 Hey guys, this is the Bishop with Radio Rothbard and we've got a great offer only for Radio Rothbard listeners. You've been talking a lot of late about Murray Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right and if you want to get your own copy, for one you should already have one, but if you don't yet, that's okay. We have a 20% off coupon code at the Mises store. Just hit code Rothpod, R-O-T-H-P-O-D and you'll get 20% off a new copy of Betrayal of the American Right. One of my favorite books of Rothbard, one that I think you'll definitely enjoy, particularly if you're a fan of this show. Welcome back to Radio Rothbard, though Bishop here joined, as always, by Ryan McMakin. We have a special guest for today's episode, Brandon Buck, who I was very happy to meet at this year's RGS. Brandon is getting his PhD at George Mason History, but his focus is on a topic that is unfortunately relevant to today's world, kind of the history of the anti-war right. Before we begin, Ryan, last week's episode, we got a lot of great feedback. Did you get any particular interesting emails from last week's show on the right against the regime? Well, I did get an email from Joshua Tate, who wrote that article we had talked about a lot at the Bull Work. He was very polite. I thought we had trashed the article too much to earn any politeness, but I mean, he was right. We actually had said, right? I said, I basically agree with this article, except that for the framing, right? Because he was talking about how the issue is, is that suddenly the right is waking up to this idea that they actually oppose what the government is doing and not just the welfare state aspect of it. And then so the real area of disagreement was, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Or is it a dangerous thing? I of course think it's a good thing because as we'll talk about today, the right is just so law for so long played real nice with the regime and its wars and its socialism and stuff. Yeah, we criticize Medicaid every now and then, but basically everything else the regime does is fine. Social security, they never actually criticized that. And then of course, openly support wars. And it's been this way since 1945 at least. But our guest, I think, will probably provide a lot more detail there on that. So I'm looking forward to our discussion today specifically on the domestic views on foreign policy. And that's a great lead-in. So Brandon, one of the things I love about your research project is that I'm sure, particularly if you're listening to this podcast, at least you have pasting familiarity with Rothbard's narrative of the betrayal of the American right, how the neo-conservatives were able to take over the right side of American politics and the Republican Party and the dire consequences that it had for the second half of the 20th century and the days we live in now. But your research builds on that narrative with a lot of very empirical work. I know you've spent a lot of research coming through congressional voting records and all that sort of fun stuff. So for our audience, can you just explain a little bit about your research project and kind of the work that you've been doing going through with your PhD? Yes. So my research started with that Rothbard sort of 54-55 sort of window. That is to sort of agreed upon scholarly consensus by people who study both the early national security state and American politics. And of course, it's also held on to by folks like Rothbard, Justin Romondo, Bill Kaufman, and other folks who are certainly closer to these events described. So I came with this project with a question because I also knew about Rothbard, the paleo strategy Buchanan in 92. So I was curious where did right wing non-interventionism go in that after that sort of 54-55 window? And so very quickly, I discovered that it didn't really go anywhere. It survives in a kind of attenuated form, a sort of fortress America vision for the Cold War world. And while Rothbard and Co were certainly right that a lot of changes happened in that sort of 54-55 window, Taft dies in 53, national review begins up in that time frame as well. A lot of folks pass away, Garrett Garrett being one of them. If you turn your gaze towards Congress and towards other forms of conservative media, you'll find that much of the non-interventionism of the interwar period survives despite the necessities of the Cold War world. So very interesting. And can you talk about some of these kind of congressional figures? Because I know with kind of the way that history is written, right? We focus on presidents, right? We focus on the victors of sort of the national inner party debates. But obviously, you know, particularly the 20th century, the regional conflicts are very fascinating from a variety of perspectives, right? You can think about various Southern populists within the Democratic Party that obviously do not fit kind of your standard narrative of the left becoming, you know, the more liberal, you know, culturally left sort of style of things. But I know you highlight within your work some of the right-wing politicians, particularly I think with the Midwest, right, that with their votes, right, with their actions within Congress, you know, they were on the losing side of this gradual ramp up of, you know, second half of the 20th century kind of American imperialism abroad. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, some of the interesting congressional figures that were kind of keeping this fight alive, at least within the halls of Congress? Yes. So the Midwest, so the rural Midwest of the Republican Party hangs on to much of its non-interventionism coming out of the interwar period. So in the interwar period leading up to World War II, the sort of headquarters of American non-interventionism was in the Midwest due to a variety of historical, you know, factors we can get into if you like. But these folks remain largely unchanged after the end of World War II, whereas the Northern Republicans of a more liberal and moderate stripe who go into the hukuhu during the interwar period were more sympathetic to non-interventionism. They're really changed by the events of the war. However, these holdouts in the Midwest are not. They do sort of bend a little bit on protections for Taiwan. Once again, back in importance in the news, but on other aspects, particularly on the issue of foreign aid, they remain every bit as entrenched as they were during earlier periods, even more so. There was a little bit of compromise in the immediate aftermath of World War II via the Marshall Plan. It was sold as a temporary measure. How often have we heard that before? But it becomes institutionalized as the Cold War goes on. And so these holdouts in the Midwest maintain their resistance and try to sabotage these plans in Washington. And the other aspect were some elements of multilateralism and aspects of defense packs and the like. So as late as 1965, the Republican right wanted to pull U.S. troops out of Europe, with the exception of West Berlin nearly as a kind of tripwire for the Soviets. And they wanted to do the same for East Asia, despite having a certain soft spot for certain governments in the Pacific. And throughout all this, they maintained a sort of dissident view of the Second World War. And I think this is really the sort of lifeblood of their dissident view in the Cold War. They did not view the Second World War as this purely righteous accident that was forced upon the United States with the events of Pearl Harbor, but rather it was the inevitable outcome of American involvement in the Philippines and in Europe during World War I. Well, I remember in the... Well, I wasn't there. But in the late 70s, in the wake of Vietnam, and of course what you got is you have Lyndon Johnson basically really starting that war, sustaining it, making the buildup happen. And then of course Truman with Korea, right? So I remember in the late 70s, it became kind of a talking point among some Republicans to refer to those quote-unquote Democrat wars. And so try to position the GOP a little bit as the anti-war party, recognizing, of course, that these wars were very unpopular. But of course that was all pre-Ragan when it became gospel to revive the public relations value of the military and to really play up the value of military intervention. And Grenada, I suppose, is perhaps hailed as a big success. And the next thing you know then in the late 80s, you got Panama and so I think that slow buildup then to Iraq, the first Iraq war. And then I guess in typical dem fashion, Clinton just normalizes all of that as well as the multilateral aspect of it. And then you get 9-11. And so when I were talking about this, I think offline last time on how the anti-interventionist thing never really quite went away on the right. And it wasn't really due too much to theoretical weakness. They had some good arguments and they certainly had people who were sympathetic to the point of view on the right. But 9-11 just was really just devastating to the argument in a similar way that Pearl Harbor was devastating to the America First Committee. And that just convincing people under those conditions that because people just don't understand diplomacy, they don't understand that defensive military is different from just invading a bunch of countries and that those things don't necessarily make you saver. It's real hard to explain those things. So it's just much easier to say, hey, these people attacked us. So let's start a new war. And so just those two events were always devastating to the idea of non-intervention. And it never killed the idea intellectually or theoretically, but you have to then get people beyond those sorts of historical events to start taking seriously the idea of non-intervention again, it seems. Yeah, you mentioned the late 70s. And so in 73, what you might think of is like the last of the old right retires, a man named H.R. Gross. You can kind of think of him as a sort of proto-Ron Paul in a way. And he quite tragically voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution despite being very vocally against the war in Vietnam. But he hung around into the early 70s and opposed rather vehemently the expansion of the war into Laos and Cambodia. And I was just going through his papers a few weeks ago and reading these constituent letters, people like begging him to do what you can to get out of this. We were told this war was going to be ramping down. And he says that he's trying, but there's this kind of sense of futility because what vestiges there were on these kind of issues from the late 50s and early 60s had, through attrition, either they just died in office or there was also, as I'm sort of arguing in my dissertation, the FCC and the IRS were being leveraged against some of these so-called ultra-right broadcasters who held onto some of these dissident views of Vietnam. So one of the quandaries I'm trying to get my arms around is how is it that the old rights view of America and the world becomes the sunset at precisely the same time one would think it would have its most sort of fertile ground? And not just internationally, but also domestically, right? Like all of the revelations of what all the shenanigans to CA and the FBI were up to throughout the 60s. But this seedbed has been basically sort of cleared out first by the sort of Eisenhower wing of the Republican Party at the top and then through folks like William F. Buckley, policing people on his right. So by the time you get to the 70s, what vestiges of this ideology there were have basically been shunted into the libertarian movement and perhaps like the Rockford Institute in Illinois. But what small threads of institutional power which had hung on at the end of 45 are basically cut by the mid 70s and that's how you get reaganism and neoconservatism and the like. This is one of the very interesting and kind of troubling parallels that we see right now. I know you've written about the way, as you mentioned, the FCC and some of these other government institutions. You think back at Pearl Harbor, right? That's an attack on American soil. You think about 9-11. It's an attack on American soil. Some guy comes up to a bar and punches you in the face. It's the emotional response to fight back. It doesn't matter if some other guy that told him that you were hitting on his girl, right? So he felt that he was justified in doing so, right? There's a natural reaction there to kind of fight back. But it seems that the amount of effort the regime requires to get normal Americans to have that sort of emotional buy-in into conflicts that did not start with kind of shedding of American blood on American soil. That requires an incredible amount of propaganda power. And you talked about what are the articles you've written about the way that the living threat of fascism was kind of used as a way of demonizing these sort of non-interventionist right-wingers, which again seems extremely relevant when you have Joe Biden out there actively bragging, taunting. I think yesterday it was these heroic right-wing Americans that want to stand up against the American government. Well, you're going to need F-15s. Again, funny to do that shortly after the anniversary of pulling out of Afghanistan. Or the explicit line of the Democratic Party that the current Republican Party is essentially a neo-fascist movement trying to destroy American democracy, which of course is meant to embody everything good in the world. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic and maybe some parallels that you see between what's happening in the 60s and that era and the kind of modern political environment we find ourselves in? Yeah, I certainly think we're living through a third brown scare. I think the first brown scare would be the interwar period, as you say, this fear of domestic fascism. Yeah, I mean, there was an American boom, there were silver shirts, there were some people of the, you might call it the far right or the illiberal right, but they were so far few in number, they had no real political power. The Nazis were horrible at domestic espionage in the United States, what few agents they had got captured. But nevertheless, these small groups and their rather tenuous connection to more mainstream figures or bodies like the America First Committee was used to gin up this fear of domestic fascism. And this did attenuate the argument about intervention and then about America in the post-war period. We think of the interwar period as posting essentially just like anti-war right, but there were anti-war progressives, there were liberals who were opposed to intervention, but partially through this sort of brown scare, those people are sort of scared away or severed off from the forces on the right. And this had a bit of a, this is sort of tamped down in the post-war period. I recently came into some great sources where I figured in Robert E. Wood, who was a chief figure amongst the America First Committee, was writing to a senator named Carl Mont asking him to turn the DICE committee, which originally was used to hunt the far right, for tool to go after domestic communists and the people who smeared him during the interwar period. So you can see like the second red scare really is being a form of payback for the brown scare. I think this is something that Rothbard mentions in Betrayal of the American Right quite openly is that he wanted revenge for being accused of being a fascist in the 30s. And then if this boomerangs back, you can argue that there was a second brown scare, which is really what we call the ultra-right fear in the 1960s. Well, once again, the fear of domestic fascism was used to curtail the Overton window. I mean, Barry Goldwater was accused of being a fascist. I think we also know that story. And we're sitting through it again. And I think unlike the earlier periods, so one of the things that I've been writing about is conspiracism and conspiratorial thinking and arguing that the mode that we're living in where people don't trust the institutions is well-grounded in reality, like empirically. A big part of the brown scare and the interwar period were people on the right and others more generally understanding that they are basically deceived into entering World War I, like the British intelligence was trying to gin up American opinion to support intervention. They had suspicions that the same thing was happening. And they didn't know it at the time, but it was. I mean, the British intelligence again was trying to gin up American support for entry into the war, I mean, for perfectly understandable reasons, right? They wanted to survive as a nation. But they went so far as to interfere in American elections. They actually got a very prominent non-interventionist unceded, many of Hamilton fish the third. So revelations of this came out in the early 60s, right as the SEC and the IRS were launching their war against the first generation of conservative talk radio. So conservatives who were alive in the 30s, now active in the 60s, they're coming to find out that, oh, wait a minute, we were right, like, there really was a conspiracy against us. And so you fast forward 30 years later, the revelations of the SEC and the IRS come out in the 90s. And so now you have two, really three generations of sort of malfeasance on the part of the American establishment feeding into this notion that, yes, the institutions are in fact corrupt and arrayed against us. So I think part of this sort of fear of fascism now is the fact that only half of the country seems to be recognized this history. The fact that the government has used its institutions and its agencies to pin in the overton window, particularly on the issues of foreign policy. Well, and people I think recognize they're being lied to a lot of the time as an important component of the failure of institutions. And that was a point Lou Rockwell often made is like, look, the regime lies to you all the time, but they especially lie to you on foreign policy. You really can't believe what they're telling you there. And that was often the blind spot that you would get on the right is, oh, you know, you can't trust the government, I don't believe anything they say, what's that? What's that? The federal government told me that Iran is planning to invade America and destroy everyone in America. Well, I believe that 100% do whatever it takes to invade and destroy Iran, because the federal government told me. And so it was just kind of this weird sort of self-defeating view of the regime that the right was taking. But I think it's taking more and more to get people worked up. I mean, even in World War Two, Paul Fussell in his book, War Time, notes that even in Europe, they really didn't know why they were there. And because everyone agreed that you have to fight Japan, because Japan bombed us and let's obliterate the Japanese. But Fussell, who served in Europe, said that the kind of the thinking among their common soldiers in Europe was like, I'm not quite sure why we're fighting Germany. And he said, when we would ask the higher ups, it was just some really generic stuff about fighting global fascism and how Nazis didn't like America. And they were fascists, and we're going to liberate Europe and all that stuff. It had nothing to do directly with defending the United States, as you could easily tell people who are fighting in the Pacific. Hey, look, the Japanese, they want to invade America. And so even then it required a bit of effort to get the Americans to buy into the war in Europe side of things. And you probably had continued then the issues with that, like Korea, Vietnam, you had to manufacture the whole domino theory thing. And it was quite delightful then to see finally, when they tried to get the US to the Americans to support the invasion of Syria, nobody seemed particularly enthusiastic about it. Nobody seemed to care. So they ended up putting a few small units in Syria and doing sort of a stealth invasion there. But I think the hope was among the neo-conservative crowd was that, well, this is the new Iran or Iraq, and we'll get everybody buying into this idea. We need troops and boots on the ground in Syria, and the support just never came. So it was at that point that I was wondering, maybe people are starting to kind of learn their lesson on this, that maybe it's getting harder and harder to convince people that this latest war is a good idea. And I think maybe some progress has actually been made in that respect. But I think as some of the point that Brandon is making is that it was never actually totally easy. There was always some effort that had to be made. And I think maybe when you look back on it, you just see the winning side of it. And you just think, well, everybody agreed that this was a great idea. But I think it is important to highlight that there is usually a sizable amount of dissent in a lot of these cases. But then the Washington elites just end up taking a position. And we've known, of course, for decades that elites don't have the same foreign policy positions as most of the taxpayers. There's usually a big gulf there in opinion. And that persists back into the 40s and 50s even. There were some actual disagreements. So I think it's important to keep in mind that this is not a new thing, right? The idea that there's some dissent here as far as foreign policy goes. And of course, the elites also don't have nearly as much skin in the game. I know one of the articles that you wrote, Brandon, you highlight the difference in casualties for Americans in rural America versus the size of the population within elite cities. One of the reasons that so much state capacity is needed to really fund that war machine is because a war machine churns out the bodies of Americans that are not those generally connected to those in power. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic of your research? Yeah. So American foreign policy is fundamentally liberal. And I use that word advisedly. I don't mean leftist. I mean like a kind of center left liberal technocratic sort of view of the world. So it's always been kind of like a weird graft onto American conservative thinking. I mean, conservatism in America is basically sort of right liberalism. So I think in some way, one of the reasons why this is coming apart now is because since the 70s, with the elimination of the draft and the inflammation of selective service, we've, you know, the US government has basically created a martial cast where you have, you know, smaller and smaller segments of American society, more and more generational service, particularly in the American South, and also in the interior, you know, serving in the United States military. So, you know, as I've argued in some of my work is that, you know, over the past 20 years, you know, the burden of service has been pushed more and more into the exurbs and the rural areas of the United States, all across the United States. I mean, you know, one of the interesting things about this movement is it is sort of decentralized, whereas before the non-interventionist right was mostly Midwestern, not entirely, but mostly. Now it's spread out through, you know, parts of the Rust Belt, parts of the South, the Middle West, you know, and the Rocky Mountain West. And, you know, part of what I argue is that this disparity in service has exacerbated other aspects of our cultural war and our domestic, you know, political squabbles, right? You know, regardless of how you feel about immigration, it doesn't make sense to argue that you can't afford to build a border wall or increase, you know, policing of the border while also spending a bajillion dollars to police other, you know, country's borders. Similarly, I think this has exacerbated this, you know, the sort of great sort, as it's been called, this creation of a sort of upper middle class versus sort of everybody else, that most folks who live in high income, you know, zip codes don't join, join the military, they certainly don't enlist. So I think this disparity is being wide and because there is this sort of view of middle America and rural America as being like part of the provinces, right? Like we're seeing this emergence of imperial thinking within the United States, which is fascinating because in the old days, people in the Midwest view themselves as being in a colonial relationship with the East. And I think you're starting to see that reemerge again. But this way, this time it's, it's, it's a two way street where people are openly, openly talking about populism as being like kind of rebellion in America against the sort of metropole. Brian, if I can ask a personal question, you yourself served in the military, can you talk, did you feel, again, obviously this was before diving into, you know, this is this sort of deep research project, but did you feel that sort of class difference serving, you know, versus say the politicians on TV or perhaps certain types of military leaders that do not go the enlisted route? Did you feel that kind of on the ground, or did your colleagues and brothers-in-arms, did they ever kind of comment on that sort of class distinction there that you're kind of talking about? Oh yeah. I mean, so I joined before 9-11. I come from a firmly upper middle-class background, basically enlisted as an actor of rebellion against my like, you know, elite bourgeois background. And yeah, I'm in, you know, in the sort of platoons that I served and I was basically only one or two of a person of my socioeconomic status. Most people were, you know, working-class white people from the rural areas or working-class black folks or Hispanics from the inner cities. And there was this sort of class tension or like, you know, gentle shitting about, you know, having a silver spoon or so they thought anyways. So yeah, I mean, without my military time, I probably never would have been exposed that regularly to working-class people. Just wouldn't have happened. I also served in the National Guard, which is a little bit different because it's a kind of a different socioeconomic strata. But even there it's basically skewed towards, you know, towards working-class people, you know, great college jobs, as you might say. And it's interesting because this is something that I think people, you know, I'm working on a PhD. I'm certainly not a blue-collar guy. But this is one of these aspects of the kind of class divide, which seems to be completely lost on people in my educational cohort that this exists. And unless it's addressed, it could lead to some serious problems in this country. One of the interesting things going on right now is that it seems that the regime is kind of actively provoking precisely the types of people that historically served in the military. I mean, you kind of saw a de facto purge of sorts with the use of vaccine mandates, where you had a lot of people fall out of military service. Because of that, a lot of people felt they had no other option and at the very least harbor an element of resentment to that. And I remember vividly, you know, I thought one of the most telling sort of portraits of modern American politics was the Biden administration, you know, where they bring in all these National Guard members to fortify the inauguration after January 6. And yet they didn't trust military members with ammo, right? So I can imagine a more fitting illustration of the modern regime than a militarized presidential inauguration full of service members that they don't trust to actually fire. It goes to the legitimacy of the standing power arrangements. I know, Ryan, you've talked a little bit about the falling enlistment rates as perhaps one of the positive indications of growing distrust of the regime. I have a feeling that it takes a whole lot of college education in a lot of time in D.C. to think that you're going to replace Georgia Farm Boys with a bunch of trans women of color to make up the backbone of the American military. It seems to be, though, where we are in America 2022. Well, did you see, speaking of that, maybe the plan to ensure that you still have Georgia Farm Boys applying to the military is to tank the economy. Yes, this is an interesting conspiracy theory. And I don't use that as a pejorative. Maybe there's some elements of this. Did you see that tweet? It was some GOP congressman now there are good arguments against loan forgiveness that Biden is doing. Lots of good arguments against it. But this GOP congressman gets there and says loan forgiveness is bad because now we won't have working class people over a barrel paying off student loans. And now they won't have to join the military to get the GI bill. Now people can just pay off their college costs without having to go through the military first. And he thought this was just a brilliant patriotic argument. He's like basically he was saying we aren't screwing poor people enough and forcing them into the military. This is a GOP thing. So I mean, just astounding that he said that part out loud. And I guess obviously he had this thought, right? I guarantee you, he said this to someone else like over lunch already and they all laughed and thought that was a brilliant observation. And then he says it on Twitter, just like truly bizarre. And for context, he's like Jim Banks, he's the head of the Republican Study Committee, which is kind of supposed to be the more conservative, serious wing of the Republican party. It was kind of the precursor to the Freedom Caucus before the Boehner, Ryan types kind of took it over. It was like 2014 or so. But like Banks was someone who he talks a lot about, you know, sort of working class blue collar values. And yet so this is not like Kevin McCarthy or some sort of like obvious dopey person out there. This is someone who in theory is one of the better than average Republicans who has this thought, which again just goes to just how insane that the quality of your average Republican congressman in DC really is even in 2022. Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I, you know, in some sense, I think the right is coming around on this notion of interventionism, but it's not necessarily coming around on this notion of militarism. Because, you know, once upon a time, to be a traditionalist conservative was to sort of do military service with some suspicion, especially for the draft, right? And there's this notion that the war in the draft upsets traditional families, it upsets your local communities, it pulls people out of their desired professions. But in that 48 to 55 window, it's when, you know, the right starts to sort of acquiesce to most aspects of defense spending, and that has been something that has been, you know, stuck. I suspect part of that might be, you know, material, especially in the in the Sun Belt as the center of as the political center of the American right shift south and into the west, you're not in economies that are more firmly in line with with the needs of the Defense Department. And you also just at this point, you have like three or four generations of inertia built up and with this reverence for military service. So that's going to be a difficult thing, I think, to, well, maybe not. That's probably going to be the sort of toughest nut to crack, breaking that aspect of the sort of mind of the American right. And then, and oddly enough, I think that's going to be something that that the center is going to be the most resistant to. Like, you know, how dare you move away from like the slot that you've been that you've been put in, which is to be the sort of, you know, the enforces for the American state. So of course, one of the forces that's been kind of pushing that sort of narrative has been an explicit intellectual figures on the right. As we mentioned earlier, so the purges of the the Buckley rights, and I was going to make a joke about, you know, it's hard to imagine Buckley in a foxhole, but you know, given his perhaps some State Department leanings, you know, he's not completely out of the military industrial complex with some of his real life experiences, perhaps. But it's interesting seeing that dynamic as well, be repeated, kind of with the modern American history. I know, you know, I remember back in 2016, you had Kevin McCarthy joking that he thought Trump in a California relatively non-interventionist congressman, Dana Rohrbacher, you know, we're on Putin's payroll, right? Again, why in the world Trump didn't purge Kevin McCarthy immediately after that again, another weakness of Trump right there. Now you have people like Dan Crenshaw, you know, I patched John McCain, you know, actively accusing Marjorie Taylor Greene of, you know, trying to become the next anchor of like Russia today, which is exactly the sort of, again, you know, if you're against, you know, pumping in tens of billions of dollars and untold weaponry into an unstable part of a corrupt Ukrainian regime, then somehow you are the one that's being anti-American, right? You are the one siding with the enemy here, which again, just the propaganda playbook doesn't change, it just kind of repeats throughout the kind of the current political framework. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's just it's just binary thinking. I mean, and unfortunately, I think most people, this is sort of hardwired into us, it takes active effort to think about crises, not merely as the thing that's happening now, but the buildup for, you know, of decades, you know, or longer. So I think that's why this Russia, this accusation of, you know, fidelity to Putin is so effective, because most folks don't know that there was an active debate about, you know, American expansion to the East in the 90s before Putin even came to power, right? I mean, this has been a completely memory hold. So unfortunately, it's one of these tactics that's effective, especially now in the age of social media, which while it gives dissidents a voice, it also gives, you know, the regime, you know, a means of like, memetic power, they can just keep repeating the Putin-Russia thing, Putin-Russia thing, and it sticks, even if it's completely untrue, like, you know, President Trump was not, you know, particularly acrimonious with Russia, but that doesn't matter, because just, you know, the mere repetition of it, unfortunately, has a lot of power. Well, George W. Bush wasn't particularly acrimonious with Russia either, whether that hardly made him an agent of Putin. And of course, Obama too. It wasn't until, boy, when was it that Mitt Romney came out and declared Russia America's most important strategic enemy, basically, and it actually earned some shortals at the time, because it is obviously untrue, unless the U.S. just wants to make Russia its most important enemy. I mean, the fact is the Russia is no threat to the United States, unless the U.S. somehow manages to back it into a corner and provoke a nuclear war. Their conventional military is no match for the defensive capability of the U.S. Sure, if the U.S. decides to invade Central or Eastern Europe, and get involved in the conventional fight with the Russians there, who would be right next to their own supply lines, sure, that could be a problem for American conventional forces. But can you imagine the scenario under which Russia would be a problem for the United States in the Northern North Atlantic, off the coast of North America? I mean, it's just not a plausible scenario. But that's what I guess Mitt Romney wants us all to believe, because for whatever reason, he decided Russia was the problem. I mean, at least the people who are anti-China, they have some, they make some plausible arguments, right? China's this huge country, the huge economy, a huge footprint in the trade world. And I do disagree that the United States needs to confront China and East Asia, and that the United States needs to be a global hegemon, including East Asia. But at least that has some plausibility to it, whereas this idea that Russia was the biggest threat to the U.S. was just never really convincing at all for anyone who can look at some numbers regarding the military capability of this country versus the U.S. Navy and its own nuclear defenses and all of that. But somehow that's become the narrative where Russia is just the big thing. And it's been remarkable then to see how it's just come down on party lines. So if you're a John McCain type, a Mitt Romney type, then the Russia is the enemy. So if you're a wealthy white GOP establishment politician, Russia's the enemy. If you're just a normal tax-paying American from Alabama, you've got other problems that don't include Russia, really. But those people then get denounced as tools of Putin. So it's a real bizarre, something I could not have predicted at all 10 years ago, how this weird thing would break out and that the right would somehow divide upon these lines. The thing is, is that the anti-Russia, the obsessed with Putin thing as a bad guy seems to be just sort of a plaything of the elites on the right, and not really hasn't permeated the populist base at all, whereas the left is now going all in on the national defense state. And there doesn't really seem to be much of an anti-war element left on the left at all beyond the hardcore leftists that I was friends with in graduate school, who we all got along because they were new left types and they liked Rothbard to a certain extent and all of that. But those people are all now 65 years old. So all that's left now are these sorts of people who shout you down on Twitter and their hardcore anti-Putin crazies, and that just seems to be it now. That's your choice. You can be a left winger who's obsessed with Putin, or you can be a right-wing elite also obsessed with Putin and it seems the only people opposed to World War III against the Russians is this populist right. And boy, in 2005 I would not have guessed that's how we would shake out. But of course that Mitt Romney view of foreign policy makes perfect sense if you understand that the responsibility of the American military is not the protection of the American homeland, but rather the enforcement of global liberalism abroad, particularly when you're dealing with white countries. The objection to Putin I think hits differently. Perhaps there's a little bit of the historical dynamic too, just kind of Cold War nostalgia, but the same sort of arguments are very rarely made with the same sort of passion for Saudi Arabia, because Russia looks European, Russia looks Western. And so therefore if you allow for non-liberal global powers to exist, then that is a threat against the entire purpose of the modern American military state. And of course that's precisely why Ukraine now looking to legalize gay marriage is a top wartime issue, because that is necessary to secure the flank of certain sort of American and European leaders that they are on our side and they are not the others on the cultural issues that are far more important to the current state of Western leaders than anything resembling the actual well-being of our own countries. You know it's fascinating watching this realignment, because in some ways it looks a lot like you know 1947, 1932, where the real intellectual force behind intervention now is the center left, because it's the liberal portion of the Democratic Party. So in some sense they've come home, right, like they're sort of back where they should be. You know the Iraq War kind of derailed that for a while, I mean let's be honest mainly because it was a Republican who watched it. They didn't say anything about Syria or Libya or Yemen or the expansion on wall in Pakistan. So in some sense we're sort of resetting the board back to something that makes a lot more sense. And going to what Tho is saying, I think part of this is because since World War II the very idea of particularism cannot be uttered, right, because fascism, particular Nazism, you know took particularism in its most horrible direction. We can't even think about nation states as being organic things that exist in reality, that had to have histories. So we're stuck in this sort of hyper-cosmopolitanism where it has to be the entire globe, because if the entire globe is not part of one system there will be war. And now that Cold War has ended, the people who are most resistant to the ideology is the right. And perhaps not at a great, you know, at a really deep intellectual level, but just an instinctual one, right? You know why is it that I have to sacrifice for liberties on the other side of the planet, especially as we've seen those projects fail, right? Like Afghanistan. I mean the fact that, I mean there's a reason why that's being memory holds so quickly is because the establishment cannot stand you asking questions, basic questions like is it possible to import liberal democracy? And you know, history show no, right? But the thing that we're told is that World War II, particularly with the Marshall Plan in both Europe and Japan, that modernity can be planned, it can be implemented by technocracy, and that is a model that can be imported elsewhere in the world. And this, I mean, Vietnam was sold this way, right? We think of it nearly as an exercise in anti-communism, but really it was an exercise in liberal internationalism, as was most of the prosecution of the Cold War. But now that the Cold War is over, I mean it's harder and harder to keep the right in line on these questions. They did it for a while with 9-11 and the War on Terror, but now that that scene's gone, it's difficult to see how they're going to be able to reconstitute the sort of paradigms of the Cold War. Yeah, I guess the key is to just keep casting about until you come up with an axis of evil that's sufficiently evil in the minds of a Midwestern American, that they'll subvert all their domestic interest then to the pursuit of this foreign policy goal. And that's what we saw. You would see those great right wing Midwestern guys like Howard Buffett, right? Saying things like, you know what we're being told to do? We're being told to basically give up all American values for the duration of the Cold War for 20, 25, he naively said 20, 25 years on this. And then maybe after it's all over, then we can have American values back, but until then everything's in the service of American foreign policy. And then of course Buckley just came out and said straight up, right? Well, if we need to adopt essentially a totalitarian bureaucracy in America to defeat the communists, well then that's just what we got to do. And so apparently this past muster with a lot of Americans, they thought, yeah that seems legit. We'll just put the US Constitution on hold until we defeat the commies. So you had this amazing blessing of the endless war essentially that lasted through the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. And boy, if you were the interventionist, right? That was just such a gift from the gods. And I think best case scenario is you get something like that back where there's always a huge foreign enemy. And the Chinese haven't managed, they haven't managed to whip that up even with the Chinese yet. Except, I mean you do see that in the people who are always referred, they never refer to the Chinese regime. It's always the CCP, have you noticed this? It's like a certain code you use among China obsessed right-wingers. We don't refer to Beijing like you would to any other regime, right? You refer to Beijing or Berlin or Moscow or whatever. No, no, it's just the CCP, I guess, to emphasize some sort of like tiny group of communists or something were running that country. But so that's like sort of a weird dog whistle that they use. But even those people seem to be pretty small. The number of people who are willing to fight a war with China over this issue. I mean the Taiwan thing doesn't seem to be getting a whole lot of traction. And then of course, I wonder how long it would take to get, to just have a few US battleship blown up with 6,000 sailors on board before people start to have second thoughts. They could go either way, right? They could double down and say, well, we can't stop fighting this war until it's over and I don't care how many hundreds of thousands of Americans have to die. But on the other hand, they might say, well, maybe this is a terrible idea. So I actually can't predict which way that would go. But it does seem like they're going to have to put a lot more effort to it because no new axis of evil seems to be working yet. Well, that definitely is the concern. And I think there's some naivete that you get in certain sort of libertarian circles about some of the actions that China, the Chinese regime has taken. I do think that there's an issue with, I think they commit explicit sort of economic fraud against American interest. I think that there are, I think China is a more explicitly hostile actor than some of these other countries that we've knocked over in kind of recent history in the way that they approach American Americans kind of broadly in that regard. On the other side of it, though, is that the same sort of miscalculation that kind of helped fuel the Soviet Union is, we're kind of seeing it peek out, I think increasingly as time goes on. The economic disarray of China right now, the economic hurdles that Beijing has right now, when you have protests going on, you have the consequences of lockdowns, you have the consequences of very bad debt within the system, you see them doubling down with credit expansion, you have Xi transitioning away from get rich to sustainable lifestyles, you shouldn't have more than one home, etc., etc. China's weakness is the consequences and the results of their own form of over-the-top intervention within the domestic economy. However, Washington seems to be doing everything it can to agitate internationally. I mean, not only do you have the high-profile political photo ops going on in Taiwan right now, which you can, for decades, now the default position of America is that Taiwan belongs to China. We've been playing this sort of proxy war with certain countries trying to get them to ensure that they continue to recognize the Taiwan regime while our official position is Beijing, etc., so this has been kind of an interesting dynamic for a while now, but now they're looking at billions of dollars on arms funding, trying to be proactive with the same sort of policies that we're now doing in Ukraine post-invasion. They're using the excuse of Russia's invasion in Ukraine to be proactive within Taiwan, which of course is going to do nothing but fuel agitation and, in its own right, create a very useful foil for the CCP to rally support amongst Chinese residents who are feeling the pain of the economic follies of that same regime. I do fear that you're going to end up, we were so desperate for a reaction from China, and I'm not sure that China is not kind of within the state of mind to perhaps give us exactly that sort of thing, which it goes back to the potential of something like a Pearl Harbor, like a 9-11, whether it's sinking a ship or doing something like that. If you box in a country like China far enough, I mean it's just like Russia. I mean, there's going to be a time there where their only calculation is going to be going on the offensive. Yeah, you know, going back to the domestic side, so I think as you both sort of mentioned, there is a bill coming up in Congress now for some, you know, a bajillion dollar, you know, arms deal to Taiwan, and it'll be interesting to see how those votes break down. Who opposed Ukraine and Taiwan? Because historically, the Republican Party has been the party of the Pacific, and the Democrats by and large have been the party of the Atlantic that held over even into the early Cold War, right? Some of the non-interventionists that I'm studying were kind of okay with some bilateral security arrangements, including with Taiwan. This goes all the way back to the 1898 with McKinley and the Philippines, so there's a lot of history there. There's a lot of inertia built up with conservatives who are more, you know, suspicious of American relations in Europe, but more kind to this notion of American benevolent empire in the Pacific. So I think if the gains made for the non-interventionists, right, if they're just to go away, it's going to be because of some sort of escalation in Taiwan. But, you know, even if you can't get enough voices to stop it, I don't undersell the notion of just having a very potent minority. You know, in the early national security state, obviously, it's grown into to be what it is today, but there's an argument to be made that it could have been a hell of a lot worse on the docket or programs like National Service, you know, universal military training for all American citizens that was a very real possibility coming out of World War II. There is this notion that the draft and military service was this great liberal project, right? It's almost sort of sold on a kind of new deal, sort of WPA kind of ideology, right? We're going to make American citizens through military service. And that program was killed and then, you know, sort of downgraded to a selective peacetime draft because there was so much anti-statism still left within this system, within Congress. You know, Truman quite famously tried to nationalize the steel industry, you know, that got killed. You know, there are some other aspects of defense spinning and in the early, you know, Cold War period that were either downgraded or killed because there was a intransigent minority. So even if the Republican Party cannot become fully this sort of party of non-intervention, so long as there's a 25-ish percent, you know, of people who really believe and are committed and to know how to use power in Congress, you know, some good things can come from this era in which we live. On that point, and I know we got to wrap up here soon, Tucker Carlson, I think is a very interesting figure within kind of American politics right now because he has the most watch show on cable news, which makes some, you know, I think particularly on the right, you know, particularly after the passing of Rush Limbaugh. I mean, I think it's very easy to argue that Tucker Carlson is the most influential voice within the American right. And he has been, you know, incredibly consistent for many years now on foreign policy, non-interventionism and questioning the regime's narratives and things like that. What do you think, how important do you think is that to help kind of fueling that anti-interventionist kind of minority if we can't get anything more than that? And secondly, are there any sort of historical figures that you would identify as sort of parallels to Tucker Carlson and having that very broad, non-interventionist platform that wasn't being overstated, right, you know, as the impact of like a father coffer or something like that, you know, are there any other sort of figures that you would identify as sort of precursors to Tucker that had a influential impact on maintaining that sort of non-interventionist strain within the right? Yeah. So, I mean, I certainly do think it's important because like you have to give people a narrative and it's not enough. So I think this is why, you know, sort of left-wing critiques of American imperialism fails because, you know, you can't keep, you know, poo-pooing the country that everyone lives in, right? You have to give them a sort of counter narrative. It's not enough to say that American empire merely is the product of just endless search for markets and, you know, this sort of deterministic notion of American power abroad, but someone like a Tucker or someone like people on the non-interventionist right, going all back to like Garrett Garrett, if you present empire as a matter of contingency, as a matter of choice, you can give people a counter narrative to say that America is better than this. You can give them a kind of civic nationalist idea of what America ought to be and how it ought to sort of behave in this world. So having someone like Tucker Carlson, I know he's controversial for some, I mean, whatever, but he is like a foot in the door to ask some of these more substantive questions while still giving people kind of a national narrative to sort of glob around. And as for like historic figures, I'm looking into someone by the name of Dan Smoot. Smoot, I sort of describe to my colleagues, he's kind of like a more demure version of Alex Jones, but with footnotes. But he had some of the, he asked some of these more substantive questions about America's involvement in the world. He was very critical of U.S.-Israeli relations. You know, he was of the opinion that American involvement in the Middle East was what was actually inflaming tensions in the region. He did not think that communism was a sort of prime mover of problems there. He felt the same way about problems in Europe that it was the presence of American troops, which were inflaming tensions and causing problems. So in some sense, I think Tucker is kind of like him because he has the willingness to say that it is the American regime, it is American government, which is the initiator of crises, or at least an active participant in them, not merely as like this like passive, you know, reluctant hegemon. It's this notion that American power does have agency in the world and that agency can bring about, you know, poor consequences. Well, Brandon, this has been great. Again, love your research. It was great spending time with you at Rothbard Village after RGS sessions. For those out there, if you want to follow Brandon's work, you can find him on Twitter at Brandon underscore buck. Anything else you want to pitch, Brandon? I guess this is the time in which I would normally pitch a book, but I don't have one yet. So just if you want to follow my work, you can follow me on Twitter or check out my website, brandonpbuck.com, all one word. Excellent. Again, for Ryan, for Brandon, this is Stoke Bishop. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.