I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
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Here in studio, I've got Eric Brakey, the former state representative, or state senator?
Senator.
Senator from Maine, who is the new head of Young Americans for Liberty, and also with Reed Cooley from YAL as well.
Welcome to the show, guys.
How are you doing?
Doing all right.
I should be specific, though.
I'm the new senior spokesperson for Young Americans for Liberty, and we have a- I should have asked you that first, so I could have got that right.
We have a new executive director we're happy to have on board as well.
Okay, and who's that?
Her name is Lauren Dougherty.
She's not here today.
Right.
I would know if she was.
I would see her.
Yeah, she could be hiding in the wings somewhere, but- Yeah.
No, but okay, so that's great.
And then, so you are the new senior spokesman, and you moved all the way down here, and you're now my neighbor, my fellow friendly Austinite, is that correct?
I'm down here a lot in Austin, though I love to be back home in Maine as much as I can be.
I see.
See, he is a politician.
You can tell.
All right.
So, well, what are you here to spokesman about?
Well, you know, I wanted to come and talk about Defend the Guard, which I know you know very well.
I know you and I have tag teamed testifying on a few like Zoom public hearings across the country, specifically when it came up in committee in Maine.
But I think that this is one of the most exciting opportunities to actually fight this forever war state that we've been in for 20 years, have an actual practical impact, not by going to Congress and begging them to take action like we've been doing for 20 years with no impact, but to go to the states, assert the right of nullification, and remind everyone that the states, when there is no declaration of war, and there hasn't been a declaration of war since World War II, when there's no declaration of war, the states have authority over the state National Guards, and they can order the National Guards to come home.
Yeah.
Now, and of course, you know, to have this legislation where the states are insisting that you cannot have our guard troops, it could be argued that, well, this could be put to the test and a president probably would get what he wants anyway.
What do you say to that?
Yeah, it would kind of be put to the test.
It would probably it could probably result in a in a in a real constitutional question that kind of has to result in, you know, go to the Supreme Court.
But at the end of the day, I think that the Constitution is pretty darn clear.
It gives the president the authority to call forth the militia, so the National Guard.
That's what the National Guard evolved from, the state militias, to call forth the militia under three circumstances.
If to suppress insurrection, to repel invasion, in this case, that doesn't apply to either that doesn't neither of those to apply to the war in Iraq.
If anyone's the invaders, we are, you know, or to enforce the laws of the nation.
Now, if there was a declaration of war from Congress, which the Constitution gives them the power to do, for some reason they don't do it because they don't want to sign their names to these unpopular wars.
If they actually declared war, then the president could call forth the National Guards on his authority to fight these wars.
But Congress doesn't do that.
We all know why they don't do it.
They are simultaneously beholden to the military-industrial complex, so they don't want to end the wars, but they are afraid of their constituents who oppose the wars, so they don't want to vote for them.
Exactly.
And so what defend the Guard would do is it would force Congress, it would put them in a position where we are forcing their hand to either declare the war or bring the troops home.
And when I say, you know, the National Guard, it's, you know, by the numbers I've seen, the National Guard are men and women in the National Guard fighting these wars account for close to 50% of all the soldiers, you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria.
So it's not an insignificant number.
Yeah, including special operations forces, I guess, you know, the common perception would be that these guys would just be the reserve infantry, you know, last ditch, but no, they're Green Berets and they're, you know, leading the charge in a lot of places.
Right.
Right.
Absolutely.
I mean, I know, you know, one of, you know, back in Maine, one of our biggest activists fighting for defend the Guard is a gentleman named Sergeant Aaron Rollins, who retired from the Maine Army National Guard, and he's also the commander of his American Legion post, largest American Legion post in in Somerset County, where he lives.
And he's done amazing work, kind of, you know, making the case for this, speaking as a combat veteran, speaking as a retired member of the of the of the Maine of the Maine Army National Guard.
You know, one thing I didn't realize that he pointed out to me is that the American Legion as a national organization passed a resolution just in the last few years, calling for an end to the forever wars.
So this is the largest veterans advocacy organization in the country that's taken a definitive position, not necessarily in favor of defend the Guard, but in favor of ending these, the state of forever war.
And he got his American Legion post to unanimously endorse defend the Guard.
He got his county GOP to unanimously, well, near unanimously, there was one former politician who didn't like it, argued against it, but near unanimously endorsed defend the Guard.
But sadly, defend the Guard in Maine got killed in committee by his Republican state senator.
So and this is what's going on across the country.
31 states, defend the Guard legislation has been proposed in 31 states.
The Pentagon has mobilized a two star general to lobby in the states to defeat this because they're afraid of it.
They're afraid of the implications of it.
They're afraid because they know it would actually make a difference.
It would actually work if it passed at threatening the forever wars.
And you know, Aaron Rollins, own state senator, his name, a senator named Brad Farron, rallied all the members of the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee to kill this bill.
So it can't come to the floor for a vote.
And this is I think this is what we're seeing in other states across the country as these bills come forward.
But but I'm actually encouraged because, you know, I've worked on, you know, during my time in the state Senate, I've worked on many different policies.
I you know, I worked on constitutional carry.
I got Maine to pass constitutional carry.
We were the sixth state in the country.
You know, I remember back.
Wait, wait.
Stop.
Round of applause.
OK, go ahead.
I see similarities in what it took to pass constitutional carry across the country versus what it's going to take to pass Defend the Guard.
Ten years ago, people were laughing at constitutional carry.
They said this is a fringe issue.
Nobody's talking about it.
We were supposed to just be happy to live in a state where we could where we could beg for permission.
We could get a government permission slip and become and sign on to a what's effectively a gun owner registry in order to be able to carry firearms in public.
And no one was doing constitutional carry.
It wasn't until the activists who were fighting for constitutional carry started not just, you know, getting the bill up for kind of roll call votes and advocating for it, but then going back in election season and holding the politicians, especially the Republican politicians accountable who oppose this.
And there started to be a few political bodies, you know, politicians who lost their reelections or got primaried and whether they won or lost the primary, they had to expend time and resources to defend themselves.
Once politicians realize that there are political consequences against their own self-interests for opposing constitutional carry, people started coming on board.
OK, now there's part of my brain that says nonsense.
Power always wins.
Special interests always wins.
And you know, this is no democracy.
And what are we supposed to do about it?
Give me a break.
And your answer to that is what?
My answer would be especially on the state level, especially with your local state legislator, your local state senator.
People often underestimate how much power they have.
When I was in the state Senate, if I got five phone calls from constituents on a single issue, that was a lot.
And it made me and it makes every politician say, well, geez, there's something going on.
I better know what's going on with this.
Constituent pressure works because in the Constitution still, you are the only person, we are the only people with the constitutional authority to fire the politicians.
And when we wield that authority, we can make things happen.
So on constitutional carry, I'll always remember, you know, I have figured out who kind of were the swing votes, who were the votes we needed to get on board, who were the squishy Republicans who needed to hear from their constituents.
I'll always remember a Republican state senator who said, you know, the day it was coming up for a vote, first of all, their phones were ringing off the hook and they were just begging, can we just vote on this bill already?
I want to stop with the phone calls.
I want to stop the emails flooding my email inbox.
But I'll always remember a state senator Republican who said, I don't think the people of Maine want constitutional carry, but for some reason, the people of my district really do.
And she voted for it in her heart of hearts.
Did she support constitutional carry?
I don't know.
In a certain sense, it doesn't matter.
What mattered is she voted out of self-preservation to get us our freedoms back.
And that's what we need to do on Defend the Guard, is that we need to, now that we've gotten some state-level politicians on record.
Right, because it's been a couple of years of this now, right?
So we know who's who.
We're beginning to learn.
Yeah, we've, well, and this is the first time in Maine in a decade that Defend the Guard has come up, been put forward at all.
But we've got, now at least we've got the people on the committee.
We've got them on record opposing Defend the Guard.
Yeah, we've learned a lot about the guys in Texas too, where we had a really nice guy, freshman state house member, who introduced the thing.
And then the other guys on the committee got him to swap it for this other nonsense, which...
I think he got hoodwinked a little bit.
I think he's a good guy, heart in the right place.
But I like what you say about, yeah, no, that's okay though.
Because it just shows us where all the possibilities are.
There's a perfect positive spin on the thing, and we know exactly who to pay attention to for next time, and what the arguments are, and how to go about it better next time around.
There's a rule in politics.
You can be loved and manipulated, or you can be feared and respected.
And I'm a nice guy.
I like it when people love me.
But ultimately, at the end of the day, we're fighting for things that are important.
We're fighting for liberty.
It's more important that the politicians respect us.
And the only way to do that is to make them afraid of us.
And the only way to do that is to message and communicate with their constituents to hold them accountable.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school, but should have.
Follow through from the link in the margin at scottwharton.org for Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Look, here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things, like shirts, and sweatshirts, and mugs, and stickers to put on the back of your truck, and to give to your friends, too, that say Libertarian Institute on them, so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder, and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to LibertasBella.com, and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right-hand margin at LibertarianInstitute.org, LibertasBella.com.
Okay, so now here's the thing of it, right, is we've got this great group of combat veterans leading this organization, BringOurTroopsHome.us, and they've taken Pat McGeehan's defend-the-guard legislation from West Virginia and nationalized it with the help of Young Americans for Liberty.
And that's the key to this, right?
Because Bring Our Troops Home is great, but Young Americans for Liberty is volume of kiddos with shoes, and you guys put them to work, and they can be very, very effective when deployed just right, and we've seen it in the past.
And so talk a lot now about Young Americans for Liberty's role in this mission of getting this done.
Well, first of all, let me say, before I sing our own praises, I can't speak highly enough of Dan McKnight and defend-the-guard.
I mean, what...
Forget about it.
Or Bring Our Troops Home.
They're doing a fantastic job, and they...
Now it's been a nice partnership, and this is one of the things that Young Americans for Liberty can do and does do.
We have mobilized...
Our mission is we identify, educate, train, and mobilize young Americans who believe in liberty, believe in the message of Ron Paul, believe in that...
That's where we come from.
We were students for Ron Paul in 2008.
We became Young Americans for Liberty, but in our heart of hearts, we're still students for Ron Paul.
Yeah.
Aren't we all students of Ron Paul, at least?
Absolutely.
I'm still learning.
Oh, yeah.
I've been at this for 10 years now.
I'm still learning.
But in recent years, we have been mobilizing our student activists, identifying liberty activists running for state legislatures across the country, and we have been mobilizing our students to knock doors and get them elected.
We've had tremendous success.
We've won 179 races now for state legislatures across the country, which is huge.
When I was in the state senate, if you were to ask me how many Ron Paul-style state legislators there were in the country, it would be hard-pressed for me to count to 10.
What do you think it is now, really?
In our coalition now, we have 177.
We're at 179.
We kicked three out, and we added one.
Okay, good.
We kick people out because we believe in accountability.
For example, we had a few folks we helped get elected in South Carolina.
They promised, oh, we're going to support constitutional carry.
It turns out they were more roadblocks to constitutional carry.
And you know, look, we want to—the dark side is powerful, and people can get sucked over to the dark side, and we don't want to have any Siths in our ranks.
There you go.
Good.
And let that be a lesson to them, too, of whether—you know what?
Last time I got elected, those kiddos knocking on doors sure were helpful.
You know?
You're either going to have them or you're not, you know?
I don't know.
Well, and more than that, you know, if someone—frankly, I want it—because we go through a big vetting process—and let me get back to something.
The reason I bring this up is that so many of the legislators who've been sponsoring Defend the Guard are legislators in our Hazlet coalition, we call it, our Hazlet legislator coalition.
They're the folks that we've helped get elected and we work with and partner with in the legislatures.
But of course, one of the challenges now is that people see how effective our election programs are.
I mean, we've just won—we just like—the establishment gives out kind of like—you can apply for like political awards from these groups, the Polly Awards, the Reed Awards, and Young Americans for Liberty just swept these awards for our canvassing programs.
We've got the best canvassing programs out there, Republican or Democrat, wherever you look.
Young Americans for Liberty has got the best canvassing programs, and of course, this makes it desirable for politicians to want our support, and that's a double-edged sword, right?
Because now, you're going to have people trying to deceive us on what kind of politician they are, what they're going to do when they get there.
They want the support.
So the challenge for us is we need to make sure that it is more harmful for a politician to try to lie to us and deceive us to get our support, because the proof will be in the pudding in their voting record on what they do.
We want to— Like not just will we withdraw support, but we'll support your opponent in the primary next time.
We will recruit a primary challenger and we will knock doors to get you out of there.
Yeah, there you go.
See, that's what I like to hear.
A little bit of vendetta and vengeance can go a long way when it comes to—and look, we're only talking about doing the right thing here.
And now, so 31 states this year are debating this.
It was almost 30 last year, right?
Something like that.
Well, I guess COVID kind of shut down every damn thing last year, changed everything.
So that ain't nothing out of 50 states.
And in every case, it's sponsored by YAL, conservative, Ron Paul, Republicans?
I couldn't tell you for certain in every case, but I know that in the cases that I've certainly followed the most, I mean, in Maine— I know they have Democrat co-sponsors, right?
I mean, I'm not saying that.
Certainly.
And we're not opposed to having Democrats in the coalition if they support liberty, but I just haven't found many.
Yeah, well, you know.
We haven't found a Democrat legislator yet who supports the Ron Paul vision of liberty, but theoretically, if they did exist, we'd be open to it.
But I know in Florida— And this is a single issue thing, too.
You can be for defend the guard and be terrified of firearms and vote for every gun control law.
I'm all for when I'm talking with our legislators, I'm all for, hey, build coalitions on every issue you can.
That's what Ron Paul did.
Right.
Absolutely.
He built coalitions with Dennis Kucinich.
Doesn't mean that Dennis Kucinich is a liberty guy, but he was right on some issues.
And Ron Paul never compromised with anybody on his position in order to join a coalition.
It was just find out who agrees with you where you are and do that.
Right.
When I got constitutional carry through, it was by identifying who are the pro-gun Democrats.
To this day, Maine is the only state that ever passed constitutional carry through a Democrat-controlled chamber.
Yeah.
And that's because of following Ron Paul's model on coalition building on issues when you can.
That's really great.
But on defend the guard, we've got Representative Heidi Sampson, who's been our bill sponsor up there, who's in our Young Americans for Liberty Hazlitt coalition.
In Florida, you've got Representative Anthony Sabatini, who's actually running for Congress now.
He was our bill sponsor in Florida.
You have, but you have, uh, yeah, Liberty legislators who are really the ones kind of taking up.
And oftentimes, you know, it's, it's, it's combat veterans.
I mean, those are oftentimes the best advocates.
Yeah, absolutely.
And look, I mean, it's obvious why, although maybe it doesn't go without saying, right, is it's because out of all the different kinds of federal employees, the soldiers take their oath to the Constitution the most seriously, at least among the enlisted, some of the officers But certainly among the enlisted, because they're putting their lives on the line for the damn thing, right, where somebody from the Department of Health and Human Services just check in a box, or at least, they don't have any major incentive to take it any more seriously than that.
But then you got these guys who literally have bled for the thing.
And they're being told that, as Henry Hyde told Ron Paul in 2002, that Article One, Section Eight, Clause 11 is an anachronism.
And we don't do that anymore.
Now we do these authorizations, we let the President and the United Nations Security Council decide instead, this kind of thing.
You lost your friend Jimmy over there, and you lost part of your leg over there.
And then you come back here and hear Republicans talking like that about the Constitution you swore your oath to.
That's a whole other level of insult.
And I'm not speaking for veterans.
I'm just telling you what I've heard them say to me a hell of a lot of times over again, that that's how they feel about it a lot.
You've said a lot nicer than many of the veterans I've heard.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Well.
There's usually a lot more swear words involved.
Yeah.
They have license, as they say, to go further than me on that.
And then I know that this is what they say to their buddies to change their minds, too.
There's a real taint left over from Vietnam.
They're like, born on the 4th of July.
He served bravely over there and everything, Ron Covick.
But he comes home and he moves left.
And that's what it means to be anti-war is to grow your hair out and pal around with Jane Fonda and listen to Janice Joplin records and some kind of summer of love old nonsense from 50 something years ago, 54 years ago.
Right.
When here you have all these combat veterans, not all, but so many of these combat veterans coming home from the 21st century wars, they haven't moved left at all.
They're standing right where they were on their road to the Constitution.
And they're wondering where the hell is everybody else.
So and what do hippies and weed in Vietnam have to do with that?
Nothing.
Right.
These are guys who look at Dan McKnight, for example.
And the guys, you know, and again, just having the name GOP associated, that means you're not a leftist.
OK, this is not.
And these aren't rhinos either.
Right.
These are these are not liberal Republicans.
These are libertarian Republicans.
And that's different.
It's a constitutionalist.
That's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
They follow the Constitution.
I mean, that's I mean.
When I've talked to which, by the way, is a giant poison pill.
Right.
That's the point.
You can't have our guard troops unless you declare war means you can't have our guard troops because we know you won't declare war.
You wouldn't dare take responsibility for declaring a war.
So gotcha.
Well, and that's I mean, and it's I think it's a symptom of a much larger thing that's happened to Congress over the last many decades is what controversial do they really vote on anymore?
I mean, they've given they've given as much as possible all their constitutional authority way to unelected bodies so that they never have to be on record.
They love to spend their time just naming post offices.
And, you know, while while, you know, the unelected bureaucracy decides, you know, where and when we go to war, who's going to die, who's going to be spied on?
This is this is how Congress is these these days.
They don't want power.
I mean, if they want the power to stay in office perpetually and never be held accountable by going on record for anything.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, not for anything that could blow back on you, like supporting a war when America hasn't won a war since they last declared one.
So if the wars never end, I suppose we can't lose them.
Right.
Right.
They thought they'd won in Iraq.
But then that was 30 years ago.
And so, yeah, not so much fighting there this whole time since.
Yeah.
I, you know, I think it's it's it's hard to believe the Afghanistan papers came out two years ago.
Yeah.
There's never any.
Washington, D.C. never grappled with the implications of it.
They never even really the political class never even really acknowledged it.
They never acknowledged that.
I mean, the Afghanistan papers, as you know, and I'm sure your audience knows, is basically, you know, an admission that nobody in any of the leadership and decision making capacities in in over these wars has any idea what victory looks like, what or or even really just clear articulatable idea why we're over there, why our troops have to keep dying.
And that's in their own words.
That's what they admit candidly when they don't think that it's ever going to be published.
That's not, you know, your cynical interpretation of them insisting that they were trying their best.
That's, you know, Douglas Lute, who was the war czar for Bush and then Obama, was the one who said we didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were doing over there.
Yeah.
Well, why didn't you resign and give a big press conference about why we got to stop the war a decade ago then?
Yeah.
Sorry.
I keep rounding down.
Yeah.
15 years ago.
Yeah.
They deserve, you know, our troops, they deserve a clear constitutional mission or plane ride home immediately.
Yeah.
Right on.
Which means a plane ride home immediately because they don't have the former there at all and won't.
So listen, I mean, this really is turning into a phenomenon.
But let me say I gave a talk in Pennsylvania at a Libertarian Party event the other day and wasn't exactly a debate, but it was a discussion with a Libertarian Party guy named Nick Sarwark.
And my first question was about Defend the Guard, which I wasn't really expecting.
But so I went off talking about Defend the Guard for a while.
And then my discussion companion said, yeah, but that's a perfect example of, you know, essentially pissing up a rope.
Right.
You're going to introduce this bill all over the place, but you're not going to get it passed anywhere.
And if you did get it passed, the president's going to win in the supremacy clause.
And the whole thing is just purely symbolic, just like you can complain at antiwar.com all day, but you haven't ended any wars, have you?
And so this is the same thing as that, which not really sure what our other options are supposed to be.
But that was his complaint about what I was trying to say in promoting this thing, that, you know, essentially this is just symbolic.
And so who cares?
I mean, I would argue that I think he's missing things.
And so when I look at what are some of the most successful kind of advancements in freedom in America in the last couple of decades, I think of nullification efforts like, you know, two great examples.
One kind of came more from the left.
One came more from the right.
Cannabis and right to try.
So for, I don't know how long, decades, half a century, you know, advocates for cannabis freedom, the end of cannabis prohibition had been going to Congress and begging Congress, please, won't you please just repeal this unconstitutional law?
Congress didn't care.
It took no action.
And so they switched strategies in the nineties and decided, we're just going to go to the states.
We're going to put it at the ballot box.
They went to California and to Maine and the people voted by majorities to just ignore Washington D.C.'s unconstitutional law.
And I say unconstitutional because you open up article one, section eight of the U.S. constitution.
You're not going to see any power there where it said that Congress can outlaw a plant.
There's no authority there.
And the 10th amendment is pretty clear that those decisions belong to the states and the people.
And so what could Congress do about it?
Well, they whined and stomped their feet, but they really couldn't do anything.
I mean, they tried shutting down dispensaries and stuff like that.
But here you fast forward two decades and 44 states have nullified in some shape or form federal cannabis prohibition.
So that took two decades, but it happened.
And it even forced Congress to pass the farm bill with the changes in it on the federal level.
Right.
Right.
You know, when this is coming from the states, it ultimately it forces Congress's hand, partly so they can feel relevant.
The states have already made these decisions.
But then you look at this happened even faster in this most recent decade on, you know, right to try policy.
Are you familiar with right to try?
I know what the phrase means, but I worry that maybe the audience doesn't.
All right.
Right to try.
And this was something I you know, this was actually I sponsored the bill and got it through in Maine back in 2015.
We were the first state in New England to pass it.
But New England was kind of a laggard behind a lot of the rest of the country.
I first heard it just listen to Tom Wood show and listen to the gentleman over the Tenth Amendment Center talking about it.
Bolden.
Bolden.
That's right.
And Meharry.
So what right to try basically does is that, you know, you've got terminally, you know, terminally ill people who have tried all the available FDA approved medications for their illness and nothing has worked.
And there are investigational medicines that are working their way through the FDA process.
But that FDA process can take 10 years, cost billions of dollars, and you got six months to live.
Well, what are you going to do?
And the FDA says, used to say, well, tough luck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess you're just going to have to die because it's too dangerous for you to try this investigational medicine.
Well, dangerous.
Well, what do you have to lose?
You've got a terminal illness.
Shouldn't that be your choice to make between you and your doctor?
And so right to try, I think it started in Arizona or, you know, and it caught on.
Right to try just basically said, you know, states rising up and saying, yeah, we're not going to follow that.
We are going to authorize terminally ill patients to try investigational medicines.
And within four years, it spread across the country.
Over over 41 states passed it.
And then Congress kind of coming in at the 11th hour to be relevant and be the heroes.
Oh, we're going to pass this now.
And Trump signed it into law.
But that was nullification in action.
So, yeah, if we can start passing, defend the guard, you know, if you start in the hard thing is no state wants to be the first.
Right.
Yeah.
Because we're going to get Montana next year, I think, you know, they passed a really good thing.
A resolution demanding the repeal of the AUMFs of 01 and 02 against the terror war in Iraq.
And boy, they love my speech, if you believe that I didn't do so well in Texas or in Maine.
But in Montana, they loved it.
And I think the for whatever reason, I'm not exactly sure what was concerned, veterans of America and Americans for prosperity who are doing it.
And I guess we're not all exactly on the same page with defend the guard.
So they had sort of this other angle, I guess, to pass this resolution demanding an end to the AUMF.
But I don't know why we can't pass them both.
Right.
And this is this is should be the same thing.
We need to all work together.
Where are we going to have a big barbecue between YAL, bring our troops home and Concerned Veterans of America and get them on board?
Well, geez, I'll host it if folks if folks want.
Is that right?
Well, I suppose we could make it happen.
I know those guys and they're good guys, man.
Let's have a barbecue, dude.
You know what?
I love I love I love both groups.
I love Concerned Veterans for America.
I love.
And working together, I think we ought to be able to get all these things passed.
I know Concerned Veterans for America, their strategy is more, you know, they're trying to lobby Congress.
And I think there's value in that.
And look, well, they were lobbying the state legislature in Montana.
Awesome.
And to get this thing done.
And those guys were for it there, you know.
So I think, you know, anyone like anytime someone on the right side of the aisle is opposing war, I think that needs to be celebrated, because I remember you remember under the Bush regime when, you know, if you were a Republican who's who, you know, even just question the words, you were drummed out as un-American and you you hate the troops, you know, all kinds of slurs thrown against you.
So I want conservatives and folks on the right to be emboldened, right, and be celebrated when they speak out against these unconstitutional wars.
Yeah.
Well, so if we can't get anybody to actually pass it this year, and I hope we can, I don't want to call that score too early or anything, but I bet you we stand a really good shot in getting Montana to be first next year.
And the test will be, you know, the only way that happens is if you always got to connect what happens in legislative season to what happens in election season.
Yeah, we got it.
You got it in all in all of these states where the bill has been proposed and we got people on record.
You got to pick at least one of those politicians and you got to give them hell in election season.
You got to hold them accountable.
And all the rest of the politicians in that state capitol are going to take notice of that and say, I don't want that happening to me.
And look, you know, for people who are so libertarian that they could never participate in politics, it's rational and I understand it.
But, you know, I would remind you that Murray Rothbard participated in politics his entire career long, and you could be for everything up to and including the total abolition of the state.
And still, as even Lysander Spooner said, vote in self-defense and try to do, you know, try to move the margin toward peace and liberty wherever you can.
Right.
Would anyone say that, you know, we'd be better off without constitutional carry if it took lobbying politicians to vote for the damn thing?
I mean, that'd be crazy, right?
It's just usually we don't have a bunch of victories on our mind.
And so it's easy to just say, oh, yeah, vote harder.
And no matter what, this is Tom Woods law.
But he's talking about presidents.
No matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
But that's not true for every state representative.
It's not.
And and so, you know, I'm a sit behind the microphone guy.
I have not always been a heavy participant in electoral politics, but I know it works.
You know, you're not the only one, Eric, who's told me this.
You know, I've talked with the great Kates, Kate Kaiser and Kate Gould, both of them just these wonderful antiwar lobbyists who work for different organizations at different times, but usually the Friends Committee up there in D.C. and groups like that.
And they'll tell you, they'll swear.
Oh, my God.
Even in U.S. Congress, man, when the phone's ringing and the people are hot about something, it matters and it moves margins and they'll swear to you.
They've seen it happen over and over again.
And so, yeah, when it comes to the state legislature, it's like the parable of Ron Paul, right?
Ron Paul could have been the president.
No, he could not have.
Right.
And look what happened.
Right.
They rigged Iowa against him.
They rigged New Hampshire against him.
They screwed him every way they could.
I was there.
Oh, yeah.
They did everything they could.
But still not.
It is true.
He could have been the president if enough Americans had just said, I want this guy for president so bad.
I'm joining the GOP and voting for him.
There's 300 million people in this country, like 250 million of whom are registered to vote or, you know, are eligible to vote.
Anyway.
Right.
And and so, yeah, if the American people had insisted, it would have been unstoppable.
The problem was it was only a few tens of millions of us.
We really needed a solid hundred million in our quarter and we didn't have them.
But but it could have been literally speaking, it could have been and there's nothing they could have done to stop us if we'd really all been willing to do the work.
And I'm not ashamed of libertarians for not participating in that because they did.
But I mean, everybody else, if they had joined us and made this our American effort to elect this man and make him the president, the wars would have been over a long time ago.
The people would have been set free a long time ago.
And so I don't think you have to be a big believer in the process of democracy and the virtue of compromise with people who would take your guns away or, you know, whatever, however you want to phrase it in the most, you know, stark way to oppose.
You know, I don't think you have to buy into the full civic religion to still vote in self-defense, do what you can, you know, to move the margin on the margin, because in fact, you might be surprised just how far you can move it.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, here you're a Ron Paul guy, real human being.
I'm looking at you.
Right.
And you were in the state Senate and you got him to legalize carrying a gun, man, that ain't nothing.
That's something for real.
And I just started as a, you know, grassroots activist.
I became the state director for Ron Paul's campaign in Maine, made the Republican establishment hate my guts when we took over the state party in 2012 and ran for state Senate.
Two years later, took out a 36 year Democrat incumbent by just going out there, knocking on thousands of doors, talking directly with voters.
And when we talk about the state level, I mean, this is where we can make a practical, real difference.
Everyone is always focused on what's going on in Washington, D.C.
And it's a sideshow.
It's a circus.
Very little of productive is ever going to come out of Washington.
But we have this notion, and it's a false notion that we need to dispel, that, you know, the way to combat federal tyranny is we've got to get people elected to federal office.
And it's just not true.
Jefferson and Madison laid it out perfectly in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, that when the federal government goes off course and is ignoring the Constitution, it's the responsibility of the states to stand up and to nullify those unconstitutional actions.
And we are finally getting people into liberty activists, into state level offices with the backbone and the willpower to do that.
I mean, look at New Hampshire right now.
I mean, New Hampshire, liberty Republicans, Republicans influenced directly by Ron Paul, are now the majority of the majority party in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
Wow.
I did not know that.
It's the first time that's ever happened.
The majority leaders are Ron Paul Republican.
Wow.
So what good has it done us so far in New Hampshire?
Can you tell us?
Well, so far, it's still in kind of this first session where it's going on.
You've had the Republican majority challenge the Republican governor on these emergency lockdown orders.
You don't see that happening in too many states.
You see plenty of times you see, oh, you know, Republicans will speak up against a Democrat governor or Democrats will speak up against a Republican governor.
Right.
But you have the Republican Party challenging the sitting Republican governor on these emergency lockdown orders.
And New Hampshire became one of the first states in New England to back off from it because of that.
And so you have the opportunity for New Hampshire is potentially on the road to becoming the first right to work state in New England, which.
And what about Defend the Guard there?
And Defend the Guard, I don't I can't speak specifically the status of Defend the Guard in New Hampshire.
I don't know if it was put forward.
I haven't heard in New Hampshire.
But that's something that if it hasn't been done this this round, we are.
Something to add to your spreadsheet.
Absolutely.
Something that needs to happen, not just in Maine and Florida and all the 31 states, but we need we need to get this filed in every state we possibly can.
We need to get the politicians on record and then we need to hold those politicians accountable at the ballot box for voting to if they vote to allow these unconscionable, unconstitutional wars to continue.
Awesome.
OK, hang on just one second.
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All right.
So now let me interview your friend Reed here for a minute.
Reed wasn't expecting to be interviewed, but he's here.
Pass the microphone over.
Hi, Reed.
Welcome to the show, man.
How are you, dude?
I'm fantastic, Scott.
How are you?
Great to be here.
So tell us, what's your role in YAL?
Well, I don't really fight in the trenches on a legislative level like our mutual friend Eric Brakey here.
I'm just a filthy propagandist who masquerades as the vice president of communications at Young Americans for Liberty.
That's self-effacing, but sounds like a pretty good gig.
Well, I mean, being honest.
But yes, that's the extent of what I do is I really run everything media and communications related at YAL.
But I'll tell you a little bit of how my department and my team's mission relates to exactly what it is we've been discussing already.
So on the grassroots side, I do a little bit of work, but mostly it just involves communicating exactly what it is that we're achieving at the grassroots and in the policy front.
I will say, however, that we're actually building a system here where we can build compelling, provocative content that unabashedly and unapologetically promotes the ideas of liberty and gets it into the hands of the people who are the most likely to vote and actually elect people who support those ideas.
So you might say, we're actively building public support for the ideas of liberty in a way that I haven't seen in this country since Ron Paul's second presidential run.
At least I think that's what we're seeing here.
So a couple of quick examples of that.
We got Eric Brakey published in an op-ed with The Hill over the weekend, and it was on Defend the Guard.
Okay.
I don't...
I shouldn't speak for Antiwar.com.
It might be the spotlight for all I know right now, but I'll make sure that that's on Antiwar.com if it's not already.
Absolutely.
But, you know, I think, you know, Scott, if we don't, as libertarians, actually take it upon ourselves to get the ideas of liberty out there to the greater public, into the hands and into the minds of people beyond just what is currently the liberty movement, I think we're missing square one.
Right.
Absolutely.
So we got Eric's op-ed on Defend the Guard published in The Hill.
And let's mind you, The Hill is a newspaper in Washington, D.C., and it's by no stretch of the imagination a libertarian newspaper.
Right.
The average Hill reader, which is a pretty big paper in terms of circulation, it's a very center-left kind of paper, very beltway, right?
And but we see, like, those people are seeing the words Defend the Guard, Eric Brakey.
They're seeing, you know, heroes like Dan McKnight mentioned in this op-ed.
They're saying, bring the troops on, you know, actually written into this op-ed, into this newspaper they're holding in their hand, or maybe they're reading it online.
So what we're doing is we're actually taking the ideas of liberty and we're introducing it to a much larger audience.
Right.
So and when it comes to nullification specifically, I think another great example we could point to would be like the two sanctuary states.
Right.
I'm seeing people kind of within the greater sort of conservative ink world.
I'm seeing a lot of Republican voters and stuff like that talking about how we should get more states to be two sanctuary states.
Well, this is another form of nullification.
What can that tell us with respect to Defend the Guard specifically?
Tells me once again that the people outside the world of libertarianism, in particular, maybe the average MAGA voter, they're not unfamiliar with the concept of nullification.
And if we're not spending this sort of weird, slightly dystopian, you know, post-Trump era, attempting to capitalize upon that, capitalize upon the fact that nullification has been introduced to the conversation in a way that I haven't seen in a few generations, I think we're missing a tremendous opportunity here.
Right.
We talked about Right to Try just a little while ago.
Right to Try was another thing that was popularized via Trump's rhetoric.
I mean, he was talking about this repeatedly in his speeches.
Right.
I think that, you know, like him or hate him, I think we should absolutely be capitalizing on some of the ideas that he further popularized, even if his policies were meh, right through his rhetoric.
Right.
So I would say that, you know, Young Americans for Liberty, you know, every single day, myself, Eric, other members of our staff, we go in there and we actually find ways that we can take the ideas enshrined in the Ron Paul revolution.
We can make those relevant for the new cycle that's happening today.
And then we utilize all of our platforms, all of the various machines that we've built across our organization.
We get that into the hands of people.
We're Liberty pilling people who follow Turning Point USA and PragerU every day, and we're turning them into followers of the Ron Paul revolution.
Yeah, exactly.
So talk a little bit more about what you guys are doing on campus.
Sure.
So right now we have a little over 500 college campuses across the country.
And I'll be the first to say the last four weeks have been a little bit dramatic in terms of terms of a lot of our campus activists.
So just this week, we had an activist named Sara Rotsi up in New Jersey.
She challenged Rutgers University's mandatory vaccine policies for their students.
She said, no, we're absolutely not doing this.
We helped her get in touch with the media, various media sources across New Jersey and national news sources across the country.
NBC conducted an interview with her just a couple of days ago, and they actually ran an article that was seen by tens of millions of people on these young libertarian college kids pushing back against mandatory vaccine policies.
In addition to that, we had Hannah Davis, another activist of ours at Skidmore College up in upstate New York.
She pushed back.
What happened was the college didn't want to approve the formation of their Young Americans for Liberty chapter.
They wanted there because of some SJW BS about how Young Americans for Liberty allegedly promotes racism.
You know the drill.
It's more of this.
Camelot.
Yeah.
Absurd.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, we've been doing interviews the whole nine yards, launching baseless accusations that aren't work.
So we fought back.
We are continuing to fight back.
And Hannah Davis, she was she wound up on Fox News talking about that just last month.
She's gotten several more interviews about that.
And we're continually applying pressure to the college with the vast following we have on social media.
We're applying pressure to that college to approve the formation of our Young Americans for Liberty chapter there.
So just in terms of what's been happening in the last month, I mean, I would say it's been those have been two huge, huge moments for our students.
Right.
Yeah, that's great.
And you said 500 campuses.
That's really something.
All right.
Listen, guys, I'm sorry.
We got to end it here because I need at least five minutes to shake your hands and thank you for coming over and show you out the door before my next interview.
So thank you both so much for coming on the show.
It's just been great.
Hey, thank you.
It's been great to talk with you.
I think this is actually the first time I've gotten to meet you in person.
We've spoken on the phone and we've done Zoom testimony on, you know, committee hearings.
But it's good to finally meet you in person.
Absolutely.
You too.
That's Eric Brakey and Reid Cooley, both from Young Americans for Liberty.
That's YAL.org, especially for you young'uns.
Sign up.
Do what you can to help.
Thanks.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
