right to this whole time.
And it was wrong to keep this going the whole time.
And if we had the same conversation in 2015 or in 2009 or in 2005, we shouldn't have done this.
And the fact that we're doing it now and that nobody says, oh, we should send 400,000 men in there and that'll pacify that place.
No one's arguing that there's some path to victory here.
Even the worst hawks say, well, we just have to keep Bagram forever or something.
But that means that all along, the whole project was bankrupt.
And everybody who said that we shouldn't even be trying it was right all along.
And everybody who said, no, we have to stay, no, we can't go yet, no, we're almost done.
Yeah.
What about women's rights, et cetera, et cetera, this whole time?
They've been wrong this whole time for 20 years.
Sure.
And it was like, you know, Douglas Lute, the three star Army general who was the White House Afghan war czar even said, we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.
We did not know what we were doing.
Yeah.
If the man that was in charge of the war is saying that, yet the neoconservative interventionist, you know, neolibs and neocons like Lindsey Graham and Liz Cheney and Dan Crenshaw, if they're willing to come out and say we should stay there, not indefinitely, but forever, where's their position?
Where does that come from?
Lindsey Graham served in the judge advocate as a judge advocate attorney that gives him the right to tell us we need to stay in Afghanistan forever.
Yeah.
Now, let's let's listen to the people that know we've made the mistakes.
Let's just listen to the people that had skin in the game.
The ones that are they're called on to actually wage the war.
Let's listen to what they have to say.
You know, General Lada just came out on Fox News the other day, and he was second in command in Afghanistan.
And he's saying it's time to come home.
It's time.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you about Crenshaw, because he said a little bit of skin in the game, so he can.
He lost an eye over there somehow or something, I don't know.
So he gets to have his opinion.
And I saw a thing where I actually didn't hear it, but it was a write up of it that he did this interview on Charlie Kirk's show, the young conservative activist, and that he said the way that our leaders have served us wrong here or done a poor job here is that they told us that we would have victory.
But the mission was never victory.
The mission was always, of course, this place is a hellhole and it's going to stay a hellhole, but we are going to hang on to the Bagram Air Base so that we can kill people nearby that we want to kill from it.
Simple as that.
Safe haven myth.
We can't allow Afghanistan to be a place where people can gather out of range of our ability to reach out and touch them.
And so then that's it.
We're staying at Bagram.
And I don't think he really addressed what of the Kabul government and the civil war or any of that.
But, you know, he just kind of says that's off to the side and besides a point.
But that where Bush and Obama and all of these generals have served us wrong wasn't promising us any better outcome than simply keeping a base in the midst of the chaos.
So what do you think about that?
Maybe that's a good strategy.
Keeping a base in the middle of that place, it will do nothing but create this continued insurgency.
It creates a perpetual need for war.
We are creating an enemy out of our own hubris and empire building in the state of our nation is one that we feel like we are the moral authority for the world.
And I'm sorry, that's not our position.
You know, after World War One, we stayed out of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations because we had bold senators who stood up in the Senate and refused to sign that peace treaty because it would put us in a state of perpetual war because we'd be called on to defend our allies' interests regardless of whether there was an American interest or not.
And so our confidence and hubris in the world that we are this moral authority is what people are hanging their hat on.
You know, there's so many things wrong in the world that deserve attention from the good guys, but we don't do it because we can't spread ourselves that thin.
And we're getting to a point with Crenshaw and Cheney and Lindsey Graham and folks like that that want us in every conflict around the world.
They want us building our nation and our strength all across the continent of Africa, Central America, South America, hell, Antarctica probably next.
Let's colonize Antarctica, send our military to fight the polar bears.
I mean, it's ridiculous what they want us to do in the name of American exceptionalism, which is something I believe in.
But let's be exceptional here.
Let's lead from America.
Let's not defend these hellholes across the third world country.
Yeah.
Well, this is one of the real problems with the Afghan war that, you know, T.V. will mention this from time to time, but it's certainly not the dominant narrative.
And that is that the people that our government is backing in power there are not good guys.
Absolutely.
They're just warlords.
They're Mujahideen of different factions and different flavors than the Taliban.
But all along, you know, if you listen closely, you have, you know, non-commissioned officer types saying, man, this is crazy.
I can't believe that my job is protecting this guy as the governor in power in this province, or protecting the mayor of this town or this police chief when all he does all day long is commit crimes against his people.
And my job is to keep him safe from them.
I mean, this is nuts.
Yeah, that reminds me, you know, the story of, you know, Marine Sergeant Ben Adams, who was the watch commander the night that a T-boy in Afghanistan, and we all know who the T-boy is.
We don't need to go too deep into that.
But they're children that are held as sex slaves to these warlords and provincial governors.
And Sergeant Adams was the watch commander that night, and he was in charge of security and monitoring the radio when a call came through that one of these T-boys had gotten a hold of an AK-47 and had attacked United States Marines because he saw them as protectors of the man who was abusing him and his friends.
And shot and killed, shot four Marines, killed three of them.
And Sergeant Adams, who lives here in Idaho, was the man in charge of the nine line medivac and in getting the blade spinning and sending the helicopters out to recover his fallen brethren.
And that that that episode is stuck and haunted him for a long time.
It's taken a while to speak out about it, but he's finally done so.
And he's coming out now saying that it's not our job to prop up the pedophile culture in a nation that supports that type of immoral and inhuman activity.
And you know, Ben's finally doing something about it.
Ben today at 1 p.m.
Mountain Standard is actually going down to the Idaho Capitol building to announce his candidacy as a as for the Idaho state legislature, where he's going to be running on a non-interventionist states, right?
Tenth Amendment platform, trying to wrangle the power from the from the federal government back to the states to keep our National Guardsmen from going and fighting these perpetual wars.
Yeah, I know that story.
It's in the book there, those Marines, and that's happened more than a couple of times in the in the space of the 20 years there.
So wow, I didn't realize that you knew that guy and everything.
And now he's an anti-war guy.
That's really great to hear the guy in charge there.
And I always thought I can't imagine you sign your boy up for the Marine Corps, and that's how he dies, is that he actually was serving as the bodyguard for this criminal in a, you know, very literal sense.
And that kid had the right to kill his enslavers bodyguards, you know, like, sorry, that's the position that Barack Obama put your son in.
And you kind of helped him.
And that is a hell of a pill to swallow.
And you sign up under some myth that you're going to be meeting the Wehrmacht out in the field somewhere, something like that.
Everyone you'll come in contact with is a combatant, and that you have every right to engage.
And then the reality instead is, wait, my guys got shot in the back by who again?
Wait, what?
Oh, yeah, that's America's war in Afghanistan.
It's a little different than they sold me in the commercial there where I get to, you know, march around with a sword in my dress uniform all day looking handsome and stuff.
Right.
Yeah.
There's I don't think anybody in the military decided they wanted to join so they could go and prop up a pedophile culture or defend opium fields or any of the other things that we're asked to do in Afghanistan, build water tower facilities or pave roads.
Nobody signed up for that garbage.
Hey, I'll check it out.
The Libertarian Institute.
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Hey y'all, Scott here.
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All right.
So now you mentioned this guy is running as a 10th amendment guy.
You didn't mention as a Republican, but I think that clearly fits in what you're saying there.
The implication, and that ties in with what your group is doing.
You have this alliance, bringourtroopshome.us, you have this alliance with the Young Americans for Liberty, which is the Ron Paulian founded group there.
And I don't know who all else, I sure don't want to exclude anyone else that you're working with here.
And you guys are pushing and you are succeeding in getting Republican state legislators to introduce these defend the guard bills.
So I would like for you to tell the audience everything you can think of to say about that.
Absolutely.
Defend the guard, it's a bill and essentially in a nutshell, what it says is that the national guards of the states, or what was referred to in the constitution as the militias of the states, shall not be deployed or turned over to federal service to deploy and fight in overseas combat or war operations unless Congress has first done their job and declared war.
Basically, it's telling the states or having the, we know what the states have the authority on their 10th amendment, that anything that's not expressly given to the federal government in the constitution, that power resides in the state closest to the people where it should be.
And this is a big push to, to basically re to support what's in the constitution.
We're not changing the constitution.
We're not adding to it.
We're simply supporting it from a state level.
And the national guard has been used as the easy button in these, uh, these endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Yemen.
And it's not the role of the national guard.
The national guard has a fourfold mission and that is to repel an invasion.
That is to put down an insurrection.
It's to enforce the laws of the land and it's to help in a time of national emergency.
And right now in Syria, the largest contingency of American soldiers in Syria, where we have an undeclared war going on is the South Carolina national guard where they're there in Bradley fighting vehicles, guarding oil rigs, not the role of the national guard.
And so in states, uh, Wyoming, Iowa, Oklahoma, Michigan, Georgia, South Carolina, West Virginia, where this all started, um, New Hampshire, um, we're working on, um, those, those are states where we've got the bill formally introduced in one form or another.
Idaho, we're running up against a roadblock.
One single man, my own representative, Joe Palmer, um, is single handedly stonewalling, um, this bill in Idaho.
We have a very archaic, um, legislative process where a bill has to be printed before it can be discussed.
And so we have to have these print hearings so that somebody can literally reach down to the keyboard and press F10 to print the bill, uh, before it can be assigned a bill number and have a public debate.
We can't even print the text of the bill in the newspaper.
We can't discuss it in the public square.
We have to wait for this man to give us his blessing and allow it to be printed.
And Joe Palmer, a conservative, quote unquote, Republican from the legislative district 20 is single handedly holding it up in his committee and just, if anybody's interested, his, uh, his direct phone number is 208-332-1062, and he'd love to hear from anybody that thinks this bill should be printed.
Um, and be smart about it when you call folks.
Don't go sticking your foot in our buddy's mouth here, you know, we're trying to do a good job with this.
The best, the best thing to do would be to just simply call and say, I encourage you, um, as a veteran or as a concerned citizen to allow defend the guard to be printed.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
And, uh, so anyway, and that's where we're at.
We've got 20 other states where we're working on, on sponsorship and it may not get done this legislative session, but it's coming.
And we're hoping by 2021, 2022 at the latest, we've got a bill in introduction in all 50 states.
And the, the ultimate goal would be to pass one of these bills.
Um, how many we haven't already introduced one, two, three, four, nine right now.
And I left fly off the list yet.
So, um, this, this was started by a gentleman up in West Virginia.
Pat McGeehan is his name, a delegate Pat McGeehan, and it's taken him five years to get the bill to where it actually got a vote for discharge out of committee.
It's been buried every year.
It's been lobbied against by the adjutant general from the state of West Virginia, um, with a false pretense.
His big argument is that if we pass this bill, we will lose funding, therefore losing jobs.
And the deep state actors that are perpetuating this myth, um, have gone as far in West Virginia, I'm sorry, in Wyoming as having surrogates and, um, from Liz Cheney tell the local state legislature that she would personally pull four C-130s from their state and send them to Texas if they pass this bill.
Wow.
That's great.
You know, I saw a clip of Pat McGeehan being interviewed, um, on a conservative radio show and like with yourself, they're like, well, you fought in the war.
So I guess if I support the troops, I better shut up and listen to you for a minute, you know, and let you have your say.
And one of the things that the host brought up was, yeah, but you know, critics say that the DOD could really freeze us out on a lot of projects and we could lose a lot of money in this.
And he was just abrupt as could be about, he said, you tell that to the parents of the next dead soldier that comes home to West Virginia from the war in Afghanistan.
That yeah, but we had to leave them over there because or else it might've cost us some money back here in West Virginia.
And that that's why their son's dead.
You know, we're told we're doing this for our national security.
Now you're telling me it's for the jabs, you know, sorry, that's not going to cut it.
And the guy was like, hey, you know, what can I say?
Check and mate.
Correct.
You can't fight that argument.
You lose to that argument.
You do.
And I think the way Pat handled it in West Virginia, in the way that representative in the majority whip in Wyoming, Tyler Lindholm handled it.
He said in the media there, when we announced the legislation with Rand, Rand Paul flew out there to help us with the announcement.
Tyler said, if you want to take four planes away from us for passing legislation that requires Congress to do their job and potentially saving the lives of one Wyoming citizen who serves in the National Guard, he said, keep your damn airplanes, keep them.
And boy, doesn't that just show exactly who and how Liz Cheney is.
That's just, that's exactly right.
She's daddy's little girl.
She's the heiress of a war mongering, war profiteering fortune.
And sees all of this as purely transactional, too, you know, in the starkest terms.
What fun, in a way.
You know, it's the great clarifier of the wars, as Justin Raimondo always said.
But now, so, something very interesting and odd about our era is that Trump talks a good game about the wars, but he doesn't do too much.
I know we started here with some good news about Afghanistan, and as you said, it remains to be seen just how good this news is, but it's certainly something.
But it's, in a sense, in terms of American politics, it's almost more important what he said than what he's done in the sense of just normalizing the anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-nation building, anti-policing the world type spirit among the American right and letting them know, and Ron Paul did a great job of this, but Trump especially was like, the Bushes, they're the worst!
You know, which just means you do not have to believe in them anymore.
You do not.
You can, you know, throw your old Bush loyal you away and come with me on this, and going to the Middle East, not just Iraq, going to the Middle East is the worst decision any American leaders have ever made, he says.
And this kind of thing, normalizing that point of view on the right to a degree I could have never really hoped for, I don't think.
But then, of course, there's still a large outstanding sentiment of fear and hatred towards Arabs and Muslims, and, you know, an enjoyment of kicking butt and seeing military machines in action and explosions go off and that kind of thing.
And I wonder exactly how you feel like those competing kind of ways of looking at things are shaking out inside the right right now, and especially since you just came back from CPAC, which must have really been something else, to have a group like yours at a place like that, and seeing all the reactions and, you know, how the word plays out there.
So I'm all ears, dude, would you please talk to me about it?
Yeah, I'll start with CPAC.
So we went there, you know, we set up a booth in the in the display area of the trade show.
And our booth was, we were not bashful about who we were.
We had a large banner that said, end the forever wars, bring our troops home to the U.S.
The backdrop said, bring our troops home.
We had, you know, a cut out there of President Trump.
We had your book on display.
We had all kinds of things that scream anti-war and conservatism.
And people came by, and I'm not a scientist or a pollster, but I do live in the real world where the data I collect is unique to myself.
And standing at that booth and working for three days, of the hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of people that came by and took our literature, an overwhelming majority, 90% plus said, we agree.
We agree.
Congress has abdicated their role and responsibility as the only authorized body to declare war.
And we're sick of it.
We're tired.
And they all applauded President Trump's words and part of his actions in trying to end the war and all said the same thing.
We need to do more.
And CPAC is a very unique crowd.
It's probably split 50-50.
50% are 25 years and younger, and 50% are 60 years old and older.
And it's because it's really targeted towards young, college age, up and coming conservatives.
And so those folks flock in from all over the country.
And then the other ones that can afford to do the big fundraising things and go to the Reagan dinners are obviously your older population.
And it was not germane or unique to either one of those classes.
Everybody said the same thing.
We are tired of war.
And the younger ones were more tired of war as an anti-war mindset.
The older supporters were tired of war because we haven't followed the fundamentals of the Constitution.
And it just shows you that two kind of diabolically opposed demographics agree on the same principle that war has gone on for too long, but for different reasons.
And that's why it's so powerful coming from the conservative right, especially as a veteran from the conservative right, as we're able to bridge that gap.
Yes, we should stand on the principles of the Constitution.
Yes, we should value human life.
And as a veteran who's been there and been a part of the atrocities, we're bringing this whole crazy circus under one tent.
And it's really starting to make a dent.
It's really starting to attract the attention of the people that we want.
Well, you know, I could see in that clip that Pat had sent me of his interview on that conservative radio show.
I really should be listening to a lot more AM radio.
But, you know, this guy was clearly, the host, was clearly old enough to have been a full-throated Bush-era cheerleader for the whole damn terror war, of course.
And yet, when he's talking with Pat, he's even stopping Pat to clarify to the audience that the guy that you're listening to is a combat veteran.
And so, therefore, we really ought to pay attention to what he's saying here, man.
And he has definitely earned the right, which, of course, is silly.
Everybody has the right to criticize whatever they want.
But we understand the whole skin-in-the-game thing.
It counts for a lot.
And especially with guys like this, what's he going to do?
Tell Pat McGeehan that, come on, you don't know what you're talking about, and just blow him off?
He can't blow him off.
And same thing with your whole organization and, you know, the entire, I guess, the brand of it or whatever the cynics would call it.
And so, but then that leads me to the next question, real quickly.
What's the future?
In fact, what's the near-term future for bringourtroopshome.us for the year 2020?
Right now, the immediate push is obviously to defend the guard legislation, because we're convinced that Washington's a lost cause for a group of grassroots activists, right?
I can't influence Senator Jim Risch from Idaho.
We can't really influence Liz Cheney from Wyoming, who will probably be the Speaker of the House next year.
We can't influence Lindsey Graham, right?
We can't do that.
But who we can influence is, you know, Representative Joe Palmer, who lives two blocks away from me.
Who we can influence is our other members of the state legislature whose children go to school with our children, who attend the same churches, who shop at the same shopping centers, who have to look us in the eye and tell us why we can't do more to protect our men and women in uniform, why we can't do more to keep the state of Idaho's National Guard from deploying to their seventh combat deployment in a war that just seems like it will never end.
And so our push is all around the country is to take the fight to our neighbors.
And if our neighbors who are serving in the legislature will not do something to act to protect the Constitution, to protect our state's rights, to protect our men and women who are being called up to deploy over and over and over again, then we'll find somebody who will.
And everyone that's listening that's a legislator, don't take that as a threat.
Don't take that as a threat unless you see it as a threat.
And if you see it as a threat, you need to look in the mirror and understand that maybe you aren't doing your job.
You are abdicating your role and responsibility as a representative of the people to some unelected official, possibly the adjutant general of the state militia, or an aide in the governor's office.
No, you're a legislator, you hold the right to create law.
And if you create law that you believe in, and then send it off to the governor, and he vetoes it, that's his right then.
But our right as people are to put legislators in office who support a position that we believe in.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So if there were veterans of the wars listening to or of the military at all, and they're listening to the show right now, and they wanted to participate, how would they join you?
Two things.
The first one would be to go to either our website, which is bringourtroopshome.us.
Or if it's specific to the defend the guard legislation, your interest, go to defendtheguard.us.
And there's a map there when you first land on it, and you can click on your state to see if there's anything happening in your state.
And if there's not, I would encourage everybody to scroll to the bottom and click the contact us or email button and fill out the contact form and send us your information and tell us that you're interested in helping, or perhaps even the name of your legislator who you think would be interested in sponsoring the bill.
And then our contact list is growing.
We send out a newsletter.
We try not to bombard you more than maybe once or twice a month with a valuable newsletter that's germane to us.
We don't copy and paste a lot of material.
It's all written by us.
And we're just looking to build that army of concerned citizens, of veterans, of people that support the military, and most importantly, people that believe and stand on the principles of the constitution and help us build this army nationwide.
And let's, let's defend the guard.
Let's take this back from the bureaucrat swamp creatures in DC.
All right, you guys, that is Dan McKnight.
He is what's your title there exactly?
Sorry.
I'd say chairman, founder, veteran, bottle washer, all the above.
He's the leader over there at bringourtroopshome.us.
It's such an important new organization, as you guys can tell, they're really getting great work done and anything you can do to help them out.
I know they all appreciate bringourtroopshome.us and also defendtheguard.us.
Thank you again, Dan.
You bet, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Appreciate it.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
