 Libertarian Party presidential hopeful Jacob Hornberger has a message for Americans under 40. Right now the government's taken out a year paycheck, two trillion dollars a year, just for Medicare and Social Security. I'm saying, bull, keep your money cut out the middle man. I trust you to handle this on your own. Hornberger is the new front runner in the race for the LP nomination, following the withdrawal of Congressman Justin Amash. And he's running on a platform that's straightforward, concise and doctrinaire. He unapologetically stands for open immigration, free trade, an end to non-defensive military interventions, the legalization of all drugs, and the replacement of the income tax and the IRS with voluntary payments to fund the government. I talked with Hornberger via Zoom about the role of the Libertarian Party, what he would do as president, and how his unconventional beliefs about history inform his platform. Jacob Hornberger, thanks for talking with reason. Oh, thanks for mine. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here with you, Nick. Great. So, you know, let's start. Why do you want to be president? I want to live in a free society. I want everyone to live in a free society. When I discovered Libertarianism at 28 years of age, I was a young lawyer in my hometown of Laredo, and it came as a shock to me. All my life I'd been taught that I was in a free society. I've pledged allegiance in the public schools I'd attended and so forth, with liberty and justice for all. And here I'm discovering a philosophy that says you're not free at all. What year was that? So, you're 28. That would have been 1978. Okay. And you're coming out. You lived in Texas in Laredo your whole life. What were your parents? What did they do? And were they Democrats, Republicans, old-time conservatives, or yellow dog Democrats? I guess that would have been in play back in Texas. Well, at that time everybody was a Democrat. I mean, it was a rare thing to be a Republican in Texas in 1978. And my dad was active in Democratic Party politics. He had come from San Antonio, where he was born and raised and came down to Laredo for a temporary time and met my mother and fell in love and decided to stay. And my mother was a housewife. Her parents had immigrated from Mexico, from Lampasos and from Monterey, Mexico. And when I grew up, it was with the Democratic Party. I campaigned for Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy in the fifth grade. I went to the Johnson Ranch for a political rally with my dad in the Laredo delegation. I shook hands with Lyndon Johnson himself. And so everybody was a Democrat. My dad was mostly a conservative Democrat, but that's the way I grew up in Laredo. I became a liberal Democrat until I discovered libertarianism. Yes. And in your most recent book, you talk about your kind of conversion narrative. How did you become a libertarian then? Yeah, I was an ardent Democrat. I believe that the government served a useful and valuable function in helping the poor. I was on the Legal Aid Board of Trustees for the Local Legal Aid Society, which provided free legal assistance to the poor. I was the ACLU representative in Laredo. And then I ambled into the public library in Laredo one day. And I find these four little books called Essays on Liberty that had been published by the Foundation for Economic Education some 20 years before. And I started thumbing through them and it was a road to Damascus experience. I was just stunned by what I was reading. What stood out? Because then I'm thinking, when you're talking about being a liberal Democrat in Texas and the South more broadly was maybe not in the late 70s, but in your childhood it had been pretty conservative. If you were working for the ACLU, that meant that you believed in racial equality. You probably believed that women deserved equal rights to men and all sorts of things like that. What did the libertarian kind of philosophies, what itch did that scratch that wasn't being covered by Democratic Party politics in deep in Texas? Well, you're right about the ACLU. What attracted me to the ACLU was ardent devotion to civil liberties. You know, I was a lawyer and when they had their defense of the Nazi protesters in Skokie, Illinois, that just so deeply impressed me that here was an outfit that's standing on principle with a big price. But their economics just kind of bothered me. And then when I discovered these four little books, the big thing in which is one of the driving forces in my campaign here was the welfare state way of life. And the very thing that I had favored, that government exists to help the poor, the needy, seniors, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. And at that point I learned that if I ever am going to live in a free society, I have to get this dismantled, the whole welfare state way of life. That these books were essays by Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Reed, that made the moral case that it's for freedom, that it's wrong for the government to take money from one group of people and give it to another group of people, that that's not charity, it's just political stealing. And at that moment I learned that if you want a free society, you have to challenge the system in its fundamentals. If you buy into social security and Medicare, which are the crown jewels in which two of my principal opponents in this race favor, you've given away the store. You've got to go head on and make the case to the American people that this was a horrible system. We had the finest economic system in history based on economic liberty, the concept of economic liberty. People keep everything they earn, no IRS, no income tax, no social security, no Medicare, no welfare state. It produced the greatest standard of living in history and the most charitable nation in history, all voluntarily. The welfare state revolutionized American society and it destroyed our freedom. And that's why when I entered this race, I made it very clear I want to run a campaign of principle that goes after Democrats and Republicans on their welfare state as well as of course the national security state, which is a whole different subject. But you can't live in a free society as long as you live in a welfare state. Okay, so I want to get to your kind of thumbnail critiques of Trump and Joe Biden as well as run through some of the main issues in your campaign platform. I just want to finish this early, kind of the early Jacob Hornberger story. You were against the welfare state. You also talk in a location that used to be used much more commonly in the late 60s and early 70s. You're also against the warfare state, but you also have served in uniform. What did you do in the military and also when did you realize that the warfare state was also as problematic as the welfare state? All right, I went to college after graduating from high school in Laredo and I'd grown up on a farm on the Rio Grande. And so it was an unusual way of life. You know, I became an expert in bailing hay and selling hay there on our farm. We had a horse and cows and wild hogs and stuff. But I graduated from high school in Laredo, went to college at Virginia Military Institute. My dad had said, look, you know, you really ought to consider going to this school. The probability is you're going to end up in Vietnam. You want to be well trained. You're going to get a good education here. And so I did that. Well, I didn't mix well with the military structure at VMI. I didn't know anything about libertarianism or individualism, but man, the military structure there did not get along well. All the rules and the regimentation. I mean, to me, when people ask me today, what did you learn at VMI? And I said, well, I got a great education. They got me into law school. No question about that. But I also learned what it's like to live under a socialist fascist society where justice is arbitrary and tyrannical, where the state's taking care of you, where they know where you are every minute. And it made me realize how much I appreciate a free society because a military school is the opposite of a free society. Okay, I spent four years there, though, and I graduate and I'm a happy man when I graduated. And so I'm going to law school at this point, but I get commissioned. I'm a commissioned officer in the Army. I was an infantry officer. And I knew what I was doing. I mean, I was in the Ranger unit at VMI. Rangers are your elite military component in any school or in the military itself. So I go to law school and halfway through, I drop out to attend infantry school at Fort Benning, Georgia, three months. Well, I've got an eight year reserve commitment. And so I did those three months, which were not the most pleasant months in my life at doing infantry school in Columbia, Georgia, Columbus, Georgia. So then I go to Dallas and I wait tables at the Glory Hole Mine Company in Dallas to get the money to pay the rest of my schooling, which was about, you know, a semester and a half left. So I returned to law school and then returned to Laredo. And interestingly enough, they forgot about me in the military. I mean, they kept me in what was called a control group. So I never had to go to meetings. I never had to go to summer camp until my seventh year of my eight year commitment, I got orders to report to the quartermaster unit in Laredo. So I had to do one year of monthly meetings there that they never they never made me go to summer camp because I had an active law practice. And I told them that I said, look, I got trials and stuff every, you know, the whole time. So then the eighth year, they let me out of the last year of commitment. So I only ended up spending three months on active duty plus one month in the active reserves. Well, that's a good way to get out of serving in Vietnam. So while being patriotic, let's let me point out that Vietnam, when I graduate, see my first two years at VMI, I was, it was clear that we were all going to Vietnam. And, you know, they would make announcements in the mess hall sometimes on people that were killed in action that were VMI grads. And it was a somber time at it. I'll never forget those announcements. But my senior year was 72. And Nixon's pulling the troops out of Vietnam at this point. And then so they, I had a two year active duty commitment, they walked into our military science class one day and said, anybody here want to trade a eight year, I mean a two year commitment for eight years in the reserves and my arm practically came out of my socket. So Vietnam was winding down by the time I graduated. But I also should point out that I believed in the Vietnam War for the first two years. And then I realized what a Crockett was my junior year. And that's when I turned against the war as did many VMI cadets. Well, you know, we're going to talk about foreign policy in just a second. Let's before we get to Biden and Trump and your platform, let's talk about coronavirus, the coronavirus pandemic and the response to it, because, you know, that that is going to dominate the news between now and who knows when, what's what's your sense of the coronavirus lockdown? And, you know, are local state and federal governments doing this right or are they wrong? How would it be different if you were in office? Well, I take a different perspective on this. I go back to fundamentals that, you know, in 1994, I wrote a book called the day or published a book called the dangers of socialized medicine in my work at the future of freedom foundation, which I should emphasize is not endorse my candidacy. And we have always made the argument that in order to resolve the healthcare crisis, and we have to remember there's been a healthcare crisis long before coronavirus, that you've got to get government entirely out of healthcare. And that specifically means Medicare and Medicaid, which distinguishes me from at least two of the opponents in this race. That's the root cause of the soaring healthcare costs. When I was growing up in Laredo, before Medicare and Medicaid healthcare costs were like going to the grocery store. Nobody had major medical insurance because they didn't need it. Doctors gave free healthcare to people in Laredo. Poor people. I lived in the poorest city in the United States. They gave it away free. They never turned away anyone. Same way with Mercy Hospital, the Catholic hospital in Laredo. This is what my ideal of a healthcare system is, where people are doing things voluntarily. So then you've got this coronavirus crisis that has exposed the other aspect of this socialist system and Medicare and Medicaid are socialist programs. And that's central planning. You've got the Centers for Disease Control. You've got the FDA. You've got the president's task force. You've got the health and human services. Central planning, as you know, Nick, is a central construct of socialism. And so central planning always produces this kind of chaos that we see going on, shortages, mass ventilators and stuff. Same thing happened in the Soviet Union, which was based on central planning. You've got planned chaos, as Ludwig von Mises would call it. And underneath that, the foundation, these socialist programs, Medicare and Medicaid, well, when this system doesn't work and it clearly doesn't work, that's when they turn to tyranny and oppression. Same thing happened in the Soviet Union. That's where the lockdowns come in, the arrests, the threats, the handcuffing and so forth. What I'm bringing to this race is saying, let's build the foundation for a permanently healthy healthcare system by separating healthcare entirely from the state. Get rid of Medicare and Medicaid, which would cause healthcare costs to plummet down to low and reasonable levels. You get rid of the central planning. You have a dynamic free market healthcare system. The free market produces the best of everything. If we'd have a free market healthcare system, right now we would be looking to the healthcare industry for guidance on getting out of this thing. We wouldn't have politicians and bureaucrats who are showing their little inner tyrants and inner dictatorships. So what I want to bring to this race is a higher vision for the American people of how do we build the foundation for a free society and a healthy society, as compared to saying, let me show you how I'm going to run their dysfunctional system. Because when you've got an inherently defective system, it doesn't matter who's in charge. But just specifically, I'd say the novel coronavirus, do you agree that there should be mandatory lockdowns or that some businesses should be shut down until some level of public safety can be reasonably ascertained or things like that? That's what I'm saying. This is all tyranny and oppression. You've got to get the state totally out of this thing. This is a natural disaster. It's no different from a hurricane or a tornado. But normally, and I think even people like Ein Rand and I suspect even Mises would say in the wake of a hurricane or of a flood, there might be a period where the government comes in and says, okay, we're coordinating stuff. You say no categorically or no in this particular instance. No categorically. The free market is the greatest answer to these kind of crises. And get rid of all the anti-Gaojin laws that governments bring to this thing. That you let the free market provide the bottled water that needs to come in. They can make big money, big prices. That's the way this price system works. Get government out of these natural disasters and let the free market operate. Well, let's talk now about Donald Trump first, and then we'll talk about Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. Donald Trump, what is your, and we don't have an infinite amount of time, but make a brief case. Why is Donald Trump a bad president? Because he stands for a bad system, a bad philosophy. And we can lump Joe Biden and Donald Trump into the same answer because they both stand for the same thing. They stand for this welfare state way of life. They stand for the warfare state way of life, the national security state. They stand for immigration controls. They stand for the drug war. In other words, their entire system is the problem. I have no interest in going after Donald Trump for being a bad person or what he's done in his personal life. To me, that is totally irrelevant. And that's the way I've run this campaign within the party. I've instructed my campaign team, this will be issues only, never any personal attacks. We're going to run a first class campaign, win or lose. And that's the kind of campaign I'd run against Trump and Biden. I've said this repeatedly. I've said, I want to run a campaign of principles, ideas and sound ideas on liberty, because they're not accustomed to that. That's their weak point. They can't answer when I challenge them on their welfare state, on their drug war, on their immigration controls. They can't handle that kind of challenge because they don't know how to respond. So there's really, for you, there's no meaningful difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden? Absolutely not. They're one party divided into two wings, the welfare warfare party. Let's say you manage, you get the LP nomination, which is, you know, we'll be unfolding over the next couple of weeks. And you somehow you become president. How do you work with Congress? Because you're saying that these, you know, the representatives of these parties are both the same thing. They don't think that, but, you know, and that they're both completely so awful that you, you know, you have to overthrow them. Is there any way that you can be an effective leader if you're running on the principles that you're running? Absolutely. I mean, because you can do a lot as president, regardless of where they stand, you can lift all the executive orders that impose sanctions on foreign countries that are targeting innocent people like Iran. These are a moral abomination. You rescind those executive orders, you can pardon all nonviolent offenders in the federal system, especially drug offenders, but Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, you can order the Secretary of Defense, which I would do to bring all troops home from everywhere, Korea, Europe, World War II is over, Iraq, Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa, Latin America, bring them home and discharge them. That's another thing that distinguished me from my opponents. They want the troops to come over and stay and become this giant military establishment. I would discharge them. The pricey and the debt ceiling, when that debt ceiling comes up, I wouldn't cave like Donald Trump would. I would stand there firm and say, if you can't live within your means, yeah, this government's going to have to shut down or at least the nonessential functions. Now, then you do, then you get public pressure on them to like repeal the drug war. Because I think that's teetering. You get people to email them, telephone calls. I mean, Congress responds to public pressure. And then if they don't respond in a positive way, you start running libertarians two years later for Congress, all across the land. You run libertarians in every single congressional race, and you let the American people know. Start sprinkling Congress here with some libertarians so we can bring freedom to this country by pushing Democrats and Republicans in the right direction. So you've kind of given away the preview of some of your issues, but let's run through your platform. And I'm going to throw out some topics or planks and explain to me what your preferred policies are. And your website, I'm sorry, is it Jacob? What is your website? JacobForLiberty.com. Okay. And your platform is a marvel of straightforwardness and concision, not a lot of extra words or camouflage going on. Free trade. How do you define free trade and what's your position on free trade? It's the freedom of people to trade whatever they own, buy and sell without any government restriction whatsoever. So I favor unilateral free trade. No negotiations with any foreign power. The president, in my opinion, is not a designated elected agent for American businessmen. American businessmen can handle their own deals. Just drop all restrictions, tariffs. Unilaterally drop President Trump's trade war against China. So destructive of not only economic prosperity, but also liberty. I mean, that's what these trade restrictions are. They are an infringement on liberty. I would have just unilateral dismantling of every single trade restriction because... How do you respond to the criticism, which we hear a lot from both Donald Trump talked about this in 2016. We'll be talking about it again. Joe Biden and the Democrats, particularly factions within the Democratic Party that are affiliated with trade unions, say, look, we had free trade with places like China where we're allowing them to sell here cheap. They put up tariffs on theirs. That's why Americans are out of work. What's wrong with that critique of free trade? Well, it's so amazing that we still have this debate. Adam Smith comes up with his treatise on economics in 1776, and you've got the classical economists and Frederick Bostell making the case for free trade. And to me, it's amazing that we're still having to debate these things with these Democrats and Republicans. In every trade, both sides benefit. And that's just an axiom because you give up something you value less for something you value more. So the corollary of that is that any restriction on trade is interfering with your ability to raise your standard of living. I mean, you can raise your standard of living just through trade. So are you saying, just to work through the logic, let's say China puts 100% tariff on American cars being sold in China. We don't have any tariffs on that. And the government subsidizes a Chinese car so that it's sold safe for $100. The effective price of an American car being sold in China is say $500. You're good with that. And you just say that people will sort things out regardless of China. The government there really kind of putting its thumb on the scale in favor of its local producers. Well, I'm never good with any restrictions. I mean, what the Chinese government is doing is really hurting the Chinese people because the tariff is a tax on them. It's not really a tax on Americans. So let's say we have a total free trade policy here and a foreign regime, let's use China, imposes a high tariff, a tax on the Chinese people. Let's say that they even subsidize cars there by taxing the Chinese people so they can provide $100 cars for Americans. We benefit from that. I mean, if Japan all of a sudden offered everybody $100 Toyota Corolla, I mean, everybody would love it. Well, that's hurting the Chinese people. The worst thing that America can do is retaliate by shooting themselves in the foot by saying, okay, you're having these things. We're going to impose these things on the American people. Just keep the American people free and let the Chinese people see the virtues of free trade and ultimately repeal their restrictions. If they don't, well, that just means Americans businessmen have to work around those restrictions. But don't retaliate by taking away our freedom and our prosperity here at home. A compliment to free trade is immigration. You are an open borders advocate. That's a phrase which in libertarian circles, generally speaking, I think most libertarians are in favor of the freedom of people, goods and services across borders. Some libertarians are not, and I want to get to that in a second, but what is your position on immigration? What should the U.S. immigration policy be? Open immigration, abolish the immigration service, the ICE, the border patrol, abolish all restrictions on the free movements of goods, people and services. The same way we have domestically. I mean, if you want to have an idea of what I favor, look at domestically, people are free to cross state borders without any restriction. That's what I favor in terms of- So there wouldn't even be in a Hornberger United States, there would not even be something like in Ellis Island where you come through and say who you are and get some kind of ID number and get checked for a communicable disease. It would just be like, you know, I'm talking to you from New York City. I'm just going to drive across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. No checkpoints, no anything. Exactly. We don't have an Ellis Island between Texas and New Mexico, and so why should there be an Ellis Island between Mexico and the United States? In fact, when Ellis Island was working, where they were trying to ferret out people who had tuberculosis, in the American Southwest, my homeland, there was no restrictions at all, especially after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. People were free to cross back and forth. There was no stations at all. Same on the West Coast. People were coming from China and Japan for more than 100 years. This was our heritage. It's the greatest immigration system in history. What do you say to fellow libertarians? And I'm thinking of people like Ron Paul, and you have the backing or the sport of the Von Mises, or the Mises Institute kind of wing of the Libertarian Party. Oftentimes people like Ron Paul, when he was in Congress, he was against NAFTA. He was against a lot of free trade agreements saying they weren't really free trade. But the net effect was to keep trade barriers in place. They're also often skeptical of immigration, particularly of the open immigration that you're talking about. Where are they going wrong with their analysis, do you think? I think they're going wrong with respect to holding on to what really is Republican baggage. I mean, this is where Republicans are different from libertarians. Well, and Democrats too, Republicans often say that Democrats favor open borders. That's nonsense. I mean, this is one of the precipitating that the pre, when I discovered libertarianism, one of the things I first experienced to make me wonder about Democrats was I was in a detention center representing illegal immigrants as a lawyer. And it dawned on me. I said, how can Democrats love the poor, needy and disadvantaged when they're jailing people who want to work? And so they're the only people who favor open borders are libertarians. And we're guided by the libertarian non-aggression principle. That is that it is wrong to initiate force against peaceful human beings and peaceful human activity. When you cross a political border, you're not violating anybody's rights. And when government initiates force against you, it's violating your rights. And this is where the pro-immigration control libertarians and the Republicans and Democrats, they just don't see that. And here's the other aspect that they don't see. With a immigration control system comes a police state. I grew up in this police state. I've had firsthand experience. I've been stopped by the Border Patrol. Just randomly open up your trunk. They've got fixed highway checkpoints on my farm. The Border Patrol could come on into my farm without a warrant. And they bust. We hired illegal immigrants and they busted our workers because they had the authority to get down to the river. My farm was located on the river, real grand. This is not a free society. This is a police state. And it comes with an immigration control system just as thunder comes with lightning. It is kind of relieving to hear a presidential candidate actually openly acknowledge that they hired illegal immigrants. Donald Trump obviously has done it at his properties, but kind of sluffs it away. And Joe Biden pretends that he's never done anything wrong. How do you, the federal budget before for 2020, fiscal 2020, before the coronavirus stuff happened, was coming in around $4.8 trillion. How much should the government, let's leave aside anything about coronavirus. What should the government be spending for the federal government be spending per year? And how do you pay for it in your scheme? Well, I favor a limited government republic. And that's our founding governmental system. That's why I oppose the national security state type of governmental system. That's been the biggest mistake America ever made. And if you support a national security state, then you can kiss your hope of a free society away. And then there's the welfare state, which we've talked about. If you dismantle the whole welfare state programs with Roosevelt and Johnson and the whole panoply of welfare state programs, and then you dismantle the national security state, CIA, NSA, Pentagon, military industrial complex, and you end up with a limited government republic that has just a basic military force to protect the United States, you're talking about 95% of government expenditures gone. You don't need an income tax. You don't need an IRS because you don't have the Department of Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security. You don't have anything. I think you end up maybe with a Department of the Treasury, Attorney General, Justice Department, Secretary of State, and that's pretty much about it. That doesn't, and you send all criminal jurisdiction to the state district attorneys. There's no expenditures left. You have a federal judiciary that's handling civil lawsuits. You're talking about minuscule, minuscule government expenditures. How do you pay for that? Is that through service fees or what? I mean, there's no IRS and a Hornberger administration, but what do you do for the few pennies that the government needs? How do you raise money? Well, the Framers answer for this type of minimal government was what they called indirect taxes. They hated the idea of a direct tax like an income tax because it's so intrusive and the Internal Revenue Service is such a tyrannical agency. So if you pay a sales tax or something like that, it's less intrusive. For me, and I agree with that, it's much less intrusive. For me, the initiation of force can never be morally justified. And so I would favor a voluntarily funded government that people believe in government. Most people do. They believe in the police to protect them from robbers and murderers and rapists. We rely on people to support churches, hospitals, libraries, charitable organizations, Reason Magazine. I think you would have absolutely no problem generating voluntary support for government at all levels, federal government, state level, and local government. That's my ideal. And I think the freest society in history one of these days is going to be a limited government republic voluntarily funded. We've talked a bit or touched on some issues about war and kind of the deep state, the national surveillance center, national security state. How do you differ from a typical democratic or Republican candidate when it comes to war making and towards national defense? I oppose all foreign interventionism. America was founded on a foreign policy of non-interventionism, and that's in John Quincy Adams' great speech in search of monsters to destroy that he delivered to Congress on the 4th of July in 1821. Just end all foreign interventionism, abandon all foreign military bases, lift all sanctions, bring all those troops home, discharge them because you don't need them anymore. You've stopped foreign interventionism entirely. That's not even enough though for a free society. This again is what distinguishes me from some of my opponents. To get a free society, you've got to get rid of this national security cold war era state, and that includes the NSA, the CIA, and the vast what Eisenhower called a military industrial complex where you have just a basic military force that's able to protect the United States, garner support in case the United States was ever invaded, which is a virtually non-existent possibility. Now compare that to what Biden and Trump stand for. They stand for the CIA, the NSA, the vast military industrial complex, the garrison state, which is the opposite of a free society. In your worldview, does America have allies? I mean trading partners and things like that. What do you do, say with a country like Taiwan, which is an ally of military and commercial ally of the United States, constantly being threatened by China? If mainland China of communist China moves into Taiwan, we say it was nice knowing you, but we're going to work with your new overlords. How do you respond to that kind of provocation? George Washington gave the soundest advice when he says no entangling alliances, that the U.S. government should just stay here at home and tend to its own business. Do not be a world's policeman because, as John Quincy Adams said in that speech, as soon as America goes abroad to police these types of things, she becomes the dictator of the world. And then we lose our freedom here at home because of all the threats then that America faces. But that's not to say that individual Americans should not be free to go to Taiwan and fight on behalf of the Taiwanese or the South Koreans or the South Vietnamese. If somebody's outraged over what's happening overseas, go over there, take up arms and join the cause, but keep the federal government out of the process. You have written in the past some provocative things, and I want to touch on them because they factor into this. You've written that essentially that the United States is responsible for the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and effectively that the received narrative that Japan attacked the United States, declared war on the United States, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, we go into World War II. You actually have written suggesting that FDR goaded Japan into attacking us. What's going on there? Well, there's no question about it. Even Roosevelt apologists say that he did the right thing and wanting to get the United States into the war. And there's no question. Historians all agree now that he wanted to get the United States into the war. Absolutely. But isn't that different? I mean, it's one thing to say that we're going to get embroiled into it and we want to get in on our own terms or as quickly as possible and saying that somehow FDR is really responsible for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Well, when you say responsible, we're talking about directly or indirectly. Obviously, the bombers are the ones responsible for dropping the bombs and Japan's responsible for ordering the bombs to be dropped. But you have to put things in context because there's nuances taking place here that Roosevelt knew that around 90% of the American people after the debacle of World War I did not want to enter into World War II. So this was when presidents were still honoring the declaration of war requirement in the Constitution. He knew he could not get a declaration of war. So he had to figure out a way to get into this war. And so he goes Germany into attacking American ships in the Atlantic. Germany refuses to take the bait. They didn't want another U.S. entry into the war after World War I. So he goes into the Pacific as sort of a backdoor to war. Look what he does. He freezes all Japanese bank accounts. The U.S. wasn't at war with Japan. He imposes an oil embargo that was surprisingly effective involving different countries. Well, he knows that Japan has this war machine going on in China. It needs that oil. And then when Japan said, let's negotiate, Roosevelt imposes these humiliating terms which amounted essentially to a surrender. He knew they would never accept it. So we look at Pearl Harbor. He's got ships all there ready to be bombed. He leaves troops in the Philippines. I mean, what are troops doing in the Philippines? That's like, that's not even the United States. And everything point, he had broken the Japanese civilian code. So he knew that the war crowds were brewing. He doesn't give the warning directly to the commanders in Pearl. Every, all the circumstantial evidence points to, now there's no flashing, smoking gun here, but the circumstantial evidence points to that he was trying to provoke Japanese, the Japanese into attacking somewhere. Philippines didn't really matter where so that he could then go to Congress and say, well, we've been attacked. That is, that is a controversial take. And one, I can't go there with you. When you look at expansionist Imperial Japan, they didn't need a lot of reasons to kind of try and strike out. Let's jump though to a really thing about that. Okay. They didn't need to attack Pearl Harbor. They weren't invading the United States. There was no reason to start a war with the United States. They needed oil and they were going into the Dutch East Indies to get that oil. And they figured if they could knock out the Pacific fleet, that they would be able to get their oil unimpeded. That's why they attacked there. If Roosevelt had never done these machinations, they never would have attacked the United States. They would have just gone into the Dutch East Indies. Yeah. And, you know, and then we get into a long conversation, which I'm not sure how fruitful it would be. What would the world look like, you know, under an alliance of Japan and Nazi Germany and a few other countries, et cetera? Can we jump to a more unequally, I think, controversial claim that you make? You've written a number of books about the JFK assassination and you've held some conferences. You've pulled in people like Oliver Stone, the filmmaker, and other people who say that JFK was obviously he was assassinated. He was killed, but that he was not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. He was killed by the deep state. What is, what's your basic argument there? And how does that inform the way that you think about your run for presidency? Well, it informs my view with respect to the national security state. When President Eisenhower left the White House, he delivered his farewell address where he said, this way of life, the national security state, is an alien way of life. It's a grave threat to our democratic processes and our liberties. And this is what he's referring to, is the dangers of a giant military intelligence establishment here. If I could just point out, because my father fought in World War II, so I take a great interest in it. And it is nothing short of amazing that Eisenhower in 1960, you know, 15 years after World War II, the leader of our effort, of the world's effort, is calling out a military industrial complex and the idea of standing armies and merchants of death. It is pretty stunning. And I think we've in many ways have lost exactly what that means. But oh, it's phenomenal. And then 30 days after the JFK has asked nation president Truman or former president Truman, publishes an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that the CIA has become a sinister force in American life. And that we need to look at this. That could not have been a coincidence. Who killed in your, in your understanding of things? Who killed Kennedy? The deep state. Okay. Be more specific, though. What does that mean? And did Lee Harvey Oswald actually pull a trigger that day? Or is he, as he liked to claim, was he a patsy? And again, can you bring this rather than talking about the JFK assassination, which as a country we've been doing for over half a century, how does this inform what you would, how you would act as president? Well, because it shows the dangers of a national security state way of life. Because you see, their job is to protect national security. Now, what happens if a president becomes a threat to national security? Well, remember, the CIA's got the power to assassinate people. They have a power to assassinate Americans, fully confirmed by the federal judiciary. They make the call on what's a threat to national security. This is why a national security state form of government is so dangerous. And they have assassinated Americans based on national security. So here, John Kennedy comes into office as your standard Cold Warrior. He immediately gets in a huge fight, battle war with the CIA over the Bay of Pigs. And then he gets in a war with the, with the military over the refusal to invade Cuba. They had Operation Northwoods that they wanted the, the, the president to, to pursue, which was a fraudulent scheme to invade Cuba. Well, then the Cuban Missile Crisis comes along and both the CIA and the military exhorting him to attack Cuba and invade Cuba. He refuses to do so much to everybody's happiness afterward, because it turned out it would have been an all out nuclear war. Because what the CIA and the military didn't know is that the Soviet commanders had what fully armed nuclear weapons with battlefield authority to use them. So Kennedy strikes a deal with the Soviets, where he really gave away the store. I mean, he said, I will guarantee that you will never, that we will never invade Cuba. And he gave his word on that. What, well, that immediately made him a threat to national security because everyone knew in the military industrial complex and the CIA that Cuba was a great threat to national security, that America could not survive with this communist dagger. Well, then at this point, Kennedy is broken through all the Cold War Crock that was going on. He realized it was just a racket. So he goes to American University without even telling the Pentagon and the CIA what he's going to do. He announces an end to the Cold War, unilateral. He says, this is, this is a racket. I'm, I'm finishing it. I'm going to establish peaceful coexistence with the Soviets, with the communist world. We can get along. We have different ideologies. The speech was broadcast all across the Soviet Union. At that moment, he becomes a threat to national security, just like most of that in 1953 was a threat to national security. So who, who, who, who signs the order? What, you know, what part of the government, what part of the deep set is responsible for Kennedy's assassination? There is no smoking gun as to who exactly was involved. But, you know, it's, it's the same as, let's say, a regime, the regime change operation in Guatemala in 54. Or in, and did, did Oswald pull the trigger? Like, was it his shots that killed Kennedy? Or is it, did, did those bullets come from someplace else? They came from somewhere else. I mean, this guy says, you see, this one's fascinating about Oswald. He didn't just deny doing this. I mean, that would be the, the simple reaction is, Hey, I didn't do this. I have nothing to do with this. He went one step further. He said, I've been framed here. Now, why would he go that far? Why would he say I've been framed? It's partly because he was caught and he knew he was going to be tried and executed, but no, no, it's not that easy because if you get caught, you deny you do it. If you say you've been framed, they're going to say who framed you then. Now you've got a new burden that you've assumed. So he clearly has somebody in mind when he takes this position. And now my books deal with the autopsy. I don't know if you've read Doug Horn's five volume book on the autopsy, but that's the definitive case of, of what happened in the autopsy. And that's how you learn that the deep state was involved in the assassination because it's clearly a fraudulent autopsy. So I mean, you know, what the, the, you're kind of, you're read of World War II and of FDR's actions there as well as the Kennedy assassination lead you to wanting to dismantle or get rid of national security state, deep state, things like that. Let's talk about some of your other platform planks or positions. And we can go through these, I think, a little bit more quickly, but you've mentioned that you're against the drug war. Why are you against the drug war should do and, and you are not simply against the idea that people who are using marijuana should not be criminals. You talk about getting rid of all laws about drugs. How would that work? Yeah, because again, I want a free society, Nick. I want to live in a free society. That's what I decided when I was 28 years old when I discovered libertarianism. And that takes certain prerequisites. If we're going to live in a free society, you got to get rid of the welfare state, including Social Security Medicare. You leave those and you don't live in a free society. You got to get rid of the national security state. If you leave those, you're not living in a free society. And the drug war, essential aspect of individual liberty is the right to ingest whatever you want to ingest. I don't care how destructive, harmful, dangerous it is. So you support Donald Trump's right to take hydroxychloroquine, whether it works or not. And that's one thing you can agree on. He should be able to take whatever he wants. Of course. I mean, that's the mark of a free society is being stupid if you want to be stupid. Would you also, you would get rid of prescription drugs in the sense that there should be no centralized control of saying, this drug is only available if you, you know, if you get a doctor who is certified by the state who says you can, you can get this. And then you go to a drug store or pharmacy that sells it, that answers to the drug enforcement administration. I want no government involvement at all. Now, if a private pharmacy says, I'm not going to distribute these classes of drugs without a prescription from a doctor, then that's great. I mean, that's how a private society works. But otherwise, leave government out of it entirely. There's absolutely no reason why you should have to go get government permission for medication. What a marriage equality. Should any two people who want to get married be able to get married? Of course, but government should play no role in marriage. It should be an entirely private thing, a religious thing or a secular thing or something. You don't need government. This is a money-making operation. Marriage licenses, they make money off the deal just like their whole licensure scheme. Licensors from doctors and lawyers and shoe shine people and hairdressers. Just a big racket. Get rid of government out of it. Get government out of the marriage business just like I'm saying. Get government out of the healthcare industry, the monetary industry, economy. Get government out of all these areas and now you're talking about a free society. You are anti-abortion, but that doesn't necessarily indicate what kinds of policies you would pursue as president. What's your stance on abortion? Well, I'm a Catholic and therefore I believe that life does begin at conception. Therefore, I'm pro-life. Having said that, I don't put a lot of faith in the criminal justice system to reduce the number of abortions. For one thing, it's like a murder case. After they prosecute somebody for committing an abortion, the abortion is already committed. They haven't saved the life of that baby. I really put my faith more in educational areas in the Catholic Church. There's something called Project Gabriel that encourages women to come in and get counseling and help. Then for those women that do so out of economic reasons, I want a free market economic system where people keep everything they earn, 100%, 100% voluntary charity. For those women that go the abortion route because they don't have the finances to raise a baby, that would alleviate that sector. That's my position. I've read in various writings that you've done, you believe abortion is murder, but you don't believe the federal government has any say. It really can't address that. People like Ron Paul and his son, Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky, regularly introduce legislation to sanctity of life amendments or laws that would say at the federal level that abortion is a form of murder and it should be stopped. You wouldn't do anything like that or you wouldn't sign that if it came across your desk. I wouldn't sign it at all. There's no constitutional authority for it. It's just a murder case. I mean, we don't want the federal government enacting laws against murder or rape or theft or burglary. These are state crimes. Leave it to the states to resolve. Can I ask you, as a Catholic, I was raised Catholic, 50 miles from here. I won't name the parish that I'm from because I think they're a little bit ashamed of me. I'm a lapsed Catholic or maybe a future Catholic once again. But do you believe in contraception or how the Catholic Church does not believe in contraception other than natural means, like the rhythm method? I assume if you're a good Catholic, you agree with that teaching, but then what should the state have any rules against contraception or at what level should that be decided? Yeah, that is a fascinating question and I've struggled with that one. I agree with you. That is the Catholic position and that is the position I hold personally. Whether the state should be empowered to stop that, I just have problems with that. I just never been able to resolve it for myself. It's an issue that I've struggled with for a long time. Can I, more broadly, it's fascinating in a way. You mentioned John F. Kennedy, or we've talked about John F. Kennedy, the only Catholic president to date. When he was running for office, his religion was a big deal and then religion went away and then it became a big deal again, particularly in the late 70s and 80s. Jimmy Carter really mainstreamed the idea of born-again Christianity. He was a fundamentalist or an evangelical. Ronald Reagan played to the religious right in order to gain office and things like that. How does your Catholicism inform your libertarianism and your politics or are these separate realms? Yeah, that's a fascinating question, very profound. I find my religion and I'm a devout Catholic totally consistent with my libertarianism. This is what a lot of Catholics, I find it amazing. I go to church next sometimes and I hear them praying for the troops in Iraq or whatever. I'm sitting there thinking and sometimes I write a letter to the priest saying, why aren't we praying for the people killing these people and we never pray for the victims? It's just phenomenal. To me, you've got people, Christians, supporting sanctions against Iran that's killing all these innocent people or used to it like in Iraq where the sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and I don't see this thing as a matter of conscience for Christians and that's what I would hope to bring to this race if I win this nomination among the Christians in this country is look, you've got a conscience here. You need to start exercising it and that conscience means sometimes standing up against the wrongdoing of your own government. But in terms of things like free will, it's totally consistent with the non-aggression principle. You have the right to live your life any way you choose so long as your conduct is peaceful, non-fraudulent, no force. Well, that's what free will is all about. God vests man with free will like on charity. This is why I oppose Social Security and Medicare in these well first day programs. God vests man with the right to choose whether to honor mother and father on a voluntary basis. He wants you to, but he doesn't force you to. Well, and with Social Security, you're forced to. With Medicare, you're forced to. That's a denigration of God's great gift of free will. So that's what I would hope to bring to this campaign is striking Christians with a conscience saying this is what free will and freedom is all about, not what we got today. Very quickly, what is your take on Pope Francis in a way, and again, I say this as a lapsed Catholic, but as somebody who follows him with, follows the Catholic Church in the Papacy with some interest, on a certain level, he seems to approach the imitation of Christ that the Pope is supposed to be. He mingles with the poor and people with leprosy and things like that. And he seems to have great compassion. He also seems to be a very outspoken critic of capitalism and the Catholic Church really since the mid 19th century, you know, turned against modernity in many ways. They didn't like democracy. They didn't like capitalism. They didn't like equality of men and women. You know, is Pope Francis a force for good or bad? Do you think in the in the world today? Well, I think overall a force for good. I mean, obviously the man is very, very devout, a man of God, loves the poor, the needy. It's just like many leftists, and he's a leftist politically, ideologically, they don't see any problems with turning to the state to accomplish these things. And this is, I mean, this is just his philosophy, his leftist philosophy. But there are strands of free market libertarianism within the Church. Worm Navarra is a, you know, almost a capitalist creed. And I think if some of these, you know, devout Catholics, including the Pope, could ever just look at libertarianism and see that this is consistent with free will. And the right of people to choose between right and wrong, as long as his peaceful conduct, no murder, rape, and theft, the charity should be entirely voluntary. I think they would take a different look at it. As a final, well, I have two final questions. The first one is this. If you win the LP nomination, you will be 70 years old, so you'll be the youngest of the three major party candidates running, but you're still pretty old, okay? What is your message to young people? Because when I think, and I have two sons, 28 and 16, they have grown up in a world of 9-11, of the financial crisis of the coronavirus lockdown now. You know, it's kind of bleak. It's kind of screwed up. And I say that to somebody like you, and I was born in 63, so I caught the tail end of the baby boom and of the Vietnam War and all of that kind of stuff. Things were bad, but things are really screwed up now. As a 70 year old man, you have the benefit of being partly part Hispanic because of your heritage. So you look like the future of America, which is multi-ethnic, you know, kind of free thinking and individualistic. What is, what's your message to young America? Why should they be libertarian and why should they vote for you? Well, it's interesting you say that because young people would be one of the target audiences I would, I would target in this campaign. And my message is I trust you. I trust you with your freedom. Right now the government's taken out of your paycheck $2 trillion a year just for Medicare and Social Security. And what they're saying to you with taking this money out of your paycheck is you're a bad people. You cannot be trusted to handle your own money. That you'll turn your backs on your parents. You'll turn your backs on the needy. I'm saying, bull, keep your money, cut out the middleman, the IRS and these social socialist administrations. I trust you to handle this on your own. God trusts you. Who is the state to take away that trust that God places in you with free will? But the problem, that's not the problem here. The problem is you have to start believing in yourself. You have to get self-esteem. You got to say, we can handle this. We'll honor mother and father on a voluntary basis. We'll donate to the poor on a voluntary basis. You got to believe in yourself. You got to believe in others. You got to believe in free will. You got to believe in freedom. And for me, you got to believe in God. And that would be my primary message to them, which is very different from some of my libertarian opponents. They say, oh no, you need this coercive system here because young people can't be trusted. In England, let me give you an example of this. In England, the government called for 250,000 young people to volunteer to help out seniors who are under lockdown. They couldn't get their groceries or their medicines. 750,000 young people volunteered overnight. That's the kind of society I want for America. And then the final question is, what is your, you know, the LP has had in Gary Johnson, it ran in 2012 and 2016. He had a lot of critics because he wasn't a purist. You're very much a purist. But Gary Johnson did phenomenally well, relatively speaking, for the libertarian party. What do you expect if you can win the nomination? You know, what kind of outcome do you expect realistically? And, you know, will it be an improvement on the numbers that Gary Johnson put up in 2016 and 2012? Impossible to say. But I mean, we've been here 49 years, Nick, as a party, and we celebrate a 3% return. I mean, I just think that's kind of sad. We've never elected somebody to Congress. I say this time around, this movement, 70 years old, this time around, let's not settle for what's practical and, you know, reform this and reform Medicare and reform social security and scared of how people are going to react. Let's do something bold. Let's go all in and have a campaign of pure principle where we fight with just libertarian principles and go to the American people who right now are doing some serious soul searching. There's nothing like the prospect of death to cause people to do some self-examination and say, this is what a free society is. It's the absence of a welfare state. It's the absence of a national security state. It's the absence of immigration and trade restrictions. It's the absence of drug war and central planning and make the case to them in a principled way. Because when you make the case to people on programs that are Republican or Democrat that are not libertarian, you may get a large vote total, but what have you accomplished? The only way to achieve freedom is by making that case for freedom to Americans. They may reject it, but it's the only chance you have. But I've learned in life, man, when you act with boldness, you've got a chance for a big payoff. When you play it safe, you don't have a chance for a big payoff. You're going to get maybe three, four percent. You act boldly and you go after Donald Trump and Joe Biden and their Democrat and Republican cohorts with principles, ideals and ideas on liberty. You got the possibility of a big payoff. And after 49 years, we've earned the right to a big payoff. And then your vote totals are meaningful because people know upfront exactly what you're trying to do when they join you. They're joining you for the right reason. All right. Well, that is the ultimate zag when people are zigging. We're going to leave it there, Jacob Hornberger. Thank you for talking to reason. I appreciate it very much. My appreciation is, Nick. Thank you so much for having me.