April 1, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:35
1882 Empire of Corruption - A Conversation with Karen Kwiatkowski
Karen U. Kwiatkowski is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the National Security Agency. Since retiring, she has become a noted critic of the U.S. government's involvement in Iraq. Kwiatkowski is primarily known for her insider essays which denounce a corrupting political influence on the course of military intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/karen
I've been, of course, browsing your articles on Lew Rockwell, and I think that they're ferociously wonderful.
I really appreciate the writing skill that you bring to bear.
You have quite a way. You wield the words like a sword-wielding flaming samurai, and that is something I really, really appreciate.
Just before we get to the sort of main topics, though, I'm always fascinated by how people come about this benevolent brain virus called libertarianism, or, you know, I don't want to put your thoughts in a box, but where this arose from you, because based on my cursory view of your background, it wouldn't seem to be the obvious development for you.
So what do you think brought you into this realm?
Well, both my parents were Goldwater Republicans.
That's what they were.
And so when I was a kid, like, you know, 14 or 13, that kind of age, you know, when I was 14, Nixon stepped down.
And they defended Nixon.
They liked Nixon. But then after that, they really complained a lot about government.
So I got to hear a lot of, like, government does too much and, you know, anti-socialism.
So, and I agreed with it. I didn't really disagree with it.
They loved Reagan. And by that time, I was already in the military.
Me and my two brothers both went into the military.
That was something that was kind of a family thing to do.
It was always talked of.
And I remember, you know, Cold War.
So it was like this clear, you know, the words weren't as corrupted, I think.
I mean, they were. But it seemed like we were fighting for freedom against communists.
That was an easy sell, I think, to someone like myself who really didn't study history at that time.
So in the first 10 years of my military service, that was the last 10 years of the Cold War.
So it seemed to make sense.
Of course, we predicted, and the people in the military predicted, it's not going to end, and if it does, it'll end in a war.
And of course, how it ended was in a collapse of the state.
Which made sense economically, and I was starting to get interested in those things.
So I thought, well, you know, this actually could work.
And, you know, Reagan, for all of his growth of government, his monstrosities, his words, he predicted in some ways that it would kind of collapse.
It was unsustainable. To use that word that has a couple of different meanings.
Sustainability. But anyway, so my expectations, again, naive.
This was halfway through my military service.
And meanwhile, I was married, had four kids, so I'm kind of dependent on my job.
I'm having fun, kind of.
I'm halfway through my 20-year career, and I'm expecting, as the Soviet Union collapsed, that NATO... Sure.
Sure. Sure. I really...
Well, you know what it is, is when you expect something and then the opposite happens or something different happens, that's when you go back and you say, well, what is with my assumptions here?
Because I got that wrong.
And so, you know, I'm kind of...
You know, questioning at that point what really we Americans on American foreign policy and the so-called free world policy was.
And meanwhile, I'm continuing my education, so I am getting to read a little more history.
A little shortly time after that, maybe early 90s, I discovered, mid-90s, I guess I discovered Lou Rockwell.
So then my education really got started.
And meanwhile, I'm also working in...
Or had just come out of working in acquisitions, military acquisitions, Air Force acquisitions.
And we were buying stuff to fight the Cold War with, but this was like several, you know, years after the Cold War ended.
And we were spending, I mean, the, I mean...
Well, you know, you never know.
It could just have been a massive ruse on the part of the Russians.
They could have just pretended to collapse and give up Eastern Europe.
You know, it's a big trap.
You know, it's important to be prepared for those kinds of issues.
That's right. Well, actually, it sounds funny when you say it, but I'm sure a lot of military people believe that.
But they spent the obscene amount of money, the obscene amount of waste, the racket, the absolute racket that exists with the major companies selling goods and services both to the military.
And this was before... Really before we outsourced even more things.
I mean, nowadays we outsource, you know, we've got Halliburton serving up the, you know, the ice cream and everything.
And so their hands are in every bit of this.
And the waste that's built in, that's contracted in, it's by design, the nature of the lack of competitiveness.
I mean, it's appalling from just a...
Right. Right.
Right. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's only waste if you think there should be savings, and the people who are cashing in on that stuff never think there should be savings.
No, this is very profitable, it's very rewarding, and very not hard work.
I mean, this is easy work.
I mean, seriously, these people are not...
I was not working hard.
I was working long hours, but I was not working hard.
I was producing nothing. I saw no one around me producing anything.
Even the contractor guys.
It was kind of eye-opening there.
Then I worked... Well, I went back to my assignment in Europe, and I got to see how NATO kind of did very much the similar things.
And by this time, Clinton was doing his thing in the Balkans, so there was a so-called pseudo-war operation.
And again, the world's first humanitarian war, so they sold it.
And again, the hypocrisy, the lies, the money-making, the racket, it was becoming more and more clear to me.
Then I worked at NSA. I got a little taste of how we backdoor everything and all of the commercial IT equipment in major companies.
How we work secretly, which seems to be...
It's like the state was integrated with business, which is not how my Goldwater Republican upbringing led me to expect.
I certainly knew it wasn't right, but I didn't think we had that.
I thought that was something we would guard against, not something that we would...
You know, realize and act as normal.
So there was that.
So that kind of prepared me.
Meanwhile, reading Lou Rockwell, finally, and it seems like, God, I must be really stupid to have taken this long to figure it out.
But again, I have to tell you, I thought about getting out numerous times.
And it was, in many ways, an economic and family decision.
Not to do it because I was the breadwinner.
And so if I just decided to, you know, quit and do something different, it wasn't just me.
So I have those same pressures that everybody has when they have to make a decision like that.
Well, and four kids is not a small nest to be feeding rooms into.
Yeah, it's true. It's true.
Now, you know, when they're little, I think you can get away with it, too.
They're easy to... They never know if they're poor or not.
But once they get to be about 10 or 11, you know, then it becomes something where they have an opinion about it, you know, and they like how things are.
Anyway, not that we were rich, but seriously, I will say this, and anybody listening must know it anyway.
In fact, the polls tell us this.
The government people are well paid, extremely well paid.
And if you actually look at their productivity, they're obscenely well paid, because they don't really do anything.
Well, and combine that with the soft benefits like lower job losses and all of the benefits.
And very difficult to be fired.
I mean, it's job security, not just in terms of all the niceties, the insurances and everything, but you have to pretty much commit a violent crime.
And be caught. And it be in the media.
And do it against somebody that the state likes.
You know, we commit lots of violent crimes, but they cheer those on.
So anyway, yeah, there's a lot of...
Superficial benefits. So I'm still doing that.
And sorry if you don't mind me interrupting, just as sort of a relatively new dad.
I mean, how did your kids handle them?
Because moving around is the big challenge for kids in the military.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah. I had them pretty close succession.
So the last couple of moves, and my retirement move, was probably the worst one for them.
Because, well, the best and the worst.
The best because it exposed them to a better life.
But... But they were of the age where I think one had to change high school.
He's doing fine now, but when he got four, some of them are not going to do as well as others.
Everybody's a little bit different, but they're all doing fine.
But yes, there were complaints.
There were complaints, and you have to deal with that.
The military, I'm diverging a little bit here, but they sell themselves and they sell They're supporters and potential recruits, you know, on this idea that, you know, there's this great military community.
And they do provide, well, an insular kind of lifestyle, especially overseas.
And that we also, my husband and I also found that to be corrupting.
And so we did when we were overseas the last time.
Sorry, corrupting how? Well, yeah, I mean, it's...
They're, you know, state clones.
I mean, the mindset is that what they're doing, like, I was in Spain and I was in Italy on permanent assignments.
And, you know, we're over there.
There's no Cold War.
There's bombs and people getting murdered from all different angles in the Balkans, which we're, you know, that's in the news constantly.
And the military...
Families and the military members not only don't question it, they cheer it.
This is freedom.
They don't have any idea why they're there, but they're told it's freedom, and they do.
Anyway, it's kind of frustrating.
We live here. We lived off base in Italy with Italian neighbors, and that was just a wonderful thing.
Not that the Italians aren't statists, but the way they live their lives is interesting and kind of independent in many ways from the state, and they laugh a lot at their state.
Yeah, I think that's the one thing that the sort of non-imperialistic countries have a pretty cynical relationship with their state.
I mean, I remember traveling through South America and the governments were all, the minions were always referred to as el bandidos.
You know, like everybody kind of got what the story was.
And that's because you need less propaganda if you don't have an empire, right?
Yeah, well, I never thought of that.
That's perfectly true.
And, you know, you can't say anything in this country against this state, and you're labeled.
I mean, it makes people nervous.
The state, you know, the level of fear to criticize the Democrats.
They'll blame the Democrats, or they say we're spending too much.
But seriously, that's mild criticism.
I mean, you know, we don't...
Criticize the whole context of what this modern state has become in the last 70 or 80 years in this country.
We don't seriously question that.
If you do seriously question that, people will just say, well, moves and wheels.
And they don't want to talk about it.
They don't want to think about it because it really would turn their whole perception, their whole framework, completely upside down.
Well, there was something, I think, on one of the polls just today that I saw, or an article I saw just today, and they were talking about the number of people that work for government outnumbers the total Number of people that work in industry, combined with farming, combined with five other areas, we have more people working for government than they do combined in all these other productive ways.
And it used to be, I think, as recently as a decade or two ago, it used to be quite the opposite, right?
You'd have twice the people working in manufacturing, they're working in government, now it's the other way around.
And that's an inevitable, I mean, it's a cancerous growth.
I mean, the economics are inevitable.
It is. That's right. It's predictable and it makes sense from the way the state operates.
It makes perfect sense. But it is unsustainable.
We can use that environmental word, use that new world order word, unsustainable, and apply it to the state because I think we're going to definitely, you and I definitely are going to see it in our lifetimes for sure.
Yeah, I had Doug Casey on the show the other week and he said it was within the next year.
That was his perspective.
So yeah, I think it's probably going to be sooner.
But of course, we don't have the facts.
We can't lift the lid and see what's going on behind the curtain because we don't have the facts about how much money the Fed is really printing or what the deficit really is.
I mean, it's all smoke and mirrors for the outsiders, the people on the inside.
I think that the escalation of status programs, particularly war, has something to do with grabbing as much treasure before the door comes down as possible.
I agree with you. I think we can't lift the lid, but if we can look for clues, the clues are how, in a wide variety of ways that profit-taking can be made, taken by the folks pulling the strings, by the folks that are benefiting from these states, and not just ours, but all of the European states, the global states.
I mean, we have global statism.
I mean, seriously, you can hardly find any mindsets other than that that are associated with the whole country.
I mean, even Switzerland, I don't...
You know, they're sucked in or part and parcel.
So, you know, looking at how profit-taking is being accelerated, how they're setting themselves up for whatever it is that comes next, is a sign that if they know, if they're acting on that, then that's how soon, how day...
Yeah, I mean, if the company is about to go bankrupt, a lot of stuff goes missing all at once, and I think that is...
When you're in business, if it's going to outlast your lifetime, then you're going to be very conservative with your predations.
But if the repossessors are pulling up at the door, a lot of stuff goes in your pockets.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right. And, you know, they are banditos, you know, and they are criminals.
And so they behave with, you know, that sense of, hey, it's all about me.
You know, this idea that, I mean, I don't believe in altruism, but this idea that the state is caring for others.
I mean, my God, it doesn't.
You know, its actions are totally enriching its...
The folks that are running it.
And anyway, I mean, I'm surprised the Democrats don't see this or the Obama supporters don't see this with Obama's very Bush-like, you know, recent act in Libya.
You know, I mean... Well, it's worse than Bush.
I mean, if there's worse than like 99% evil, 99.1% evil.
I mean, it's worse than Bush in terms of there seems to be...
I mean, I had Dr.
Elon from the Independent Institute on a couple of days ago, and he was talking about how Obama had followed the letter of the law, but I've certainly heard other arguments that a unilateral declaration...
I mean, it is war.
I mean, they're bombing their...
Oh, yeah. They're killing a bunch of people.
Yeah, killing, bombing, you know, and the fact that he didn't even remotely seek congressional...
At least Bush got a, you know, declaration of congressional intent or authorization.
I mean, this, you know, bomb-hurling lunatic in the White House at the moment hasn't even gone that far.
That's right. And my suspicion is, because I don't think much of Obama at all in terms of his, any of his capabilities, that, you know, that he basically was instructed that this is what needs it to happen.
I mean, you know, he was advised.
So, you know, get the money while you can, whoever it is that needs it.
I mean, this is, you know, get the oil if they can, you know, move money around.
I mean, it's funny to see how the Federal Reserve papers indicated, you know, money was given to the Central Bank of Libya.
I don't know.
It's just.
No, I didn't.
I didn't know about that.
What's the word about this?
Well, it's a small part, but I guess the 26,000 pages of records that the Federal Reserve released as a result of, I think it was MSNBC's suit, or I forget, one of the news agencies' business channels filed suit against the Fed to reveal who received all the money that they were pumping out when they did the bailouts of the big banks.
And so the Fed wouldn't give it to them, but finally they lost their suit.
And so they did publish, I guess, 26,000, 20,000 pages of papers.
And people have gone through those just in the past several days, I guess.
And a lot of European banks that nobody's ever heard of received a lot of this money.
And the National Bank of Libya got money.
And of course...
I don't know. It's just crazy.
Well, let me finish the whole thing.
Yeah, let's get back to your evolution.
I think that's a fascinating story.
Well, I don't know how fascinating it is, but most people really only...
I know me as a person who complained, I guess, somewhat publicly, although ineffectively, I think, about the invasion of Iraq, 2003, because at that time, in the year before that, I'd been assigned into the Office of Secretary of Defense near East South Asia.
I didn't volunteer to go there, but I was moved over there when you're, you know, just move people around.
So they moved me over there, told me to do North Africa desk, which was fine.
I had some background in that.
I got our office over the summer of 2002 hosted a new office that came in made up mostly of appointed people, neoconservatives down to the person, of course, of the appointed ones.
And these guys, nobody knew what they were really doing, but they were hot bunking it with us.
So we were crammed in together. So we're in close proximity, sharing desks and things like that.
And by the end of the summer, they did find new spaces for this office.
And then we had a meeting where they said this was the Office of Special Plans, also known as the Expanded Iraq Desk.
But they also had the Iran guy.
The Iran folks that were working Iran were up there, too.
So anyway, and they told us at that meeting in August of 2002 that this office would put out talking points based on the intelligence that we were consumers of, produced by...
CIA, DIA, you know, other agencies.
And the talking points would be the only thing that we would use in any documents that we did.
We would no longer need to console the intelligence from any of the sources that we have of intelligence of analyzed work or anything.
We would simply just call when we needed to write a paper.
We would call up to OSP. And if we had anything to say about Iraq, WMD or terrorism, pretty broad areas of your work in Middle East, You would get your words verbatim from this Office of Special Plans and they would email them down on the classified system and you were not, it was specifically instructed to us that we are not to edit, we are not to Change, modify, delete.
If they send us two pages, we have to use all two pages in our document.
If they send us three pages, basically in its entirety, as written.
And in those talking points were things that were contradicted by the intelligence that we had been previously using.
Of course, that intelligence didn't change.
This was pure propaganda. But we were told to use it.
So I think there was a sense of betrayal, insult, and of course, the crime ongoing, which was that that war had already been more planned out in the spring of 2002.
And the summer 2002 and the fall of 2002 and winter was the propaganda campaign, which we then in the military and the civil service that were up there doing similar jobs We are supposed to be apolitical, but in fact, we were part and parcel to helping propagandize this war that had already been decided that was already going to happen.
So what the question was, you know, well, how do we sell it to the American people?
And they tried a couple of things, you know, they tried the...
9-11 thing, and of course, that didn't pan out because there was no evidence, and at some point, that was not a strong argument.
Although, there are people to this day, as you know...
A lot of people, yeah. Because George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney repeatedly said that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11.
There are people that believe that, and they didn't hear any subsequent retractions which were made by those same people, although I don't know if Cheney ever retracted it, but I know George Bush did.
So anyway, we had that. And then he was supposed to be working with Osama bin Laden.
Of course, the intelligence said if he had caught Osama bin Laden, he would have put him out of his misery.
Being a dictator, socialist dictator, secular leader, he was actually...
Osama had two guys that he published his hatred of, his agenda against.
And one was, of course, us, because we kept interfering with doing whatever we were doing in the Middle East for so many years.
And very corrupting and stealing, you know, kind of terrible influence that we did.
He was upset about that.
And the other thing was the worse traitors than maybe us, because he could understand non-Muslims doing it.
But he couldn't understand how a Muslim like Saddam Hussein, brought up in the right way, so to speak, would reject that and become a secular socialist and run a secular state and use the oil, potential oil wealth of Iraq to do something in Osama bin Laden's, you know, Wahhabist eyes, as being very un-Muslim and not good for, you know, not very pure.
Anyway, that whole Osama bin Laden was working with, or Saddam Hussein was working with Osama bin Laden, you know, this thing didn't sell.
So those are the things they tried.
And then, of course, WMD, we had some evidence of WMD, because, of course, we had the receipts.
So we knew that when he was our ally, you know, we had sent anthrax, we had sent some other biotoxins, different things.
And, of course, we...
We had, you know, the UN was in there and decommissioning most of that, whatever, if it hadn't already expired or gone bad, you know, so the accounting of that had been done in the 90s.
Meanwhile, we're bombing the living heck out of Saddam Hussein.
So we had pretty much good information about Saddam Hussein's real capabilities, but the American people It was an easy sell to them to say, well, WMD. And of course, if you were watching the news, anybody around the world, I'm sure, you know, Condoleezza Rice is talking about, I think, what St.
Louis was going to get a dirty bomb or some sort of poison gas directly from a, I don't know, UAV from Iraq or something.
You know, she had these big visions.
And, you know, Americans are not, if they go to public school, You know, they don't learn to think critically and they're not well educated scientifically or mathematically.
So I think it's by design.
We don't want them to think and we don't want them to add.
So, you know, this was an easy sell.
People would believe.
Well, yeah, and of course, if they don't know history, they don't remember the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, which is the main reason why only proxy wars were fought between America and Russia.
And of course, if Saddam Hussein had tried to do anything even remotely like that, I mean, they would have just turned Baghdad into concrete and glass.
That's right. And so, I mean, he would have no reason whatsoever to attempt to murder a bunch of Americans because he knows exactly what would happen next, and that's exactly what kept all the Russians' fingers off the buttons as well.
Yeah, it's true. So what it seemed like is that we wanted a war, and it seemed like this to me at the time, and even though it seems crazy now because everybody kind of knows what happened as far as the propaganda, but it was very upsetting and I have to tell you, I didn't even know what neoconservatism was as a political philosophy.
It's not something that I knew anything about.
But I found out and I learned and read.
And of course, there were people, not just Lou Rockwell, not just the anti-war crowd, but there were lots of critics.
in the media, not well-known and certainly not the editors of the main newspapers or, you know, the controllers of the television.
But, you know, the right questions were being asked, but the whole confluence of, you know, corporate America, the defense establishment in the media, all pushing, all kind of reiterating, you know, reinforcing this truly false story leading reinforcing this truly false story leading to a truly tragic, well, from a humanitarian and from a constitutional point of view, you know, a tragic end, which was this, you know, invasion of Iraq for basically no good reason.
because some guys in Washington and elsewhere thought it was a good idea.
And why? Well, We have the same reason for liberty.
We have oil. We have Israel, who was certainly beating the drum to have us do what they themselves would like to do for totally different reasons, I think.
And there was, of course, the fear that he was going to go off the dollar and onto the euro for his oil transactions.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's a book, I know a guy who wrote a book, it's called something about the petrodollar.
And it really, he really goes into a lot of detail on some of this.
And of course, you know, it's interesting, even though it has been a while since we invaded Iraq, and Saddam's been dead for many years, when he threatened and when he actually did, for European purposes, go off of the dollar for the sale of his oil, You can't stop that.
That's happening now. They're looking for alternative currencies.
If you're going to print money that's worthless and you're going to have debt that's unpayable and never will be, it's clear that this country is going to walk on its debt, inflate its way out, or repudiate it, or all three.
People don't want the dollar.
I don't care how many wars this country goes to.
They're not going to stop that. Well, I mean, the more wars, the more money printing, the less people are going to want the dollar, right?
So I think it's not about saving the dollar.
It's about extracting as much value from the general population as possible.
Yeah, yeah. And I just wanted to mention something before we continue.
It just sort of struck me that 9-11 and the associated foreign policy disasters, what an incredible opportunity that was for America to look inward and to genuinely attempt to answer the question, why did this happen?
Yeah. With some intelligent and probing analysis.
It's almost like the rush to war was almost like an avoidance of looking at root causes in terms of foreign policy and wars and toppling the Iranian government in the 50s and support of Israel and support of Saudi Arabia and all of the other horrendous policies that have been going on for many, many years. And not just, of course, from the US, but, I mean, France and And England in particular and other countries had a hand in it.
I mean, this European continual crusading colonization of the Middle East since oil was found to be valuable.
What an incredible opportunity.
I think the rush to war was, let's not stop and look at why this happened.
Let's just go act and do something violent so that we don't have to, you know, like, like, There's this old story about the guy whose wife leaves him so he goes out and gets into a bar fight because he doesn't want to figure out why his wife has left him.
He just wants to go and do something violent so he never has to look inward.
It sort of struck me that it's a little bit like that.
But my newest resolution is to try not to tangent myself into the grave.
So let's make sure that we keep going with your story, which is completely fascinating and much more interesting than anything I can toss in right now.
Yeah. No, I mean, I agree.
But I also suspect that the whole...
I mean, I have huge doubts about the whole theatrical aspect of 9-11.
Because we were almost too ready to go to war and to drop bombs.
And we were almost too ready with various types of legislation.
So... It would actually be better if it was just a violent reaction and a non-thinking reaction.
As opposed to being so ready to exploit anything or possibly even having foreknowledge or something like that.
That's right. It could be just sheer incompetence, really, that led to us not having the so-called foreknowledge of this or not being able to put the pieces together in time to prevent it.
But clearly, that event was a watershed for the neocons.
And it was a watershed for the war makers and the state makers in this country.
And it was a watershed for people who hate the Constitution, to the extent that they see.
Yeah, and of course, it was the invention of yet another industry.
Oh, sorry, yet another agency to cover up the messes.
So you had Department of Homeland Security on top of the Department of Defense and the CIA and the FBI and all of the other associated alphabet soups.
It's like, oh, well, they all failed, so let's get another one because that's going to be the final solution.
Sure. And it accounts in some ways for the last decade of growth in government hiring, too, because the government agencies have all increased.
And the military, which I had a slight, slight, slight decrease in Manning after the Cold War, but the The funding, in relative terms, really never went down.
And, of course, now it exceeds even the levels that it was at in World War II, if you can believe that.
We have no wars. Is that right?
So, percentage of GDP, it's larger than it was in World War II. It's as close as it's ever been, and it's within spitting distance of the levels it was in the midpoint of, not the end, but the midpoint of World War II. That's what I saw on a chart.
And, you know, total spending and whatnot.
Now, Anyway, so back to when I'm in the Pentagon here.
Right, so you're getting all these propaganda talking points.
Yes, I'm getting it. And again, I don't take credit for being like, oh, I'm so smart, I figured this out.
I worked with a lot of military officers, colonels and Navy captains, who we would sit and talk about what was going on around us in our shop.
We would talk about these talking points, and we would complain to each other or check the validity of them.
And say, oh my God, you know, why would they say this when clearly it's not true?
And so, of course, there's only one answer to that because that serves their purpose to say it.
The other thing that was upsetting to me, and I did notice this because, you know, we read the news, I would see the verbatim talking points that were classified secret on my desk in the New York Times, often within a very short amount of time of being updated because these talking points were updated.
And so clearly, you know, we, the talking points, the generators of the talking points, the agenda for war, and the media were all working together.
And none of this fits in, you know, with anything I was taught on how government was supposed to work, but it is how government does work.
And the checks and balances of the media, right?
And the criticisms. It's not exactly all the president's men have there, right?
Exactly, yeah. Or rather, that's a story because it's so rare.
Yes, it's very rare.
In fact, even the...
Well, there was, I think...
Well, the people that actually published some of my...
Or used me as a source while I was still active duty, the McClatchy newspapers, they were punished heavily, I think.
In fact, the company... They had a bunch of city papers, which they were busted up.
I don't know if it was a trust thing or they just had some rich guy go after them, but they did a pretty fair job of looking and developing a lot of sources within the Pentagon and elsewhere.
I was just one of a lot of people that saw what was happening and felt that it wasn't right.
But yeah, for the most part, the mainstream media, it was government media.
It was Pravda and TASS in the old days.
It functioned exactly like that.
So we could watch these talking points change over time.
And they had this one talking point that lasted from the very beginning until December, early December.
And this talking point had Saddam Hussein's intel chief meeting one of the 9-11 planners.
in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Right.
And you might remember this story because it got a lot of play.
And then at some point, somebody in FBI and other people knew, because everybody knew it wasn't true in the intel community.
They had access to it.
But finally, someone in the FBI, in a public, identified, you know, I'm FBI.
FBI asserts that this is not true.
And that was on the front page of the New York Times.
And so once that hit the times that the FBI knew it wasn't true.
Now, we knew it wasn't true from two years before that.
But, and so did the intel.
No one in intel was ever briefing that or claiming that.
that.
But the talking points that we were given internally and the same ones, of course, that were given to apparently under the table to the Times and Post and such, they did change it after the New York Times was forced to report that the FBI said this didn't happen.
That next week, the next version of the talking points out of OSP silently deleted that talking point.
So it's just like, you know, it's just like, no, we've always been at war with such and such.
Just amazing.
But and of course, these the people doing it are not following the chain, you know, There's direct contact between Cheney's office on a routine daily basis with the Near East, South Asia guys, which normally that wouldn't happen in a normal situation.
We are a bureaucracy. There are ways to talk to other bureaucracies, and it's not through direct faxes with every little thing that you're doing all the time.
You just don't. So it's a corrupting of what, even if you believe in the bureaucratic controls, it was a corrupting of those bureaucratic controls.
And it's because the people sort of in the field would give information that couldn't be correlated with the larger picture, couldn't be verified or validated with other pieces of information.
They just drill straight down to the people, get some facts that they wanted with some, I'm sure, caution and fear and intimidation, or at least pressure.
And they wouldn't have people who were higher up who were less afraid putting the blended stuff together with a bigger picture, right?
Yeah, that's right. And if people – there was actual – there was an example, and this has been written about back on this 2002, what was happening there in the Pentagon.
You know, the DIA had a guy, Bruce – well, I can't remember his last name now.
It's somewhere. Hardcastle was named Bruce Hardcastle.
He was a senior DIA. That is a great name for a senior CIA guy.
He must have changed his name, or he was destined to be that guy with that name.
Bruce Hardcastle, who may be retired now, but I know that he did not retire at the time.
He was the DIA person who worked directly for Near East South Asia and advised, he was the senior intelligence officer, to advise the Near East South Asia director, who's an appointed person named Bill Loody, a neocon who actually came over to our office from Cheney's office when the new administration came in.
So they did not get along because Bruce Hardcastle, living up to his name, refused to modify, you know, what the intelligence was saying.
And they had they bumped heads many times.
And Ludi once told us that if Bruce was going to a meeting, he would not attend.
And if he went to a meeting, Hardcastle was not to be allowed there.
Now, this is his DIA dedicated bureaucratically assigned top Intel advisor.
This was their attitude because, you know, they don't want to hear what they didn't want to hear.
And they wanted a war, and they were going to make a war, and they made one.
Now, to be fair, we've done this before.
Probably many countries have done it.
Kings have done it.
We've done it in our history in different ways.
We've made wars because we wanted them, because somebody...
Even the reports of German atrocities in France in May 1940 were, you know, they were raping nuns and gunning down children.
Absolutely. That's right.
Well, yeah, notorious the way the British media and the British government played that whole thing.
So, you know, we see this with all conflicts.
And I think the core common denominator is there has to be who somebody's making money.
There are hardcore commodities that...
You know, governments want, people in government want.
And then in this case, I think with the neocons, there is an ideological thing, and it's not about democracy, although they talk about that.
It's about Israel.
You know, it's about, you know, I always love it when they say Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
Well, it might be democracy, but it's also a socialist country where 95% of the property is owned by the state, even Israel.
Unless they're former government officials.
And it's a democracy if you don't count the West Bank, right?
That's right. And it's a democracy only if you are Jewish.
So, well, that's not exactly how Americans think of a little free market democracy.
Well, Israel's not a little free market democracy.
By any definition, Americans are used to.
But they always proclaim it that way.
And it's also funny to me that we trusted the...
You mentioned the mutually assured destruction.
You know, Israel has, both has and has let it be known, its capabilities in all things military, including nuclear.
And, you know, they're not going to get People who don't want to be turned into parking lots are probably not going to mess with them.
So in a sense, we don't need to be there to protect Israel, but there's a huge ideological tendency to see, I guess, at least the neocons do, to see the United States, I think, as a protector.
Oh, and of course the Middle East governments, the dictatorships in the Middle East love Israel being there because it gives an external enemy that diverts the hatred of their people away, at least up until recently, away from the domestic terrorism that they're going up against their own people.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it just keeps people distracted from where their real enemies are, which is the people sitting on the seats of power.
Yeah, and it is really, anyone who's even casually looking at the past 20 years of our history, we don't even have to go back to Iran in 1953 or other things.
We support Israel, who basically has got a kind of...
What's the word I'm looking for?
What the South Africans had?
Apartheid. They have an apartheid against the Palestinians who are there.
And they don't honor the UN. They call the territories theirs when the territories are really...
Most standards of war time, you know, not theirs, and they build on it, and they do these things, which are very unjust, and I think, you know, Americans don't particularly think that's just.
And at the same time, we support Saudi Arabia, which is the home of, well, the royal family is actually related to bin Laden.
I mean, he's one of them.
And they do things that are also very alien to the way Americans think their values are.
And these are our two best friends in the region.
Well, not counting Egypt, not counting Mubarak, and he's just as bad.
So, you know, it's kind of strange if you sit back and look at our policy.
Yeah, we are monster hypocrites.
And so what's it really about?
Well, it's about money for our politicians, which comes through the Israeli support, and it's about oil and opportunities for our major corporations to compete without really competing on a fair battlefield.
We want them to compete unfairly, just like France and England and all those other ones probably want theirs to have an advantage.
Yeah, you don't get an empire if you're going up against equals, right?
Yeah. Oh, and also, what are we doing in Bahrain?
We've got the Fifth Fleet there in Bahrain, so we back the monarchy there.
We're helping them shoot the protesters.
But Libyan protesters are okay.
We want to help them, but we'll shoot them if they're Bahraini.
Now, what happened next?
I feel like we're getting good foreign policy commercials, but I want to get back to the main plot of what happened to the Divine Miss Kay after these propagandas passed, slithered like snakes through your hands.
Well, starting in August, I was upset about what I was seeing, and I felt really powerless to do anything about it.
And I shared that with other people that I worked with, and they shared it back with me.
It wasn't that I was the only one that felt this way.
But there was basically a shared sense amongst people that...
You're surrounded by conservative people who believe, although in many cases falsely, they believe that they're defending the Constitution.
So, you know, we're coming from that perspective where we're thinking that it's not right, that this is, that in a sense too, the military itself is being used by politicians.
And so we didn't like that. And my frustration had no place to go, so I began to write some essays.
Short little dark humor, kind of black humor, satirical, sarcastic little essays.
And I collected them.
I shared them with some of my friends, and they liked them, and they thought they were funny.
And it was essays about what I was seeing around me, but in kind of a...
Well, this would be...
It didn't approach anything like Mark Train's War Prayer, but, you know, that kind of satirical or sarcastic critique.
That's kind of what he was writing.
So... Anyway, I shared them with friends, and I at one point sent them to Lou Rockwell, but I said, look, I'm in the military, and because I'm criticizing and making fun of, in a very obvious way, our leaders, our civilian-appointed leaders and whatnot, and our generals do, the ones that were going along with it, you know, I'll get in big trouble.
And so I don't want to have my name published.
And he said, well, I don't do anonymous.
And I understood that totally.
So then I sent those same I had five at that time by the end of August.
And I sent them over to David Hackworth and his website, Soldiers for the Truth.
Now, he's passed away several years ago, but he had a website.
He's a military guy, considered himself pro-Constitution, pro-soldier, and he fought the system.
He fought the system a little bit when he was in, and then after he retired, he was a voice of criticism of some of the stupid things that the military in particular would do and some of our policies.
He accepted them immediately, and he did not know me.
I never met him.
I never did meet him, ever. But he read those things, and he immediately made a place for me on his website, Insider Notes from the Pentagon.
And I published, eventually, something like 33 or 34, basically one a week.
And these were anonymous at the time?
They were all anonymous. He granted me anonymity.
So that was fine.
And people were reading them. They did get some play.
So it was kind of interesting.
Basically, it made me feel like I was doing something.
When, in fact, I wasn't doing much, but it made me feel like...
I mean, was that stressful?
I mean, did you feel like, oh, Lord, could it ever be traced?
No, I wasn't stressed. No, I didn't care about that.
I already sent them to people.
I sent them... There were a lot of people that knew how it was me.
Oh, okay, okay. But I think...
But if I think and I don't know at what point, while I was still active duty, that that people might have been people like authority figures might have been looking for that.
I don't know if they were.
If they were, I was not suspected because nothing bad ever came of it.
I was certainly name called, bad mouthed and, you know, verbally committed to hell by the New York Times after, you know, after I got out and then wrote publicly and claimed.
Yeah, I've had my own excitements with the media, so I know the name-calling they're capable of.
Oh, yeah, yeah. But I had no real sense of fear at all.
I don't know why. Maybe I'm just not too bright.
People knew that I was writing it.
It wasn't a real close secret.
Obviously, I didn't tell my bosses, and I didn't info them.
I didn't give them an infocopy of my latest.
But... Anyway, what I wanted to mention about David Hackworth was he never knew me.
He wasn't a big person who's pro-women in the military kind of thing.
And yet, you know, so I might have not had credibility to him for a number of reasons.
I was at Air Force, you know.
He didn't know me or anything.
But... He immediately accepted them, and I mean fast, and he valued them, and his feedback was good.
And it came to me later, I realized he was hearing much the same thing from many, many, many, many people that he knew in the system, both active duty, retired people who were working as civilians, people who had friends.
You know, he had a huge network of...
Faithful soldiers or faithful public servants, if you can use that word, who did disagree, who kind of recognized the perversion of the system that was going on and the politicization and the agenda.
Now, having said that, I think if it had been communists that we were fighting against, You know, probably Hackworth might have not been sympathetic to my view.
I don't know that. But he understood fully that there was no threat coming from the targets of the neocons' ire.
The Middle East was not something that was going to change American way of life.
They weren't going to come over here and bomb us and take our property and turn us into Muslims.
You know, he knew that, just like a lot of people did.
So he understood this was an agenda-based war, not anything based on security or defense.
So, you know, a lot of people knew it.
And of course, the weird thing was, after the war, after the invasion happened, the Office of Special Plans stood down, its propaganda job was done.
And within a few short years, all of the mainstream media is now reporting what I was saying and what other people were saying, you know?
And it's, I mean, there's well-known people like Who was the guy that did the Yellow Cake report?
Oh, yeah. The Valerie Plame's husband, right?
I can't remember his name, but yeah.
Valerie Plame's husband, yeah, the ambassador.
And, oh, a number of people.
And there were people that retired or stood down in protest.
Several State Department people did.
And it was all based on the same thing they were seeing at their level.
This propaganda, this pushing of lies, this conscientious justification of really an illegal war.
And it was, it is...
You know, and yet, for all that, nothing changed.
You know, we're occupying that country to this day.
We've, you know, we had bombed it for a dozen years in between the last Gulf War and our invasion.
So it wasn't like he had built much back, still a lot of damage.
And when we went in with all of our, what is it they did to awe?
The shotgun awe.
Yeah. Went in with...
Oh, and I'll mention this to you maybe if I mentioned this to someone else before.
I saw, you know the word from the Bible, Shekinah?
I don't know it, no. Well, it means something.
I can't forget. It's kind of like an aura or something.
It's shock and awe.
And I saw it on a church.
I saw shock and awe spelled that way.
Wow. On a Christian church off of 81.
I was driving down to North Carolina.
Yeah, so I don't know how much of the radical Christian, let's make Israel ready for Jesus again, had to do it.
Yeah, that's an underreported thing, that they believe that this war has to occur in order for end times and end of tension and all that, right?
That's right.
And the neocons, the neoconservatives, you know, they talk about global, well, globalism, they like global democracy, they talk about making people become secular liberals or whatever.
That's part of it.
The other part of it is Israel.
It's all about Israel.
And then a part of that is to gain the support of the Christian right in the United States, in particular, which they had been working on for many, many years, you know, allying this with the Jerry Falwells and the other, you know, really, conservative, pro-constitution, except conservative, pro-constitution, except unless it has to do with killing Muslims.
They certainly like to, you know, let's kill some Muslims.
So it's really an awful confluence of interests that have kind of made this, I think, possible in some ways.
But in any case, you know, we're still there.
We took out, with the shock and awe, we took out their Their urban structural systems, their plumbing and their water sewage systems and their electrical systems, tore up a lot of their buildings and then made it impossible for them to repair those buildings, either due to violence or trade embargoes or you can only buy your supplies from certain American-approved...
It was all about business at this point.
So we've destroyed the country.
They've had a brain drain of anybody that had the slightest bit of ability to get out of the country in Iraq.
They have left. And those that are stuck there are vulnerable to being divided by religion and fighting over limited resources and being manipulated by Western powers.
And we've got this massive embassy in Baghdad.
And so, yeah, we are definitely an empire.
I mean, just if you only look at Iraq, you could see it.
Oh, heavens. I mean, the U.S. military is still in Japan over 60 years after them, and they're not going anywhere, as long as there's a dollar to pay someone out there.
That's right. They're not going anywhere.
That's right, and it's an awful thing, because it corrupts us, too.
It's not just that it is evil in so many ways.
It's not evil that's far, far away in the outer reaches of the empire.
The evil is back here at home.
We live with this.
This has destroyed... Well, the Republic is gone.
And if there was any value in the Republic, well, guess what?
We lost that. And to regain it with 60% of your population that works working for the government, come on, it's not going to happen.
Yeah, I mean, the most hideous thing, I think, psychologically, is the aversion to the truth that comes with being part, either implicitly or explicitly, of this kind of evil.
I mean, you've never seen, and this is the amazing, this is why I think we don't need a government, because these kinds of social rules are enforced without any government.
There's no law that says that the mainstream media can never print any pictures of Iraq, Iraqi or Afghani victims of the war, and yet you'll never ever see one.
It is this aversion to the truth and the reality of what is going on over the horizon, that these flashes are people, not bombs blowing up.
And this aversion to the truth Yeah, it's true.
You know, even now, I mean, there was some discussion I think you could have when Obama just got, you know, during the, he was elected, it was a different, now people could maybe talk about Bush a little bit.
Now Republicans could not defend Bush as much.
Maybe there was, you know, something you could talk about.
But no, what, for half a day?
And then we're on to the same, you know, nothing changed.
I mean, the guy's Bush three. And the agenda is the same expanding, you know, imperial agenda.
Well, it certainly is my hope that people will get that, you know, voting to change the hood ornament on the car does not change its fundamental direction and that the system is far beyond the faces you end up seeing on postage stamps and hopefully people will start to peer back a little bit behind the searchlight curtain The darkness and the real levers of power.
And I think that people do feel a certain amount of hopelessness and despair about political action, which I think is also occurring in the libertarian community.
And that is, I mean, I think that gives opportunities for other approaches.
But I think Obama's been a blessing in many ways to people who say that it is not the people that is the system that is the problem.
Yeah, that's true. And he certainly broke the hearts of many enthusiastic liberal voters who thought, oh, we can actually change the direction of this car.
And, you know, they voted for him and they found out absolutely not.
And, you know, we can go back.
These Republicans who always, when they're out of power, you know, rediscover their core conservatism or whatever that is.
You know, they talk about how good they are.
I mean, they're all upset about the EPA. Well, I hate the EPA, too.
But it was Nixon.
He gave us the EPA. And they love Reagan because, you know, he just had his 100th birthday and they go all like Reagan, Reagan.
Well, you know, Reagan had some good lines.
You know, he was going to get rid of the Department of Education.
He was going to get rid of the Department of Energy.
He was a number of things on his hit list.
And he couldn't even get rid of the Rural Electrification Administration, which lasted until the late 1990s.
He could not get rid of that little organization, which was very, very tiny.
And of course, we had really electrified everything we could get to by then.
And even the great Reagan couldn't kill that one, much less the big ones.
And now we've got Department of Homeland Security, also the son of a Republican president and a Republican administration.
So Just crazy stuff to think that the trajectory is going to change.
It sounds cruel, but I think they have to go seriously bankrupt.
I just can't imagine.
I don't see change coming from government.
No, no, I think that's, it's far too late for that.
I think probably by the 1960s, certainly under the Great Society programs, if those, if the empirical failures and disasters of those weren't enough to turn things around, now everything's so entrenched and everybody is so embedded in the system.
And opposing it, of course, causes great, as I've talked about before, it causes people great challenge in their personal relationships.
You know, if you start talking about the immoralities of government, you know, like my sister-in-law works for the Department of Education.
Right? Yes.
So everybody's embedded and it's the relationships, I think, that make it hard for people to speak out.
It's true. Well, I mean, I'm part of the problem in that, I mean, I'm dependent in many ways.
I mean, I take my military retirement pay, you know, and I teach part-time at a community college, which is a state community college.
So, you know, it's...
And I teach at another college, which is another state's public university.
Well, see, Karen, what you have to do is just start podcasting and ask you for donations, because that's the really exciting area of teaching.
That's the ultimate surfboard edge, free market, cutting edge, I think, of education.
You know, I used to have a real job.
I used to work in the software field.
And, you know, just cut all ties to that stuff, go podcast, and basically spend your life on bended knee begging people for change.
It's a glorious, glorious place to be.
That's my suggestion. So what do you say?
You play soccer?
No, sorry. I used to be a software executive and entrepreneur.
I guess it happened until a couple of years ago when I quit to do this full-time.
Cool. Well, that's great. Well, my approach is to prepare for the collapse and the evaporation of all my state income by doing my other real work, which is the farming and we have different things, small things.
But I kind of feel like I write for Lou Rockwell and I Well, and I, you know, from my standpoint, I've made a very serious vow to myself to not cast moral judgments against anybody who's into farming, given where society is going, because I just never know when I'm going to show up and beg people for, like, oranges and...
You know, whatever the pigs didn't eat, you just throw it in my plate and I'll be happy.
So yeah, moral condemnation is not coming from me to anyone who's well-armed, who has plots of land, who has toilet paper and gold and, you know, stacks of food in the basement.
No stone's being thrown from me to anybody like that.
So I just want to let you know I'm hedging my bets.
That's where I'm coming from.
And you know, people are...
Of all different political perspectives, although many of them I think are anti-state, but at their heart, they may not articulate it that way, but I think they're getting in the right direction.
But a lot of people are interested in some sorts of self-sufficiency and also learning skills that we have gotten away from that can be useful to other people.
Real business and not having a...
You can't really have a business in this country.
As soon as you hire one or two people, you've got the IRS all over you.
You're paying taxes on money you'll never earn.
You have to do everything in the gray and black market anyway.
There's a lot of people doing that.
With our unemployment, they talk about 19% underemployed and then 10% straight out that they know of that are unemployed that won't work.
Of many of those people, You know, 30% of the population, you know, they're doing stuff.
There's some of them sitting watching Jersey Shore all day, but some of them are educating themselves.
They're experimenting with different ways to make money, and some of them are doing under-the-table work and production.
So there is at least that, I think, though.
I've been meaning to run through this mathematics, but I think if you, because if you look at the unemployment, you know, basically it's gone from like 5% to 10%.
That's sort of the official story.
That's not even close to the truth because there's a huge sector of the employment that has barely been touched, which is the government.
So you can't count the government in your, you know, 5% to 10% because it's all concentrated in the private sector.
It's not among the wealthy and educated.
I think unemployment among the college educated is still only between 5% and 6%.
Mm-hmm. If you look at where it's really concentrated, it's concentrated in the poor and the minorities.
All the people who used to get a few rungs up the ladder towards the middle class through manufacturing, through jobs that were semi-skilled, all of which have evaporated.
If you look at where the unemployment has actually affected...
I think it's gone. You know, I think Hispanic unemployment is 30 to 40 percent.
Among young blacks is 20 to 30 percent.
I think there's just been massive increases, but it's kind of blended into this middle class government area, rich, you know, white people who are barely touched by it.
And so it's sort of blended. But where the real craters are, they're very deep, but they're very localized, I think.
Yeah, I think that's true.
And kind of related to that, I didn't really notice this until just this week, but I get the Rasmussen reports.
They do polls all the time.
They send you what their latest polls are.
And I noticed one of the polls they sent earlier this week talked about what the political class thinks and what everybody else thinks.
Yeah, I saw that, because they're completely insulated from all this stuff, right?
Yeah, but I hadn't noticed that they were doing polls, which actually identified the political class, and then set them apart and opposed to the rest of the people.
And that's where we're getting to.
And it's good. And they've been doing that actually since at least last year, which I didn't realize.
So yes, there's a political...
A class untouched by this, pretty much, economy-wise.
And as government grows, you know, their fortunes grow.
They have a sense of relevancy, you know, because we're fighting this war, we're doing this program.
And then you've got all the rest of the people here, which are not represented.
You know, they don't understand and don't agree with what the political class is doing.
So, you know, it's interesting.
Well, not interesting.
It'll be scary. It'll be scary when they wake up.
But I'm going to try to associate myself away from the political class.
But I have to confess to you.
I have to confess, Stephen. I got talked into...
Well, we haven't completely announced yet, but there's a guy, he's actually a Green, but he runs campaigns.
He's been on my back for three years to try to run for something in Virginia.
So I'm challenging the incumbent in our sixth district, sixth congressional district.
How interesting. But I'm doing it.
I mean, I'm libertarian, really anarchist, I guess.
But I'm not a... I mean, I don't have a big A on my...
No, the word is unfortunate.
Yeah. The word is unfortunate.
But I don't, I'm anti-state.
I don't understand. And I'll, you know, I'm open-minded.
If you can show me some usefulness, you know, I'll consider it.
I'll try to think back to everything that I know and I'll research it.
But so far, I'm not convinced of any usefulness, you know, there's, so, which means I'm anti-state.
I don't think I'm a minarchist because I don't accept even that.
But anyway, having said all that, I live in a Republican district.
It's like 70-75% conservative Republicans.
And so we elect Republicans.
And our plan is to go up against this incumbent as a Republican in the primary.
And what we've done so far is very little, but it's real easy to pose him as an anti-liberty person in a very pleasant and pleasing way.
Well, then you've got, I mean, for a Republican demographic, you have credentials that stagger the imagination, like in terms of your military service and so on.
Yeah, there's some credibility there, you know, just in who I am.
But anyway, it's kind of fun.
And, you know, success for us will will will really be, I think, in pulling this guy or challenging this guy out of his establishment things and making him far more radical.
And the guy who are incumbent, just like all the guys, I would say most of them up in Congress, you know, they're all talking about, oh, we're not going to we're not going to increase the debt limit.
You know, we're going to break, you know, and they're doing one one and two percent of stuff.
You know, they're not cutting, but they're talking.
They're talking like they're all bad and they're not bad at all.
They're not even, you know, they're not scary at all.
You know, and so this guy, I was at a Reagan dinner just last weekend with the incumbent and a number of other people, and they're giving their little speeches.
And this guy almost got applause from the people.
It's a conservative Tea Party-style audience.
And he said, we are not going to raise the debt limit.
And it sounded like he was done, and people were getting ready to start clapping.
And then he said, unless we get some really good concessions.
Oh no. And nobody clapped.
And anybody who had their hands getting ready to clap, they put their hands down.
It was just so insane.
So, you know, I mean, I think people are receptive to a far more radical and critical take on And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, the conservative needs to go, you know, to the anarchist side.
The liberals, I don't know, you know, if they're progressives, we don't have too many here, but, you know, the progressives that are out there who think government can do things for people and do it better and more honestly, you know, they need to get over it.
Yeah, you know, the government is so huge now that it's like the only tool in the social toolbox is a hammer.
And of course, as you know, when all you have is hammers, everything looks like a nail.
So nobody can think of solutions that don't involve, right?
They're talking in Japan now about nationalizing the nuclear reactors as if the government didn't have massive care, custody, control, and subsidization and regulation of these things all along.
It's like, well, we have this government, so if we have a problem we can't figure out how to solve, we'll just throw it over the fence into the big government pit and we'll call it solved and walk away.
Wow.
So have you started now?
Are you in the process of starting this?
We haven't formally announced, but it's, you know, Yeah, we're going to do it. We call it exploratory right now, but they're redoing the district, just minor little movements of the district, and we're going to announce as soon as the district is.
The opponent, we already told all the Republicans, or at least a few that we've talked to, in terms of the Republican organization, so he already knows he's going to have a Republican challenger.
Well, I'm calling, I mean, I don't know if they're going to make me join the party.
I'll pay $25 if I have to.
Well, if you're interested, I've always been really fascinated to follow a political campaign.
I missed Adam Kokesh's one.
And so if you're at all interested, I'd love to get updates on how things are going.
I mean, I'm not a fan of political action, but I'm always a big fan.
Not that you should care what I think.
I mean, if you're conscience, you've got to follow.
But I'm a big fan of people doing what they believe to be the very best to the max and then finding out if it works or not.
So if you're going to do it, I'd love to hear more about this as it goes forward.
I'll keep you in touch with it.
There's a Facebook page in...
So just before we end, I want to make sure that people get your vital statistics about where you're...
Of course, you have fantastic articles on lewrockwell.com that I highly recommend.
Very, very erudite. I mean, your writing style is very, very good.
And I really appreciate that.
So if you have Facebook pages or other things, just make sure, because a lot of people will end up listening to this.
I want to make sure that people can find what it is that you're doing for Liberty.
Okay, yeah. Well, can I email you those things?
Oh, yeah, yeah. I'll tack them on to the end.
No problem at all. Yeah, I'll email them too because I know the Lou Rockwell archives, everything that I write or say, and I don't go out and do very many talks or anything, but most everything that I have written down, Lou has it.
He has it in the archives, so that's like the central place to go.
I don't have my own blog or anything like that.
Right, right. No, that's wise.
I mean, he's a clearinghouse of thinking people.
But you may want to think of doing stuff like Porkfest and Libertopia.
I know. I heard an ad for that yesterday on Freedom's Phoenix about the Porkfest.
It sounds like amazing. You're going to be there and there's a whole bunch of other people.
It sounds really good. Yeah, it's really, really worthwhile.
And Libertopia, I'll be emceeing that later this year.
That's also a really enjoyable venue.
Where is it again?
I'm sorry. Libertopia is in San Diego in October, I think.
Okay. Just double check that.
And Porkfest is in New Hampshire in June, I think.
In June. Okay.
Yeah, I'll have to check and see because...
Well, if you're going to be running, I mean, you'll either be a good public speaker by then, if you're not already, or you'll need to become better, which is always a good thing.
I think everyone who's in the Liberty Movement should practice public speaking.
It certainly didn't come naturally to me, but it is something that is well worth working on.
Oh, you're great at it. I can't believe you say it doesn't come naturally.
Oh, you wouldn't believe how much rehearsal goes into those.
It's ridiculous. Oh my gosh.
Yeah, so freestateproject.org forward slash festival is for Porkfest.
And I wish that they didn't have that name, because it really sounds like a porn convention.
But anyway, that's the name, and that's well worth it.
And yeah, Libertopia is in October in San Diego, and libertopia.org, you can check those out.
Look, I mean, shoot them an email.
I'm sure that they'd be happy to have you come and speak, and I'm sure you'd have some great stuff to talk about.
Yeah, that would be great.
And, you know, there's so much going on.
People are, I mean, now's the time for libertarians of every stripe, I think, to be articulating, you know, what they need.
Oh, I've spent 25 years waiting for this moment to arise, where there's enough rocket under the, there's enough fuel in the rocket that we could actually clear the horizon.
I think it's right up, now is the time.
Now is the time people are actually with us, whether they like it or not, because the facts are so overwhelming.
That's right. And I think that our philosophy makes the most logical sense of any, you know, fundamentally free market type stuff makes sense.
People making choices, you know, and taking responsibility for that makes sense.
All these things make sense.
And government does not make sense.
And people are realizing it makes no sense.
And so they're saying, well, what does make sense?
And so then the libertarians should be raising their hands, you know, and the anarchists and all of them.
You know what you do with 90% of your day when nobody has a gun to your head?
That's what makes sense. You know how you get to choose your own job and your own husband, your own wife, whether you have kids and how many to have?
All of that stuff is without government coercion.
That stuff works. That stuff makes sense.
You know, your career, your education, all of that you choose.
Let's just, you know, go that 10% further and then all of that stuff will work well.
But yeah, it's a hard thing for people to understand because...
And I think like you're saying that with those examples, people...
If you can put it in that way, people can understand, yes, they're already living in these ways in a form of liberty.
They get confidence that they can do the other 10%.
Because a lot of people are really scared that they can't, oh my gosh, what would we do?
Oh yeah, well with the government, everyone thinks that Mohawk tattooed lunatics are going to ride up with shotguns and flaming motorcycles and we're all going to be dumped into a bad Mad Max movie.
That's all nonsense. I mean, the vast majority of people would be very peaceful without the government.
It is only the fact that the government abstracts violence away from individuals that makes it so palatable.
If everybody wanted to do violence, we wouldn't need a government.
The fact is people hate violence, and that's why they want it far, far away from them.
They just want the gold to tumble down from the hangman's noose.
Yeah, it's so true. And you know how the whole selling point of these wars is that people love democracy.
They don't really love democracy, but they do love a lack of violence in their life.
They do love peace.
People do love peace.
And the form of government that you have, that's cosmetic, really.
They want peace. And they want free choice.
They want to be able to marry who they want to marry.
They want to be able to make decisions and follow through on them in a peaceful, happy way in a community that behaves peacefully towards them and that they're a part of.
And only real freedom can deliver that in any sustainable way.
People can have that for a little while, as we saw with the beginning of the Republic.
Certain sections of the population live very free.
And you can have it for a while, but government is like smoking.
It's fun in the short run, but it gets pretty ugly in the long run.
That's right. Oh, I will say, we have a guy in Virginia here, our Attorney General.
His name is Cuccinelli.
And he's got some national press because he did a lawsuit against the Obamacare thing or whatnot.
But he was, and he's had some success.
But anyway, he had an analogy.
He also talked about Hayek at this birthday dinner.
Which I thought, I almost fell out of my chair.
And he said everyone should read The Road to Serve and whatnot.
So that was a good step in the right direction.
He needs to go farther, but it's a step in the right direction for sure.
But he also said, and I think I've probably seen this before, but I've never seen a Republican politician or any politician give this analogy.
But he used his hands and he said, think of government and government.
It's a pie with only two pieces.
And if the government's piece is large, then the individual's piece is small.
If the individual's piece is large, the government's piece is small.
But there's no more pieces.
It's a zero-sum game.
There's one pie. It's got two pieces.
And if you think of it that way, you'll understand the proper role.
And you know what's so great about that?
In my experience, the very best metaphors are always the ones that make me the hungriest.
Now, all I'm thinking about is a nice piece of bumbleberry pie.
That's right. You've got to slice me off some freedom.
That's right. And you know, we could take this analogy and it could be on, you know, when people have pie, they can educate their children and their family members and your sister-in-law.
Right, right. But no, he gave that out there.
And of course, I think there were a lot of Tea Party crowd in there, so they were pretty well received.
But most of the big parties benefit from big government.
That's why we have it.
Yeah, for sure. Well, listen, Karen, I really do appreciate your time.
It was a very, very enjoyable conversation.
Congratulations on truly an amazing, amazing awakening.
I know that sounds all kinds of pat-pat you on the head, but I mean that with all due respect, you had a huge amount of hurdles to overcome, particularly with your family, who perhaps served in a more honorable time than now.
And so I think it's really, really an incredible testament to your integrity, curiosity, and intellect that you've managed to come on such a journey.
That's really amazing. I had far fewer struggles than I'm sure I had far more self-pity about it.
And so it's really, really inspiring.
And I thank you so much for your time.
Well, thank you. It was great talking to you.
And it's an honor for me when I look at your body of work and the things you're doing.
