All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio, KAS 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, and our next guest today is my friend Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Welcome back to the show, Jacob.
Thank you, Scott.
It's an honor to be back.
Well, it's good to have you here, and I'm so excited because coming up here in just a couple of weeks is the Restoring the Republic Conference, Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties, 2008.
It's June 6th through 8th at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, and lucky me, I get to go, and I can't wait to go, and so I want you to tell the people in the audience just what this conference is about and who all is going to be there and see if we can get some of them to get some dollars together and see if they can make it out to the Restoring the Republic Conference.
Well, this is a follow-up to a conference we held last year, which was, I think, the greatest conference I've ever participated in since I became involved in the libertarian movement.
As you know, Scott, our country's heading in a very bad direction, especially with respect to foreign policy.
You've got invasions, occupations, terrorist blowback, out-of-control government spending, a crashing dollar, and so we've taken a leading role at the Future of Freedom Foundation in trying to lead America in a better direction, in a direction of a non-interventionist republic, which is what our founding fathers envisioned for us.
So this conference, which is a follow-up to last year's conference, is designed to get people to start thinking in that direction, and we've lined up the greatest all-star cast of speakers.
And I'm sure there's better speakers on this issue than we could have invited, but we've got 20 people that are really in the vanguard of leading America out of this darkness and into the light of a constitutional republic.
That's what makes us so excited.
I think that's true.
You do have the best of the left and the right represented here, and I think that, you know, whether this is actually your intention or not, one of the effects of these kinds of things, hopefully, is, well, the libertarians, I think, need to move to, on the political spectrum in people's mind, the left-right spectrum, we need to be the center and exclude the worst parts of the left and the right, welcome the best parts of the left and the right, and get those so-called moderates who are actually the extremists, the centrists who are for every government crime imaginable, get them out of here or classify them as the extremists rather than the moderates, and put libertarianism in the center.
Well, that's absolutely right, and as you know, that's the way it used to be.
I mean, our American ancestors were libertarians, and it was only in the 20th century when Americans started embracing the socialism and interventionism that the rest of the world was adopting, and then ultimately turning toward establishing this extensive military empire overseas, that America made the turn for the worse.
And yeah, I agree with you.
Libertarianism holds the key to the future of this country.
Our founding fathers understood that, our American ancestors understood that, and we understand that.
And of course, not only is the domestic situation important in terms of all the socialism and interventionism here, but especially foreign policy.
And unfortunately, there's at least a segment of libertarians that don't understand that, that don't understand how you cannot have a free society as long as you have this extensive overseas interventionist pro-empire foreign policy.
Boy, and isn't that sad and true?
You know, the Nolan chart, which I like it, it sort of breaks through the left-right spectrum and shows it in at least one more dimension, you know, that's not too bad, but foreign policy isn't even one of the questions on there, as though you could be perfectly libertarian, and it's really only a domestic question, that a worldwide revolution is, you know, may or may not be a libertarian position to take, or something.
Yeah, I mean, and it's key.
I think, for example, that habeas corpus is the linchpin of a free society.
So even if you have freedom of speech and freedom of the press and the right to own guns and procedural due process and so forth and economic liberty, if you don't have habeas corpus, you're not going to have a free society.
And so that's what we've been trying to do here at the Future of Freedom Foundation, is not only emphasize the economic liberties and how important they are domestically to human freedom, but especially the civil liberties, which is part of what this conference is all about in foreign policy.
Those are essential prerequisites to restoring liberty to our land.
Yeah.
Well, let's talk about habeas corpus a little bit.
This isn't so much a person's right as the power of a judge to say to the executive branch, hey, bring this guy before me, I'll decide whether you get to continue holding him or not.
That's right.
And I think the reason it's key and really trumps triumphs over all these other rights is because if the state has the power to arbitrarily put anyone in jail without the person having the right to go to an independent judge to test that, then what good does it do to have, for example, freedom of speech?
I mean, the state can say, oh, yeah, you're free to say whatever you want.
But all of a sudden they grab you because they don't like what you're saying and they put you in jail.
If you don't have any way to test that detention, then your right of freedom of speech doesn't mean anything.
The only way it's going to mean anything is that if you can take your lawyer can take a petition to a federal judge or to a state judge and say they are holding him in violation of law and then the judge can say you will release him on pain of contempt, fine, imprisonment if necessary.
And that's why it's key to a free society, because, as you know, dictators throughout history, they'll have all the nice, pretty words that recognize people's rights, but throw them in jail the first time they get any criticism of the government, hurl them.
Yeah.
Well, and we need to get it straight, too, that the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which is to protect us in the war against the, you know, vaguely defined terrorists.
Let's not be too specific and call it al Qaeda.
That might, you know, take some other wars off the table.
But anyway, that terrible terrorism, that law applies to you and I as well, doesn't it?
So the President of the United States can declare us to be enemy combatants and turn us over to the military.
Well, that's right.
There's no assurance that they will not declare Americans enemy combatants.
And we already know that that's their policy because they did it in the case of Jose Padilla.
Even when there wasn't a law legalizing it at all.
That's right.
But now that it is different in the sense that they canceled habeas corpus only for foreigners that were accused of terrorism and specifically overseas.
There's still the right of Americans that are held as enemy combatants to file a petition for rid of habeas corpus.
But if the courts accept this notion of enemy combatants, which is an absolute nonsensical notion in this so-called war on terrorism, if the courts accept that, then habeas corpus really becomes a meaningless term anyway, because the state can easily come up with some kind of evidence showing anybody's an enemy combatant, especially if they can use tortured evidence, which is what their position is.
And then I guess the threshold for even the habeas hearing would be, trust us, your honor, we have intelligence that says that this guy's a terrorist, he is an enemy combatant.
Here's a tiny little bit of it.
And if the judge agrees with that, it's not off to jail you go, it's off to Guantanamo you go.
You got it.
That's exactly right.
And you're subject to the total control of the military and the CIA.
All right.
So we all know what they're doing to people.
There is the connection between the foreign policy abroad and civil liberties here at home.
And one of the biggest reasons I'm so excited to attend this conference, Jacob, is because one of the speakers is the great Robert Higgs, the author of Crisis and Leviathan.
Tell us about Higgs.
Well, Higgs is one of my real heroes in life.
I mean, it'd be difficult to find somebody that has just more integrity, more devotion to principle.
And his famous book, Crisis and Leviathan, is just, it should be read by every single American.
His thesis is that governments grow by crises.
Their power grows by crises.
They capitalize on crises.
They love crises because their power is magnified.
And last year, Higgs delivered one of the most powerful and moving speeches at our conference.
And so he's one of our repeat speakers.
And like I say, there are few people I admire more than Higgs.
I have no doubt that he's going to deliver another hard-hitting, no-holes bard, take-no-prisoner speech.
And he really is an interesting character.
He seems to have all the gravitas of the highest intellectual experts in our land, and yet he is very radical, isn't he?
That's right.
And he's a radical scholar.
I mean, he's a scholar in the true sense of the word.
And he just, like I say, takes no prisoners.
He says it like it is.
You always know that this is the man who's going to speak truth to power.
All right.
Now tell me about Andrew J. Bacevich.
He's also going to be a speaker at this conference.
Yeah, Bacevich, I've never met personally, but I'm really looking forward to it.
He is a guy that just commands respect and admiration.
He's a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.
He's a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy.
And he's taken a leading role, not only against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but putting it in the context of the entire empire militarism paradigm that Americans have been operating under for several decades.
In fact, one of his books is called The New American Militarism, How Americans are Seduced by War.
And another interesting personal aspect of Bacevich is that his son tragically got killed in the Iraq War.
And so he's going to be bringing not only an intellectual and scholarly perspective, but a real, real human tragedy element to this conference.
And so it's going to be a real honor and pleasure to hear what he has to say.
And he gets published everywhere in all the mainstream papers, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal.
So we're really looking forward to hearing him.
All right.
Now, another one of my heroes is Bruce Fine.
Isn't he the guy that wrote up the articles for the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton?
Oh, he may have.
I'm not familiar with that.
But if you say you did, I don't have any reason to doubt it.
Well, that's the way I remember it anyway.
Uh-oh.
No, no.
You should have said it.
Because I'm not real familiar with all the details of his background.
But what has most impressed me about Bruce Fine is that he is a conservative who is one of the few conservatives who has taken a leady role, especially in his column in The Washington Times, defending civil liberties ever since 9-11, when, as you know, we've been under tremendous assault with respect to civil liberties.
Fine has been there week after week after week talking about the abuses of the omnipotent presidency, the dangers of infringing on civil liberties, spying on Americans.
I mean, he's just there relentless.
And the other interesting thing about him is that he's a former associate deputy attorney general in the Justice Department.
And so here he has left the Justice Department.
Now he's getting published in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, and so forth, defending the Bill of Rights, the procedural due process, right to counsel, and all these great rights that stretch all the way back to Magna Carta.
Fine isn't a constitutional attorney who's leading the way in this area.
So that's why we invited him to come to the conference.
And now, by the way, if you're just tuning in, it's Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
And he's holding a conference a couple of weeks from now called Restoring the Republic, Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.
And he's got the greatest lineup of heavy hitters on these subjects imaginable.
And going from Bruce Fine on the right, next to Alexander Coburn, who operates Counterpunch.
What's his speech going to be about?
Do you know?
Well, I don't know.
He's going to be one of these that's kind of, I think, going to be the type of speech where you don't really know what he's going to say.
Now, he comes from the left, Fine's a conservative, Coburn is a liberal.
So it should be a very interesting dynamic, because what we've got is a mix of conservatives, liberals, but predominantly libertarians, but all of whom are taking this very important role of defending civil liberties and arguing in favor of a constitutional republic and against an empire.
So Coburn runs this great liberal website called counterpunch.org that I visit every morning.
Now, if you're a libertarian, you kind of look past all the liberal arguments in terms of socialism and the welfare state and so forth.
But their foreign policy stuff and their civil liberties things are very, very good most of the time.
And they've played a leading role in this dark period in which we've lived since 9-11 in defending civil liberties and arguing against an interventionist foreign policy.
And Coburn's been around a long time.
He graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature.
He's written for major publications, New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, and so forth.
And he's a lively guy, so that's why I say you don't really know what you're going to get from him.
But I have no doubt it's going to be a very entertaining talk.
Well, you know, we're big Coburn fans at antiwar.com.
He used to write for antiwar.com way back in the day.
And of course, the three Coburn brothers are just great.
Andrew Coburn has apparently unlimited insider access and has written these incredible books like Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, breaks major stories on the pages of Counterpunch and other places.
Patrick Coburn, of course, Seymour Hersh correctly calls him the single best Western reporter in Iraq, with no exception.
I mean, Patrick Coburn, week after week after week, the hardest hitting reporting out of Iraq.
And then, of course, Alexander Coburn over there at Counterpunch, leading the best to the left.
I don't know the guy that well, I've only interviewed him one time, although I would guess that he doesn't like the word liberal, that he's too left to be a liberal.
But anyway.
Well, he should provide some entertaining perspectives as to what's going on here with respect to the administration and government in general, of course, from a leftist perspective.
But since we have several conservatives speaking, it's going to provide a very interesting and fun dynamic.
Last year, we had this dynamic and we had Robert Scheer from Truthdig.
He's a former L.A.
Times columnist, ardent leftist, gave one of the greatest talks and was, boy, so well received by the libertarians as well as the conservatives and, of course, the liberals in the audience.
And so this year we got Coburn and we're excited about it.
Well, you know, you want the measure of a good leftist.
How about one that stuck up for the Branch Davidians back in 1993 in real time?
Not later, not now that I think about it.
That's Alexander Coburn for you right there.
Now let's talk about Glenn Greenwald.
Well, Greenwald, he's going to be one of the most entertaining, great speakers in this conference, I have no doubt that.
He is writing, I think, one of the greatest blogs on the Internet.
You go to it, it's on Salon.com.
And it's just amazing the information, the insights, the perspectives that he is bringing to his blog every single day about what's going on in Washington.
And he's, again, a lawyer.
He's written two fantastic books that have been New York Times bestsellers, How Would a Patriot Act and A Tragic Legacy.
And when you read his blog, I mean, it's just what he is so good at doing is provoking people that he's going after to respond.
And they read his blog and they hear about his blog and then all of a sudden he gets people to respond like the, I forget, some deputy commander in Iraq was sending them responses and so forth.
And the thing about Greenwald is that his blog is so well documented with facts and details that I don't think anybody's ever caught him, at least I've never caught him in a grave mistake or anything like that.
But we're really looking forward to having him, too, because, like I say, he is relentless.
He's from the liberal side, too.
He is relentless in terms of defending civil liberties.
He's also a former constitutional lawyer.
Right.
Well, tell us about now your guys, Anthony Gregory, James Bovard, Sheldon Richman.
They'll be giving speeches there as well.
Well, Anthony, Jim, and Sheldon are all writers for the Future of Freedom Foundation, our publication Freedom Daily.
Jim Bovard and Sheldon Richman have been close friends of mine since, oh gosh, the early days of the Future of Freedom Foundation back in the early 90s, and that's how long they've been writing for us.
And if I were to rank people in terms of integrity and devotion to libertarian principles, Sheldon and Jim would rank right there at the top.
I mean, they're two of my finest friends in life, and it's just such an honor to have them associated with the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Their scholarship is impeccable, their principles to the highest order, as well as their integrity.
And Anthony is one of the new up-and-coming writers in the libertarian movement, and he's just sort of taken the movement by storm.
He's a guy who's about 23, 24, came out, it seemed like nowhere, and has been writing some of the most brilliant stuff from a libertarian perspective, especially in foreign policy and civil liberties.
And all three of them spoke at last year's conference, and we're just pleased to have them back.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of Sheldon Richman.
He writes great stuff.
And James Bovard is, as far as I can tell, the most successful libertarian author ever, at least in terms of journalism.
He's got the Fair Trade Fraud and the Farm Fiasco, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and ten more.
And they're great.
All his books.
And of course, his most famous one, Lost Right, Destruction of American Liberty, won a Book of the Year award from the Free Press Association's Macon Award.
Yeah, Jim is just absolutely phenomenal.
I mean, to have written all these books, and of course he's been published in so many mainstream publications in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post.
One of the things that really strikes me about Jim was the Waco Massacre, where people were saying, let's move on, let's forget about this, it's already happened, let's put it in the past.
Jim was one of the ones that were really standing fast on the Waco Massacre, writing article after article saying, uh-uh, we cannot just keep moving on, this thing's a horrific, horrific disaster.
And he was one of the ones that are primarily important, in my opinion, of raising the consciences of the American people to take a much closer look at Waco, and thank goodness they did.
Yeah, and as long as we're talking about Jim, I have to say, his latest book, Attention Deficit Democracy, is an absolute masterpiece.
Anybody who hasn't read that book is simply cheating themselves.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I mean, no, Jim is, like I say, right at the top in terms of libertarian scholars and intellectuals.
Alright, now, last week, Ron Paul, or was it earlier this week, it was earlier this week, Monday, Ron Paul was in town signing copies of The Revolution, a manifesto down there at Book People, but I missed it because I was otherwise occupied, and one of the reasons I was able to tell myself that, well, that's okay, was because in just a few weeks I'm going to get to hopefully hang out with Ron Paul, at least a little bit, at the Restoring the Republic conference there in Western Virginia.
Who's this guy, Ron Paul, Jacob, and why would you invite him to give a speech at your conference?
Well, he's the guy that's really leading the libertarian revolution in the political arena, as we all know.
I mean, you know, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate that has just taken the country by storm in terms of bringing libertarian perspectives to the political arena, putting libertarianism on the radar screen in the presidential debates, the news conferences, and so forth.
I mean, he's the guy that's terrifying the establishment, not only the Republican establishment, but the mainstream establishment.
Even though he doesn't have the votes to win the nomination, this revolution that he's the best manifestation of, it's still going on.
I guess you know, and a lot of people know, that his book, The Revolution in a Manifesto, is now number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and for a while was number one on Amazon, and may still be.
I mean, this is incredible, this is absolutely incredible.
And Ron's been one of my heroes for many, many years, and it is just so exciting what he's pulling off here.
And he spoke at last year's conference, and he was on the same night as Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News legal commentator, and you could feel the electricity and the energy in the room at that night, and it was one of the most exciting times.
Two great speakers delivering two great speeches, and so, boy, we were really hoping he'd fit it into his schedule to come back, and he's coming back, and not only that, we are giving him the Future Freedom Foundation's first ever Lifetime Achievement Award for Advancing Liberty.
So we're hoping that, you know, Ron Paul fans come and help us celebrate and hear another great speech on where this revolution's going, especially with respect to foreign policy and civil liberties.
Well, you know, we played Napolitano's entire speech, and Ron Paul's, on this show last year, and another one of the speeches from the conference that we replayed in its entirety here on anti-war radio was by Lawrence M. Vance, a writer for LewRockwell.com, author of the book Christianity and War, and that was one of the most powerful speeches I've ever heard in my life.
I was absolutely amazed.
Oh, he blew, Vance blew the audience away with that speech, including us at FFF.
We were all blown away.
Every sentence was just filled with power, and Vance is one of the most principled Christians I've ever met.
I mean, he does not pull his punches, he's paid a personal price in terms of standing for his Christian beliefs, he has led the way in showing that this war of aggression in Iraq cannot be reconciled with Christian principles, and his articles are just fantastic along these lines.
I mean, he's really showing Christians that if you subscribe to your tenets of Christianity, there is no way that you can support, in good conscience, a war of aggression, which of course is what the Iraq war is all about, given that Iraq never attacked the United States and neither did their government, neither the people nor the government.
Well, another speaker that will be talking at this Restoring the Republic conference, a historian that I really cannot wait to hear what this guy's got to say, Stephen Kinzer.
Oh, Kinzer's one of my real heroes.
I mean, this guy is a New York Times veteran correspondent, he's traveled all over the world, reported from some 50 countries on five continents, I mean, here's another scholar-scholar, but knows the real world, not the ivory tower world.
And he's written these fantastic books delving into the history of US interventionism, specifically in Guatemala, where the CIA ousted a democratically elected president in order to put their stew in the power of military general.
They did the same thing in Iran, which produced the blowback of the Iranian revolution in 1979, and that book's called All the Shah's Men.
And then his most recent book, America's Century of Regime Change, details the whole history of regime change operations, from Hawaii all the way up to Iraq.
And I heard him give a speech in Washington about a month ago on the Iranian coup, and boy, he just had the whole audience just mesmerized, and he's speaking without a note, and giving the whole history of what happened, and encapsulating it in 30 minutes, it was one of the best talks I've ever heard.
So, I mean, as you can tell, we've got so many all-stars.
I have never seen a conference with this many all-stars in one place, and Kinzer is one of them.
I mean, you could have a conference just with Kinzer and it would be exciting, but imagine Kinzer, Bacevich, Bovard, Rockwell, I mean, they go on and on.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I've sent out emails here and there to people saying, hey, is there a chance you're going to be attending the FFF conference up there?
I'm going to be there, I'd love to meet you.
And they write back, oh my God, how could I not, with that lineup?
The exclamation points, you know?
Anybody who misses this conference, they're missing an opportunity of a lifetime, because I don't think you'll ever find this many high-powered, principled, fantastic speakers in one place.
You know, Justin Raimondo from AntiWar.com is going to be there, and I guess I owe it to you, I'm finally going to get to meet my boss.
Well, Raimondo is one of my heroes.
I mean, this guy is one of the most entertaining, principled libertarians that is riding on the Internet today.
I mean, his column is just fantastic.
It is so much fun to read, and you can just sense that commitment and that passion from Raimondo.
And he's an entertaining guy, so I think people ought to come just to meet him and talk to him, because everybody that interacted with him at the conference just had a blast.
He was holding court in our evening cocktail hour, and just cracking everybody up.
And yeah, he's great.
And of course, you know, AntiWar.com, without AntiWar.com, where would this movement be?
They've just played the leading role in bringing people, the world's attention to this interventionist empire paradigm that we're suffering under.
Well, I know, I guess I've gotten to know the guy a little bit now, but certainly before I started working for AntiWar.com, I always kind of wondered, who is this guy?
You know, I think people are kind of puzzled by Raimondo's character, might be interested to find out who he really is, and I don't know if it's worth it just for that to go to the FFF conference, but that could be seen as extra credit, you know, kind of a bonus to go.
Well, it applies to Raimondo and everybody else, you know.
We've got a quote on our website that says, look, you know, you can catch the spirit of a movement by reading books at home, but in order to catch the real life, the passion of a movement, you've got to go and listen to people and capture the passion and excitement that exists in their voice and in the oral word.
And that's the real advantage.
In addition to interacting with people that are sharing the same ideas and the same philosophy and so forth.
And on our website at FFF.org, we've got a link to the conference, which gives the testimonials from people that attended last year.
And you just see one after another that says, oh my gosh, I have never attended a conference like this before.
It was the most unbelievable, most phenomenal event we've ever participated in, and I have no doubt this was going to be better than last year's.
Well, it sure looks like a great lineup.
Let me ask you real quick about three faces on here that I don't recognize.
I know Jonathan Turley is a constitutional lawyer, and I know, in fact, Ron Paul, I think, talked about wouldn't he make a good attorney general, but I'm not familiar, I don't believe, with Joseph Margulies, Joanne Mariner, or Bart Frazier.
All right, well, let me deal with Margulies and Mariner.
Well, and Turley, too.
I mean, they're all three lawyers, and they're very, very stout lawyers.
I mean, Turley teaches at George Washington University, and he is cited in the law school, and he's cited all over the news practically every day.
I mean, you can just Google Turley's name, it's going to pop up everywhere.
And he's one of these that has taken a leading role in the defense of civil liberties.
Now, Joseph Margulies was the lead counsel in Russell v.
Bush, which was one of the first Guantanamo cases, if not the first, to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, a case that he argued and won.
And he is still representing defendants from Guantanamo Bay.
And this guy, I think it would be safe to say, if he did not deliver the most captivating talk at last year's conference, it was certainly one of the top three.
I mean, his talk was absolutely amazing.
And so he's one of the big figures in the representation of people there at Guantanamo Bay.
He's been there.
He's argued before the Supreme Court.
I mean, he's one of the real stout lawyers in America.
Joanne Mariner is one of the most impressive people I have ever met.
And I have met her personally, and of course I've met Margulies.
I haven't met Turley.
Joanne works for Human Rights Watch as an attorney.
She's based both in Paris and in New York.
And this is like an Indiana Jones woman.
I mean, she doesn't just write about things for Human Rights Watch.
She actually goes on site.
She does investigative research.
She goes out and sleeps with rebels in the desert in Africa or whatever.
She went into the prisons and interviewed prisoners on prison rape and did this fantastic expose on rape in prisons in the United States.
And she writes a regular monthly column on findlaw.com, F-I-N-D-L-A-W, that is just fantastic about what's happening in Guantanamo Bay, what's happening with rendition, everything.
Oh, you know, is she the lady that wrote that great piece about the Unitary Executive Theory?
Possibly, because she's written about a lot of this stuff.
Most of the stuff she's writing on is on torture, Guantanamo Bay, rendition.
All her columns are at findlaw.com.
And when she spoke at last year's conference, she spoke in a very soft tone of voice.
And you could just hear a pin drop in the room the entire speech.
She just had people just captivated.
And so she's another one.
She'd be worth coming to the conference just to hear her.
And the same holds true for Margulies.
You know, you bring up, I'm sorry, I want to get back to Bart Frazier here in just a moment, but you bring up her work on prison rape there.
And Anthony Gregory has pointed out before, what an important marker of a police state that is, or the corruption of a society, when we all know, this entire society knows, it's the butt of our jokes, that our prisons are rape rooms.
Oh, absolutely.
And, of course, that we have more people in prison per capita than even the Chinese communists, more than any other country, including Burma and Communist China.
I mean, what better evidence of a police state than that?
All right, now tell me about Bart Frazier.
Well, Bart Frazier is one of my heroes also.
And he has worked here at the Future of Freedom Foundation, is our program director for some seven, eight years now.
He got his degree in economics at George Mason, and puts email update together every morning, handles our programs.
We couldn't do it without him.
He's one of the essential pieces of the FFF puzzle.
And he spoke at last year's conference, and he's going to be speaking again at this one.
All right, and, of course, Lou Rockwell, the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, will be there.
Heroic Pentagon whistleblower Karen Katowski will be there.
Our four-time economist from the Hoover Institute and Antiwar.com, David R. Henderson.
This looks like a really great lineup, Jacob.
I guess my most important question for you is, is it okay if I bring my microphone and my mixing board and poach all your guests and get interviews for Antiwar Radio?
Absolutely, absolutely.
And I'm sure they would enjoy it too.
I mean, yeah, for somebody like in your position that's looking for people to interview, that share our philosophy, that are leading America out of this darkness, there's no better place than this conference.
I mean, and a lot of the LouRockwell.com writers are going to be here, as you pointed out.
Lou himself, Higgs, Karen Katowski, who's another great speaker.
I mean, this conference has it all.
If you want to find the people that are leading America into a brighter era, this is the conference to come to.
All right, now let's talk business here.
What does it take?
If you're a listener in the Chaos Radio audience and you think, my golly, I think I might like to go to that thing and meet these people and see these speeches live and in person, what's it going to take for them to get to the Restoring the Republic conference in Reston, Virginia?
It's three days of speeches.
You get 20 speakers.
You pay $495.
Now, there's something important about that.
That includes all your meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the Hyatt Regency.
Now, guess what?
That's just about what the meals are costing us.
So what you're essentially doing is you're buying your meals for three days, some of the best meals you'll ever have, if anybody's familiar with the Hyatt Regency.
And so you get 20 speeches thrown in for free.
Because what we've gotten is we've gotten donors to subsidize the cost of this conference by helping us with the speaker fees, the travel, the hotel, and so forth.
So all we're asking people to do is, hey, you want to come to this conference?
You're paying for your meals, and you get all these speeches in for free because they're subsidized by our supporters.
Now, if they have to stay overnight, we've negotiated a deal with Hyatt where the Hyatt rooms are discounted to $149 a night.
Now, I don't know what the regular rate is, but I know that it's a lot higher than that because this is a Hyatt Regency.
But because we had the conference here last year, because they like us, they gave us a really good discounted rate.
So people would essentially, if they live in the area, they pay $495.
If they don't, they stay at the Hyatt Regency for an extra $149 a night.
Well, and there's Motel 6s in town, too, right?
That's right.
I mean, it's in Reston, which is one of the nicest areas in northern Virginia.
In fact, Money Magazine said Reston was one of the 10 best places to live.
But then there's Herndon, which is right nearby.
They've got the Motel 6s there.
They've got cheaper motels all around there.
Somebody's got a car, no problem.
Best place to fly into is Dulles Airport, because there's a free airport shuttle to the Hyatt, and it's only like 15 minutes away.
So, like I say, this is one of the greatest conferences I have ever seen.
It's well worth the money.
I keep telling people, this is the one conference in your life you really don't want to miss.
Yeah, I mean, this really seems to me like you're making history here, Jacob.
Well, you'd never see a lineup like this.
I mean, you know, just to get Kinzer and Margulies and Mariner and Curley and Basic, I mean, you ordinarily would say, oh, well, let's have a conference with one or two of those people.
This has it all.
I mean, it's just incredible.
I mean, I'm so excited about being part of this thing.
All right, now, the essence of this, the danger, the mix, the consequences of an imperialistic foreign policy, the destruction not only of lives and liberty overseas, but the destruction of our liberty here as well, this really comes from a point of view that really starts with the individual.
And I think most people, or many people anyway, might be under the impression that that's really the essence of the conservative philosophy is individualism.
They always mock it and call it rugged individualism and that kind of thing.
And yet, you point out in a recent blog entry just how different conservatism is from libertarianism by quoting Tucker Carlson as calling 9-11 kookery blasphemy, and how apparently to conservatives, really, they're collectivists.
They start with the state first.
It's the most important thing, and we're all secondary to its purposes.
To say something bad or wrong about them is to, you know, take the Lord's name in vain.
Well, there's no question.
I mean, the conservatives have come to view the federal government as an alternative god.
Now, I'm not suggesting they don't believe in God, because many of them are very religious.
They'll even wear their religion on their sleeves oftentimes.
But there's no doubt that they look on the federal government as another god.
It provides their retirement, their Social Security, their health care, Medicare, Medicaid.
They look to the government for their food, their children's education, their sustenance.
And while, you know, the other god says, through the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread.
You know, that's what work's all about.
That's what charity's all about.
Helping the poor.
Conservatives say, no, you know, God really made a mistake by trusting people with so much freedom.
We need to have our other god, the federal government.
And so they really do consider it blasphemy, like, when you criticize, like, the troops.
I mean, you can criticize God's angels, and conservatives won't get too upset.
They'll kind of laugh.
So you criticize the troops, which is the enforcement arm of Caesar, their alternative god, and man, all hell will break loose.
Because, you know, this is the troops, you know, you're not supposed to criticize them.
Well, libertarians, we place the individual, we place individual freedom above everything else.
We don't look to the state for our sustenance.
And I'm a devout Christian.
I look to God for my sustenance, for my support.
I look to voluntary charity.
And I never want to interfere with a person's freedom to do what he wants with his own money.
And this is what separates us out from the conservatives.
Yeah, well, I'm really glad that you make that distinction, that civic religion.
Libertarians don't worship the state.
You might find a state worshipper who calls himself a libertarian, but he's simply mistaken.
You'll never hear that kind of language out of a libertarian, that to be wrong when talking about, you know, something that the state did, that you're accusing something the state did as being blasphemy.
I mean, I actually, when I read that, I sort of tried to imagine putting those words in my own mouth, and coming up with a way where I would ever be in the position where I would consider it a sacred violation for someone to criticize the government.
I mean, what insanity is this?
It's conservatism.
Well, yeah, yeah.
And I was shocked, too, that anybody would say it'd be blasphemous to say something bad about the federal government.
This is just the organized means of coercion that people bring together in society.
There's nothing holy or sacrosanct about the government or government officials.
And, in fact, all they're really supposed to be is just our servants, and servants who are supposed to be protecting our lives and liberty, and yet they have, in fact, and are the greatest threat to our freedom.
This is the point of this conference.
You know, they go and they invade countries, they bomb countries, they embargo them, they sanction them, they support dictators all over the world, and then they produce the blowback, like on 9-11, that then gives them the excuse to take away our freedoms with respect to the Patriot Act and financial privacy and spying with the telecoms on our telephone calls and records and so forth.
I mean, it's a nice little scam they got going to expand their power and take away our freedoms.
We've got to fight our way out of this thing, just like the Founding Fathers did.
And that's why, at this conference, you're going to hear a lot of things from the Founding Fathers.
What liberty means, what is the role of government in a free society, why Washington and Jefferson were against this foreign entanglement and foreign wars and so forth.
All right, everybody, that's Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's helping to put the state back in its place, if it has a place at all.
Do everything you can.
I know it isn't going to be easy for most, but see if you can figure out a way to attend the Restoring the Republic Conference in Reston, Virginia, that is at the Hyatt Regency, June 6th through 8th.
Thanks very much for your time, Jacob.
Thank you.
It's FFF.org for all the details.
I meant to say that.
FFF.org, the Future Freedom Foundation.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Scott.
