Title: John Kiriakou on the War on Alternative Media
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2022-05-06
URL: https://youtu.be/IW1kBeG4444
Duration: 42:00

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[00:03] [Music] all right shall welcome to the scott horton show i'm the director of the libertarian institute editorial director of antiwar.com author of the book fools aaron time to end the war in afghanistan and the brand new enough already time to end the war on terrorism and i've recorded more than 5 500 interviews since 2003 almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org

[00:35] you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at [Music] horton youtube.com all right you guys hey listen here on the line i've got jaron kiriakou he used to be a cia analyst and then he became a cia operations officer guy and then he went to prison for telling some truth about them torturing people yeah then uh he became you know one of us pretty good anti-war guy and he writes

[01:07] articles and he tells the truth about things a lot hi john how are you hey doing well thanks thanks for having me i appreciate you uh joining us here uh good friend of mine told me this morning that he just finished reading your book because i says to him i'm gonna interview john kiriyaku today and he says i just finished reading his book which is doing time like a spy how the cia taught me to survive and thrive in prison which is also where they locked you yeah they did who do they think you are carter page they're just going to stab you in the back like that poor carter page i've talked to him once

[01:38] or twice i feel sorry for that poor guy yeah boy who would ever want to be a cia asset or agent or officer yeah if they'll just hang out to dry especially for doing the right thing and they do they do they just walk away from you and you're on your own now if you sign up to be a knock that's one thing and you know a non-official cover you're out there but otherwise don't they give you that same bs like in the army that like hey we're family and all that oh my god yes like kentucky

[02:09] yeah it's all nonsense all right and you got a brand new book coming out wait let's go back in time for a second here the convenient terrorist you wrote with joseph hickman who is a certifiable american hero because even though he was just a guard at guantanamo that's not heroic he told the truth that the cia murdered some guys down there in two thousand six july if i remember right wrote a book all about that and heroically stuck his neck out and uh you co-authored a book with him not about that that's his other book i'm sorry uh do you remember his book off the top of

[02:39] your head yeah it was uh oh i'm thinking of his second book which was the burn pits that one you can't put down i got it the first one escapes me now but yeah he told he told the truth about you know the cia would take these uh these al qaeda or alleged al-qaeda prisoners into an interrogation room and then by morning these guys would be dead and the cia interrogators would say oh you know what uh we just walked out for

[03:10] a minute and they committed suicide yeah seriously i'm sorry i have it on my shelf but my shelves are like two and three rows of books deep sometimes so i can't always find what i'm looking for yeah um anyway uh and then so you wrote this book with him about abu zubaydah and then it turns out that the reason that everybody thought all these things that weren't true about abuse of beta was because he had an identical cousin like that tv show from the 70s it's crazy right so there were two guys named abu zubaydah and so

[03:42] the cia didn't know that there were two and so you look at the cia file and you're like my god this guy's a terrorist superman he's everywhere he's in jordan he's in montana he's in north carolina he's in pakistan he's in saudi arabia well it turned out there were two of them ah man all right convenience and then before that the reluctant spy and this is the memoir about uh what you're doing screwing around there kidnapping al-qaeda dudes and renditioning off to bangkok to be tortured right

[04:14] uh i never said bangkok you did but uh yeah pretty much all right i'm the one who said bangkok and then so you weren't actually brutalizing these dudes but you were standing there watching them getting brutalized is that really right no no i was the only one who declined the the torture training i said this is a torture program i have a i have an ethical problem with it i think it's illegal besides being unethical and i refuse to do it and so the their first response was to pass me

[04:47] over for promotion but um but i had kind of a rabbi up on the seventh floor and he promoted me out of cycle and then i became the deputy director's executive assistant so i was able to read all of this compartmented cable traffic that they were sending back from the torture site all of which turned out to be false they were just making it up and we didn't even know that until 2009 when the cia inspector general released a declassified report finally saying

[05:18] that all that crap that was coming back from the secret site was just made up yeah or plagiarized from the fbi and that's really what the truth was it was plagiarized yes the fbi was like here have some tea and a cigarette and that was what got him to talk exactly yeah all right and then uh i know gareth wrote most of this but still it's great and it's got a good title the cia's the cia insider's guide to the iran crisis this is a trump era book kind of

[05:50] shorthand uh summary catch up everybody on the uh policies in all the history surrounding iranian terrorism if i remember right in the nuclear program and all the different controversies surrounding america's relationship with iran a great one but then you got a brand new one here you can comment about that too but you have a brand new one here how to disappear and live off the grid a cia insider's guide so that's a comment about iran and then tell us about your new one here sure well the iran one was kind of fun because i i got this contract from sky

[06:20] horse they said hey can you write a book about iran and i said you know i'm not really an iran expert i said i i can write about the history of iran that that i know but let me talk to gareth porter because gareth knows more about iran than anybody i've ever met so the funny thing was we start writing this thing and i'm like gareth we have a really short deadline i said they have to have the book in eight weeks so i wrote as quickly as i could and then gareth just keeps writing and writing and writing and writing it's like gareth i was calling him every day you got to stop writing but every day there was

[06:51] like an update every day trump would say something or pompeo would say something so finally we sent it all in and they ended up cutting out most of my part and they took all of gareth's part and that's what became the book oh and that's too bad because i bet your part was pretty readable too you know what the hell i was proud of my part and then the these it's actually a trilogy of books that i did this the cia insider's guide to disappearing and living off the grid the cia insider's guide to lying and lie detection and the cia insider's guide to

[07:24] surveillance and surveillance detection and they're all coming out on may 25th oh all three of them are coming out then all three of y'all see now yeah okay and then i did one just sort of for myself i it's crazy but i sat down and i just didn't get up from the computer and i wrote this book in six weeks it's going to come out in the next few months it's called remains of the day the complete guide to washington dc's historic cemeteries that's interesting

[07:56] something completely different just a little side hobby of yours huh yes okay yes it's the only place i can find peace is in a cemetery yeah well listen i think a lot of people are going to be interested in this living off the grid one and line and lie detection that can serve you in personal life and business for sure surveillance and surveillance detection and you can't imagine how many how many questions i get from people who you know think their spouse is cheating on them want to know how to how to do

[08:27] surveillance and not get caught or vice versa think that their spouse is having them followed and how can they you know become certain that it's happening or it's not happening so there's actually a market out there yeah very good well i hope you make a bunch of money selling these to people man thank you i appreciate that that's great so everybody just type in kiriyaku just like it sounds yep uh and uh put in amazon with that and you'll be awash in books to read

[08:58] listen let's talk about the insane soviet lawless unbelievable persecution of my good friends and some heroes at consortiumnews.com and and not only them but mint press news is getting it and my god kyle anne's alone at the libertarian institute got zotzed as uh peter lee the china hand put it off of facebook and i thought things were turning around john kiriakou what the hell oh i'll tell

[09:28] you it's worse than ever it's worse than ever next interview is gonna be about well john you got kicked off amazon.com now what seriously that's what's that's what the next step is you know it and it's it's uh uh grayzone uh has now a red tag from this fascist group called newsguard and and uh uh consortium news is being threatened with the red tag consortium news had its paypal account suspended

[09:59] garland nixon a guy that i work with who's very outspoken on the left uh was thrown off facebook yesterday for for sharing an article from nbc news because it included a a photograph of of an azoff battalion guy wearing a swastika no way it's just gone completely out of hand it's like it's like mccarthyism look i mean that guy and this goes for everybody on facebook too but it's also important that that guy garland nixon is a leader he's the

[10:30] kind of guy who says listen everybody here's what's going on and people listen to him because he cares and he knows what he's talking about absolutely kick him off of facebook that's not nothing that's a big damn deal it is and for an nbc story that was just handed to them by the pentagon and the cia exactly it wasn't even a scoop right it wasn't like they did some good work it was a press release exactly right and that's what they do that's what most these national security uh correspondents or journalists do they

[11:01] just take a press release from the cia and they gist it you know uh there's a there's a guy because by the way the nbc story that you're talking about someone they're bragging about helping sink uh russian battleship right yes yes exactly exactly um jason leopold from buzzfeed uh filed a freedom of information act request with the cia and he asked for it was just a blanket request he asked for all correspondence between the cia's office of public affairs and um and all

[11:32] reporters for the last five years okay they ended up giving it to him it's thousands and thousands of emails as you might imagine and what's in these emails but um a back and forth with ken delanian formerly of the los angeles times the last many years decade the chief intelligence correspondent at nbc news and msnbc and what was this clown doing he was writing articles about the cia and sending them to the cia for approval

[12:04] before sending them to his own editor okay that's not journalism and it's especially not investigative journalism that's just gisting what the cia wants you to gist and what happens if you don't do it you don't get invited to the christmas party anymore so where's the investigative journalism who's actually covering the cia and asking the hard questions i think the answer is nobody nobody's covering the ceo they all just get captured by their sources with like one or two stories and now i was like

[12:35] well where are you gonna get your stories from if not for me right exactly and and this is a threat that the agency makes like if you don't do what we say if you don't white if you don't write what we say we'll cut you off and then you get nothing and because there's no budget for investigative journalism at most of the outlets you know with a possible exception of the post the times the journal and propublica they just do as they're told yep and then you have places like consortiumnews.com which is mostly original opinion a little bit of

[13:07] you know uh real first-hand journalism but definitely an independent take on what the hell is going on around here oh yes and led by a guy you know joe lauria for years was at the christian science monitor at the wall street journal he was the un reporter for the wall street journal for like 10 years or something like that right time sunday times of london right you know so this is a guy who's a real journalist it has been his entire career by all of their standards and is now the editor of robert perry's site perry who was at ap in the new and

[13:39] newsweek before he found a consortium news um so these aren't they didn't come from pirate radio like i did these are real ass reporters who then went independent which is important and then but nope they can just get yeted as the kids say these days right off of the internet yeah you know one of the reasons really the reason why i went to consortium news was because of the respect that i have for uh for joe lauria uh you you were exactly right a second ago when you went through his resume the guy

[14:11] is as serious a journalist as there is anywhere his whole career attests to that and because he was and i knew i knew bob perry you know before he passed away and joe took over but bob perry was just as much a serious uh journalist who broke big stories and and you know he's a polk award winner for heaven's sake i mean he was really one of the major forces behind breaking iran contra in the nineteen years perry was absolutely impressed and then you know what happens the other

[14:43] day uh paypal just decides in its infinite wisdom that that consortium news is somehow duping its its readers and is in violation of the agreement with paypal and not only do they permanently shutter consortium news's paypal account but at least for the first few days they seized the 9 350 that was in the account and it was only because people like you and me and

[15:13] you know those friends of ours in our circle um uh complained and made such a big stink about it that they finally released the money but but the latest to the story is they're still not reinstating the paypal account so consortium's gonna have to figure out another way to take donations and to pay its writers yeah well look i know what they say and we all know it's true bitcoin solves this yes and that's what we have to do i mean more and more we

[15:43] have to rely on this kind of thing and yeah you know the institute gets a certain amount of its donations and and we save them too unfortunately it's a very boomy busty market more than most right so you know that's a turn off to many but it you know it comes down to it like what are you gonna do if they can just i mean in paypal is just absolutely essential i'm afraid to even say how important paypal is to every organization that i have any affiliation with including just my own ass like what am i

[16:14] going to do without them i'm doomed um and so yeah we have to work on this this is a big deal and they started with julian assange because the state department lied and said he's breaking the law well he wasn't breaking the law they just lied and then paypal said well your word is good enough for me i don't need a judicial judgment and order i'll just take the executive branch's word for it and un-person this man and that was where it started and now we're all julian assange well you are

[16:45] and i'm afraid i'm next yeah seriously seriously nobody's safe nobody and you know as ask max blumenthal he'll tell you all about it because he's under the same kind of pressure and mint press news and jacob magazine and you know it's all of us they're coming after all of us yeah and look they did the same thing back in 2016 or 17 i guess it was with that proper not bs with the washington post um published this list and it included antiwar.com and the ron paul institute and the american conservative magazine i

[17:16] think and truth out and truth dig and by the way those guys i mean yeah they're leftists but it's not like they're even you know trotskyites or whatever like the world socialist website is at least a couple of clicks left of them oh definitely right like truth dig i think you wrote for truth dick before like truth take truth out there like one click left to the democratic party you know what i mean in a good way right most likely supported news yes yes exactly um but in other words though there's nothing extremely controversial about them there

[17:48] and then it seemed like they threw in antiwar.com just to prove that they weren't only picking on leftists so then they're like oh yeah i thought exactly the same thing yes yep and um so yeah and then and google d ranked us you know i mean you think about all the content on antiwar.com going back 25 years we got some search terms but they you know deranked you know all of what we're doing back then as much as they could anyway um and then yeah i don't know what's going to happen i mean it's crazy to think that literally the richest man in

[18:18] the world buying twitter might actually buy us a little bit of breathing space here john how crazy is that but i'm i'm one of these people who is is saying listen let's let's give elon musk a chance here because if he's serious about being um a first amendment purist okay that's that's what we want we want somebody who's gonna truly stand up for free speech even when it's ugly so let's not judge the guy let's give him a shot

[18:48] yeah hang on just one second hey guys i have some wasps in my house so i shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety i don't have a deal with them but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from amazon.com by way of the link in the right hand margin on the front page at scotthorton.org so keep that in mind and don't worry about the mess your wife will clean it up

[19:19] green mill supercritical is the award-winning leader in cannabis oil extraction their machines are absolute top of the line they simply work better and accomplish more for less than any competitor in the world we are talking anywhere from a couple hundred thousand dollars for the base model and up so this is for serious business people here but the price as they say will be worth it green mill supercritical customers investments pay for themselves oftentimes in just weeks simple enough for almost any operator

[19:49] deep enough for master technicians their new novel techniques for in-line real-time winterization or leaving their competitors in the key that's greenmillsupercritical.com man i wish i was in school so i could drop out and sign up for tom woods this liberty classroom instead thomas done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level and it's all very reasonably priced just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at

[20:20] scotthorton.org tom woods this liberty classroom real history real economics real education that's what i think too and it is true that he's got government contracts and things he's not exactly jeff bezos working for the cia but he launches satellites into space for him and for the military and things like i don't know that's that's pretty compromised but i guess it just depends on and you know what really a lot of his you know auto empire is based on federal kickbacks in the name of environmentalism and all of that too

[20:52] so i don't know how much free reign he really has from this yeah i wonder have you heard of this this group uh news guard this is going to be the next big problem for us yeah so somebody told me that uh my site the institute libertarian institute site says it's under review so that's where i'm at now and i mean they don't have nothing on me you know the most uh uh you know conspiracist type stuff um

[21:26] on there is the oklahoma bombing but you know what i'm bulletproof on that and all of that is is you know there's none of this um lori milroy judith miller bs about saddam hussein did it no no no it's all about the fbi informants who did it and we can prove it right it's all government documents it's all the oklahoma bombing archive it's libertarian institute.org okc it's secret service documents fbi and justice documents atf documents and court records and all these things

[21:58] and it's not our fault that andre strassmaier's name comes up over and over again they're the ones gotta explain that by the way you're a cia guy you ever heard of mr executive assistant you ever heard of andre carl strossmeier the german army intelligence officer who helped do the oklahoma bombing all i can say is that one of the holy of holies is sources and methods so i'm not commenting okay but you could just say no or you couldn't just say no let me okay okay this is a yes or no

[22:28] question could you just say yes or no or could you just say no instead of i refuse to answer yeah it's it's safer to say i refuse to answer because then they stay off your case all right hey i'll tell you something i want to know whether that's really code for i yeah i know who you're talking about and he did it all right no no no no no i'm not saying that i'm not saying that i know nothing as sergeant schultz once said all right well i'm being news guarded right now just for bringing this

[22:59] up i guess and you know what i mean honestly if they want to use that as just a smear campaign about everybody who's not nbc news is some kind of fringe lunatic or whatever then that'll just be a badge of honor anyway you know warning explicit lyrics don't listen to this rap album because they talk about boobies in there you know right exactly exactly and look at the board of directors of news guard it's it's uh mike hayden the former nsa and

[23:29] cia director and deputy director of uh national entertainment well you mean the guy who was the director of nsa on september 10th 2001 that guy yeah and he's going to decide what is true and what's not true another board member is tom ridge the first secretary of homeland security um it's a bunch of mainstreamers from from the uh wall street journal i mean it's it's everybody who hates alternative media yeah and they're the ones that are gonna

[24:00] decide in this in this partnership they have with google if uh when you google you know the institute for example or consortium news or gray zone uh whether you get this red tag in your in your google feed where it says that it's an unreliable source of news yeah and i don't want the cia telling me what i can and can't read you know i don't know man at this point i wonder if that kind of act of

[24:32] desperation is really only more counterproductive for them and beneficial for us in that explicit lyrics i i hope so like you wouldn't be warning me not to read kiriakou if he wasn't telling me something crazy about how many people the cia tortured to death or something yeah you know yeah yeah well max blumenthal said on the jimmy door show the other day that that he welcomes this red tag that that it's his tag of honor and if they want to put a red tag on grayzone they're perfectly

[25:02] welcome to do it see the problem is too is all the consequences for like well paypal turn around and say well you got a red flag from newsguard and patreon is going to sk you got a red flag from news garden you know that's where it matters it's not necessarily with your popular audience but with your institutional one advertisers on your podcast you know i just cut a deal with one of these uh podcasting companies to insert you know real professional ads into my show i don't think they paid me yet

[25:32] but i could see you know a situation like that where they go well i don't know our lawyer says that this red thing means that you're rushing disinformation and we're gonna get in trouble yeah you know right right you know uh speaking of russian disinformation scott i i gotta tell you and i make no secret of it but i work for sputnik radio and um when sputnik first offered me a job back in early 2017 i turned it down i said thanks but i don't think i want to do russian media

[26:03] but uh thanks for thinking of me and then they called me again like six months later and they said we'd really like to uh offer you your own show and i said well because i still didn't have you know very good job at the time i said well if if i take this job i i want the freedom to be able to talk about anything that i want to talk about and to criticize anybody that i want to criticize including vladimir putin and they said done and i said yeah you put it in writing he said done i'll put it in the contract

[26:35] and they did they put it in the contract and so i can say literally anything i want to say and i do criticize vladimir putin when i feel that he needs to be criticized so um i was doing the show this is about two years ago and i have a segment or i had a segment every thursday called criminal injustice where i had kevin gastala who's a journalist at shadow proof and does criminal justice issues who's excellent a friend of this show and an excellent journalist excellent a great guy a great

[27:08] friend and a terrific journalist and the other regular guest i have or had was paul wright who's the editor and publisher of prison legal news and criminal legal news magazines so uh we talk about you know crooked judges and prison conditions and and uh da's that ask for more than the minimum or the more than the maximum recommended sentences and you know stuff like that so the washington post it turned out was

[27:39] listening to the show and uh they did an article about it and they said that this was an example of russian propaganda interfering in the american judicial system right three americans sitting around and talking about corruption in the judicial system and sounding just like their man balco exactly and and what they said and this is i've actually i've actually made a copy of it to save it as a souvenir they said that by doing this segment every thursday i was weakening our democracy

[28:13] that's what they said that i was weakening our democracy by criticizing the judicial system and then uh georgetown university did some kind of academic paper in which they said the same thing that i was perpetuating russian stereotypes of the american judicial system by by criticizing it jesus christ dude how do you win against something like that i mean the the lack of historical

[28:43] reference there too is just spectacular right right like this sounds like the not just the birchers but like the right wing of the birchers saying that anybody who wants civil rights for blacks is an agent of the commies because the commies talk about how blacks are mistreated in america exactly if you want to do something about that then you agree with them and that's all we need to know and now this is the liberals now this is the liberals now in america you gotta

[29:14] love it yeah it's true um well and it's and look when i say their man balco he's my guy too man i think ellie balco was absolutely great and he formerly was at cato and reason and essentially promoted up to the post i guess because you know they needed somebody who understands police issues um on his level and you know i guess from their point of view he's a right winger not because he's a libertarian he's not a right winger at all but no you know what i

[29:45] mean like no he's not from their point of view he's not a leftist he's more grounded in constitutional law and this kind of thing you know for his his arguments and all that so he's not a leftist crusader but more of a constitutional type one um but man he does such great work on exactly what you're talking about there and really hell the washington post i think i won't say they're unparalleled but they are neck and neck right there with the best projects for keeping track of police violence in america yes they're in the killings

[30:16] i mean this is really their job are they just you know back to jason leopold right at the time that it was not the russians who hacked the dnc and gave that stuff to uh wikileaks but right at the same time jason leopold was getting his giant foia release from the state department when you think about the most scandalous some of the most scandalous of the hillary clinton emails they didn't come from wikileaks in the dnc you can find them at wikileaks because the sanchez uh catalogued them there but they came

[30:46] from from our guy leopold and uh and i'm a personal friend of his he's a personal friend of mine going back you know many years um i'll scold him a little bit because he got a couple things wrong i'm mad about but not really but um he's the one who released all the ones from sydney blumenthal advising hillary clinton on the libyan war and he you know he's the one who released a bunch of those came from in fact where sydney blumenthal is warning her that hey our guys are rounding up blacks and murdering them look out and then the war kept going for seven months after that

[31:18] that's kind of that was jason that did that so at the same time where this was vladimir putin's plot to destroy and disrupt and destabilize our democracy to benefit donald trump well does that apply to jason from buzzfeed who's clearly a leftist and or a progressive at least and and um and clearly is not in the tank for trump whatsoever but he's just doing his damn job as a journalist getting foia records on the previous secretary of defense i mean pardon me on the previous secretary of state

[31:50] exactly how in the world jason leopold has not won a pulitzer prize is a mystery to me yeah he deserves one he's got some real good ones and the more he relies on documents the better he does jason because you can never question his conclusions they're always based on documentary evidence yeah and his sources have fun burning him sometimes i don't think it's fair he gets jerked around by liars from time to time yeah um but uh he is a good dude

[32:20] i know him personally and he is and and he does a hell of a lot of great work with those foias uh as well um and and i had forgotten that he was the one who got that dirt on ken delanian the lion yes people just type in ken delany and even misspell it google will help you ken delanian cia it'll come right up because he got criticized widely for this like wow you really can't do that man even reporters at the washington post in the new york times were like ken geez yeah what do you think a little over the top bro

[32:54] oh man so true um anyways so um let's talk about mint press news yeah uh well tell me everything you know about him i know i got a couple of friends there and in the past more than that um they come and go but they've done a hell of a lot of great journalism over there what's wrong with them is there something wrong with them i need to know john kiriakou oh my god you know uh mint press news is owned by a jordanian-american woman named minar adley i know minar i've known her for

[33:26] many years and she's a terrific journalist and besides being a terrific journalist she's a good manager and she has put together mint press news and made it into a highly respected alternative news site independent news site she's constantly under attack i'm sure that part of the reason is that she's a practicing muslim and uh and a woman and a progressive

[33:57] uh and she's uh she's pro-palestinian as you might imagine so she gets beaten about the face and head from all different directions well when paypal went after consortium news they also went after mint press news and suspended their account as well when newsguard went after consortium newsguard also went after mint press and you know i've got a lot of friends who have cycled through mint press um half a dozen or so

[34:27] and they're all serious journalists they're all youngish people with degrees in journalism who are out there looking for the big scoop doing investigative work and they're not doing it for the money god knows that and just because you don't tow the the dnc line on issues like ukraine or israel then you're not to be taken seriously and if people continue reading you then the government or others turn to

[34:58] organizations like paypal or newsguard or prop or not to try to shut you down or to steer uh viewers and clicks away from you yeah this is the the world we live in now it's outrageous yeah and you know what too because uh we're stuck with this left right thing no matter how bad the liberal democrats get all we've got's a bunch of damn republicans so we so desperately need a viable third party i you know you know me well enough to know that that i

[35:29] campaigned in 12 states with gary johnson back in 2016. i thought he would have been a terrific president and um you know he told me something that has really stuck with me and that is that the libertarians the libertarians would be so much more popular in so many more states if they had a benefactor if money wasn't an issue like it's not an issue for the democrats or republicans you know that advertisement that the libertarians always always uh promote that

[36:01] you know in your heart you know you're a libertarian that's true when you give people that questionnaire that's on the libertarian party website everybody comes up as a libertarian because civil rights and civil liberties are important to us but it's all about the money and uh you know i get these i get these emails from the libertarian party they crack me up because they're so breathless they're like oh my god joe blow just got elected to the anchorage alaska water board he's a

[36:31] libertarian and i'm like yeah that's that's great but we need a libertarian in congress to start guiding people you know or to stand up for for what's important to us and we're just not there yeah well as long as you brought it up i'll go ahead and tell you that right now there's a project on to reform essentially the national libertarian party there are thousands and thousands of new members most of them coming in by way of what's

[37:03] called the mises caucus and that's essentially me and my friends and uh the thing that is is we want to make the libertarian party great again and what we don't have is a billionaire and you're right that that sure would help if we had a billionaire however i think uh once the reno reset is accomplished in uh at the end of this month then we're gonna have a whole new uh round of uh intake of new members and

[37:34] of new donors and of new excitement and essentially uh you know having a grand reopening of the libertarian party great under new management in the name of ron paul in the name of annihilating central banking and war and stuff like that and that is exactly what we need so it's on and it's happening and by the way if anyone listen to this is the delegate to the national convention and you're part of our mises group for the love of god please show up

[38:04] don't not show up and if you're a delegate to the national convention and you're not on board for this mises caucus thing well i am and you ought to really consider it maybe talk to me when you see me there on friday and we'll see if we can have a little conversation i can win you over to our side here because uh it's on and for a very good cause and then you know what it's true we used to have ron and rand had a strategy that included playing this stuff down especially for the first few years there in a way where it really

[38:34] just we went from having a national leader to just not having one and we're really working on that in the form of our next presidential candidate here but um the thing of it is um you're right that it absolutely is time and when the libertarians are part of the conversation yep we win it you know yeah it's that's the standard because we're the ones who care most about this stuff and have thought this stuff through in a way because we don't have any power we just really think of it in a

[39:06] non-partisan way in just a cause effect solution sort of a way rather than just what the other side is saying about us and reacting against that and all that stuff you know yep yep you're exactly right because the other side isn't saying anything about us right we're not even that's so we're just like how can we really solve the problem of drug abuse or whatever it is are foreign what's mitch mcconnell going to say if i say this yeah or what's schumer going to do if i propose this amendment

[39:38] yeah you know you don't get that at all and i understand how rand was going to the senate and had to find a balance but i don't think he found a very good balance although he does seem to be getting his footing more and more recently so i hope so i he's been particularly good the last couple of months i think yeah that's true yeah especially on you know on an emotional issue like what's going on with russia where he's willing to say man why didn't you just take nato membership off the table come on exactly things like that he knows that he's getting himself in hot water but he

[40:08] doesn't seem to give a damn so well you know if i give him credit for that he said that he said that what a a couple of weeks ago and msnbc and cnn immediately jumped on him that he's a putin apologist and he doesn't understand the suffering of the ukrainian people and then a few days ago the pope said exactly the same words right it's like you're going to call the pope a russian apologist now or are you going to give this a serious analytic look well at the daily beast they call

[40:39] them a conspiracy theorist and everywhere else i think they mostly just ignored it right oh my god i saw somebody joking on twitter that oh look see the pope listens to the scott horton show just because which is really obviously just a reference to you can't find this point of view very many places not that it's wrong but you know wow all right well so listen i hope that uh you guys get back personed again or you know figure out how to get back on some sort of

[41:12] whatever the closest substitute to paypal is other than bitcoin and get that going and let us know too man make sure and tag me in tweets about it and whatever and i'll try to promote whatever alternatives you guys come up with we'll blog about it at antiwar.com and things like that appreciate it yeah i mean hey you guys do great work over there we're all counting on you and you do too it's always a pleasure all right well take care john appreciate man thank you take care bye-bye the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in la

[41:45] apsradio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org
