Nick Mottern, the founder and coordinator of Knowdrones.com, discusses his organization’s use of targeted advertising to educate military drone operators and the general public that these deadly strikes are illegal, kill innocent civilians, and are not about fighting terrorism.
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All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show, et cetera like that, scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org, and I'm on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Okay, introducing Nick Mottern.
He is organizing this effort to put ads on TV running against war, I guess, in general and in specific.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Nick?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Press release here from the Institute for, well, Sam Husseini.
Is Fort Smith drone base and Little Rock Air Force Base targeted?
Ooh, what a headline.
Targeted with propaganda.
Tell us all about it, please.
Yes.
What we've been doing, and this just has been going on for a year out at Creech Air Force Base in Las Vegas and several other places where there are drone bases.
We have been running 15-second ads on MSNBC, CNN, other cable news shows, some entertainment shows directed first toward military people and secondarily toward the general public.
The ads raise questions about the morality and legality of drone warfare, and now in Arkansas we've expanded this to raise questions about the purposes of our wars, basically saying that these wars are being conducted in the interest of the 1% to protect their overseas investments and urging military people, in the case of Arkansas, C-130 crews not to follow orders to fly missions, refuse to bully the world.
And for drone pilots, we've been asking them to refuse to fly.
So these are ads that run usually over about a week's time.
And we also just started one near Sacramento, California, directed at people at Beale Air Force Base who were involved with gathering intelligence in the area of North Korea to not help Donald Trump attack North Koreans.
So these are all ads that speak directly to military people because in our society, the people who are being ordered to do this killing are really the only people in American society who are directly affected by these wars.
Right.
So what's the reaction been so far?
Well, we are able to see on the note, we have a website called No Drones, knowdrones.com.
And so we're able to see when people go to that website and go to the various pages on the website, the website is noted in the advertisements.
And so we do see there is an increase in traffic on the website when these ads are running.
In Las Vegas, we saw that the most popular page was the page dealing with the impact of drone war on the drone operators.
Also, when we were running the ad at Beale Air Force Base, we got an angry tweet saying that we were left wing propagandists and criticizing us.
So we do know that people in the military are seeing the ads and are, in one way or another, responding or inquiring, which is extremely hopeful.
Yeah, so that's great.
So listen, I think this is a great idea.
And I guess I won't ask you your secret for how you can afford to do this, but I think it's a really great thing, and especially targeting the drone operators and things like that.
Well, I should just say the way we can afford it is we've periodically raised money on GoFundMe.
We have a contributor who gave us a $10,000 matching grant if we could raise an additional $10,000.
And so we basically pieced the funding together that way.
We have major funding also from Veterans for Peace, and we have a very significant grant from the Puffin Foundation.
And basically, it's a popular kind of support for this.
Cool.
All right.
So I guess I want to address one thing, and I know everybody doesn't have to agree with me on stuff.
So I'm a libertarian, which means that I know that there's only a small percentage of the population that really agrees with me on most things.
But I also know that there are a lot of people on the right and the left who do agree with me on all the things that I care about the most, such as, for example, ending the empire and all of the wars and that kind of thing.
And so what I think is an effective strategy, or it could be if it was deployed more, would be to try to attack the right from the right.
Because if somebody is a right-winger and they see something that sounds like it's just a left-wing partisan attack on a Republican administration, then they just yawn.
There's nothing really interesting about that.
Of course you don't like Donald Trump.
You're a Democrat, shrug.
And I think when you say the 1%, it's not that you're necessarily wrong about that.
It's just that now you've tagged yourself as coming from the left and arguing a left-wing argument, when in fact, I mean, you started off already right, talking about the law and this kind of thing, where you could be showing these drone operators, most of whom are not leftists, you could be showing them, hey, the Constitution, whatever happened to declarations of war and this and that.
Look at how we're creating more terrorists and jeopardizing our security rather than enhancing our security and that kind of thing.
And in that way, sort of in the same way where people who could have never been convinced to be anti-war by Michael Moore were in a heartbeat convinced to be anti-war by Ron Paul.
Because he said, oh, don't worry, you don't have to change your identity to change your opinion about this.
You could still be you and change your ideas about this.
Most left-wingers are pretty much against this kind of thing anyway.
It's the right-wingers we really got to convince to break their consensus.
So why not attack them always from the George Washingtonian position that George Washington wouldn't want us to be an empire?
He'd want us to be a limited republic with a constitution and all that, you know?
Well, I think those are very good points in the sense that people don't want to be made fools of or killed because of that.
And I think if people feel, yes, there is an empire and yes, this is what we're being engaged to do, they'll feel, yeah, we have to stop it.
So I think those are very, very good points.
But I should say also that if you say from the left that there's unanimity, I have found that not to be true.
Well, no, I agree with that.
Yeah, I didn't mean to oversimplify too much.
I guess I meant more in the minds of the average American, in the minds of the average rank-and-file Republican voter, they just assume that, yeah, Susan Sarandon and every other liberal is against it, but that doesn't mean they know anything about it.
And that doesn't mean that we need to listen to them, kind of.
You know what I mean?
Not that they're right about that, just that that's the way they see it.
So how do you, in other words, how do you convince the right-wing email uncles of the world on their email chains that, you know what, this whole saving the world from itself thing is really not working out or, you know, that kind of deal?
We're sick and tired of how the right-wingers say it.
We don't want to be the policemen of the world.
Because after all, you know, the entire premise of the empire is completely contradictory to the U.S. Constitution, which says that this government's job is to protect our rights, not to change every regime.
In fact, they even have the mandate that if California ever becomes a dictatorship, that they have the right to regime change and guarantee a Republican form of government to all the states in the union.
But not all the states on the planet, just all the ones in the union.
And so you make that kind of argument to a military man, I think he already thinks that, right?
He already thinks that.
His oath is to the Constitution to protect the people of America, not to be the policemen of the world.
You're already talking in his language now.
I think those are really very good points.
Definitely.
Cool.
I'm glad I made an impression on you.
Yeah.
And I also feel that the, you know, I was in the Navy.
I mean, I, other people who have had, you know, military service, my experience was that I actually, in the Navy, at the beginning of the Vietnam War, very early on, volunteered to go over there.
And little by little, you know, from what I saw there, but even after I got back home, it was very clear to me that I had been totally lied to about the purposes of that war.
And I was extremely ashamed of myself that I had been duped into participating in it.
And ashamed of the whole kind of enthusiasm that I had based on what the government had told me about, you know, the righteousness of the cause and all that.
And I see the same thing happening, you know, at this time with these various wars.
And so I don't know if it's a matter of redemption on my part or whether it's just I'm a retired person, I have, you know, an ability to do this on a full time basis.
Many other people don't have that luxury.
So the idea, for me, of reaching out to people in the military, speaking about these things, I think is very appealing.
And it also is very necessary to the degree that we can prevent anyone from having the experience that I had.
And the consequences of, you know, what we did.
That's how I'm engaging in it.
Well, I think the idea of the TV ads is really just great.
And, you know, it really is.
It's 2017 now.
So the Bush years and that level of fever for intervention on the right is just gone.
And really, Obama helped put it in the grave because the last thing a right winger wants to do is follow orders from Barack Obama.
So he really discredited by continuing Bush's policy.
He helped discredit it on the right even more.
Now, there's always a tendency on the right to go for, yeah, go get him, Donald, and knock the hell out of ISIS and that kind of thing.
But they don't want any more George W. Bush or Barack Obama counterinsurgency escalation missions and occupations.
They already lost one son.
They don't want to lose another.
They don't believe any more in this hype.
Not really.
I think they're really, you know, Ron Paul tried to really get through to them in 08 and in 12, but it was still too soon kind of a thing, you know.
But I think now that even Donald Trump sort of pretended to be the reluctant warrior half the time as he ran.
And I think that was appealing to the right.
That didn't turn them off.
It turned off D.C.
That was what they hated about him.
But the average rank and file right wing voters were like, you know what?
I don't really want to overthrow Assad.
I don't really want to overthrow anybody, you know, this kind of attitude now.
So I think, you know, in other words, the harvest is there.
I mean, people are ready.
We just got to scoop them up.
And I think, you know, this kind of way going directly to them on TV this way and telling them, you know, basically portraying it as this is the bipartisan consensus on all sides is we just don't want to do this anymore.
If we portray it like we've already won, which, according to the Pew polls, the American people do agree with us, Nick.
So that's the way we just portray it is like the consensus is on the march.
And and even if you need to, we support the president's policy of getting along with Russia.
And we all we support the president's policy of not overthrowing the government in Damascus.
If that's what it takes to appeal to right wingers, we accentuate the positive when the slight reluctance of Trump on some issues.
And and, you know, for that matter, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, the Democrat in the House, and Ron Paul, the senator in the Republican senator, have the Stop Financing Terrorists Act.
Now, we don't really know how Donald Trump feels about the CIA backing the terrorists in Syria at this point, but we might just pretend like we're we still believe in his slogans and say, here's that bill you wanted, Mr. President, the one where we don't want the CIA to back these groups to try to overthrow Assad anymore.
Isn't that what you wanted?
Here's that bill and get him to support it and get right wing support for it.
That we know that we hate, you know, nobody likes Assad, but if he was gone, Al Qaeda would be the prime beneficiaries and we don't want that.
I mean, the argument is so easy and clear, and it's half of what he said in the past.
So it seems like maybe there's a good avenue to try to, you know, turn the narrative around in the, I mean, I don't know if we can really change the way the people on TV think about it.
But, you know, I think even to a degree we could if the American people could really get the point across that the consensus has broken and changed and gone the other way now that which is true, again, that we could make it feel inevitable.
We could make them say, no, I guess we just got to come home.
We can't escalate again.
We got to just come home.
Well, you see, I would I guess I would say that at this moment, it seems that Donald Trump and the Congress are very uninterested in what the general public thinks.
And I wish, you know, that there would be a mechanism to cause the, you know, the change that you're talking about to have an impact on them.
And I guess that's one reason why we're trying to speak directly to the military, because if you look back at the Vietnam War, one of the reasons that that couldn't be continued is because people inside the military wouldn't have it anymore.
And it just was, you know, action taken against officers, which I don't believe was correct in terms of violence.
But there was a growing reluctance of troops to participate in operations and in any way, you know, emotionally supporting what was going on.
And I think that we that's that's pretty much the position we find ourselves in when politicians refuse to actually pay attention to the very things that you're talking about.
I think you're so smart to do it this way.
And I think, honestly, even just some reaction from the military, from enlisted men that you're targeting with these ads, that could do so much itself to change the narrative overall.
Because after all, if our golden idol, perfect heroic warrior, best and brightest of us all are sick and tired of this, well, they can't be wrong, can they?
Well, if they simply if they don't, if they don't want to do it anymore, raises some fundamental questions about what needs to be done with our policy.
Right.
Well, I'm sorry for talking at you instead of asking you questions so much during this conversation, but it's really been great and best of luck to you.
And I think it's just great work that you're doing here, Nick.
Well, I appreciate that.
And I would like to ask if I might direct people to our website.
Yes, sir.
We're still, you know, out there raising money to carry forward with this.
And the website is No Drones, K-N-O-W-D-R-O-N-E-S dot com.
And there's, I would say, a wealth of information for people who want to understand more thoroughly what the tragic and very profound consequences are of these drone attacks that have really actually spread war rather than contained it.
So I really am grateful to be on your show, Scott.
Great.
Well, I'm very happy to talk with you.
And I think I have a couple ideas, actually.
Maybe I'll be emailing you back here again soon.
That'd be great.
Okay.
Thank you so much again.
Appreciate it.
You bet.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That is Nick Mottern.
And he is at No Drones, K-N-O-W-D-R-O-N-E-S dot com.
They've got, I think it's three different ads that they're running now.
Anti-war ads in markets near military bases in America, reaching directly for the minds of the enlisted men.
What a great project.
Check it out.
K-N-O-W-D-R-O-N-E-S dot com.
Scott Horton dot org for the interviews.
Four thousand something of them going back to 2003.
Also, Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton Show.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
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