Alright, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
92.7, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live worldwide on the internet, KAOS959.com, and introducing our first guest today, it's Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Their website is fff.org.
Welcome back to the show, Jacob.
Hey, it's nice to be back, Scott.
Yeah, good to talk to you again.
Likewise.
Yeah, well, you wrote this great article this week and I want to start with this.
I've got a few different subjects I'd like to go over with you here, actually, today, Jacob, but I want to start with your article about why Germans supported Hitler.
And, you know, I forget what it's called, but there's some law that says that any political debate on the internet can only go, you know, 50 responses or something before somebody calls somebody Hitler and then that's the end of all arguments.
And people kind of get sick of that, right?
It's the worst of hyperbole, right?
Anybody who disagrees with anybody about politics tries to make the analogy to Nazi Germany as the ultimate example of all evil that they agree with and that kind of thing.
But what you've done in this article is, I think, really the opposite of that.
Rather than playing into this kind of crazy hyperbole game, comparing everything to Hitler and, you know, Nazi Germany as the exemplar of all evil on earth, you take us back and you ask your audience, well, look, we all agree that this is, you know, the worst form of fascism in human history.
We have to ask ourselves, why is it that the people of Germany supported it?
The thousand year Reich only lasted 12 years, but how did it even last 12 years?
How did the Nazis even get power in the first place?
Why would the average doofus in Germany put up with the Nazi party for a week?
And the way you ask the question and the way you explain your answer in this article is extremely informative and interesting to me.
So I guess I'll just go ahead and see if I can just set you off on a rant about, you know, what you're trying to get at here with this article, why Germans supported Hitler, which just ran, I guess, late last week on LewRockwell.com.
Right.
Well, what motivated me to write the article is a movie, well, two movies, actually, Sophie Scholl, The Final Days, which is a German movie, but it's a story of the White Rose, a story of a group of German students who began protesting in the middle of World War II against the Nazi regime.
And their activities obviously were very surreptitious, very secret, because the Gestapo was searching desperately for them.
What they were doing is publishing a series of little pamphlets that are very libertarian in nature called the White Rose.
And they were sharing them in different parts of Germany, even though the students were located in Munich.
So they were obviously risking their lives to do this.
And it's one of the, I think, if it's not the most inspiring story of courage that I've ever come across, it certainly ranks in the top five.
It is an absolutely incredible story.
People can Google it, the White Rose, Sophie Scholl, and the movie's fantastic.
It's really worth looking at.
And then there was another movie called Downfall a couple of years ago, which was the story of Adolf Hitler in the bunker.
And what struck me about that movie was that his secretary, who was very young, about 21 or 22, was telling her story of, look, I was offered this great job to be the president's secretary, the chancellor's secretary.
Who would turn down a job like that?
It was a great opportunity.
I was serving my country.
It was wartime.
And then at the very end of the movie, they have the real woman, not the actress, coming on the film and saying, well, you know, after the war, I discovered that there were people like Sophie Scholl.
And she says, and then I realized, my gosh, maybe I should have been asking some questions.
And so that's what inspired me to write, to start reflect, well, I'd been longtime reflecting on why the German people did support Hitler.
But I said, you know, this is an interesting time now that, you know, now that I've seen these two movies, you have these two young people, both taking different opposite perspectives.
One is standing up against its government, their government, and they're saying, no, this is what the true patriot does.
The other one is saying, no, we've got to support our government, especially in wartime.
And that's what patriotism is all about.
And so I said, you know, I'm going to write about this and I'm going to explore why the German people did that.
Why didn't they do what Sophie Scholl did?
Why did they do what this young secretary did, by and large?
Why did they support their government in a time of war, instead of standing up against it?
Yeah, that's really interesting.
Two kinds of patriotism.
One that gets blended into nationalism and leads to, you know, absolute hell on earth for millions of people, and the other kind of patriotism that stands the strongest against the former.
That's right.
I mean, you know, obviously, I'm attracted to the Sophie Scholl type of patriotism that says, and it's the type of patriotism that characterized our founding fathers.
I mean, we often forget that on July 4, 1776, those guys that signed that Declaration of Independence were not great Americans, contrary to what we've been taught.
They were great British citizens.
There were as much British citizens as you and I are Americans, and they were willing to take a stand against their own government.
That's what Sophie Scholl and Hans Scholl and their friends were doing.
They were saying, look, genuine patriotism means examining what your government is doing, and if your government is in the wrong, then you've got to have the courage and the principle to take a stand against that government.
That's the genuine patriot.
That the traitor is the one that says, well, I'll abandon these well-established principles and norms of behavior in blind support of what my government is doing.
And of course, we see this most often in wartime, that the German people took the position, look, once the shooting starts, the discussions are over.
We've got to rally behind the truth.
We've got to rally behind the government.
And then that's, of course, where you have the greatest infringement on liberty is during the wartime, because people are afraid and they've got this blind support of government.
Along comes Hans and Sophie Scholl.
Along comes Thomas Jefferson and says, uh-uh, genuine patriotism means you've got to take a stand against your own government in order to get your country back on the right track.
Now, wartime is really what led to the creation of Nazi Germany in the first place, the Treaty of Versailles, as we all learn in elementary school, hopefully, at least back in the 80s we did.
Yeah, unfortunately, I think all too many Americans don't learn that, Scott.
I mean, as you know, I mean, what we all are taught in our public schools about World War II, but it's almost like World War I has gone down this memory hole.
It's almost like even U.S. officials don't like to talk about World War I. But as you point out, World War I was simply the origin, it's really one big war.
The World War II can be traced back to World War I, and specifically American intervention in World War I. I mean, you know, Europe had been fighting these wars for centuries, and you had this sort of a balance of power there during World War I. They were killing off each other in equal amounts.
There was a stalemate.
And Wilson thought that he was going to come in and just settle to Europe once and for all.
He was going to bring democracy to the world.
This was going to be the war to end all wars.
And he gets American intervention that totally alters the balance of power in that war.
And Europe, I mean, Germany is overrun, decimated, total defeat.
And then you've got the humiliating Treaty of Versailles imposed the reparations.
And all that laid the groundwork for Hitler to come along and capitalize on it.
And so then you end up with, of course, the 1930s, the horror of how they were treating the Jews, and then World War II.
So I've often suspected that the reason why there's not a lot of stress on World War I in this country anymore is that even the interventionists know that but for that intervention in World War I, there wouldn't have been a World War II.
That's right.
And not only would there have never been a Nazi Germany, but there would have never been a Soviet Union and there would have never been a British and French Middle East either.
It was the Wilsonian intervention in World War I that finally destroyed the Ottoman Empire as well, and led to a lot of our problems in the Middle East today.
As Jim Powell explains in his book Wilson's War, Lenin and Trotsky had their re-revolution in October 1917 after the original revolution in March.
It took them four tries to be able to successfully seize power in Russia.
And of course, that was because Woodrow Wilson had come in with all this money in order and, you know, send his diplomats over to put the full-court press on Kerensky to keep the Russians in the war, even after the overthrow of the Tsar.
So without American intervention in World War I, no USSR, no Nazi Germany, and no British Middle East.
You know, you go and try to count the consequences of American intervention from there, in World War I from there, and it's pretty easy to see where we are today and how we got here.
Jim Powell points out that Hitler began, oh, this is something very important too, Jacob, that Wilson, because he was such an idealist, refused to accept surrender, unconditional surrender, from the German militarists.
He said that wouldn't be legitimate.
We must get the German Democrats, the people who were opposed to German participation in World War I all along, we must make them accept the Versailles Treaty and sign the Versailles Treaty.
So Hitler then spent his whole career beginning every speech denouncing the traitors of 1918, the German Democrats who had signed the humiliating peace, because Wilson forced them to take the responsibility instead of the Germans who'd actually been waging the war.
You're right.
I mean, it's just classic blowback and perverse consequences of this philosophy of interventionism.
And you know, that's why I keep telling people that, you know, what should we do about Iraq?
Well, obviously, you know, you pull out, but that's not the solution.
If all the United States and all the American people do is withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, nothing has been solved.
And that's why we've been working so hard here, along with your group and the antiwar.com and so many others, of raising people's vision to a higher level of what Ron Paul was doing, essentially, in the presidential races, challenging people to question this entire philosophy of interventionism, where the U.S. government is the international policeman, interloper, intervener, sanctioner, embargoer, foreign aid provider.
I mean, if we can get people to challenge that paradigm and restore a limited government paradigm, dismantle this overseas empire where we have bases in more than a hundred countries and so forth, then that's the real solution to how we get this country back on track.
And to point your right to just classic interventionism, where one intervention has these perverse consequences that lead to new interventions like World War One leading to the Treaty of Versailles, leading to Hitler, leading to World War Two, and then World War Two, resulting in the total communist takeover of Eastern Europe for some 45 years.
That ally of the United States becomes the new official enemy, precipitating the Cold War, which means a massive military industrial complex, the Vietnam War, the Korean War.
I mean, it's just one bad history after another of this interventionism.
And that's why we keep saying, you've got to challenge this thing and its roots if you really want to go places in this country.
Right.
And, you know, another part of that was backing religious right-wing crazies all throughout the Middle East to counter the communists and basically any kind of secularists in the Middle East.
You know, when America supported Saddam Hussein and his office, when they took over Iraq, the CIA provided the lists of intellectuals of all descriptions to be rounded up and murdered, you know, supported the religious right-wing crazies in the Middle East this whole time against the Soviet Union, even against secular nationalist types.
You know, Nasser was trying to kiss up to us, and we told him, you know, basically go screw himself, so then he turned to the Soviets.
So then we, you know, created and supported the Muslim Brotherhood, or at least, you know, helped the Muslim Brotherhood grow as a counter to Nasser.
And then they turn around and kill our guy Sadat.
It's just nothing but intervention, as you say, intervention begets intervention begets intervention.
At some point, Jacob, it seems to me like we just have to kick the habit.
We have to say, look, there's going to be consequences when we stop intervening.
But guess what?
There's going to be consequences if we keep intervening, too.
At some point, we've just got to kick.
Well, I think that's what people are going to have to confront now.
You know, up to this point, you've got these series of interventions, at least in the last 20 years or so, like Haiti or Grenada or Panama, against minor third world countries where regime change was fairly easy.
But all of a sudden, I think they got themselves in over their head.
And we kept saying this, I mean, you know, we've been in existence since 89.
And from January of 1990, when we started publishing articles here at the Future of Freedom Foundation, we were saying, you know, now's the time to dismantle this thing, because you're finally going to have a crisis that you're not going to be able to deal with well.
And we predicted terrorist attacks on American soil before 9-11 because of this foreign policy.
And I think now they're in over their head.
I think they're trapped.
I mean, I don't think Bush can pull these troops out, at least not before he gets out of office.
He's too concerned about his legacy.
And that means I think the American people are having to confront the reality of this foreign policy, like it or not, because they can't avoid the steady stream of dead U.S. soldiers, the steady stream of Iraqi dead.
And so this is an opportune time.
You know, out of crisis comes opportunity.
And this is the time where Americans need to talk about kicking this interventionist habit.
Instead of just judging these interventions on whether they're, quote, successful or not, judge them on the morality of them.
What's the morality of attacking a country that never attacked the United States, killing hundreds of thousands of people after imposing sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of children, announcing to the Middle East that the deaths of those children were worth it, as Madeleine Albright did when she was serving as UN ambassador?
I mean, this is the type of thing that gets people really angry.
And, you know, for a long time, Americans have just sort of looked the other way at CIA interventions all over the world, the U.S. government, military interventions.
I think now people are starting to think about it.
And that's a good thing, because I think we got a shot when people start thinking about something like this.
And you know, even if the people on the other side of the water from here remain cartoon characters with no rights whatsoever in the mind of the average American, at some point they're going to have to confront the fact that our government is treating us like subjects of our foreign empire more and more, that we're losing our status as somehow immune from the tyranny that we send our government to go and enforce on people around the world.
And you know, I'm going to keep beating this drum, because I think it's just the greatest thing.
Chalmers Johnson's new book, Nemesis, he says, the Romans decided that they would rather live under their empire than give it up, and they destroyed themselves.
The British, on the other hand, when it really came down to it, they preferred to give up the British empire, at least hand it off to us, and keep their English liberty.
And we are now on the path of the Romans, and we have got to decide whether we want to be able to keep our Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the rule of law in this country.
And I don't want to, you know, fall into that hyperbolic trap of comparing everybody to Hitler and then making my argument sound especially weak, like I'm grasping at straws, which is how that argument usually sounds.
But you know, in your article here, Why Germans Supported Hitler, that ran on LewRockwell.com last week, Jacob Hornberger from the Future Freedom Foundation, you really do a lot to get into the head of the average German citizen during the 30s and then even during the war time as well, and what it was going through their thought process, basically, in justifying what was happening to them.
And of course, the key to taking people's liberty away, and I think you quote Hermann Göring to this effect, is you tell people that there's an external threat.
And that really was a big part of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, was that, as you point out in your article, they had a Cold War against the Russians, and they had a war on terrorism.
And as long as Hitler was protecting the German people from the Russians coming through the fold of the gap, as long as he was protecting them from anarchist terrorists and communist terrorists, Jewish terrorists, or whoever he was pointing the finger at, the people of Germany were willing to tolerate the, not only the loss of their liberty, but the centralization of power in the hands of one man.
Well, and the point I was trying to make in there is to say, look, you know, it's easy for Americans to look at those grainy films of Hitler with his bombastic speeches and say, gosh, I would have never done that.
How could those people do that?
And what I tried to do in the article is I said, well, now wait a minute, put yourself in the shoes of the average German and then ask yourself what you would have done.
And as you and I both know, the way that governments expand their power is through, the best means is through crises and emergencies, because this is when people are most frightened, they're willing to go along with anything.
And so we start out with the 1930s, the Great Depression.
I mean, we see the similarities between Hitler's programs, Mussolini's programs, and Roosevelt's programs.
And people were praising Roosevelt for all of these socialist fascist programs, the AAA, the NIRA, the cartelization of American businesses.
In fact, Hitler even sent a letter to Roosevelt praising him for the policies that he was enacting and praising his methods of rolling over Congress and so forth.
It's this concept of the great leader in times of crisis.
And then you've got, of course, the searing 9-11 event in German history during the Hitler regime when the terrorists struck, firebombed the Reichstag.
I mean, imagine if terrorists had firebombed the U.S. Congress.
I mean, that's the type of thing.
So Hitler goes to the German Reichstag and said, look, give me permission to suspend civil liberties just temporarily to deal with the terrorist threat.
And there was a big debate.
And he said, look, the freedom of the German people depends on me having this power where in crisis the terrorists are here.
And the Reichstag gives him that permission.
And of course, it's renewed so often every two years or so.
And so the temporary became permanent.
And then as you point out, as I point out in the article, you had the Cold War there between Germany and the Soviet Union, this monumental battle forming between the Soviet communists and the German Nazis.
And we can certainly relate to that because we had a huge military-industrial complex and two hot wars and a Cold War because of the Soviet threat.
And so what I'm trying to do in this article is to say, beware, beware crises and emergencies, because these are big governments' best friends.
And that, as Santayana said, those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it.
And so it's not a matter of comparing Bush with Hitler and all this.
It's saying, look at these people, look at what happened to them, see how they traveled down this road, and beware, caution, you put all the warning signals on so that people, at least if they continue walking down this road, they do so with all the warning flags in front of them.
You know, Jacob, I used to be a lot more of a conspiracy theorist than I am today.
But I used to think it just seemed so obvious to me since I was a young kid that all empires fall.
Everybody knows that.
I don't even know when I learned that cliche.
But everyone in America, all 300 million of us know all empires fall.
And I used to believe, and I have a lot higher standard of evidence now, I guess, but I used to believe that the people in power in America obviously know this just as well as I do, and therefore this must be a plot to destroy us on purpose.
How could they ignore 10,000 years of human history that says when you build an empire and you go around conquering people and robbing them, etc., that it always costs more than it benefits and that it's the quickest way to militarize and then destroy your society?
How could it be, you know, never mind all us ignorant Americans who go to government schools and don't know the first thing about history to forget in order to repeat it, but what about the people with power in this country?
Don't they know that the project that they have embarked us on is 100% doomed to failure?
Well, I think that in their mind, the pro-empire mindset, is that, look, they understand that the citizens finance this through taxes, and what their ideal is is to have the goose continue to lay the golden eggs that supports this huge empire, but without picking enough feathers off the goose where they kill the goose.
And so far, they've done a very good job of balancing that out, where there's not a big tax protest, Americans are meek, they're submissive, they're going along with all this, and there's plenty of golden eggs to support the empire.
Now, all of a sudden, things are getting a little bit shaky.
You'll recall that conservatives used to brag about how they brought down the Soviet empire.
They made the Soviet government spend its way into national bankruptcy.
Well, now you've got government spending here in this country out of control, and I think there are people getting nervous about it within the empire.
I mean, certainly those of us that are among the citizenry, we're concerned about it, and the dollars cratering in international markets, and I don't think we've seen the worst of it yet, by a long shot.
You've got government spending out of control, but you've also, I think, got people within the empire that are nervous about this.
They see the military being torn apart with these extended terms in Iraq.
You see recruitment down.
People are figuring out, I don't want my kids going into this machinery.
The military industrial complex, it's still prospering.
But I think everyone gets the sense that if you kill this goose, you're killing the people that are sucking off this goose.
And I think that what we've got to be talking about in this country, is what we're talking about on this show, is not how to reach this balance to save the empire and preserve the empire and make sure it can go and intervene in future countries.
We've got to restore a republic to this land, both domestically and in foreign affairs.
We've got to challenge the welfare state and the warfare state.
And that's what we're doing here at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
And I think it's the only solution to the future well-being in this country, as well as the liberty.
And let me just add one more thing, and to supplement what you were saying about the liberty side of this.
We have gone a long way to lose our liberties.
People have traded their freedom for security since 9-11.
The best example of that is the enemy combatant doctrine, where the Pentagon now says, we've got the right, post-9-11, to pick up any American we want, anybody, and just by labeling him an enemy combatant, lock him up in a cell, torture him, do whatever we want to him, deny him a jury trial, due process, or whatever.
That's not what freedom's all about.
Hey, translate some Latin for me here, Jacob.
What does habeas corpus mean?
Habeas corpus is bring us the body of the person.
That habeas corpus is really the linchpin of a free society.
I mean, without habeas corpus, forget freedom of speech, Second Amendment, freedom of association, freedom of religion.
If you don't have habeas corpus, none of those make any difference at all.
Why?
Because the greatest, most direct power that a government can have over a people is the power to simply go pick them up and put them in a jail cell and torture them and execute them, do whatever they want to them.
If a government's got that power, what difference does it make that you've got freedom of speech and freedom of the press?
Soon as you write something, you can say, well, I got freedom of speech.
Yeah, we got the freedom to come and pick you up and put you in a cell and forever for the rest of your life and torture you.
So habeas corpus was developed in British history to test a detention, an unlawful detention, where the person can file papers through his lawyer in an independent judiciary, independent court, and the judge issues a writ.
It's an order, a formal order, to whoever is holding a person in custody that says, bring the body of that person into this courtroom and show cause why you should not be required to release him.
So as soon as that power came into existence, everything was revolutionized.
Now the king could no longer just arbitrarily pick somebody up because he knew the very next day a judge would say, bring him over and let me rule on whether you've got grounds to hold him.
Now, as you know, in the Military Commissions Act, for the first time, well, probably, I guess, the second time in American history, considering Lincoln, you've got a suspension, a cancellation, really, of habeas corpus.
I mean, that's what the Congress did.
They canceled habeas corpus for foreigners, which is really hypocritical.
But obviously, if they can do it to foreigners, they can do it to Americans.
And while Americans still have the right of habeas corpus, the Pentagon is still claiming the right, despite habeas corpus, to pick up people as enemy combatants.
So that even if they do go to court, the Pentagon is saying, well, as soon as we have the habeas corpus hearing, once we establish they're an enemy combatant, you got to send them back to jail.
And that's what they're claiming in the Padilla case is what they're claiming in the Al-Marri case is what they're claiming across the board for every American.
I think the lesson that just rings so clearly between the lines of what you just said there, Luke, is that all of this depends on the belief systems and the will of the American people.
The judges have what, bailiffs, maybe some marshals on the state or federal level.
They cannot force the police or the military to do anything.
It comes down to a battle the executive branch could kill the judicial branch in one day.
The only reason that the police would have to respect or the prosecutors would have to respect the judge's order to bring me this person and and convince me that you ought to be able to continue to hold him is because the society at large embraces that principle and demands that that principle is enforced.
And if we don't believe that, that's it.
Well, that's right.
I mean, the constitutional order is a very, very delicate, balanced system.
And it's not so fortified that it's inevitable.
I mean, so far, Bush is complying by and large with court orders.
I mean, he does his best to circumvent them, Guantanamo and so forth.
But by and large, you don't see him saying, I refuse to obey.
Now, once he got to that point, obviously we're dealing with dictatorship.
I mean, just total dictatorship.
He's already ignoring what Congress is doing with those signing statements where he signs a bill, but then signs a note next to it saying, I don't have to comply with this if it interferes with my commander in chief powers.
Well, he hasn't quite done that with the judiciary, but you're right.
Ultimately, how far these people go depends on public opinion.
And there's a reason why totalitarian dictatorships fear ideas on liberty.
I mean, imagine here, consider the Chinese government as essentially total power over the Chinese people.
Yet it fears ideas on liberty.
It has to censor the Internet.
It has to censor the press.
Why?
Because it knows the power of ideas on liberty to energize the people, to raise people's consciousness.
And that can certainly happen here in the United States, where all of a sudden Americans start to realize what a crock this war on terrorism is, that it's all centered around U.S. foreign policy, that if you just stop the intervention, terrorism disappears.
So you don't need this massive war on terrorism edifice.
You don't need to be invading other countries.
And if Americans start to figure out these things, and they start figuring out that the heritage that they're giving up here with habeas corpus and due process and the Bill of Rights all for a crock, all of a sudden things could change very, very rapidly.
You know, the free society is where the government fears the citizens.
The unfree society is where the citizens fear the government.
Now, I know you're a constitutional scholar.
Oh, by the way, I haven't said it in a few minutes.
Jacob Hornberger, he's a former lawyer.
He's the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, fff.org.
And I know you know this constitution backwards and forwards.
And I'm really glad that, being libertarians, both you and I, we don't fall into this left-right, you know, kind of partisan trap.
And I know that I can get a real straight answer from you here.
I'm really torn, in a sense, about this unitary executive theory and the asserted power of the president to say, look, I'm not going to enforce unconstitutional laws.
I don't care if the Supreme Court has called it unconstitutional or not.
I'm not going to enforce one.
I'm the president.
I'm the boss of the executive branch.
I'm the boss of all the cops in the federal government.
And I will order them to only enforce this part of the law, not that, or whatever.
Or, you know, maybe not the law at all.
Although, I guess you should just be vetoing, you know, unconstitutional laws in that sense.
But, you know, if you were the president of the United States and Congress kept trying to pass all these laws to make you do unconstitutional things, don't you have the power to add a signing statement that says, oh, no, you don't.
This I will interpret to mean this and not that?
Well, you know, we've got, you mentioned, we've got the system where if the president feels that a law is unconstitutional or invalid or just bad policy, his duty is to veto it.
I mean, that's his obligation.
That's his power.
The power of veto.
What is so deceptive about what this man is doing is he is signing the law into law and then saying, I've got my fingers crossed behind my back and an X, which means I don't have to comply with this law because I'm a wartime commander in chief.
And of course, every time he does it, it's in favor of himself versus the rights of us and the powers of other branches of government, et cetera.
It's not like he's standing up for liberty when he adds these signing statements.
Of course not.
No, this is an aggrandizement of his own power.
And it's a total abrogation of our constitutional system.
I mean, the system is the Congress passes the law.
If the president feels it's a bad law or unconstitutional law, he vetoes it.
The Congress then votes on whether to override the veto.
And then ultimately, that law comes before the courts and the courts decide whether it was constitutional or not.
And they are the final arbiters of whether it's constitutional or not.
But this system where he is claiming, I'm a wartime commander in chief, I'm like Napoleon, I'm like Santa Ana, I can exercise any power I want during my presidency.
I don't see how that is any different from dictatorial power.
I mean, it just seems to me that is what dictators do.
They say, we're going to issue decrees.
We're going to issue executive orders.
We don't have to go to Congress to do what we want to do.
We can spy on Americans.
We can monitor their email.
We can monitor their telephone calls.
We can take them into custody as enemy combatants.
It's incredible.
We can spend as much money as we want to by simply printing the money and debasing the currency and causing the dollar to fall in international markets.
None of this is consistent with a free society, Scott.
None of it, as you well know.
Well, now let me ask you this.
We're going to be talking with Greg Palast in the next hour about the US attorney scandal and so forth.
And part of that is that Congress, and I'm sorry, I don't have all the details at my disposal right in front of me, but I think this is close enough to write.
Congress has asked Harriet Meyers and a couple of others to come and testify.
And they have said, no, I won't come testify because the president has invoked executive privilege about the conversations you want me to testify about.
And Congress has said, oh yeah, well, we want the Justice Department, as it says in the statute, to convene a grand jury and see about prosecuting you for contempt of Congress, which is a crime.
And according to the Washington Post, George Bush, and hopefully you know more about this than I do and can explain it better than me, but something to the effect of George Bush has told the Justice Department, no, you will not convene a grand jury and you will not investigate this.
I'm the unitary executive.
I'm the boss of the Department of Justice.
And I say that I don't care what the statute says, you will not investigate the people that I'm invoking executive privilege over.
And the quote from Henry Waxman, who I pull no truck for whatsoever, was, well, what's next, just abolishing the Department of Justice?
And, you know, even when the Washington Post is saying, oh my God, look at this insane power grab we've never heard the likes of before in all of history, it seems to me like that's something pretty serious going on there.
I wonder if you can explain in any kind of better detail the situation there.
Well, unfortunately I cannot, because I really haven't kept up with this scandal.
But, you know, to me, what strikes me about it all, and I haven't kept up with the details, is just this aura of secrecy that pervades this government.
I mean, you can't have a free society when you've got all this secrecy going on in government.
Seems to me that they ought to just come clean and say, sure, we'll testify about any of our decisions on these U.S. attorneys, and just send their people to go and testify.
I mean, all they do is create this sense that they're hiding something.
And, okay, if they had a good reason for firing all these people, just get up there and say it, get up there and testify.
But it's just part and parcel of ever-growing secrecy.
What about the idea that the President can tell the Justice Department, no, you are forbidden from investigating criminality in my White House?
Does the President have the power to tell the Department of Justice that?
Well, I think he does have the power.
I mean, whether it's a smart political move or not, I think that's, you know, it's time for Congress to appoint an independent counsel.
But obviously, the Attorney General works for the President.
Now, ideally, you'd like an independent-minded lawyer in charge of the show, but that's not the way politics works.
I mean, the cabinet officials ultimately answer to the President.
And I think ultimately, at that point, if there is something going on in there, you know, like Watergate type thing, I think that's when you need the independent counsel.
And I think Congress has the authority to do that.
Yeah.
And we have Alberto Gonzalez as the Attorney General of the United States, which, you know, you think about how bad we thought of John Ashcroft when he abandoned all his former civil libertarian rhetoric and went and became this fascist Attorney General.
But you know, I'd probably give him my right arm to have John Ashcroft back at this point.
Well, yeah, it's like frying pan into the fire type of choice.
This guy, Gonzalez, he just, he strikes me as the type of lawyer that just is a lackey for the President.
Instead of exercising independent judgment, independent decision-making, he just strikes me as the kind of guy who says, Mr. President, what do you want me to do?
And that, to me, is not the ideal kind of person you want in the judiciary.
It's not the kind of person you want running a Justice Department.
I mean, after all, it is the Justice Department.
It's supposed to be seeking justice.
And I don't see how you can do that if all you're doing is saying, tell me what you want me to do, Mr. President, and I'll do it.
And, you know, I haven't kept up with all his activities, but he just strikes me as that kind of lawyer.
All right.
Now, is it okay if I keep you a couple more minutes here?
Sure.
Jacob Hornberger from the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Did you get that link I sent you asking about that executive order that everybody's making such a big deal about in the last week or two?
It doesn't strike a bell, but I'm so far behind in my email that it's not surprising.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, there was this executive order, which I don't know the number of it.
I couldn't find the number of it, but it's called blocking property of certain persons who threaten stabilization efforts in Iraq.
And it's being interpreted in the alternative media, it seems like, to mean that the president can seize your property, Jacob Hornberger, because you make such a convincing argument against American interventionism.
You're leading to the downfall of the Maliki government, USOB, and so they can come and shut down your foundation and seize your property and stop your effective arguments.
Now, to me, that seems like it just doesn't ring true.
Don't get me wrong.
I wouldn't put it past them.
I could see these people attempting to just set the Bill of Rights on fire in front of all of us and say, what are you going to do about it?
But something about the interpretation that I'm getting of this executive order doesn't seem right.
And I was wondering if I could get somebody who actually can interpret legalese to look at it for me, but I guess I'm going to have to put that off.
Well, no, I know exactly what you're talking about.
In fact, I just blogged on that thing, and I'm certainly no expert on either, but the best place to go is an article in the last couple of days by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post on it.
Oh, I didn't see that.
It is a very, very insightful analytical commentary that raises the exact kind of points that you're raising of how potentially expansive this executive order is, even to the point of going after people who indirectly support the insurgency in Iraq by making donations to some groups or even perhaps by what they say.
It is a very, very dangerous executive order, and Pincus points that out, that it has ominous overtones.
Now, notice, though, that while people are objecting to the substance of these executive orders that Bush has been entering for many years now, no one questions this process.
I mean, this is what I find so amazing.
Here this man has issued an executive order that applies to all Americans, and he has given it to the Treasury Department to interpret.
Now, has this gone before Congress?
Has there been a debate on it?
Have citizens had input?
Have they been able to write their Congressmen and say, no, have they had a chance to put amendments to it?
Nothing.
He just issues a decree, just like dictators do.
They issue decrees, rule by decree, and all of a sudden it's now the law, and people can lose all their assets.
That's what Pincus was pointing out, that they confiscate all your assets if you make the wrong move here.
Well, I think it's time for Americans to start questioning this whole notion of these executive orders.
I mean, we have a Congress.
It's Congress' job to pass laws, not the president.
The president's already assumed the power to declare war.
Why do we want him to have the power to make laws too?
That's what dictators are all about.
And so, yeah, we ought to question the substance of that executive order, plus all the others he's raised.
We ought to question the process too, Scott.
Yeah, I'll tell you, it's a mark of my naivete that that was actually one of the reasons that it didn't ring true, is I thought, and, you know, I've seen some pretty crazy executive orders in my time, looking through the White House websites, this president and the last one, and history books before that.
But when I read this, I thought, nah, this is too much for an executive order.
This would have to go through Congress.
There would have to be something legalizing this.
That was, you know, goes to show even how naive I am at this late date.
Well, I think the problem is that most of us just cannot believe that a lot of this is going on.
I'm uploading the article right now for your listeners.
It's in the Washington Post by Walter Pincus.
It's called Destabilizing Iraq Broadly Defined.
And it's Monday, July 23rd, page A-15.
And just Google Walter Pincus on the Washington Post website, and you can pick it up.
And it's worth looking at, because it is a very, very ominous order.
It could affect anybody in this country.
It's the same type of mindset of expanding government powers.
All right, yeah, thanks for that.
Again, that's Destabilizing Iraq Broadly Defined by Walter Pincus.
I'll be sure to look that up and read it as soon as the show's over.
And one more question.
You brought up Ron Paul earlier in the interview, Jacob Hornberger from the Future of Freedom Foundation.
And so I wanted to ask you a question about his campaign for the presidency.
Isn't it great?
Man, I'm so excited about the Ron Paul campaign.
And I don't care if he gets dead last, which I know he won't.
He's doing so much better than that.
But this is the greatest damn thing for liberty that I've seen in America in my lifetime and from what I know of history, probably since Andrew Jackson chased the British out of New Orleans, man.
Well, he's raising people's vision to strong principles that form the founding of this country, this philosophy of non-intervention overseas, the opposition to the drug war that's been so horrible, opposition to welfare state programs.
I mean, he's touching a lot of cords and people, cords that have been long forgotten, but are deeply seated in the American people because this was our heritage.
No income tax, no welfare, no Federal Reserve System, no Social Security, no foreign wars.
He's touching those cords and he's obviously creating an enormous buzz.
And he's also creating a lot of fear among the establishment people.
I mean, I think it's absolutely fantastic and exciting what he's doing in the realm of politics in terms of raising people's vision to a higher level here.
It's absolutely fantastic.
To my knowledge, it's the first time that central banking has been a subject of debate in a presidential campaign since 1912.
That's right.
I mean, I don't know of any candidate in my lifetime that has raised the idea of abolishing the Federal Reserve, the central bank.
I mean, it needs to be abolished.
I mean, they've made a disaster beginning with the Great Depression that the central bank was the primary cause of, not to mention all these decades of inflation and debasement and paper money and so forth.
And then we see it today with the dollar cratering.
It's fantastic that you've got a candidate out there raising that issue and causing people to think about it.
Because I often think if you just get people to start thinking, put some oil up in those gears and get the gears moving, we've got a shot to get this country back on track.
Hey, Scott, can I mention one more thing before we sign off?
Sure thing.
Go ahead.
You know, we had what I consider one of the greatest conferences that I have ever participated in since I joined the libertarian movement many, many years ago.
And that was held in June called Restoring the Republic, U.S. Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.
It turned out to be a spectacular success.
It's on our website.
People can access it.
It's on the tag that says Conference 2007.
It is the greatest collection of 24 speeches I've ever heard in my life, including Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano.
We're going to be selling DVDs and CDs.
We'll have those ready in about three weeks.
We've already got Andrew Napolitano's and Ron Paul's and James Bovard's speech on YouTube.
We're going to post all 24.
But we invite people to take a look at those talks.
Come to our website and see the schedule because we're going to be providing the links to all the speeches.
But I want to bring that to people's attention because, you know, this obviously is a burning issue of our time, foreign policy and civil liberties.
And FFF is trying to play a leading role in raising people's vision to what the pro-freedom position is.
And this is the greatest collection of speeches that I think I've ever heard on this subject.
So, you know, it's again, it's at FFF.org and then click over on Conference 2007.
I really think that the Future Freedom Foundation, among the very few libertarian think tanks, propaganda outfits, whatever you want to call it, I think you guys are really just leading the way, Jacob Hornberger.
You're a monarchist, a constitutionalist, but you are a radical and it's obvious that you put human liberty first.
And, you know, you've got assembled at FFF an incredible collection of writers, the Freedom Daily and all this stuff.
And to people in the audience who aren't too familiar, I just couldn't recommend the Future Freedom Foundation higher.
You talk about, you know, getting the message of liberty out there.
It's not a conservative message and it's not a liberal message.
It's the libertarian, individualist, human freedom comes first point of view.
And it can be found at FFF.org.
And I thank you very much for your insight, as always, today, Jacob Hornberger.
Well, thank you.
The feeling is mutual, as you well know.
We've got a big challenge, but it's an exciting fight and I'm glad I'm on the same side as you, Scott.
I am too, man.
Believe that.
All right.
Thanks very much, Jacob.
Thank you again.
