12/04/09 – Jeff Frazee – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Jeff Brazy from the Young Americans for Liberty.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Happy birthday.
You guys just had your first birthday there at the Young Americans for Liberty, am I right?
Yeah, we just celebrated the first year.
December 2nd, 2008 was the year Dr. Paul endorsed the organization as a youth movement to continue students for Ron Paul.
And so we kind of say that's our very first founding.
And yesterday, or two days ago, the second was our official first year.
So we've been very proud of the accomplishments we've been able to achieve.
That's great.
All right, so now tell me all about it.
What exactly is the Young Americans for Liberty?
Young Americans for Liberty is sort of the continuation...
I should say, who are the Young Americans for Liberty?
Well, that's a good question, too.
I'll answer them both.
I guess to start, the Young Americans for Liberty is the continuation of the Students for Ron Paul campaign.
I was Dr. Paul's national youth coordinator during Ron Paul 2008, and started Young Americans for Liberty to continue this ever-growing youth effort around the idea of liberty.
So to answer your question of who are the Young Americans for Liberty, it's a very diverse group.
We have membership all across the country, over 170 active and forming chapters on high school and college campuses.
And it's very diverse.
We have people who consider themselves conservative, limited government conservatives.
We have people who consider them progressives who understand economics.
We have anarchists.
We have objectivists.
We have people who run the whole political gamut.
So we don't necessarily tell people what they...
There's not a standard you have to meet this test in order to be a Young American for Liberty.
We just, as long as they subscribe to our ideas and want to associate with us, more than welcome to join.
Awesome.
All right.
Well, so what kind of projects do you guys do?
Most of what we do is, our mission statement is to train and educate youth activists winning on principle.
And what we are is we're a 501C4 nonprofit, which is different than a C3 nonprofit because we're involved in the political process.
Really, the short of it is to develop young leaders to hopefully follow in Ron Paul's footsteps.
Find the young activists out there who want to be involved in politics, groom them, train them in traditional campaign tactics, get them involved in campaigns, get them involved in local initiatives, and hopefully encourage them to run for office or help other principled politicians run for office themselves and get more Ron Paul candidates elected to office.
That really is the goal.
You have to go after the root cause, and we can sit here and debate libertarianism or any type of political philosophy all we want, me and you, but as long as we're sitting here on our couch not doing anything with it, the state still exists, and the state is still taxing us, regulating us, and sending us to war.
So we've got to do something about that, and that's getting involved in the political process, hopefully electing enough people to all levels of government and pulling it back, restoring this republic.
All right.
Now, I guess we're all at least somewhat familiar with the conflict inside the Libertarian Party as it's been framed over the years, and that is whether they should be ideologically pure libertarians and be an educational organization or whether they should try to get people elected to office.
And it always seemed to me like that or, the second choice there means act like a bunch of Republicans and then somehow believe that the American electorate would vote for a Republican who's guaranteed to lose instead of for a Republican who could win who's actually a member of the Republican Party.
So if the Libertarian Party ought to be anything, it ought to be pure libertarian and try to get people elected as pure libertarians rather than some kind of moderate, sometimes pro-war kind of weird thing.
And in fact, I'd go you one further and say for the entire war on terrorism, the Libertarian Party has blown it.
They could have made themselves the leaders of the American anti-war movement and increased their membership by 100,000 percent or something.
And instead, they just kind of put it on the back burner because they don't want to alienate a bunch of right-wingers or whatever.
And so I just wondered, you know, which principles you guys put in which order, you know what I mean, when it comes to.
I know that you by definition aren't necessarily, you know, as you just said, pure libertarian and you try to bring together as many people as you can, which I'm all for.
But I wonder, you know, which are the lines that can't be crossed as far as, you know, membership being pro-war or being, you know, for repealing the Tenth Amendment or, you know, something that, you know, is there a line?
Or how does that work?
Yeah, well, I mean, the first take on the Libertarian Party, we don't represent the party or try to.
We encourage our members to get involved in the political process.
And whatever avenue that may be, they find best works for them.
Personally, I take Ron Paul as a perfect example how to achieve political success.
He ran as a libertarian in 1988.
No one knew who he was.
He never got, you know, really any national attention.
And then he ran in the Republican primary in 2008 with the exact same views, the exact same positions.
And he started a national phenomenon.
So I think you might kind of understand where I'm going with that.
But in terms of where we draw the line and compromise all the rest, I don't really see it as compromise.
We don't allow anyone who wants to associate with our ideas to join the organization.
We don't have a litmus test that says, no, you can't come here, you can't join.
Because a lot of young people, to be honest, are just trying to figure out what their ideas are, what they believe in.
And so you don't want to start off by turning them off, saying, oh, well, you know what, you're wrong because this, you're wrong because of that.
But, I mean, I guess the question is, though, is who do you choose to promote for office or not?
Oh, well, we can't, talking legally, we can't promote anyone for office being a nonprofit.
What we do is train and educate young people to get involved in the political process.
Now, we have our magazine and our website and our statement of principles that explains kind of the positions we take and the issues that are important to us.
But we leave it up to our individual membership to decide what type of action they take.
And we hope through the culture of the organization, the people we associate with, it's kind of apparent what kind of direction we're heading into.
And our hope that we'll influence our membership to join certain campaigns that share those views.
So we don't endorse candidates.
We don't do anything, that type of activity.
But we're very, I mean, we come out of the Ron Paul mold.
We're the students for Ron Paul campaign.
So that should be pretty clear in terms of our positions.
And, well, you know, I really appreciate what you say about trying to have open arms and bring in as many different people as you can, you know, focused around the most important issues.
I'm reading your mission statement here.
I mean, this is a very libertarian statement of principles that you have here, a very individualist one, a very anti-government one.
And I would say, you know, it's at least implicit in here, an anti-war one.
But so I guess what I want to say is this is what I would like, you know, if I had any influence on anybody.
What I would like to try to do as best I can is to push for this realignment where I realize that libertarians like myself are never going to be, you know, the majority opinion.
However, I think if liberals and conservatives can put their priorities in more or less the same order as mine, many of us will find that we all agree on peace and, you know, little things like the Bill of Rights ought to be the law, you know, stuff like that.
And then if we can, you know, take care of the most important issues, we'll find that we really have a lot more in common and we can have a real realignment against government action.
You know, kind of the inverse of the 9-12 phenomenon, right?
We want the 9-10 phenomenon.
Yeah, I could agree with you more.
I agree.
I think there's so many big fish to fry.
If you ever get in a room with, you know, strict libertarians and start talking, the next – I guarantee you it's going to be a matter of time before you start debating the privatization of roads or the privatization of the police force or something like that.
I mean, these are philosophical ideas, but they're in no way attached to current modern-day reality.
I mean, we have the IRS to deal with.
We have these wars overseas to deal with.
There's such bigger-picture problems right now we should be going after that we can kind of coalesce around from all sides of the political spectrum.
Yeah.
Those are the issues we should be targeting.
We shouldn't – you know, privatization of roads, you know, I would love to be in America where we're discussing on mainstream news the privatization of roads.
But that's not where we are in current political debate.
So let's go after the big fish.
Let's get rid of the IRS.
Let's stop these unconstitutional wars, and let's worry about those big issues first before we get to some of the very – you know, the smaller issues, I guess, for lack of a better term.
Well, you know, just in the past few weeks, or past couple of weeks, I guess, Ron Paul has had, as far as I know, his biggest legislative accomplishment, which is attaching a real Audit the Fed bill to another Empower the Fed bill that they're passing out of the House of Representatives now.
And I guess it remains to be seen whether this thing will make it out of conference committee in its original form and things like this.
But, you know, of course, this is another major issue right there with, you know, the Fourth and Fifth and Sixth Amendments and the rest of them being the law, with bringing the troops home from overseas and ending the empire is the bailouts.
And what many, I think, have credibly described as the biggest heist in the history of all mankind, which is going on right in front of all of our faces as we speak still, more than a year after it began.
And, you know, in fact, Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece about how a bunch of progressive bloggers came together to provide support for progressive Democrat Congress people to vote with Ron Paul and Paul Grayson to get their amendment out of committee, not the compromise bad version, the Mel Watt version, but the real version.
It was a libertarian and a left and right realignment in miniature right there that helped Ron Paul get this thing done.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
I mean, this is a tangible achievement that Campaign for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty has kind of rallied around.
You know, before the Ron Paul campaign, the Federal Reserve wasn't even known for the most part.
You talk to your friends, people didn't know what it is.
And now people know not just about the Federal Reserve, but now they know about monetary policy and that the Federal Reserve is bad and what it's doing to us.
It's really kind of waking up a lot of Americans.
It's because we're getting involved in the political process.
We're lobbying heavily for a bill that is the root of the war machine.
I mean, these wars don't occur unless the Federal Reserve is there to fund them and monetize the debt and print the money.
So this is a large, tangible goal that I'm even impressed at how far it's come along.
Now it's being added to a larger financial bill, which will be the ultimate irony is Dr. Paul's going to end up voting against his own bill.
But, I mean, it just goes to show that the tangible results we have now with this effort is something that just seems so logical that we should be auditing the Federal Reserve.
And that's connecting with a lot of Americans.
So it's these type of issues we've got to identify that us as constitutionalists have always supported, how to take those mainstream, gather enough people, rally around them and actually produce real results.
And now I always thought, and maybe I'm wrong because look how effective I am, not very, but I always thought it was better to attack the left from the left and the right from the right.
And it seems like especially when we're going through these topsy-turvy times when you have a peace candidate supposedly who was elected from the Democratic Party and you have the switch from the liberals and the conservatives about who's in power and who's in the opposition.
And yet here we have Obama escalating the war, just as he promised he would, but still quite contrary to the beliefs of most of the people who supported him, I would think.
And when I was in New Hampshire giving a talk to the Young Americans for Liberty chapter up there just a few weeks back, quite a few of those young guys were veterans who were anti-war and were members of the Young Americans for Liberty up there.
And it occurs to me that what really should have been going on the whole time was that everybody who was right-wing and anti-war at all or libertarian and anti-war at all should have been making that the number one argument and attacking the right from the right, calling them a bunch of one-world revolutionaries and that kind of thing.
And that sort of argument seems like now with all these liberals who are disappointed in Obama, all the liberals who are apologizing for him and pretending not to see what he's doing and all that, that this is a real opportunity for the Young Americans for Liberty to really replace the Answer Coalition or whoever as the leaders of the anti-war movement in America.
Yeah, well the real peace movement is the liberty movement.
I think that's pretty clear and evident with the fact that here the progressives have rallied around Obama and he's just been more of the same.
And you're right, there's a real opportunity right now for the liberty movement, especially young people, to really speak out and spread our ideas.
There's so many people we've met who have been a part of the anti-war movement and just because of the culture the anti-war movement's been that they've just drifted towards I guess progressivism, socialism, those type of ideas that we're now exposing to them and saying, hey look, you can believe in free markets and still be anti-war.
That makes sense.
And just exposing these people to these ideas and just getting the gears turning in their head has been highly effective because they've really been fooled by the left and trying to elect a quote-unquote peace candidate and not getting what their desired ends are.
So they're realizing that there is a principled position and that just because you believe in free markets you don't necessarily believe in war and just because you believe in socialism doesn't mean you believe in peace.
It's actually quite the opposite.
So it's been, for better or for worse, the war issue has been a big issue amongst young people because we're seeing our friends go overseas and not come home or with one less arm or leg and it's devastating.
We're the ones taking the brunt of this war whether it's with our friends, with our own human life, or with the debt that's going to be put on us in upcoming years.
So there is a real opportunity right now.
We have some plans coming up in the new year to actually target this issue even more.
I'm not going to reveal those yet because there's still some planning to be, but stay tuned to the website Young Americans for Liberty.
We're going to have some activism projects in 2010 that's going to focus specifically on this issue and Obama's war.
All right.
Now, Jeff, tell us a little bit about how people can learn about the Young Americans for Liberty, how they can join.
Well, the best part to start, I guess, is the website YoungAmericansforLiberty.org or YALiberty.org is the shorter version.
You go there, you can join.
Our membership is just $10 a year.
We usually have mostly young people who join.
The benefits of that are quite large.
In fact, you get an annual subscription to our magazine, Young American Revolution, which publishes quarterly.
Also, if you're not a student or a young person, but you're young at heart and you believe in these ideas, a contribution of $50 or more will get you a subscription to the magazine as well.
I've been extraordinarily proud of it.
Dan McCarthy, who you may know, Scott, who's the senior editor at the American Conservative Magazine, is our editorial director and has been putting together some amazing pieces.
And every issue, we make sure we touch on the Constitution, we touch on the anti-war message, we touch on limited government message.
And we're using these magazines to get into the hands of students to recruit them on campuses.
So we're mailing them out to our chapters, we're passing them out, we print out over 10,000 every issue.
They allow you to grab a copy, sit down, read some in class, and go, wow, I really connect to these ideas.
How do I get involved?
Go to the website, join Young Americans for Liberty, and get a chapter started on your campus, whether you're in high school or college.
We're starting chapters all across the country.
As I mentioned earlier, we have over 170 that are currently active and forming.
Well, you know, I'm really proud of you, Jeff.
I think what you're doing is a great thing.
And I think, you know, actually this is going to be part of the history of America.
What you're doing is really helping shape the future of the libertarian movement, however you define that as broadly or narrowly as you want to.
But you deserve a lot of credit for what you've done.
Thank you.
Thanks, Scott.
Well, even more than the libertarian movement, it's just America at large.
I mean, I view these ideas as common sense ideas.
I know we sometimes get labeled as radicals.
But the real radical ideas are the ones that are in Washington right now.
And we've got to make that connection with Americans that these are common sense ideas that have been proven by history.
And the great thing is young people are flocking to this message, as you saw with the Ron Paul campaign.
It's growing literally leaps and bounds by the day.
And it's just a matter of keeping our arms around it and keeping our students and our activists resourced and always doing the necessary outreach to bring more people to our message.
Right on.
Well, keep up the good work.
And thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Yep.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Anytime.
All right, everybody.
That's Jeff Frazee, executive director of the Young Americans for Liberty.