 I'm very pleased to be here at what has to be the largest hate group rally of the year here at Callaway Gardens, you know, Mary Rothbard used to say, hate is my muse. And what's not to hate about the welfare warfare police state out there. And when I was asked to give a talk at the conference, I had just written an article for lurockwell.com entitled constitutional neo-conmen. And so I thought I'd talk about that theme today. And what you know one of the things I was thinking about was that I noticed that all during the George Bush administration the neo-conservatives had a mantra. The mantra was 9-11 changed everything. So every time Judge Napolitano would be on the Fox News channel to debate O'Reilly or Hannity or one of these people, the mantra would come out. 9-11 changed everything. Here's a judge saying this, the Patriot Act is unconstitutional. Wiretapping without a warrant is unconstitutional. The mantra would come out. 9-11 changed everything. And of course what that means is the hell with the Constitution. Constitution, Schmonstitution was the mantra of the neo-conservatives all during that time. That abruptly changed immediately as soon as Barack Obama was declared the winner of the election four years ago. Immediately these same people, Rush Limbaugh started sounding, you know, he sounded more like Benito Mussolini during the Bush administration, but he transformed himself miraculously into Murray Rothbard as soon as Obama took the oath of office. And even the odious Mark Levin, who Limbaugh calls the great one, Lou does too, Lou Rockwell calls him the great one, but he spells it G-R-A-T-E, the great one. He wrote a book on the constitutional liberty. So all of a sudden all these neo-cons are Ron Paul libertarians when Obama is in office. So they're phonies in other words. And so, you know, of the first order. And I'm not speaking of phonies. One person that I'm going to quote, that's sort of the theme of my critique here, is in the course of doing a little web research on writings on Teddy Roosevelt. A couple of weeks ago I found an article by Charles Kessler who works at the Clermine Institute in California. He's one of the neo-cons. And if you don't know about the Clermine Institute and their stance, this is a group that gave Statesmen of the Year Awards recently to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Victor Davis Hansen, and Rush Limbaugh. Statesmen of the Year. So you know kind of where they're coming from. And Kessler wrote a review of this book on Teddy Roosevelt. And he said this. He said, and this is sort of the ideology of the neo-conservative Clermine Institute, government must be strong but limited. Think about that. So that's like, in my notes I wrote, it must be short but tall, light but dark, good but bad, high but low. And it makes about as much sense as all of that, strong but limited. And of course, this is contrary to everything we know about government. And this guy is a professor of government at Clermont Graduate School with a Harvard degree. And so surely he knows better, but he doesn't say better. He must know better though. But it's really a proposal. How is government to be limited anyway by the Constitution? Well no, that if history proves anything is that a written constitution is all but useless in limiting government. We should learn that a long time ago. How about secession? Will that limit government, you know, giving people freedom of association? In theory, yes. But of course, the last time any group of Americans seriously threatened to secede, the federal government ended up killing 450,000 of them according to the latest estimates. There's updated estimates, by the way, using modern forensic research techniques on the Civil War deaths. And it puts just the southern deaths at about 400 to 450,000. Whereas it used to be 300,000 as the old number that lasted for about 100 years. And so well, that didn't really work out either. And of course, the one of Murray Rothbard's favorite philosophers was John C. Calhoun, who in his famous Disquisition on Government wrote and explained in great detail why a written constitution could never be relied upon to limit government. You need something else that people themselves need to be empowered to interpret the constitution, to veto unconstitutional laws and so forth. You could never trust the government itself to be the final arbiter of constitutionality. And of course, there is no bigger haters of John C. Calhoun than the Claremont Institute and the neo-conservatives for that reason, because they are sort of the purveyors of the nationalist, centralist tradition in American politics. And so the most evil thing in the world to them is the Jeffersonian tradition of decentralization. And Calhoun in his day, he died in 1850, carried on the decentralization tradition. And so in terms of the role of war, I'd like to just talk about a few historical facts that illustrate this fact that the idea that you can be pro-war, you know, when people like Charles Kessler say government must be strong but limited, well, the strong part, he means the military industrial congressional complex. We must have a gigantic military to protect our freedoms. That's what he means by strong but limited. He means limiting government to the constitutional functions, which are Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution really is mostly foreign policy and war-making. And then there's weights and measures and naturalization and a few things like that. But the real big money items have to do with war, defense, foreign policy there. So that's what he means. Well, this idea that 9-11 changed everything is really a contradiction to what I consider to be one of the best statements the US Supreme Court ever made about the Constitution. And this was a statement that was made in a case called ex parte milligan in 1866. And it was the Supreme Court, Abe Lincoln was finally dead. And so they finally got up the nerve to criticize him for having illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus. The Chief Justice did at the time, Roger Bitani, but then an arrest warrant was issued for him. And so he was sort of intimidated as for other judges. But once Lincoln was dead, the Supreme Court, even though it had several of his appointees were quite heroic in saying this, they said, I'm quoting, the Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people equally, equally in war and peace. And it covers with its shield of protection all classes of men at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of men that any of its great provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. So the Supreme Court in 1866 was saying it is especially during wartime that we have to be vigilant and enforcing the Constitution because we can't trust government to concoct phony wars or phony crises with the intention of grabbing our liberties and throwing them away at any time in the future. And so that was the court's way of chastising what Lincoln had done. And so of course he had done much more than suspend habeas corpus. They mass arrested tens of thousands of Northern civilians, newspaper editors, the mayor of Baltimore, Congressman Henry May of Maryland was thrown in prison. A large part of the Maryland state legislature was imprisoned without due process. The grandson of Francis Scott Key was imprisoned in Fort McHenry not too far from where his grandfather wrote the Star-Spangled Banner for criticizing in an editorial Lincoln's illegal suspension of habeas corpus. A member of Congress was deported. Clement Vellandigan was his name for opposing the Lincoln administration. And Lincoln essentially redefined treason to mean criticism of him and his administration. But if you were to read the article 3 section 3 of the United States Constitution, it defines treason as follows. It says treason is defined only, it uses the word only, as levying war upon the states or giving aid and comfort to their enemy. And the states is in the plural. So what else would you call Lincoln's levying war upon the southern states other than levying war upon the southern states? It was the literal definition of treason in the U.S. Constitution to begin with. And so to argue that we need to have a strong military establishment to protect constitutional liberty does not have a very good historical record. When I debated one of the top Lincoln cultists in California shortly after my book The Real Lincoln came out, Harry Jaffa, I debated him at the Independent Institute. After my first turn, he stood up and said, Abraham Lincoln never did anything that was unconstitutional. And the room of about 200 people just exploded and laughed her because most of them had read my book and that cites all the scholarly literature on this because generations of historians have never said that. They've called Lincoln a dictator, but they say he was a benevolent dictator. But not Jaffa, who by the way is also associated with the Claremont Institute in California. And so that's Lincoln. So this established precedence. Precedence are important. There's a book by a left wing law professor called Our Secret Constitution, and he celebrates the fact that the Lincoln administration pretty much trashed and ignored the Constitution in the north, in the northern states, because it established precedence for expanding government far beyond what the actual Constitution would would allow for, or even without waiting for amendments to allow you to do additional things that you would like to do with government. And so these many of these precedents were used as justifications in quotation marks for similar abuses of constitutional liberties during World War One. For example, the Espionage Act, under the Espionage Act that was passed during World War One, there was a 20 year jail sentence and a $10,000 fine for discouraging enlistment, for simply criticizing the war in a way that could be construed as discouraging enlistments. So there were jail sentences for questioning the constitutionality of the draft. The draft came in, and if you question the constitutionality, a few feeble souls, for example, had the audacity to point out that the 13th amendment to the Constitution outlaws involuntary servitude. And so if you were to quote the 13th amendment in public, you could go to prison for that. A movie producer was in prison for making an anti British movie. Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president who won over 900,000 votes, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for criticizing the war. The government organized lynch mobs to harass anti-war protesters. The postmaster general prohibited circulation of newspapers critical of Woodrow Wilson. There was a committee on public information to spread public government propaganda. Of course, the entire government today is now as a committee on public information. So is the public school system. For that matter, they should call it the committee on public information. Private property was confiscated. There was a law passed that allowed the president to confiscate any factory or to order a factory owner to produce goods for the military at a price he the president deemed appropriate. And if you refuse that, you went to prison. There's a prison sentence. Private property was confiscated of all sorts. Not only was there a draft of humans, but the draft applied to businesses as well. So businesses could be drafted and conscripted into producing things for the government and sold at prices the government ordered you to be sold for. The Supreme Court rubber stamped every bit of this. None of this could be it could be conscrued as being constitutional by any fair reading of the actual constitution. But the government Supreme Court rubber stamped all of it. And here's a before Woodrow Wilson became president, he was a political science professor at Princeton. Let's not let's not just badmouth Harvard like the judge did earlier. Let's add Princeton in there. And here's what he said about the idea that, you know, after the civil war, it was not it was not the idea that the blackrobed deities of the Supreme Court or five government lawyers with lifetime tenure would be the sole arbiter of constitutionality on all matters. That that didn't exist until after the civil war. Before the civil war, people had the quaint idea that there were three branches of government. And that maybe even the people themselves should have a say on constitutionality, not just five government lawyers with lifetime tenure. But when this came about after the civil war, Woodrow Wilson celebrated this fact before he became president. He said this in one of his books, the war between the states established this principle that the federal government is through its courts, the final judge of its own powers. And of course, during his administration, the Supreme Court decided that the government should have unlimited powers. And the World War two was a repeat of the constitutional abuses of World War one, only many or many time many orders of magnitude worse than in World War one. There was more nationalization factories were ordered to produce things again, there was price fixing. If the government decided that your profits were excessive, there was a excess profits tax. And of course, the worst abuse was the the rounding up and imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese Americans. Some of them were third generation. Not a one of them was ever accused of a crime, let alone convicted of any crime. But they're put in what FDR himself called concentration camps. This was before we use the phrase concentration camps to refer to the Holocaust in the in the German concentration camps. And but FDR used it to describe what was going on with Japanese Americans. Six thousand conscientious objectors were imprisoned. And and of course, the Supreme Court rubber stamped all of this all of this once again, was found to be to be constitutional. Fast forward to today's today's version of this course, the neocons that I've been talking about, just as a brief review, you know, the Congress gave President Bush the power to declare martial law. Bush claimed to have unconstitutional powers of what he what he called the unitary executive. You remember that the unitary executive, the Patriot Act allows the government to declare that almost anyone who protest government actions as an enemy combatants allows warrantless wiretapping. Proclaim the Bush administration was exempt from the Geneva Convention permits the government to order individuals and financial institutions to turn over to it private financial information. And then if you reveal to anyone that the government has been snooping on your private financial information, you can go to jail for that, for letting people know that they have been doing that. And so and so every war that we have, we have the government using the war as an excuse to abolish liberties. If there's one article I would recommend that you all read in addition to Rothbard on war in the state that Walter mentioned not too long ago. It's wars the health of the state by Randolph Bourne. Many of you are already familiar with this. It was written in 1918 and when Bourne was a relatively young man and he died before he actually could finish the essay. It's online in a number of places. But here's what he says on this topic here. He says during wartime minority opinion, which in times of peace was only irritating to government and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with an actual crime, becomes with the outbreak of war a case for outlawry. Criticism of the state objections to war lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription are made subject to ferocious penalties far exceeding in severity. Those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public opinion as expressed in the newspapers and the pulpits in the schools becomes one solid block. Loyalty or rather orthodoxy becomes a sole test for all professions and so forth. Another thing he says that I'm going to finish up with is he points out that the punishment for opinion during wartime is often far more ferocious and unintermittent than the punishment of pragmatic crime of real crime of rape, murder and so forth. And finally I'm going to conclude with this because Peter is standing up in the corner again over there is he says this, the state represents all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a society. It is a sort of complexes of everything most distasteful to the modern free creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Then the next line is war is the health of the state. It's the health of all of this. And my time is up. Thank you very much.