All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest today is Lou Rockwell.
He is the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
And, you know, I got this killer thing for Mozilla called the Tab Kit, which means I can stack all my tabs on the right side vertically, which means I can have, you know, 50 tabs open or 100 tabs open, divided by, you know, region, mostly, is how I do it, for news coverage on this show.
And then I can sync all my different computers together.
That's great.
But one thing about this is three of my home tabs are Lou Rockwell's pages.
The front page, lourockwell.com/blog, and lourockwell.com/political theater, which is everything Ron Paul, which I absolutely love like a junkie loves junk.
It's absolutely great.
Welcome back to the show, Lou.
How are you doing?
Scott, great to be with you.
I'm very happy to have you here, Lou.
And let me ask you this to start us off here.
Why do you think Ron Paul is so anti-war all the time?
What is the matter with him?
Well, Chris, he realizes that, as Murray Rothbard pointed out, foreign policy is the key issue.
If we even look back to the 19th century when the classical liberals were defeated by the bad guys, it was the war issues.
Just from a utilitarian standpoint as a movement, it's the power of nationalism and chauvinism and all the, you know, we're the over mention and you're the intermention.
All that kind of, we can kill you, all that kind of stuff is very destructive to liberty.
It's also because war is, you know, the greatest act of immorality.
I mean, it's mass murder.
How many people has the U.S. killed in its history of wars?
A hundred million probably, more than a hundred million.
Who can look at that and say, well, that's a great thing.
Hey, you know, wonderful.
We defeated the Germans, we defeated the Southerners, we defeated the Spanish, we defeated the Mexicans, we defeated the British, you know, and so forth.
Then there's the economic effects of war.
War empowers the government like nothing else.
So it not only suppresses all dissent, people are afraid to speak out because, ooh, you're a terrorist in the current dispensation.
So there's that.
But they also are much less likely to oppose the government taking their money because, after all, it's for national defense or national security or any of these other made-up terms to justify robbing us.
So all the debt, all the spending that's gone on in the wars, Ron Paul realizes it's what's been the basic reason, aside from the Fed, which is the funder of wars, that we're in an economic hole and going deeper.
So if you're also concerned about civil liberties, this is what gives the government power to announce they can shoot any American citizen if they want to, say he's a bad guy, no trial, nothing, just kill you.
The kind of thing that we used to think was a bad thing when Stalin did it.
Now it's a great thing when the American general secretary of the party is doing it.
So we can have concentration camps in other countries, in Guantanamo.
You notice the gal who was the defector from the CIA is the tweeter.
She's now tweeting about the CIA.
I apologize, I can't remember her name.
But she talked about how the CIA has a psychiatric prison in this country.
And I immediately believe it, of course.
There's nothing beyond these people.
And they're empowered by war.
The CIA came out of World War II, and it grows and becomes richer and more powerful through wars.
It has its own army, in fact, its own covert army, number of armies.
So if we look at what threatens us in terms of the size and power of government, what it's doing to the economy, what it's doing to our civil liberties, what it's doing to sort of just civic culture and making people afraid to speak out and making people bow down to the government instead of opposing it, that's war.
So that's why Ron Paul talks about war.
All his life he's been opposed to war, and he continues to be.
And it's why I think the Pew polls last summer showed this of young people.
We saw just UCLA last night where 6,200 kids, 6,200, I beg your pardon, it was actually 7,800.
6,200 was at Chico State.
UCLA was 7,800, and that may even undercount it.
Some people think it was more than 8,000.
College kids came out to cheer him.
And those are Obama-sized crowds from 2008 there.
Yeah, nobody else can draw that kind of adoring crowd.
So why do young people love him so much?
It's basically the war and peace issue.
It's many other issues.
It's personal liberty.
It's their fears for their economic future.
They realize they're going to be graduating with huge debts and no job.
So all those other things come into play, but it's a great moral.
It shows the morality of American young people who have not been warped by the state and by the warfare machine, that they are, first of all, opposed to the vicious, murderous, bloody wars the U.S. government is waging all around the world.
There's a few different things I want to go over there.
I guess one of the things is I wonder if you think that the young people and their willingness to turn out to a Ron Paul thing is a symptom of the change in the patterns of media consumption here, that really the middle-aged and old people who are still mostly watching the Larry News Hour or CNN or whatever, they're being told Ron Paul can't win.
Ron Paul's not legitimate.
Yeah, we all like him, but forget him and that kind of thing, whereas the young people, they're just on Facebook, and Facebook is telling them everybody thinks Ron Paul's great.
This whole thing is a world historical thing.
I mentioned the Obama-sized crowds in 2008.
TV was saying, wow, everyone, isn't it historic?
Go out and take part, and whatever.
It was totally officially top-down, sanctioned, love this rock star kind of a thing.
All these kids are turning out to see Ron Paul.
I don't know if it's in defiance of TV, but maybe just because they're completely ignoring TV.
Well, it's a good point, and in fact, ever since the 1970s, TV viewership has been falling, which I think is a wonderful thing.
And certainly young people don't watch television anymore, TV news, that is, any more than they pick up a newspaper.
So because, as one recent article argued, news makes you stupid.
I mean, if you listen to the regular news and absorb it, it actually lessens, it lowers your IQ, because it's just a bunch of lies.
So yes, young people are not paying attention.
They're not watching the NBC nightly news and the rest of these propaganda things.
They're getting their news from the Internet, Facebook, and elsewhere.
And so, yeah, although I also think it shows the Ron Paul revolution is far more important than this election, far more long-lasting than this current political campaign, because Ron and Paul has won the youth election, if we can think of it that way.
So I think that these kids are interested in Austrian economics.
They're interested in issues of war and peace.
They're interested in prosperity, very worried about their own future, lack of prosperity, and they're concerned about sound money, Federal Reserve, all these kinds of issues that they're not supposed to think about.
You're not supposed to know about this stuff.
You're not supposed to care about it.
And if you do care about it or know about it, you're just supposed to take the CFR or the NBC or CBS or whatever view of things.
They don't.
So I think it's so encouraging.
So regardless of what happens in this particular election, and whether it's Cree Bay or Cree Bee ends up getting elected in November, the underground revolution, the bottom-up revolution, which is the only kind of revolution that matters and that means anything, and the fact that people are changing their hearts and minds are being changed, which is what has to happen before anything else can go on.
So Ron Paul is changing the climate of opinion among young people, among the future leaders of this country and our society.
So I think it's just terrific.
I think we're all going to live to see it, and I think it's not going to be happening tomorrow.
But this is boiling up.
It's bubbling up.
And, by the way, this terrifies the regime.
It's one of the reasons they never want to mention Ron Paul's name.
I mean, I noticed this morning the news was all about, well, there's this Santorin Gingrich who they're going to drop out.
They're going to do the wonderful thing and drop out.
They won't even mention Ron Paul in a story like that about how he should quit.
Yeah, they don't even mention his name.
That's funny.
All right, we have to leave it there and go out to this break.
We're talking with Lew Rockwell from Mises.org.
That's the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
And also LewRockwell.com and /blog and /political theater and /podcast show, too.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Lew Rockwell.
He's the author of The Left, The Right, and The State.
And he's the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
That's Mises.org.
And he keeps the website LewRockwell.com.
I like the, you know, in the spirit of Good Friday and Easter and all that coming up.
The top story today on LewRockwell.com is the government murdered Jesus Christ.
And, yeah, that's the kind of fun stuff you can find at LewRockwell.com.
We're talking about the heroic Ron Paul and his reprise of the greatest speaking tour on behalf of peace and liberty and sound economics in world history.
And that goes to something you were saying before the break there, Lew, which is that this really doesn't have much to do with the election.
It's not like the empire was ever going to let him win anything here.
What's going on is the greatest speaking tour ever on behalf of peace and liberty and real sound economics.
As you were saying, these giant crowds are turning out, especially here maybe after it's too late to get the nomination.
The crowds are really starting to build.
And the point being that by the end of this, just like four years ago, by the end of this there will be thousands and thousands, maybe tens of thousands of new libertarians in the world, smaller numbers, smaller proportions, but still of new anarcho-capitalists, of Austrian school economics economists, people who go and get their PhDs and are serious about pursuing economics as a career, but are of the Austrian school and not Keynesian or Chicago schools, and on and on and on like this, assuming that the governments don't kill us all with their hydrogen bombs.
Ron Paul is going to live forever.
Ron Paul has just completely thrown out that stupid conservative liberalism and liberal conservatism consensus that we have in D.C. and exposed the masses, really, of the whole planet Earth to hardcore plum-line Rothbardian libertarianism, and there ain't no going back for him.
Scott, exactly right.
And as you say, it's not only in this country.
I get reports from countries all around the world, from libertarians and classical liberals all around the world about the immense effect that Ron Paul has had among young people in their countries.
I had somebody tell me the other day that Ron could be elected president of Brazil if he could only run.
I mean, there's young people all over the globe, and this, of course, is an international movement.
It's certainly not limited just to the little dotted line on the map of those of us who were taxed by the wonderful Uncle Sam.
Young people all over the world are being attracted to this.
This is where revolutions start.
They are young people's affairs, and Ron is going to be his next speech, which I think is tonight, but I'm sorry not to be 100% sure of that.
He's at Berkeley.
Now, what Republican could go to Berkeley?
He's going to draw a huge crowd at Berkeley, just like at all these other colleges and universities.
He's been at thousands and thousands of kids.
This is true in 2008, too.
So he brought a lot of maybe millions of young people all around the world in 2008 into this.
This is happening again.
It's building, and of course he's not, as he himself says, he's not running for political power.
They criticize him for this, that he doesn't dream of exercising power over others and running their lives, that he wants to diminish the power, that he wants to let people have freedom and make their own decisions, live their own lives.
So this is really, it doesn't have anything to do with politics as we normally think of it, and I think when historians look back on this era, Ron Paul is going to be the dominating figure, not Obama and not Mitt Romney.
Yeah, they're not the leaders of any ideas whatsoever.
They're just the leaders of groups of followers.
That's not true of the rest of them.
I mean, they're just two looting gangs.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, the world's lousy with people that other people are lined up behind.
That doesn't mean anything really impressive, you know what I mean?
We could point at any crappy pop group for that.
Ron Paul is making a mark.
And you know what it is?
I saw this thing, and it's the same old thing, but they said on TV what MSNBC or one of these talking heads was saying, yeah, you know, there's been a lot of troubles in Obama years, and so people are swinging back the other way to a Mitt Romney conservatism.
And the point of that is that who's this still working on?
You know, the fooling some of the people some of the time and all of that?
That's got to be a smaller and smaller group of some and a lot more people who are standing outside the consensus and saying, really, if I don't like Obama, even if it's any more, I've got to swing toward Mitt Romney as the only way I have to go from there?
That's the pendulum swinging, you know?
It doesn't make any sense.
No, and, of course, these guys are just twins.
I mean, Obama and Romney have no substantive differences except who should be in power.
That they differ on.
But otherwise they have no differences.
They both are controlled by the big banks and by Wall Street.
They both are controlled by the military-industrial complex and by big pharma and all the other corporate state interests that are in league with the central state.
So this is all just a game.
It's just pretend.
I mean, it's just a joke.
It's a trick.
There's no substantive change.
These guys are just identical.
They have different hairdos.
That's about it.
Yeah.
Well, I know you get the e-mails just like I do.
You post them on your blog from time to time, and it's people saying, you know what, I used to completely buy this whole right-wing or left-wing package, and I believed in all that until you guys.
In fact, of course, you're often on the same list with me, and people say, now I get it.
Boy, did I believe a bunch of stupid conservative things, but now I'm an individualist, and God is straight, and we really do have being right on our side.
You know what I mean?
We shouldn't, as Murray said, in the left, the right, and the state, that we should all have long-term optimism about how this is going to work, because liberalism and conservatism as they exist now are such corrupt ideologies.
They're just indefensible.
You'd have to be a bloodthirsty lunatic to believe in these things.
And again, they're not opposites.
I mean, they're twins.
They're twins of evil.
So it's all a trick to keep us distracted from what they're doing to us and doing to people around the world.
But more and more people aren't buying it.
They aren't voting.
They aren't participating in elections.
And this is the young.
Now, I wish they were voting for Ron Paul, but they actually don't buy into the whole corrupt.
They actually think, most of them, that the electoral system is corrupt and that Ron Paul would never be allowed to win.
So my guess is that's correct.
I don't think Ron Paul ever would have been allowed to win.
I think there's a lot of evidence of crooked stuff in some of these caucus states and probably primary states.
Well, you know, you mentioned that last time.
We didn't really get a chance to go into it very much, but I wanted to say that I agree with you about that, and I don't really know all about it, but I'm perfectly willing to speculate that they stole a couple of those and maybe even the big one, the first one, Iowa, which would have changed everything because, you know, Romney was definitely going to win New Hampshire.
He has a house there or whatever, but it was all a question of how strong of a second for Ron Paul.
If he had won Iowa and then had an even stronger second for being the big news out of Iowa in New Hampshire and then been able to go into South Carolina like that, he could have been looking at an entirely different narrative for the outbreak of this thing, the entire way that it's been run.
And I don't know how many of them they stole, but I think there's been some real shenanigans going on.
Oh, there's no question they set out to cut them off of the knees to prevent any momentum from building.
And I don't think there's any question, especially in those early ones, that there was outright theft that sometimes shocks people.
But, you know, this is a bunch of happy to steal millions of dollars for their Cayman Islands bank account and is happy to start wars and kill a million people in Iraq for economic reasons and power reasons.
They're willing to do the most horrendous things that we're supposed to think that they're somehow morally above stealing an election.
So this is a long American tradition, stolen elections.
Not only does Mayor Daley in Chicago famously stole the 1960 election there for John F. Kennedy, although probably Kennedy was better than Nixon, but again, the thing...
Yeah, my dad always said it's a good thing he stole it too because Nixon would have blown up the whole world during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Well, but I mean, so there's been many, many stolen elections in American history, and I don't think there's any question that Ron Paul is a victim of this.
It's because they fear him so much, but I think his path to influence is not through the government, it never has been, even as a congressman.
He's always used that congressional office as the bully pulpit to teach about liberty.
He never played the game of, you know, I'll vote for your bill, you vote for mine, and then I can become chairman of the committee or whatever.
That was never his way.
So he's using, again, elections and politics to spread the word, but he's not actually...
He's in the electoral system, but he's not of the electoral system.
Right.
And he's separate from... he's above it, and because of that, he will be the long-term victor.
Well, and for people who don't know this, obviously you can look him up on YouTube, and you'll have a great time looking up Ron Paul on YouTube.
You might just get stuck watching him until four in the morning.
It's great.
But also, LewRockwell.com has the Ron Paul file, which is dozens, anyway, of articles about Ron Paul, and must be hundreds of Ron Paul's articles.
Of course, we have his foreign policy archive at Antiwar.com as well.
And I urge people to read Ron Paul, you know, just for your head.
Never mind electoral politics, but he's among the best of the libertarians, always has been, my hero.
And I know yours, too, and a good friend of liberty.
Thank you, Lew.
Appreciate it.
Scott, thanks for having me on.
Everybody, that's Lew Rockwell, Mises.org, LewRockwell.com.
