Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Pat McGeehan.
And he is a member of the House of Representatives in the state of West Virginia.
And a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Yeah, good to talk to you again.
So one time, Michael Bolden asked me to give a speech.
I'm really embarrassed about this, because the beginning of it was just terrible, but later on it got okay.
I don't think it even convinced some people in the crowd from what I was told later.
But I didn't know how to end it.
I was trying to end it on theme.
And I was saying, so we got to figure out a way how to nullify the warfare state from the ground up.
And figure out how to use, if possible, use the state governments to engage in nullification and interposition and do whatever they can to throw monkey wrenches in the warfare state in the interest of the American people and the USA.
And so that got a good response, but it was void for vagueness.
It was just horrible, and I didn't even have a single good idea.
Which, I guess, I'm starting to think of a couple now, but I don't know.
I was not prepared.
But you got the best idea.
You're trying to get the state of West Virginia to take a firmer grip on its own state guard units to prevent them from being deployed into the wars.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that's right.
And that's a good idea that you had in that speech, whenever that was.
You were right on point.
And I can't take credit for the idea completely because the Tenth Amendment Center had model legislation for this already.
I think I came up with the idea independent of them, but we kind of joined forces and they really provided me a lot of research and a few other folks helped me out.
Anyway, it kind of came together.
But yeah, all the bill says is, really, if I just want to sort of simplify it, is that the feds cannot send our own boys and girls and our national state guard units here in West Virginia into combat overseas unless the U.S. Congress takes a vote and declares war.
And I think that's a very good thing.
As you know too well, the executive branch in this country is growing far too powerful and it really doesn't matter who the president is because the president has even been somewhat said that the president does not need authorization from the Congress at all before our boys and girls are just sent into war overseas, kind of willy-nilly into foreign nations.
And that essentially has just thrown out the Constitution completely.
So that's a pretty extraordinary claim, and I think we've heard that claim made, that the president doesn't need permission from the Congress several times just in recent months.
And meanwhile, you know, the Congress does very little to rein in this growth in executive power.
So I don't think we can honestly expect Washington to take accountability for their actions.
And sometimes the states just have to force this accountability.
So yeah, this is an issue I've really focused and honed in on.
I've actually introduced this bill, it's called the Defend the Guard Act, for five consecutive years now in the West Virginia state legislature.
And it's just exactly what you kind of got at and what I just was saying, is it's a bill designed to force accountability on Washington, D.C.
It also promotes the adherence to the rule of law, constitutionalism, decentralization.
It does all of this by taking on the most disastrous and just atrocious thing the government does, and that is offensive, unjust, and unnecessary wars around the globe.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey guys, have you ever read The War State by Mike Swanson?
It's great.
It's a history of the rise of the military-industrial complex after World War II through the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations.
I think you'll learn a lot.
I think you'll like it a lot.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Well, you know, so here's the thing of it too, what's really important, because I don't know what would happen, say if you could get your whole legislature and the governor and everybody on board, I'm sure there'd be some big fight in the court or this or that.
But what if this happened also, and I don't know, maybe you'd win, maybe you wouldn't.
But what if this was going on in 20 out of the 50 states?
You know what I mean?
Because that's what it's really all about is, you know, what you just said, you're an Air Force vet talking like this.
It's not like this is a big kind of weirdo counterculture take.
This is the consensus of the American people now that it didn't have to be like this.
The whole 21st century, it didn't have to be like this at all with these wars, and it's time to end them right now.
And so we need to show that, you know what I mean?
I think this is, I was just talking to a few Air Force buddies earlier today, actually, and this issue, these sort of never-ending wars, you know, the so-called empire, I think it's just the defining issue of our times.
And I just think it's so important to do whatever we can to get the message out that it is the defining issue.
In my opinion, you're either, I don't want to sound so absolutist, but you're either with the good guys or you're with the empire, you're with Darth Vader.
So I'm sort of talking a little bit informally here, but that's just how I've started to come to see things anymore.
And I see myself, I'm not some sort of peacenik, I'm not a hippie, nothing like that.
I'm an Air Force Academy graduate, I was an intelligence officer, I did a tour overseas.
I come from a proud military background.
My father was a career Air Force officer, he was a bomber pilot.
You know, I have ancestors all the way back to the Civil War that fought in basically every war this country ever had.
But this is just such an important issue to realize and get your head around now.
And I find myself, what I was originally trying to say is, I find myself really agreeing more and more with the Glenn Greenwalds of the world and the Tulsi Gabbards of the world now.
Because everything's so kind of weird in the political climate now, 2019.
It's so upside down, you're not exactly sure who's going to say what from day to day, if you know kind of what I mean.
Yeah, of course, war is the great clarifier, and partisan changes of power are the great confuser of all things.
War helps show us what order of priorities people have, what order of values they have.
And the partisanship, of course, is the big countervailing force against morality.
And you can see it, especially the confusion on the right right now, where, you know, hey, Trump says the war in Afghanistan is stupid, then everybody knows that, it's time to end this thing right now.
But then Trump wants to ratchet things up with Iran.
Oh yeah, let me tell you about the Ayatollah, he's got to go, man, blah blah blah.
So they can't decide if they're doves or hawks right now because Trump can't.
And they're trying to keep track of him, you know, changing his position on these different things all the time.
He's bad on Iran, but he's better on Syria, but why be better on Syria?
That's the whole point of being bad on Syria, is to be bad on Iran.
What's he even doing?
Does he even know?
But anyway.
I don't understand, you know, I don't know.
I don't understand the, you know, that's sort of what kind of drew me to Trump at first, was his non-interventionist talk, and then he surrounded himself with these psychopaths, you know, like the John Boltons and, you know, Pompeo.
I mean, I don't know if you caught this, but it was maybe last month, Pompeo was giving some sort of lecture in front of a young college crowd at Texas A&M, and he made some quip, you know, Pompeo was a West Point graduate, and West Point has, you know, the same honor code as the Air Force Academy, more or less.
And he made some quip about, you know, everyone knows, you know, West Point's honor code is, we will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate those who do.
But let me tell you something, I was the director of CIA, and we lied, and we stole, and we cheated all the time.
And, you know, and I was like, it was almost like the whole Socratic, the charge against Socrates for corrupting the youth, only he was corrupting the youth.
And it's just sort of like, that's the standard moral compass now, perverted moral compass now, which is, you know, it's okay to, you know, the ends justify the means.
It's Western ethics backwards.
It's NSC 68, man, you know, Paul Nitze, and all of that.
It says right there that, you know, we cannot maintain our standard of living except at the expense of everybody else.
Yeah, well, you're a government employee, what do you know about economics?
You know, it's nonsense.
Military men are left to come to conclusions like that, you know, that we have to steal it, or we can't have it.
It's just crazy.
And to base your whole policy on that.
I know, I know.
Before I forgot, I wanted to tell you something, actually.
It was the one and only time I was on your show before, and I think it was maybe a year or so ago.
Well, since that time, some guys from Texas evidently heard that show, that podcast, or heard your show when I was on it, and they worked to get this bill, the concept of this bill, into the Republican Party platform in Texas.
Are you kidding?
Yeah, and I don't even know these gentlemen.
It was, I think, maybe a state rep and, like, a county chairman down there and a few other guys.
But they were able to get it into the Texas GOP's platform this past January.
And the only reason I know about it is because they hit me up on Twitter, and my Twitter account started blowing up all of a sudden in early January, and I'm like, who are these guys?
And it was some county, some guys from some county in Texas, and they got it into the platform, which is, you know, it's kind of a big deal.
So, I mean, I guess, you know, this issue really takes only a small minority, maybe, to push it forward for it to perhaps start to become effective.
I think certainly the best way to, one of the better ways to appeal to conservatives is to appeal to the constitutional law and just what is it exactly we're conserving around here.
And if all you're asking for is a good old-fashioned, honest declaration of war before committing state troops like this, then that sounds fair.
It's not like you're saying, I demand a double UN resolution by the French and the Chinese.
You're saying, I want the law as it was written, as we thought it was understood to be, that only the legislature can do stuff like this, you know, this kind of deal.
So, not much of a better way to approach that when it comes to Republicans.
So, what kind of progress have you made with Republicans in your state, or Democrats for that matter?
Well, the first time I introduced it was back in 2015, and there was a big powwow in the Speaker's office, and the Adjutant General of the West Virginia National Guard evidently got a call from the Pentagon, and I believe at the time he said it was the Chief of Staff of the Army who called him and basically threatened him that, A, if the bill saw the light of day, the National Guard units, the West Virginia Guard units in our state might be moved or relocated to other states, or possibly the bases here would be put on the BRAC list, which if you're not familiar with that term, it just essentially means they'll put on the list of the closure list.
And I don't know if that's true or not, or if the Adjutant General was just sort of, you know, I don't know, trying to put out some sort of threat, because he didn't want the bill to run.
So, it didn't go anywhere, but I kept introducing it, and we have a new leadership in the West Virginia legislature this year, and the new Speaker was a quasi-friend of mine.
You know, he's my age.
I'm 39.
I'll be 40 this year.
So, you know, he's my age.
His office was right across the hall from mine for the last couple years, and I had a lot of talks with him on this bill, and he promised, basically, well, he implied I'd get a full vote, up or down vote on the House floor this year, and we just concluded our regular session, legislative session, not too long ago, and that never came to fruition.
So, I never, he never allowed it to come out, but that's okay.
Not to get into inside baseball and parliamentary procedure, but essentially, I made a motion, which rarely ever works, but I made a motion to circumvent the entire committee process.
You know, when a bill gets introduced, the Speaker references it to certain committees, and then it works its way through, and then it finally comes to the full House floor for a vote.
So, I made this motion to skip the committee process, because they were just trying to kill it, you know, and never have it taken up in the committees, and it worked.
You know, I got like 56, there's 100 state reps, and in the lower House I'm in, and the House of Delegates, it's called here in West Virginia, and I got 56 votes in favor, 44 against.
I had to make that motion twice, so it was about almost a week-long fight to do this, and making those kind of motions are sort of frowned upon, you know, because for sort of obvious reasons, going against the grain, embarrassing the leadership, all that kind of stuff, but whatever.
But, you know, we got it on the House floor, we won that motion, and I was kind of surprised, actually.
I was like, wow, that never works.
But after that, that was the successful part, but after that, sort of outside forces, the powers that be, saw what was going on, didn't like it.
The adjutant general of the West Virginia Guard, two stars, started getting involved again.
He was, you know, sending text messages to different state representatives.
You know, he brought some guys up.
They were all in camouflage coming up into the statehouse, sort of trying to look sort of intimidating, trying to go into different state reps' offices, you know, tell them why they shouldn't vote for the bill, yada, yada, yada.
Depending on which state rep you talked to, it was a different reason.
You know, oh, we'll lose federal funding, or I won't be able to deploy some of my units' missions we have to carry out.
And this guy, this adjutant general, he's really a political appointee, this two-star.
He kind of fancies himself, Scott, like some sort of Captain America, where he has to go around saving the world.
And there's a couple of special forces units in the West Virginia National Guard, and those guys, he's always deploying those guys to God knows where.
So, of course, this bill will get in the way of that.
But the interesting thing about this entire process, this past February and March, was that nobody ever made any rational arguments against it on the House floor when I was presenting the bill several times I presented it to make those motions.
Nobody ever said anything about, you know, no one ever took up the, I guess, the Hamiltonian perpetual union nullification is not a real, legal, legitimate principle.
Nobody ever made any arguments like that.
I mean, it's so interesting because it was just accepted that, yes, we could do this.
It was just that we shouldn't do this, the people against it.
And so I found that because, you know, I had all these arguments prepared to put those ones down, but I never had to.
So it was really interesting.
Yeah.
You know, I'll tell you the same thing I said to Colonel Bacevich earlier today.
You ever think about running for the U.S. House of Representatives?
Oh, me?
Yeah.
See?
You could do a lot of good damage up there.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, I've had conversations with different people about it, but I try to kind of keep my ambition in check, and I'm making a difference at the state level.
And I kind of just gave up on Washington anyway.
It's kind of like a foregone conclusion.
Understandable.
But really, I mean, you know, I don't know.
It takes a lot of money to run for Congress, and I just feel like I might have to make promises I'm not willing to make.
And, you know, I feel like there's a lot of good that I'm kind of helping to perpetuate at the state level.
And, man, I just wish that if we could just get six or seven other states on board, a couple more state reps just to commit to this idea, I really think it could be effective.
One other thing I wanted to say is, you know, the National Guard is separate from the active-duty forces.
And under the Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, Clause 15, which is the so-called Militia Clause, every National Guard unit in every state explicitly derives their sole legal ability to exist from that clause in the Constitution.
And that clause says that the U.S. Congress has to call up the state National Guard units when they want to, quote-unquote, federalize them.
And they can only do it under three expressly enumerated conditions set forth in that clause, the Militia Clause, where all our National Guard units get their legal ability, cite their legal reasons for existence.
And those three conditions are to suppress an insurrection, repel an invasion, or enforce the laws of the Union.
So, you know, calling up a bunch of National Guardsmen who signed up really just to maybe throw some sandbags to stop a flood or help some people out in the local community, throwing those guys into Iraq, I hardly think that qualifies as repelling an invasion unless you want to interpret it in some perverted way.
You know, so it's really interesting that, you know, there's several different ways to approach this.
You can approach it from there.
Of course, a declaration of war, which we haven't had since the early 1940s, Second World War, that would technically, presumably, be enforcing the laws of the Union.
We haven't had that.
You can approach it from that angle or approach it from many other angles.
You know, you can make the argument that the National Guard, you know, should belong home.
They shouldn't be, you know, they should be, you know, taking care of our local communities.
They signed up to do that.
We shouldn't be deploying them for 18 months in Iraq or Afghanistan or around the world.
So, you know, this is an easily defensible position.
It's effective, I think, especially if we've got several states to do it.
And if it goes to the Supreme Court, if it wound up in court, fine.
I think it's a debate.
We could possibly win it.
But, you know, we could have some governors that just say, well, I don't care what the Supreme Court says.
They're not taking our boys.
Yeah.
Well, and either way, you make a huge story out of this.
And you create, you know, a major impression that legislators out there in flyover country are starting to take matters into their own hands on things like this.
You know, there was this big push, you know, around the turn of the decade there by, well, let's say special interest groups to push this idea that the Islamist terrorists were taking over the United States of America.
And the way that they did it was by lobbying all these state governments to pass laws protecting the population from the institution of Sharia law, even though nobody was trying to institute Sharia law.
It was all just kind of make-believe.
But they acted like it was a big emergency.
And we've got to force all these laws through right now before Sharia gets us.
And this was a really convincing way of going about lying to people and scaring them, essentially, in Obama years there.
But you can see the wisdom in it, too, from a cynical point of view or, you know, about their thing.
But for your thing, it's the same kind of difference, where if people, if different state legislatures, again, if just 5, 10, or 20 of them started even trying to pass resolutions like this, that in itself is huge.
And that's the kind of thing that, you know, could change the entire tone of a presidential election season, for example.
Something like that.
You know, because there's strange coalitions being made.
You know, the old saying politics makes for strange bedfellows.
You know, there was a lot of Democrats that supported my bill.
It was truly bipartisan.
You had constitutional types, you know, supporting it.
And then you had these, you know, uber leftist progressives supporting it, probably just because they don't like President Trump.
But, I mean, I don't really care.
That's fine.
If partisanship makes them do the right thing, we'll have to settle for that.
Yeah, exactly.
So I just think maybe there's an opportunity here in the coming year or two.
You know, I've had some state reps from other states express an interest in introducing this bill.
And, you know, it's not an easy thing to forward and really commit to, because, I mean, there are some strong forces that are going to get very, very upset and push back very hard.
But that's sort of how you know it could be possibly effective.
You know, if you're over the target, you're taking a lot of flack.
So, you know, I just think it's – but you have to really research it.
You have to understand sort of some of the nuances, because they'll come at you with different arguments in your office or in some other supporter's office.
And they won't understand, and then they'll get confused.
And so you've really got to lead the – know what you're talking about, lead the argument, the right arguments on the House floor, make the correct speeches, put down all the naysayers that are trying to pull supporters away from you.
I mean, it takes a lot of commitment.
But I think if we – if there was the right state legislators in different states, all you really would need, I think, was five or six, maybe seven states to get something like this on the books.
And I would just like to demonstrate and signal to other state legislatures that this can be done and we can just get it out of one house.
If I just got it past the lower house, that would be a big signal, I think.
Well, hey, I sure like that story you told before about some people heard you on the show and it made a little bit of a difference after that.
So maybe that will happen again.
And I think so many libertarians and libertarian-leaning people understand that war is where it's at.
And really, it's our comparative advantage to fight about this.
If the leftists don't want to prioritize it, then how about the libertarian, the more capitalist leaning of the so-called right coalition in America and let us prioritize this.
And to the degree it surprises people, that's the same degree to which it should be effective and instructive for people that, hey, it doesn't have to be this way.
But it really doesn't.
Check out this Air Force officer says so.
He was there and he says that you shouldn't send your little brother to the next one.
So, hey, that's pretty clear.
Yeah, I agree with you there.
You know, my dad was a scholar and he was a great guy.
He passed away when I was younger.
But anyway, I had a conversation with him once when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old.
And it was in his library.
And he was a bomber pilot and a real gung-ho kind of guy.
But he was just sort of a principal to the end, that kind of guy.
Taught me a lot about honor and integrity.
But I had a conversation with him.
He was really gung-ho, real patriotic.
And I asked him once in his den or his library.
It was after the Gulf War.
It might have been like 1993 when this happened.
And I was pretty young.
But I remember it distinctly because I asked him why didn't we go in and unseat Saddam Hussein and topple his government.
Something to that effect.
You know, I asked him that.
And his answer was, I wasn't prepared for what he said.
I thought he would say the opposite.
But he basically just said, hey, we should have never gotten involved in the first place.
We don't understand the culture.
You know, we'll get bogged down.
It's a quagmire.
We can get a lot of men and women killed.
And he said, so we shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place.
And it's a good thing.
At least we didn't go all the way to Baghdad.
And ever since then, I just thought, yeah, man, yeah, maybe in my head I got all this wrong.
And I was just young then.
So it always stuck in my mind.
Yeah, definitely a wise take on the thing when everyone else was saying that was the conventional wisdom, should have finished the job and all that.
Look at what all the blowback we got, including the September 11th attack and Iraq War II and everything after that, just as blowback from the war as it was without going all the way to Baghdad.
But with the problem of the Shiite majority oppressed in the South and the uprising that was crushed and the subsequent policy of dual containment from Saudi Arabia throughout the Clinton years and the bombing and the sanctions and the WMD snipe hunt and all of these things.
That is all part of our current nightmare, right?
It's all one big Iraq war started way back then.
So he's right.
We could have gone ahead and got started on the worst part sooner.
But, you know, it turns out when they did go all the way to Baghdad, it's just like he said, terrible quagmire shouldn't even gone in the first place, but definitely shouldn't have gone all the way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, you can rattle off some of the foreign policy, foreign affairs terminology.
It's like it's like machine gun fire, man.
You are one heck of a you must be the libertarian go to guy at foreign policy.
You know, Doug Bandow is way better than me and he's been all around the world a hundred times.
I emailed him the other day.
He was sitting down and having dinner with Latvian defense officials there.
Yeah, no, he's just I just got that hatred to motivate me to, you know, try to beat you over the head with it all in a way that he doesn't.
Right, right, right.
Well, I was an intelligence officer.
I thought I was a pretty good one, but, you know, maybe not.
You run circles around me, Scott.
That's funny.
Well, you're on a different job now.
But, yeah, man, I should let you go.
It's late Friday afternoon and I'm sure you have higher priorities, but I sure appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
And just before we sign off, I just want to once again want to say your last book, Fool's Errand.
I mean, it was just it was it was a great work, a great piece.
I mean, I seriously couldn't put it down.
I think I put it down maybe not even half a dozen times.
I read it inside a week.
So, I mean, it was it was so put together.
The structure was great.
The conclusions were spot on in a lot of things I didn't even know that you had in there.
So I couldn't recommend your book enough.
So, man, that's great.
Thanks very much.
I really appreciate that a lot, Pat.
All right.
Well, you take it easy.
All right.
God bless you to make sure and keep me on your email list there.
All right.
Roger that.
All right, you guys.
That is Pat McGeehan, and he is a member of the House of Delegates in West Virginia.
He's pushing the Protect the Guard Act again.
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That makes sense.
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