Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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 had.
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, Ben, 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 on the line.
I've got David Swanson.
He wrote a book called War is a Lie.
And it's about all of them and including World War II.
And he runs this website called Let's Try Democracy.
I prefer anarchy, but anyway, we can compromise because David Swanson puts opposition to American foreign policy first.
Welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you?
Hi, Scott.
Great to be here.
Happy to have you here.
The secretary of the Navy lied to Congress.
You don't say.
Can't believe it, can you?
Yeah, this is why they don't they aren't under oath.
Most of these big shots, you know, if it's random, people have to swear they're going to tell the truth.
But not secretaries of the Navy.
Yeah, good thing for him, although I guess even if he was under oath, they wouldn't enforce it.
But anyway, so what was it that he was lying about?
So this was something a friend of mine, Pat Elder, brought to my attention, who does a lot of counter recruitment and focuses on the problem of military recruitment and advertising and military tests in schools and so forth.
There was a hearing of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees together in a big room back in December.
And the secretary of the Navy, on the topic of recruitment, brought up unprompted this bizarre claim that there were over 1100, he said, high schools and districts.
So it wasn't clear at all whether he was talking about school districts or individual U.S. public high schools.
But either way, there were over 1100 of them that had simply barred military recruiters from entering the schools.
And, you know, a couple of the Congress members or senators expressed surprise initially at this sort of bizarre claim.
And but the senator from Iowa, the woman who was who was asking the question that got this, Senator Ernst, she blurted out, you know, acting as if she knew all about it.
And this was old hat and that and that was the end of that.
And from that point to this, nobody on either committee, none of the, you know, progressive members of those committees that that Pat and I have contacted, have been willing to to ask the Pentagon for the list of 1100 schools that bar military recruiters, which is, of course, less real than McCarthy's list of commies in the government, or even to ask for a single example of one of these schools.
And this was a statement that was in line with other statements by other, you know, secretaries of the other branches and top Pentagon officials over recent months.
They've all been claiming that schools keep out military recruiters, which is actually against the law, because several years back there actually were a couple schools that kept out military recruiters and they changed the law to require that any school that gets federal funding that that allows college recruiters or job recruiters in has to allow military recruiters in, too.
So that so so we got that we got a couple of of media outlets to pick up the story military because we offered two thousand dollars to anybody who can produce a single one of these schools from this list of 1100 and military dot com wrote a story getting the answer out of the Pentagon.
That was essentially, yeah, we lied.
There aren't any.
But that, you know, sort of muddied the waters with various comments, trying to make it sound as if it might have been possible that the guy was telling the truth.
But but there aren't any.
And we went to Pat and I went.
We were staying at the Venezuelan embassy in D.C. and we went over to a hearing just this week at the U.S. Capitol where this same guy was secretary of the Navy, was going to testify about the budget.
And they wouldn't let us in.
And they held it in the smallest room in the U.S. Capitol.
They let in three people who apparently worked for the Navy as you know, the as the members of the public for this public hearing and then closed the doors and kept out lots of other good, respectable pro war people because my friends and I were next in the line.
So it's not it's not something they want to talk about with anyone who will hold them to the facts.
But they want they want to blame somebody for low recruitment.
They want to.
I was going to say, what's the point of all of this?
Are they they're trying to just make it seem like, oh, no, the leftists are taking over everything and they're going to leave our country defenseless.
No, there's something more to it than that.
Well, you know, they're dangling fifty thousand dollar bonuses in front of kids, not to mention the lies that you won't really go to any of the wars and all the usual spiel that they give kids to get them into the military.
Why not make that one hundred thousand?
Why not have a bigger ad campaign?
Why not, you know, have a sponsorship of more race cars and more sports teams?
Why not pay more, you know, football teams to to to do exhibitions of patriotism before the games?
And, you know, the only way they boost the recruitment money and the advertising money and the recruitment offices is to have some sort of excuse.
If the explanation rather than excuse is that people are sick and tired of endless damn wars with no clear purpose that endanger the United States rather than protect it and destroy the environment and cost us trillions of dollars and erode our liberties rather than celebrate freedom and on and on.
Well, you know, and what do you get out of it?
You get increased risk of homelessness, suicide, PTSD, brain injury, moral injury, loss of limbs.
You know, if that's the problem, if that's the explanation, then who wants to dump more money into recruitment?
But if it's if it's it's if it's evil liberal schools.
Oh, and the other thing they they did in this most recent article through Military.com was say that the schools were mostly in New York City.
So eleven hundred high schools, more high schools than exist, you know, public high schools in New York City are, you know, now banning all military recruiters a couple of months back.
And then they switch the policy so that now they're letting them in somewhere within the past couple of months.
And there's not a single story about it anywhere, pro or con.
Nobody's mentioned it to Fox News.
Not a single person I know knows a single person who's heard about a single school in New York City keeping out military recruits.
So they just they never as with the wars, right, as with, oh, we didn't blow up those those children that, you know, they're still alive.
Well, actually, they were used as human shields.
We had to blow them up.
But, you know, they just they pile lies on top of lies instead of saying, oh, he was mistaken, you know, which would be the respectable thing to do.
Right.
He heard that somewhere.
Infowars or something.
There are plenty of plenty of people on every side of every issue who just pile lies on top of lies.
But the military are pros at this.
Yeah.
Well, and obviously, like you're saying, it's important that they have to come up with some kind of excuse for why it is that they can't recruit any people to join.
They're not going to sit there and testify that, well, see, the American people have the Vietnam syndrome again.
A little bit of a relapse after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria here.
And so, you know, kind of over it.
Don't believe in the mission anymore.
You got the worst been going on so long now that kids that are recruitment age are kids of dads who fought in these wars and who can tell them, I know better, son.
Right.
Like you might have fought in Korea and then told your son to go on to Vietnam.
But this is like, yeah, no, don't go to Afghanistan.
I've been there and it's not it wasn't working then.
It's not working now, junior.
So pretty hard for them to to bury that, to ignore that or explain it away other than just to come up with some other excuse.
Right.
The ideology of these public school teachers who would dare interfere with our national defense.
Right, exactly.
I mean, they do openly blame low unemployment as they should.
Low unemployment is a factor in low recruitment.
I just think what that implies, you know.
Well, exactly.
It implies that they're recruiting people who don't have any other options in their life.
And that's where they're getting people to proudly join their so-called volunteer or so-called service.
But, you know, Elizabeth Warren, Senator Elizabeth Warren, candidate for president, tweeted today, or at least recently I saw it today, demanding that the military produce an explanation of what it will mean to to win in Afghanistan, a plan for winning in Afghanistan.
We owe that to our beloved troops.
You know, I'm sorry, Senator Warren, I don't know where you've been, but they claim, you know, that they have a plan to win in Afghanistan every time, every year that they go before Congress.
And never is there anything to it.
And there is no such thing.
It's like demanding, this is what I tweeted back at her.
It's like you're demanding a detailed description to identify the Easter bunny.
You know, nobody, there is no such thing as a plan for how to win the destruction of somebody else's country.
Oh, and she knows that, too.
She's been there and said before that I just don't see a solution to this problem.
Parroting them.
I mean, that's what they say, that there is no military solution.
It has to be a political one, which means at some point some American president is going to surrender to the Taliban and leave because we lost that war already.
She knows that.
It's she knows it and she knows that we know she knows it.
And yet she still prefers to say I demand a plan for how to win rather than I demand you get the bleep out of there.
Which just goes to show who she would be as president of the United States, too.
You know that she's willing to flip flop around for, you know, political stance reasons on the war in Afghanistan.
After all this, she's going to be nothing but Donald Trump and Barack Obama and lick her finger and hold it up to the wind to decide what we ought to do about the Helmand province.
Right, right.
She's, you know, when pressed, she said, yes, she would end the war on Afghanistan.
But then she goes on about how she wouldn't do it by tweet like some people.
She would she would do it in a very profound, you know, the same old Obama routine about we must be as careful getting out as we were reckless getting in.
He was so damn careful getting out.
They haven't got out.
Right.
Yeah, he was so careful getting out by the end of 2014 that it's now halfway through 2019.
And we're still at war there.
Exactly.
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So on to the you know, back to the culture part of this here in the States.
I'm sure you saw this story of this terrible shooting at this university in North Carolina there.
And I don't know if you saw the story of the hero who apparently the shooter went into a room that was just packed full of kids.
There is nowhere for anyone to go whatsoever.
And this one brave kid rushed the shooter and tackled him to the ground, which led to others then being able to pile on and disarm him.
And the hero who ran straight at the gunman, unarmed, ran straight at the gunman, was a young recruit into the army.
He was in some kind of junior ROTC type of a program.
And I saw the statement from his parents talking about how proud they were of him for that.
But saying that he he had, you know, really fought over the decision hard about whether to go to college or whether to join the military because he was just so such a generous and decent and giving human, provably that he just wanted to serve.
And so his parents' best idea, his teacher's best idea, his minister's best idea, everybody he knew's best idea was, well, if you want to serve your countrymen, the best thing you could do would be to go and join the infantry and go and murder whoever Donald Trump tells you to murder.
Because somehow, David, still that olive green or that desert tan, it just somehow completely obfuscates every bit of truth, every bit of knowledge, every bit of wisdom, every bit of context negates thou shalt not kill in God's original commandments.
It negates anything.
It negates the 21st century that we've lived through of nine failed wars and nearly two million dead in wars that everyone agrees now, everyone.
Oh, Iraq, yeah, probably shouldn't have done that.
That's the consensus in D.C. that, OK, yeah, we did say that was necessary, but maybe it wasn't.
And maybe it kind of caused some problems.
At best, that's the spin on Iraq.
At worst, it's that the Iraq war led to the rise of the Islamic State and ISIS, all this chaos, spread terrorism everywhere.
So you're right, obviously, that they have a recruiting problem because fewer and fewer people are buying into that.
But it's such a powerful cognitive dissonance.
It's such an amazing thing, almost.
It's like I abhor violence, but I like watching Marvel superheroes beat each other up on movies and stuff because it's just pretend and it's exciting to watch and what have you.
But you know what I mean?
It's like these two realities don't conflict with each other.
The most decent kid in your neighborhood wants to go and join the military to defend this country, David.
It's a communications problem.
It's an education problem.
And this is why you get so many veterans for peace and whistleblowers.
Oh, and I'm sorry, I'm talking about this recently dead kid.
Let me just add, he made the right decision.
At least at first, he went and joined the university and went to improve his own life instead of hurting anyone else.
And then was luckily there because of that choice.
He was there to even then deliberately choose to sacrifice his life in the most heroic way in the defense of other innocent people.
So I'm sorry, I don't want to sound like I'm talking bad about the kid.
I'm just talking bad about this crazy society that had him so misled that it was even an option that a kid like that would go join the imperial forces rather than be the kind of hero that he turned out to be, you know?
Well, I do.
And I think that, you know, somehow we have to develop a communication system and an education system so that people find out without having to go live through it what war is.
Because we have so many thousands of opponents of war who say, I wanted to do good.
I wanted to help the world.
So I signed up to go kill people.
Then I discovered that it was killing people for no damn reason.
And now I'm against it.
If we could, you know, and obviously there is the poverty draft problem and the lack of options problem that contribute to this.
But people who go, especially after something like September 11th and in that propaganda blitz, go and sign up because they think it's the way to generously help the world need a better education.
So they don't have to go through that.
Because one of the things they come out of that with is a higher probability of not being that hero, as you call him in the room, but being that other guy.
The mass shooters in the United States are very disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars.
And the kid who shot up his classmates in the high school in Florida that started the anti-gun, unless it's a military or police gun movement, was in the ROTC and wearing his ROTC shirt while he murdered his classmates.
And so I think we actually need a culture where there are some other types of heroism that we can imagine, including taking risks to build a movement to ban the damn guns.
I don't know if you agree with me on that or not.
Probably not.
But when something like this happens in New Zealand and then they ban the guns, like in Australia where they had exactly the same crazed gun culture as in the United States, and then they banned the guns, the mass shootings stopped.
Somebody didn't get to play with guns.
Somebody didn't get to go hunting, whatever.
But the mass shootings stopped.
Yeah, but people were also deprived of their ability to defend their life, too, from criminals, from police.
Who's going to round up the guns from the Americans, other than a bunch of cops who are already soaking in the blood of innocents?
And what kind of civil war would have to be fought and won for the government to win the right to disarm the American civilian population?
It's word for word what they said in Australia.
I can find you examples.
It's word for word what they were saying in Australia.
And it worked.
They bought up the guns.
They didn't have anything like the gun numbers or culture that we have here.
I mean, come on.
Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats outlawed guns.
You're going to have a civil war, David.
You're going to have a million people killed.
Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats would never do a damn thing the Republicans wouldn't do with them.
They don't care.
For that matter, yeah.
Fair enough.
And I think one thing we have to change is this notion that it's any kind of a service to join up with the military.
We've got this National Commission on National Service going around holding hearings on whether to expand draft registration to women or end it or add a mandatory military service or non-military service, where of course they're going to make the military service pay the best and so forth.
And even the past heads of the Selective Service are ready to get rid of the thing.
The courts have now ruled you can't have draft registration only for males.
It's unfair to women not to require them to be forced against their will to go kill and die for Exxon Mobil.
There's liberalism in America in the 21st century for you right there.
That is something the Democrats are pushing, is forcing women into the draft or into draft registration.
There's not an actual draft at the moment.
And so you have to get rid of it.
You have to get rid of draft registration.
Otherwise they're going to add women to it, and they're possibly going to create a mandatory service where you'll have a choice of some military service or some supposedly non-military service that doesn't interfere with the military's agenda.
I'm against all of this, and they were ready to have me testify at their hearing in D.C., and a couple of good people did testify.
And then they found a woman who was willing to say that she wanted only good manly men to register for the draft.
It wasn't appropriate for women, God said so, and so they put her in instead of me.
That's funny.
I wanted to mention here, we have this great article.
There's an anti-draft activist, anti-selective service activist named Edward Hasbrook.
Yeah, he did testify at the hearing I'm talking about.
I'm sorry?
He did testify at the hearing in D.C. that I did not.
Right.
And he writes regularly on this issue exclusively.
We publish him at Antiwar.com on the blog and sometimes in article form here.
And he has a new piece from the other day called Former Director of Selective Service Says It's Time to End Draft Registration.
That's what you were referring to there.
And part of what he was saying was that if we actually took the selective service as it exists and we attempted to implement it in an emergency and tried to draft people, that is such a mess it wouldn't work.
The whole thing would fall apart.
All the data is out of place.
None of the computer programs work right.
It's so incomplete and inaccurate.
He says it could not be used for a draft that could be enforced or would stand up to due process or fairness challenges.
So that's why he's saying essentially, even from you guys' point of view, that you think you need this system to militarize the American population in a hurry.
Well, it ain't the one we've got now.
You're going to have to figure out something else.
It almost sounds like it'd be better to keep this just to gum up the works than let them have a shot at trying to create something new.
Well, I agree with Ed that there would be major resistance, denunciation.
There would be outrageous unfairness.
There would be general incompetence and screw-ups and misidentifications and so forth.
I don't think any of those arguments are necessarily going to persuade John Bolton that he doesn't want to draft if he wants a draft.
Any draft is going to draft more people than no draft.
And unfairness is just the hallmark of a lot of these people in the U.S. government.
Taking kids away from their families at the border and locking them in cages, is that being ended because it's unfair to somebody or cruel or incompetent?
No.
Creating divisions among the public and polarizing issues, this is what somebody like Donald Trump does for a living.
I think the draft and the draft registration should be challenged and should be ended.
But the fact that they're going to be grossly unfair and incompetently done, I'm not sure that's going to persuade anybody.
They'll go blow a billion dollars on some contractor to fix it, right?
Or ten billion.
I think it has to be ended because we won't stand for it and because the Bible-thumping sexists who want women to stay barefoot in the kitchen are actually right to care about women enough not to want to send them into this hell.
And they ought to just expand that to care about young men that much too.
And on the flip side of that, the liberals who think that your right to be a military officer in a world empire committing acts of aggression against other people is the epitome of equality and feminism and the advancement of the fairer sex and all of this are completely perverted and wrecked and twisted in the brain.
They're just wrong.
It's the dumbest damn thing in the world.
That's what they did to Princess Leia.
They go, oh no, Princess, well that's like old think.
She's General Leia now because that is the highest epitome of even Carrie Fisher feminism.
Did you ever think that Carrie Fisher was a wilting lily back when she was just Princess Leia?
Wasn't that the whole thing?
What a badass princess she was?
But nope, she's got to be a general.
I almost wonder, is that just J.J. Abrams' stupid brain or did the military actually give him money to do that?
Because they do that, right?
We know there are books published about this.
They spend millions of dollars, zillions of dollars influencing Hollywood to influence the American population on these questions.
And if the government itself can spend money to help redefine feminism to mean serving them at war, then that's exactly what they'll do.
It's a horrible, horrible feminist movement.
The right to participate in mass killing, it's a horrible angle for the gay rights movement.
The right to be openly gay, participant in mass murder.
It's a horrible notion of immigrants' rights that you get to be a citizen if you go help kill some random people some distant place.
You can come back and be a citizen even if you might not really because they're lying to you.
But it's just not the way that a movement for human rights ought to go.
We ought to have different priorities than the right to participate in senseless mass killing.
Hey, so there are parents listening to this show right now who might want to protect their kids.
Can you teach us a bit about the ASVAB and some of these other scams that they use to weasel their way into the high schools?
A very little bit.
Pat Elder, my friend, is a real expert and has a website studentprivacy.org, if I'm not mistaken, is the address.
And parents should know that they have the right to opt out of having their kids name and address and information given to the military.
But that most school districts and most schools do not ever notify parents about that.
And so they have to proactively contact their school and say, I want my kid opted out of this.
And many, many school districts, not all of them, use a test where the acronym spells out ASVAB.
That's given to thousands and thousands of students in schools across the country and very often not identified as being a military recruitment test.
It's just here's another test.
Do it.
But that's what it is.
And the results are given to the military, which helps the military identify what approach will best recruit your kid or you, if you're a kid, into the military.
And it's also worth being aware that the military says quite credibly that their top tools now for recruitment are social media.
So if you're going to if you're going to have a Facebook page and you're going to have social media presence, Instagram and Snapchat and so forth and so on.
Be aware that you are communicating to the military what your interests are, what would appeal to you, and that people asking to be your friend and liking you are being paid by the U.S. government to try to get you into wars.
Yeah, man, you know, it's such a horrible bit of propaganda my whole life long.
I guess there must there is a kernel of truth in this right that, you know, World War Two.
A lot of farm boys went off to war, came home and then on the GI Bill, they got to go to college and become an architect or something when that was never going to be their lot in life before.
So what a great mechanism of social advancement in a in a very real sense, right, just out of context with what else matters.
But it becomes very like a vicious kind of cycle, too, where we actually probably wouldn't even have a standing army at all if they didn't have that GI Bill.
If they didn't have this entire propaganda campaign that joining the military is actually temporary, it's really a step on your professional ladder for the rest of your life.
Be all that you can be, aim high and all of these things, get an edge on life.
In fact, they had in, I guess, Obama years, they were running these commercials that were really pretty blatant.
They like show a poor Mexican guy and they go, you want to be a helicopter mechanic?
There's only one way you could ever be a helicopter mechanic.
You have to join the Air Force first, pal.
Everybody knows that.
And they show a poor black guy and they're like, you want to be anything but a poor black guy the rest of your life?
And then they show him sitting in the back of a fire truck and they go, yeah, well, everybody knows there's only one way a guy like you could ever get on a fire team.
That would be, you have to join the Army first.
After you get out of the Army, then maybe we'll let you be a fireman.
And that's in the damn commercial.
It's not even about defending us from terrorism or any of these things.
It's all about selfishness, and I don't mean selfishness in the worst sense, but it's about what's good for you and your position in this society.
And the Afghans are just kind of beside the point.
And of course, then that's not really true.
As you said, these guys come home typically with more problems than they would have had if they just stayed here.
Well, you can't talk about any particular individual, but statistically, you end up more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless.
Because of all various injuries, mental and physical, also because the skills are not applicable to, in most cases, to any jobs outside the Army.
But the reason that World War II veterans, at least if they were white, got help with college was not because that's somehow inherent in war fighting.
If you kill lots of people, you get to go to college.
It's because the veterans of World War I raised holy hell and took over Washington, D.C., and people didn't want to see that again.
And Congress did things for World War II veterans before World War II veterans could raise hell on the streets of D.C.
But if you wanted to make college free and end student debt and be like most other wealthy countries on Earth, many of which simply make education a human right, there's absolutely no need for a war.
You could have had dozens of G.I. bills for what you spent on fighting the war before you had the G.I. bill.
And it's in the platform now.
This is actually news.
It's in the platform of several of the leading candidates for president in 2020 to make college free and to end student debt.
And it's something you can do for a tiny fraction of either what you're failing to tax billionaires and corporations or what you're blowing on the military.
Well, and it's also a case, and plenty of liberals agree with this because it's just the science of it, that this is a case where they break your leg and then hand you some crutches too.
Because it's the federal backing of the loan regime for going to college that creates such inflated prices.
And they even say, I remember on MSNBC, they talked about college administrators explaining that every year the government puts out the guidelines for the max they're willing to pay, and then they raise their tuition right up to exactly that price.
So the entire system of higher education in America is essentially like a fascist system, like a mixed economy, very skewed system with all kinds of disincentives and weird incentives in the pricing system.
But just think, if we didn't have an empire at all, and all these trillions of dollars in our economy were just here to be capital reinvested in education, health care, and every other thing, essentially we're talking about the same thing.
This money going to these things that are most important for us in real life.
You have your more democratic methods, and I have my more market-based ones.
But we both want the same thing, and we're both recognizing that the government is making it so difficult that we need them in the first place to come in and be part of this.
Why should you have to even get their help at all, much less go to war to get their help?
Well, I disagree with you on all of that, except on the military spending.
I agree with you 100%.
It needs to end.
But all I'm saying is not to argue, and I'm sorry for arguing, because I didn't really mean to sound like that.
I mean it more like this is where we all agree.
Everybody who's anti-war and on the left says the government could spend that money on better things.
And everybody who's anti-war and on the right says, well, we could spend that money on better things ourselves if you just give us our tax money back.
But so what?
Who cares?
We're absolutely on the exact same side of this, and that is almost irrelevant.
That's for arguing about later.
Well, when I say let's get together and let's say, let's take $500 billion out of military spending and put it into tax cuts for working people.
Don't tax it in the first place.
And let's take the other $500 billion from military spending and put it into education and trains and solar panels and parks and retirement.
You know what, Swanson?
You got a deal.
You and I ought to run for president together.
Well, you're the first one who has said that, because typically people say, no, I cannot in good conscience advocate spending a dime on anything.
I'm a purist.
You're the first one who has said to me, I would agree on that.
No, it's all about priorities, man.
And we've got genocide going on here, right?
No bullshit.
And you know what?
I'm not the first, because Ron Paul ran for president twice, and he said, I'll make my peace with the welfare state.
I'm not here to destroy the welfare state.
I am here to end the empire.
And you know how we're going to save Social Security?
By ending the empire.
And we're not going to kick any old grandma dependent on Social Security that she's paid into her whole life off in a way that people might fear a libertarian would do.
He said he wanted to see and come up with ways to transition to more private things, but not in a way that would hurt anyone, by taking away the current system of subsidy in any shocking way that would leave anyone at all high and dry.
And that the only way to do that will be we'll have to entirely abolish the empire and bring every single soldier home from every single base.
Not just the wars, but sink half the Navy and float the other half off our shores only and leave the world to hell alone is the only way we could afford to do it.
So he's my leading light on that.
You know what I mean?
It's just a matter of priorities.
I agree with him on that.
Absolutely.
Anyway, I admire your work so much, David, because since at least, what, 2003?
2004 was when the Downing Street Memo came out, right?
I don't know if I knew you before that, but certainly since the Downing Street Memo came out where the head of British intelligence wrote about how, yeah, Bush and Blair had this great conversation about how they were lying us into war right in front of me.
And here's my notes on it.
You have just been single-minded and determined in my exact same fashion about your priorities here in ending this thing and writing all of these books and doing all of this work.
And every essay that you write, you're all over the place.
You're always with Code Pink at these protests.
In fact, you mentioned there that you were at the Venezuelan embassy.
You want to talk about that at all?
Well, I was just there for one night to help out by being there for one night and to do some other things in Washington, D.C.
I live a couple hours away from Washington, D.C., but now since when I was there, everyone was tense and ready and were going to be attacked any moment because there was this fake coup happening in Venezuela that morning.
So I woke up to the expectation that we were about to be invaded and attacked in the embassy there in Georgetown.
But, of course, the coup in Caracas was a PR stunt.
It was a guy who, a graduate of George Washington University a few blocks away from the embassy in D.C., who has declared himself president, announcing with a handful of members of the military, now viewed as traitors by the Venezuelan government, who was announcing that a coup was happening and he had taken over a military base, which he had not taken over.
And so this was reported in the corporate media around the world as if it was true.
And yet it didn't produce an actual coup.
It was a fake coup that was sooner or later exposed as such.
And yet the right-wingers there in Washington, D.C., the Venezuelan coup advocates, together with help from the D.C. police and the Secret Service, have been creating chaos at the embassy and allowing people to make their way into the embassy and to make their way to the front steps and the sidewalk in front of the embassy.
And get into fights.
And then, of course, they arrest the peaceful defenders of the embassy and let the other folks go free.
And it's actually a medieval sacking of a city now.
They're trying to keep food and water and so forth out of the embassy, trying to starve the people out.
But what happened is that the U.S. government ordered the embassy staff out of the embassy and the embassy gave a key and permission to peace activists to go there and defend it.
And so that's what people have been doing, is trying to defend the embassy from being taken over, which by international law is what the U.S. government is required to do.
It's required to defend any embassy of any country from being taken over by a gang of thugs.
It's really funny, isn't it, the way they go, well, I mean, this is the legitimate government now.
So that's all we're doing is we're putting the new real ambassador in there.
No one in the world believes that.
They just say it anyway.
Well, the governments of dozens of countries have gone along with U.S. pressure and said that.
But I think this coup attempt backfired because even CNN was describing the guy out in the street with a handful of thugs as as someone attempting a coup.
It wasn't describing him as the legitimate government who's out there in the streets with a gang of thugs attempting, you know.
What's funny, though, I think is that was like accidental candor where they don't know that it's immoral or wrong or that it would sound like a weird thing to say, yeah, we're doing a coup now in Venezuela.
To them, that's just great.
That's what we were born for, right?
That's what I'm really worried about, is that that's the end result, is that a coup becomes something acceptable.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the way they meant it.
They were saying, oh, my God, Trump is launching a coup or this illegitimate guy is launching a coup.
They were like, oh, a coup.
Good.
That's what we all wanted to happen.
Right, everybody.
That was the angle.
You know, it's really amazing to see.
Like you're saying, this was this was so far short of an actual coup or an actual even attempt.
The way it played out, it failed so bad.
I don't know if you've read The New York Times kind of rundown of the John Bolton's day and how this did not pan out the way that they had planned at all.
And just this is really some keystone stuff, you know, I have to assume the the intent by by Guaido or by Bolton is to get the U.S. military involved.
I mean, they can't either either they are deluding themselves that Guaido actually has popular support hiding somewhere in Venezuela or that they're, you know, attempting a sort of a Bay of Pigs bank shot operation to to get the U.S. military in there.
You know, I thought another possibility that I thought of that apparently Moon of Alabama, Bernard, was writing about and had a couple of quotes.
And this could be, you know, CYA by the White House, too.
But there's the idea going around that, you know what?
Maybe Maduro was jerking Bolton around and that the three guys that Bolton was saying, hey, you guys promised that you were going to join up the coup.
That, you know, is the defense minister, the chief judge of the Supreme Court and the head of the Presidential Guard, that maybe they had been sent to tell Bolton, oh, yeah, we'll help you overthrow him.
And then just left him high and dry in order to to cause a false start, you know, premature.
Anything's possible, I don't I wouldn't bet on that, but it's it's possible it's hard to it's hard to, you know, Bolton also could be simply making things up, which he has done frequently.
So I don't know.
Yeah, that's a good point, too.
And certainly at least two out of three of those guys publicly endorsed Maduro and said they were not switching sides at all.
So, yeah, it really is an incredible thing.
And it's you know what?
There's so many scandals, fake and legit going on in D.C. right now.
And Trump is such a, I guess, outrageous character in every way that something like what's going on at that embassy is sort of just another news story instead of this crazy event.
This hugest thing going on where you got, you know, Kevin Ziss and and and the Medea Benjamin and the Code Pink crew, they're sitting there holding the door closed while these thugs are trying to break in and take over the place.
It's crazy, man.
It should be the top story.
It's that there's so much other stuff, you know, it should be one of them for sure.
And it's not anywhere close.
And Russiagate, if Russiagate could finally have a stake through its heart, it would open up all kinds of airspace.
But that's where we're at at the moment.
Yeah, well, and that ain't going anywhere either.
I'm sorry to say.
But anyway, listen, man, I'm sure you got to go.
Busy Friday, but thank you for your time.
Great to talk to you again.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Keep up the great work.
All right, you guys.
That's David Swanson.
He writes constantly and it's such important stuff.
This one is called The Secretary of the Navy Lied to Congress.
It's at Let's Try Democracy.
That's his website, davidswanson.org.
And yeah, as long as we're talking about it, I also want to mention this article by Edward Hasbrock at Antiwar.com.
Thanks, Edward, for all your great work out there, man, if you're listening.
Former director of Selective Service says it's time to end draft registration.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
