What I Told the Montana State Senate

When the whole world had burnt to the ground and America had the only major industrial economy on the planet, that we were the dominant force, and we had to face down the communists who ruled all of Eastern Europe and most of Northern Asia there.
But how could they have settled on a policy for a permanent world order, where the entire planet is dominated by the middle part of North America, way out here in the New World?
Does that make any sense at all?
That the Americans would be the dominant force in Eurasia, not just now, but forever?
At some point we have to call this off.
It's clear that we can either have a republic with a limited government, with a sacred Bill of Rights for the ages, with a free market capitalist economy for prosperity for our kids and for their kids, or we can have a world empire and destroy ourselves.
We should have got this right 20 years ago.
The American people should have never let our government get us into this mess in the first place.
Now it's clearly time to call it off.
And this brings me to the important point about what you guys are doing with this resolution here.
It's my understanding that the House has already passed this resolution demanding that the U.S. Congress repeal the authorization to use force from 2001 that authorized this war on terrorism.
This is absolutely heroic, obviously just on its own terms.
But more than that, the perception that this kind of anti-war sentiment is coming from the state houses of the Union, from the western states, well it started in West Virginia, the great Pat McGeehan with his Defend the Guard Act, which is spreading all around.
But the fact that this is coming from state houses, and especially in a bipartisan fashion, in many cases these bills are sponsored originally by republicans, introduced by republicans, and pushed by republicans.
It's so important to sending the message that this is not some Hollywood liberal elite they don't mind war, we know that.
This is the people of the country are sick and tired of this.
We know better now.
We don't believe in it anymore.
And so, you know, the national government, they don't care what we think about anything.
They've done studies like this, where if you have a pressure group with millions of dollars, they'll listen to you.
If you're the American people, they just don't care what we think.
They just don't.
There's one big exception to that.
And that is, in matters of war and peace, they have to at least have the American right.
They have to know that talk radio is with us.
And if they don't have that, they can't have a war.
And if the consensus on the American right is the one enunciated perfectly, you might say it's the greatest thing he ever did, enunciated perfectly by Donald Trump repeatedly.
He said, we divorce ourselves from George W. Bush's legacy.
And he had to do it for political reasons to defeat Jeb.
But also, he was right, and everybody agreed with him.
And being Donald Trump, of course, he said it in the starkest terms.
Going to the Middle East was the worst decision any president ever made.
It was the biggest grub.
We never should have been over there, broadly speaking, at all.
And the American right agreed that it was time to quit pretending.
It's why John McCain lost, it's why Mitt Romney lost, because they refused to say that.
Donald Trump told the truth.
And now look, 1967 and hippies and tie-dye and the summer of love was a long, long time ago.
More than 50 years ago now, long before I was born.
That doesn't have anything to do with the modern anti-war movement.
The modern anti-war movement is led mostly by conserved veterans of America.
We're in our troops home.
The young Americans for Liberty, Ron Paul Republicans, and Donald Trump Republicans, who know better than to go along with the Bush-Clinton consensus anymore.
After all, Barack Obama was just Hillary Clinton, right?
So, that's why this is so important, and I hope that you guys also will consider this to defend the Guard legislation that is being introduced in something like 30 state houses this year.
And this is legislation that says that the national government is forbidden from nationalizing and using the Guard troops unless Congress issues an official declaration of war, like in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11.
The joke is, of course, that they're never going to do that.
Because Congress would never take responsibility for starting a war.
They only authorize it and blame the President for anything negative that happens after that.
And so, I mean, you guys are responsible for the Guard in your state.
Isn't it your understanding that the purpose of the Guard is to protect the people of this state in the event of a major flood, in the event of a wildfire?
God forbid, if the worst riot gets out of control, maybe a local police department could use support in a supporting background role.
We don't even go further than that, because we know no one is ever going to invade the United States of America, ever, ever, ever, right?
If we want to pretend to be safe, our Guard is here to protect us from when the Soviet Union invades, like in Red Dawn, when the Soviet Union hasn't existed in 30 years, and there's no power on earth that could ever threaten us.
But our Guard is supposed to be here to protect the people of this country.
And this was what finally broke the spirit of support and trust in the administration of George W. Bush, finally, in the summer of 2005, when New Orleans was drowning.
More than 1,000 people drowned and died.
And where was the Louisiana Guard?
In Iraq, fighting against an al-Qaeda in Iraq group, Sunni insurgents that had never existed, until we evaded.
And where was the Mississippi Guard?
And the Alabama Guard?
And the Texas Guard?
They were all in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They had relied on the U.S. Army and Air Force, who didn't get there for seven days.
Thank you very much for that.
And that was what finally broke the spirit of support.
You know what?
Maybe George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are not the world's most competent managers after all, after their major project in Iraq had already gone completely into the toilet.
That was what finally did it.
And so, you see how important it is.
How does Jake Tapper on CNN deny that the state legislature of Montana are as patriotic men and women as you could find in this country?
How could he deny that when they demand the troops come home and the authorization for war is ended, that they do that because they care about their troops, they care about their sons, they care about their state, they care about their country.
He couldn't deny it.
So, our goal then is to make sure he can't ignore it.
And so, that's why the state senate, I urge you to please pass this and make that statement and let it be heard in Washington, D.C.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
We will have some time for some Q&A if you're okay with that, Scott.
I also want to introduce a gentleman who drove all the way over from Billings, Chris Engid.
He is with Concerned Veterans for America.
Go ahead and stand up, Chris.
He is my, as I like to say, he's my beer inspiration.
But he's a good guy.
He's working across the state, especially in kind of eastern Montana, Billings area, trying to work to bring veterans and people of all stripes together to kind of work on these issues.
And so, I'd love for you to connect with him if you have some time.
Otherwise, we can just take some questions.
And, Scott, if you want to give your best crack at it, we can just kind of go from there.
All right.
Thank you again, everybody, for listening.
I appreciate it.
Sir.
So, when we do those resolutions, we call it a letter to the Pentagon.
Uh-huh.
Where do we go from there?
Do it again and do a bigger and better one.
Add the Defend the Guard legislation to the same resolution or concurrent resolution at the same time.
This is one that's really gotten an effect.
We know that in numerous states, we've had generals from the Pentagon come and testify head-to-head against the heroes from Bring Our Troops Home.
U.S., Dan McKnight is their leader, Idaho National Guard, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
And he's going toe-to-toe with generals.
And they come and say, you're just enlisted.
You don't know.
And he does know.
And that's what's great is he can take them on.
And they threaten to withhold funding, right?
If you have a base in your state, we'll close that down.
How would you like that?
Your National Guard gets so much support from the Pentagon every year, we'll restrict that.
And so it makes sense that legislatures give in then.
But we're going to have 30 states this year introduce Defend the Guard legislation.
So that means there's at least one three-star general who's going to have this as a full-time job this year, going around trying to talk the states out of doing this.
And that's causing problems for them in a way that is like the perfect American civil disobedience, right?
The states.
It's nullification and interposition, as Thomas Jefferson and Adam James Madison would have had it.
You know, refusing, telling the national government, we refuse to let you have our troops.
And eventually what's going to happen is there's going to be a state, whether it's Montana or another one, that tells the feds, go ahead, close your base.
And we'll turn that into productive land.
How do you like that?
We don't want your welfare check anyway.
We can turn that land into profit-making land by putting business there instead.
And we'll be just fine without you.
Thank you very much.
Because they don't have the constitutional authority.
Or I guess, let's see, let's let them fight about it in the courts.
Let them fight about it in the Congress.
The most important thing is breaking the consensus, right?
This is, again, the most important thing about Donald Trump saying, ah, we don't believe in that stuff anymore.
Because, wow, all of a sudden we don't.
It's just earth-shattering kind of, you know, as they say, the page-turning or the shift in the wind.
That, boy, it's the conservative Republican right in the state houses of America who are sick and tired of this and are really bucking and really fighting back now.
That narrative more than anything else is the kind of thing that would then play into, you know, adding pressure on the federal delegations and so forth.
Right now, we're deciding in essentially five weeks from now, are we leaving Afghanistan or not?
And everyone in New York and D.C. says we have to stay.
And so then the question is, what about the rest of the country?
And are we going to make ourselves heard that, no, we really are sick and tired of this?
And, you know, the presumption is that liberals essentially are anti-war since the Vietnam era.
Now, if Barack Obama is the one doing the bombing or Joe Biden is the one doing the bombing, they tend not to mind as much.
But generally, the popular understanding is that it's the right in America that really supports foreign interventionism.
But if that's not true anymore and nobody can really pretend that it is, Mitt Romney can pretend but nobody believes him when he says it, then that's what will really make the change.
That's when they'll know that they really have to come home because they don't have the support of the people to, you know, make matters that much worse.
When they started this war, they had the support of the people.
And, you know, Barack Obama was able to keep that going a bit.
Donald Trump only was able to keep the worst going by denouncing them the whole time.
Otherwise, he would have had to actually bring them home.
But so now, and look, Joe Biden is the worst, but that's great.
It just makes him the perfect foil for especially for the next four years or God forbid even eight for it to be the conservative rights term in America to lead the anti-war movement and to show that we don't believe in this stuff anymore.
And so I understand what you're saying about the resolution, the letter to Santa kind of thing.
But the reality is I think enough of those in enough places and it starts to really count and becomes impossible to ignore.
That's my hope.
Yes, ma'am.
You had referenced Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution that Congress has the power to declare war and to raise and support armies but no appropriation of money that you shall be for a longer period of two years.
That's what our Constitution says.
My understanding is that the last time that actually happened was World War II.
Is that?
Oh, on the two-year appropriation?
To actually, for Congress to actually declare war.
Oh, to declare war.
Yes, ma'am.
The last war that they declared was against Hungary in 1942.
It was the last state that they declared war on.
And you could argue that we've been at war, in a state of war ever since then.
That never really ended.
America's war on the world.
Follow-up?
Sure.
We're processed people and I don't have any clarity on how it is we got here.
How did we get from what the Constitution says to where we are now where we have continuous and endless wars that Congress didn't declare?
Frankly, as with just about every question along those lines, the answer is that it's all Woodrow Wilson's fault.
He got America in the World War I and therefore is the father of Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and Mao and, for that matter, then the American world empire that was waged to contain world communism after their victory in World War II.
That's how the state militias were transformed into the National Guard and auxiliaries of the U.S. Army.
I think it was Franklin Roosevelt who really pushed that change through in preparation for World War II.
But World War II, of course, never would have happened if Wilson had stayed out of Europe and let World War I come to an end as a stalemate.
Instead, he gave the Allies total victory and they exploited it to the ends of the earth and ruined everything for everyone.
Created communism and Nazism as well.
So, and then, as I was saying, and the American empire to contain communism after that, which then, you know, there's what were called the Paleo-Conservatives at the end of the Cold War.
Pat Buchanan and Jude Winniski and Scott McConnell and a lot of these leaders said, Okay, the Soviet Union is gone, let's come home.
Let's abolish NATO.
Ron Paul, of course, among them.
Let's abolish NATO.
Let's bring the troops home from Europe.
Let's bring the troops home from Asia.
South Korea, Japan, Germany, these are all prosperous nations.
They can defend themselves.
And now, as Jean Kirkpatrick, who had been Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations said, Now we can be a normal country in a normal time.
Now the great Soviet emergency is over.
We can take care of ourselves and be a humble republic and lead the world by example.
But then others disagreed and said, No, now that the Soviet Union is out of our way, we're just going to expand the empire that we built in the name of stopping them.
And now we've pushed it all the way right up to their borders and, you know, really have continued the Cold War for no good reason, again, except for the special interests the shipbuilders and the long-range bomber manufacturers and, for that matter, the generals and the admirals in the Pentagon who earned their stripes in their promotions and their cushy positions on boardrooms in their retirement.
Is this addressed in your book?
It's all in there, ma'am, I'm afraid.
Thank you.
Yes, absolutely.
Is it back?
Maybe just expound on that, that after World War II, ending it the way it did, actually, I thought you said it actually caused communism.
Oh, well, World War I, sure.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry.
I should have just snapped that off real quick.
So basically the story is this.
There's a wonderful book called Wilson's War by Jim Powell from the Cato Institute.
And essentially the story is that by the time America got into World War I, it was over.
And the Russian army, the German army, the French and British were all essentially starving and freezing and had no shoes and had no rifles, and it was just essentially over.
And Wilson said he was invading and beginning American participation in the war in order to have peace without victory.
But that was what we already had.
It was peace without victory, stalemate, and essentially just deserting armies.
The thing was essentially over.
Then Wilson comes in, and the first thing he does is he spends millions of dollars and sends supplies of trucks and rifles and boots to the Russians.
Now, the original Russian Revolution was in March of 1917, and the government was run by a guy named Kerensky, who was compromising between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks and these different things.
Well, it wasn't until October that on their fourth try, Lenin and Trotsky were able to do their coup d'etat and seize power and create Soviet communism.
But that would have never happened if Kerensky had gotten out of the war because that was what, you know, people resented about the czar, but his overthrow in the first place, and that was what people resented about Kerensky, was that he kept them in the war.
And not only that, his soldiers weren't nearby to protect him.
They were all out on the front.
And so Lenin and Trotsky were able to overthrow the government and create the Soviet Union.
And this much I learned in social studies in junior high school, and this is the consensus of all historians in America and Britain and everywhere, that the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany by Britain and France, only, again, because of America's help in their total victory over Germany, led to the absolute humiliation of the German people.
And the British kept a blockade that starved millions of them after the war was over and committed massive war crimes against them and stripped them of all their outer territories.
So I learned in school that there was some massive hyperinflation because the German government printed so much money and destroyed the economy, and that kind of helped lead to the rise of Nazism.
But it wasn't just that.
It was that they had stripped Germany of all their outer territories, given them to France and Italy and Poland and all of these things.
So Hitler and his Nazis rose to power on essentially one major issue, the wave of resentment against the British and the Americans and the Russians for the war, which they blamed all on the Jews, of course.
And Hitler began every speech denouncing the traitors of 1918 who had signed the Treaty of Versailles.
Oh, and get this.
Only Woodrow Wilson could be this stupid, right?
Sorry.
I forget where I am sometimes.
Wilson refused to accept the surrender of the German militarists.
He said, like Dick Cheney, we don't talk to evil.
So only they allowed the anti-war German Democrats were the ones who had to sign the treaty.
So then they got the blame for signing the treaty, instead of the militarists taking the blame for losing the war.
And so then the militarists got to say, it wasn't our fault, we were stabbed in the back by the liberal Democrats.
It was all Woodrow Wilson's fault for setting them up that way.
And so then you have the rise of communism in Russia and the rise of Nazism in Germany and the ultimate clash in the creation of World War II.
And then, if it hadn't been for that, there was no reason for America to ever embark on this mission of protecting the world from itself.
It was the emergency of Soviet communism that made it necessary, they said.
And at the time, of course, it was Truman, the Democrat, who initiated this policy over the objection of the Midwestern conservatives, like good old Warren Buffett's father, Howard Buffett, who was one of the anti-war guys.
And then they called him Mr. Republican, Robert Taft, who was, I think, the grandson of William Howard Taft, who was the great anti-war Republican and was against the establishment of NATO in Europe and the rest of that.
And they lost.
It was essentially the Hillary Clintonites of the 1940s and 50s were the ones who created the world empire.
And it's all Woodrow Wilson's fault.
And the book, again, is by Jim Powell, Wilson's whore.
And it is fantastic.
It really is.
Any other questions?
And again, I have a box of books about the war on terrorism for any of you who'd like to take a look at it.
And thank you.
All right, I think that'll conclude our lunch today.
If you want to hang out and chat with Scott or Chris.