Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And our next guest on the show is Jeremy Sapienza, he's Senior Editor at AntiWar.com.
How's it going Jeremy?
Hey, good Scott.
Hey everybody.
Very happy to have you here on the show.
I was thinking that people read AntiWar.com a lot because it's awesome.
And thanks in great part to your efforts among others.
But I was thinking probably some of them would like to know more about AntiWar.com.
You know, there's the Who We Are button.
I was wondering if I could push yours there and give us a little bit of the history of AntiWar.com and how it started and who we are and what we're about over there.
Well, it started long before I was around.
But I think the story is something like in 1995, Eric started to protest the Kosovo War, Eric Garris.
And it was something that he did in his spare time, and then eventually it blew up as more and more conflicts in the Balkans were being cemented by our regime.
And, well, our regime was inserting itself into their problems and probably making them a lot worse than they had to be.
And so I guess it grew steadily.
And then after 9-11 is when it really blew up, so to speak.
And I was hired a few months after 9-11 to help deal with some of the growth that they were experiencing.
And I've been here since then, February 2002.
So I'm almost going to be 10 years now.
I guess basically the overriding theme of AntiWar.com this whole time has really been, even though we're all a bunch of ideological nuts, our space is open to anyone who's good on war and torture, imprisonment without trial, and the police state, and these kinds of things, basically, right?
That's right.
We're on everybody from John Pilger to Pat Buchanan and everything in between.
Yeah, which just goes to show that between John Pilger and Pat Buchanan, there's a lot of real good antiwar sentiment from across the political spectrum for a lot of the same reasons and a lot of different ones, too.
And I guess that's something that's always really been a focus of AntiWar.com, especially because of Justin's history and really the history of the site beginning during Clinton's wars, that there's always been a focus of trying really to appeal to the right, who tend to be the most knee-jerk nationalists, who tend to go along with foreign conflicts the most, right?
I guess they tend to.
I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate.
I mean, the left, as we saw when the Iraq war was about to start, was...
Okay, I use left very loosely, but the Democrats, let's say, were gung-ho antiwar and marching, and, you know, Bush lied, people died, but then once Obama got in, continued the exact same things that Bush was doing and expanded them, didn't roll back anything, not one thing, maybe a couple of things that are really insignificant.
And they're gone.
Antiwar movement evaporated.
So, I'm not sure if that's really totally accurate.
I know Justin reaches out a lot to the right to try to get them on board, but I think anybody in the right who is going to be antiwar is antiwar already.
And our coalition is broad-based because we don't discriminate as far as what you think about domestic policies.
I mean, domestic-like economic policies.
Obviously, we don't want to run you if you write a column about torture in the prisons being great, or, you know, pro-drug war.
But, you know, like Buchanan, we wouldn't normally agree with him on a lot of things, but on foreign policy, he's actually rather excellent.
Right.
Well, and I think the thing about that is, one, obviously, you know, you go to antiwar.com and you have access to all this great stuff from all different perspectives like that, too.
But then at the same time, you look at the page as a whole, we're really setting an example for the new realignment and a coalition of, you know, what I see as beyond silly left-right stuff as, you know, us, more or less the regular private citizens of this country, as versus those with the power and all the money who are against the rest of us.
You know, not like in a necessarily like a Marxist class war sense, but almost, you know.
I mean, the state and their allies definitely are, you know, at war against the rest of the society to a great degree.
Well, the things that benefit them are the things that hurt us the most.
Yeah, of course.
It is, in a way, a class thing, and it's the difference between the political class and the rest of us.
Right.
So the things that benefit the political class as the political class are the things which harm everybody else on Earth.
Yeah, it seems to be, you know, with no exceptions I can think of, the basic truth there.
So we ought to do, you know, our NPR game a little bit here and explain to the people how they can help because we're in the middle of our fun drive here.
And as we all know, these wars, for one, have – and the whole national security state are costing the society tremendously.
People are broke, and it's very hard for them to find a way to contribute at a time like this.
And again, we're broke too.
We need their help just as much or more than ever.
And there are a lot of ways that we make it painless for them.
If they go to – if you people out there go to antiwar.com/donate, we accept donations of every description and many that you've never heard of.
We have email addresses and phone numbers and all the contact information if you need to talk with a real human instead of just type things into a computer, you know, about your donation.
We do monthly donations.
You can get a credit card where Capital One gives us a kickback when you use your credit card.
And as Angela was saying, we even take junk cars as donations.
And, you know, we said that on the show once, and we got a car out of it.
Sweet.
I didn't even know about that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was really surprised to hear it.
And then the next thing I know, I got an email saying, just got a car.
That's great.
Yeah, I mean, I can't stress enough how little we need in the scheme of things.
I mean, we do so much with so little.
It's not that we're being slave-driven or anything, but, you know, everybody needs money to survive, and we have so many readers if just a few of them gave a few bucks.
I mean, nobody's asking for people to give $500 or anything like that.
And if a couple thousand people gave $10, we'd be way farther ahead in our fund drive.
And antiwar.com/donated, like you said, there's a million different options for people.
You can do a monthly recurring, or you can just do a one-off thing if you only have a few bucks.
And the credit card doesn't cost you anything.
I mean, you use it like a regular credit card, and they give us money.
It's free for all of us.
The thing is, like, there are only a few of us that work here, and so it really is all just going to our time that we spend basically all our lives doing this.
I think that's really important to stress to you guys is that this is our entire lives, whether we want it that way or not.
It's just an always-on job.
I mean, it was just on vacation.
Trying to be on vacation, really, but kept getting...
You know, I had to check my email every day, and check in, and also just see...
I was in Italy, and we landed in Rome, and I saw...
The first thing I saw on the plane was a gaggle of NATO troops rushing from a base that is used to attack Libya.
Wow.
There's a whole bunch of them waiting for their luggage with us.
And then, you know, and being in the newspaper after they bombed the Tripoli Mosque, the imam declaring holy war on Italy.
Great.
Yeah.
Can't wait to get on a plane again.
Yep.
Well, and there is no...
You know, people might think Randolph Borne is some billionaire who died and left us his will or something, but it isn't like that at all.
There's no giant office building here.
We're scraping by just like y'all, and as Jeremy said, any few bucks would help, and we'd really appreciate it, and just as I appreciate your time on the show today, Jeremy.
No problem.
Antiwar.com/donate, y'all.
Help out.
Thank you, guys.
