All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And our first guest on the show today, I'm Mark and Ian.
Oh no.
Sorry man.
I think we're all set now.
Do I have both of you there?
Yes, you do.
Okay, good deal.
Well, welcome to the show everybody.
You know Mark and Ian, they're the hosts of Free Talk Live and Ian runs this here Liberty Radio Network that we're on right now at lrn.fm.
So what's going on with you guys lately?
Well, it's an honor to be on the show.
I think this is our first time actually being guests on Anti-War Radio.
Yeah, what the hell is the matter with me?
I should have interviewed you 10 times by now, I think, probably.
We've never really done anything that deserves being interviewed, I don't think.
Yeah, you interview people that are worth interviewing, Scott.
I just listened to your Veterans Day show with the, oh shoot, I can't remember the author's name that did the Wilson's War.
Oh, Jim Powell.
Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm a fan.
I don't want you to, you know, go run around interviewing Free Talk Live.
What do we have to talk about?
Oh, you guys talk about interesting stuff all day long.
A lot of times we come back from break and I'm still laughing from the commercial.
You guys heckling your callers and all that.
I have a great time listening.
It might be a talent.
I don't know if it's worthy of an interview.
Yeah, well, hey, it's the non-aggression principle, man.
It applies to all kinds of different things.
All right, so I'm under the impression that you guys got in some trouble.
You lost four stations, four affiliates, and your advertiser being threatened because you're good on war?
That's right.
I mean, we're a pro-peace radio show and we've been that way for a long time.
The last time that we had an issue with advertisers was back when we were a local show, which was something like seven or eight years ago.
Yeah, I think it was like a wing hut in Sarasota, Florida, got threatened by somebody.
Yeah, they weren't even buying ads.
They were just bringing us some food once a week.
Not anybody bought ads back then.
Right, and so there were some upset religious zealots who complained about the show back then.
It wasn't a war issue, but now the issue is war, and it was our Veterans, well, post-Veterans Day, it was Saturday's show from this week.
So if anybody wants to hear it, they can go to freetalklive.com and click on the Saturday show at the top of there.
You probably should listen to the Friday show and then listen to the Saturday show, but of course, you'd have to have four hours to dedicate at that point.
Right, and the issue of Veterans came up on Saturday night, and we took a position basically saying that if a Veteran claims that they love the Constitution and they swore an oath to uphold it, yet they're engaging in illegal wars, undeclared wars, and the reason they're engaging in it is because, well, they're afraid of going to the brig.
That makes them a coward.
Right, they would have to believe that the Constitution was the highest law in the land and that it clearly and plainly stated that the Congress should declare a war before military action is taken.
So there were some qualifiers.
We weren't just calling every Veteran a coward.
Right, and that was the claim of the emailer who made the claim.
But it wouldn't have mattered anyway, even if we had.
Whatever we said would not have pleased this particular emailer, and he was just upset that we would dare impugn one single Veteran in any way, shape, or form.
And so he sent out, and I think he basically sat there and wrote down every single advertiser that he heard on the show that night because multiple advertisers were contacted, including the local stations advertiser, one of their advertisers at the station that we were on in Tennessee.
It's a network of four radio stations, mostly FM stations in Jackson, Tennessee.
And did you guys get a chance to say, like, hey, we didn't do it or whatever?
They just notified you you've lost us?
Four different stations dropped you?
Well, the station claimed that they had decided to get rid of Free Talk Live prior to this.
So their claim is that this was coincidental, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they just happened to drop us on the same day that we get emails from two different advertisers saying, hey, what's going on?
We're thinking about pulling our ad.
And it could very well be the case, what they claim.
They're in an unrated market, which means that Free Talk Live doesn't have the benefits of ratings in that market.
Generally, Free Talk Live kills in the ratings.
People may or may not agree with what we say.
However, they do listen to us say it.
And that is a real benefit for the show, is when we're on in rated markets, especially markets rated by the personal people meter, which doesn't require people to write down their favorite shows or whatever.
This is much more arbitrary.
What's the term arbitrary?
It's portable people meter.
It's not personal.
Okay, well, there you go.
They're not getting ratings.
They're just deciding what sounds good on their air.
Well, and, you know, wait a minute.
Have you guys had a chance to smooth this over with the advertisers who called you and explain to them what's going on or what?
In one case, one advertiser, one national advertiser, one of our advertisers contacted me and basically what's this about?
And I had a brief conversation and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, whatever.
And that was that.
They're OK.
Yeah.
The other advertiser, on the other hand, asked me to address it.
And, you know, rather than getting on the phone, because I responded in email, that's how he responded to me.
And I essentially just said that, you know, made our statement.
And he being a veteran didn't entirely like the statement that I made to him.
And so he wanted to investigate further.
He's still doing that.
So we may or may not lose that advertiser.
We're not going to change.
I mean, how could we change our opinion?
You know, my opinion is that if you're going to have a set of rules called the Constitution, you should follow them and that killing innocent people isn't OK.
The veteran that called in that was in question here, like the claim was that we called all veterans cowards.
Ian certainly did call this guy a coward.
You know, this guy said something to the effect of I said that 90 percent of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan have been have been a civilian.
Yes, civilians or noncombatants.
And he said, well, that's war at 90 percent.
As if World War One, it only had 10 percent somehow or another.
It's, you know, just you just dismiss 90 percent civilian and noncombatant casualties.
Because we're five countries that have no armies.
Everybody's a civilian.
Right.
Well, I mean, you know, I suppose you could make that.
I don't it's difficult to say, you know, who's a civilian, who's a noncombatant, who's what.
But that's a pretty high number.
Yeah, well, now and you guys don't even really cover foreign policy that much.
Right.
I mean, the format of the show is people call in, talk about whatever they want.
Most people don't care about foreign policy one way.
So it doesn't even really come up that much.
Am I right?
It's off and on.
I mean, it just depends on the mood of the callers or what's in the news.
Veterans Day, Fourth of July, Memorial Day.
Those are guaranteed.
We're going to, you know, we're going to trot out the...
We use those opportunities to talk about peace.
We're going to shake the dead, eviscerated bodies of civilians in front of the flag-worshipping public every single time.
And we've been doing it for years.
I'm actually surprised this hadn't happened yet.
I mean, that's probably the biggest single lesson from it.
We're on over 100 radio stations now, and we've been syndicated since 2004.
And we've been on stations as large as market number 12.
I'm shocked that this is the first time any program director or any advertiser has reached out to us and said, you guys are out of control or whatever.
And so we knew this day was going to come.
We had them contact us and say, well, look, we've had some complaints on your Veterans Day or Memorial Day or Fourth of July show, but I agree with you.
So, you know, there you go.
Or not that I agree with you, but it's great that they're listening.
Some program directors understand that, you know, someone calling to complain is an indicator that people are listening to the show.
But this particular program director didn't get that, and so, you know, he cut us off the air.
I don't know that it was his decision.
He claimed it came from higher up, right?
It was a group decision that they made.
But, you know, this is inevitable, and it's likely going to happen again into the future, because this is a warmongering country in which we live, and we're one of the few pro-peace radio shows that is on a national level out there.
Obviously, anti-war radio is one of the other few pro-peace shows, but, man, I bet you could probably count pro-peace radio programs that at least are on a national level on one hand.
I bet.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
And, you know, the thing is about us, like Andrew Bacevich was saying in this podcast he did for Tom Dispatch the other day, he's talking about his students at Boston University and how, to them, and they're international relations students, to them, war all the time is just how it is.
They've completely accepted the normalcy of it, just like, you know, more or less peacetime or cold war was normalcy to us when we were kids in the 80s or even the 90s was sort of pseudo peacetime under Bill Clinton.
To these kids, this is just how it is now.
So, you know, there's still a lot to challenge.
I'm going to challenge some of this when we get back, in fact.
More from Mark and Ian from Free Talk Live after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I've decided on smoking Paul Mals as my strategy to want to quit smoking, because they're horrible.
Sometimes it tastes like burning rubber or something, or you hear like something in the middle of the cigarette ignites, you know, or something.
It's horrible, so maybe that'll help me quit.
I'm trying.
All right.
The laughter there, that's Mark.
Mark and Ian, hosts of Free Talk Live here on the Liberty Radio Network, and we're talking about how they lost some radio stations, got in some troubles with some advertisers over talking smack on Veterans Day and the next day.
And I wanted to get to the point that you were making there about it being cowardly.
I think it was, Ian, you said your point that you made on the show there.
It's cowardly to go fight in a war that you know is illegal rather than go to the brig.
And, you know, that's thrown me for a loop for so long.
You think about how dangerous and scary it is to be in a war zone, people shooting at you, homemade landmines going off everywhere and whatever.
But in a sense, it really does seem you're right.
I remember thinking when I was a kid hearing stories about Vietnam and the draft and all the people who didn't want to go, who went anyway because they had to.
But what does that mean?
They had to or else go to jail.
You'd rather go kill people than sit in jail.
I don't understand that.
But yet it worked on millions of Americans when fought in Nam, you know.
Well, the guy that we were on the phone with wasn't just afraid of going to the brig.
He also mentioned that he was afraid of being dishonorably discharged.
Oh, my God, we can't have that.
Right.
And that's more likely what's going to happen from what our experience is.
We've we've asked people that have, you know, gotten out of the military in whatever way, how they did it.
People have gone AWOL.
People have just absolutely gone AWOL.
And what it was like for them.
And we don't we did not have a single one of them say that.
But I can't remember any of them saying that they were in jail for any long period of time if they were in at all.
I think they were in sort of disciplinary units at times, like picking up trash along the side of the road inside of a military base or something.
But that was only for a very short, like a week or two or something like that.
I mean, you're not talking about going to the brig for a year or whatever they might be threatening people with it.
You know, mostly it doesn't matter if you just say, look, I'm done.
I don't want to play soldier with you people anymore.
Yeah.
Well, and you look at the bravery, though.
I mean, it really does stand the flip side of that part about it.
It really is brave to stand up to these guys.
You look at Aaron Watata.
Boy, was the pressure on him probably worse than prison.
You know, people threatening his family and insulting him in every possible way.
And, you know, he was an officer.
I think he was the first.
I don't know if the only officer who refused to deploy to Iraq who said this is an illegal war and I'm responsible for my men and I will not lead men into battle where they will be committing war crimes.
I will not do it.
And they threaten him and they, you know, they had him sit in jail, waiting trial for quite a while and this kind of thing.
But eventually he won by standing on principle.
And, you know, and that really is what we were trying to say, is that these are brave men and women that stand up to the government and that that's a brave act.
And, you know, people don't want to hear that.
People want to hear that you're that you don't want to support the truth.
They want to say that every soldier's a hero.
And that's ridiculous.
Somebody who's putting potatoes on lunch trays, you know, I mean, maybe they're doing their job, but they're not a hero.
And we heroically slaughtered that family.
Yeah.
What about the guy that was convicted last week of killing Afghans for sport was sentenced to life in prison by a military court?
Is he a hero?
At what point does his heroism wear off?
That was a guilty guilty guilty.
He's the extreme example.
But there are, you know, the more everyday examples.
If 90 percent of the casualties in this war on terror have been noncombatants and civilians, then essentially, you know, you're talking about the guys flying the drones in the Air Force.
Shut up.
Those robots were over there fighting for our freedom.
Heroic.
Right.
And the people who are controlling joysticks are out in Nevada going home and doing their wives at the end of the at the end of their shift.
I mean, it's just, you know, there's not even any commitment to the killing.
Right.
And, you know, at this point, as we're saying about, you know, the normalcy of all this after so long at war, World War Two, the biggest, worst thing that ever happened, at least American intervention there was only four years.
The whole thing took six.
And now here we are on year 10 in Afghanistan and the killing doesn't even matter to the people at home really at all.
And I think that's probably a big part of the problem with your radio audiences.
They've never I mean, even during Vietnam, Dan Rather would show you the dead bodies on TV.
A friend of mine was commenting the other day he was watching Vietnam in HD.
And even though back then in the 60s, they would show and in the 70s, they would show the dead on TV.
It's completely sanitized for 2011.
And you'll always see the profile view of a soldier firing his rifle, but never what he's firing his rifle at.
Never, never.
Some guy with his guts in his hands screaming for his mother as he takes his last couple of breaths.
They never, ever show that.
And, you know, the wailing grandmothers over the site of what used to be their family's house, you know.
And so the whole thing, I mean, what's not heroic about it?
All I know is I've been told to idolize, you know, military volunteers my whole life.
And then they go overseas.
It's like they kind of went into another dimension or something like that.
Whatever happens over there doesn't really mean anything, you know.
And then they come home with PTSD and kill themselves or, you know, other people or harm other people.
And, you know, it's just it's just one of those sad costs of war that we need to, you know, sweep under the rug.
And you never you know, there's at least 150,000 people that have died, you know, over there trying to get a guess is what the claim is.
Or up to a million, depending on what numbers you read.
I don't even know.
I mean, that's a huge disparity in the amount of quoted numbers.
And, you know, the American public has no idea.
They think that these smart bombs, you know, they scoot around corners and they knock on doors and then they finally find they finally find Abdul, the terrorist, you know, lurking in a basement and then nobody else is hurt.
And it's just it's just inaccurate.
Yeah.
Well, and the Obama administration outright lies.
I mean, John Brenner, his counterterrorism adviser, former torture promoter, that was his job before was justifying torture.
Now he's Obama's counterterrorism adviser.
And he's twice claimed that no civilians have died in the drone strikes in Pakistan.
Well, anyway, his own government, his own agencies, his own soldiers release numbers that say otherwise.
Right.
I mean, you somehow the United States government is just people aren't even believing these wickedly things.
They've got their own symbols at the top of the pieces of paper and nobody cares.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Well, and welcome to my world.
Nobody cares.
I mean, you guys tackle libertarian issues from A to Z, up and up and down, top to bottom.
I'm here after years and years of this.
I, you know, I thought that, you know, maybe naively a little bit.
If you look at the way the Iraq war was the center of everyone's attention right before it started.
And for the first few months of it or whatever, seems to me something as important as, I don't know, a dozen or 14 wars around the world ought to be the center of people's attention.
But it's just not at all.
And you can see it all in the polls.
Oh, ever since, you know, we wasted five trillion dollars, eight trillion dollars killing people, the economy's busted.
And now the economy is the only issue that matters, not the wars.
Nobody cares at all.
I mean, they're anti-war.
If you ask them, are you for Afghanistan or against it?
You want to get out of there or not?
They say they're against the war.
They want to get out.
But if you put it on a list of number one to 10, do you care at all?
The answer would be no, not at all.
Who are they going to vote for?
Because I mean, is there are there any other candidates besides Ron Paul who are going to come out against the war?
Maybe Dennis Kucinich or something like that.
Huntsman says sort of moderate Republican type things about the wars.
You know, he's against Iran and Afghanistan and torture, at least according to the debate the other night.
And he's got point zero one percent or something.
The Republicans just don't want to hear that.
You know, they they I don't know if they ever read that Bible they carry around or not, but they seem to think that Jesus is this devil who goes around slaughtering people all the time.
And that's how we're supposed to act.
You know, that that Bible contains a lot about God saying that the bad guy has to get killed.
It may not be in the the New Testament version, but there's there's plenty of the stuff in the Old Testament and that's what they tend to fall back on.
You know, Scott, if I could real quick, I want to thank our listeners, the Free Talk Live listeners for supporting our show.
And it's because of our listeners is why we're on over one hundred radio stations.
They give us three bucks a month.
A lot of them do in our Free Talk Live program, which is really helpful for us.
I mean, if all of a sudden tomorrow we had a bunch of stations say, oh, my God, you guys are talking about peace.
We're done with you and cancel us.
We would still have some level of funding coming in directly from our listeners.
Thank goodness for the Internet, because your show and our show wouldn't be possible without our ability to connect directly to the people that appreciate us the most.
Take a look at one guy who couldn't do wrote one relatively small paragraph and couldn't spell his way out of a of a brown paper bag managed to do with his complaint.
You know, he he's got one advertiser potentially ready to bail and for four state radio stations.
I wonder if all that silence against you is sort of tacit agreement.
All those listeners who haven't complained and got you kicked off all this time, maybe we are making more progress than we know.
All right.
We're all out of time.
Thank you very much for your time, everybody.
Mark and Ian, Free Talk Live, LRN.
FM. Bye.
