 So I'm sure most of you know our next speaker Scott Horton is someone who really has single-handedly Changed that narrative that we spoken of especially when it comes to the war in Afghanistan. I mentioned his book It's called fool's air and if you haven't read this book Be ready for some footnotes Because Scott annotates everything. He is done. I just read this last night in his lifetime of doing Various radio shows. He's done 5,000 interviews and almost all of them fighting against this Crazed warfare state that we find ourselves in please welcome Scott Horton. All right, so Jeff Deist asked me to speak today on alternative media But this is my first opportunity and maybe my only opportunity in my life to share a stage with Ron Paul So first I'm gonna tell you about Ron Paul Lou Rockwell and Jeff Deist Ron Paul's former chiefs of staff Dan McAdams, of course Ron's closest advisor for 20-something years and co-host with Dr. Paul of the most important show on YouTube the Liberty report Carol Paul his loving wife since sometime in the 1960s. I guess Y'all just don't understand the greatness of this man Y'all don't love him like I do Ron Paul is simply the greatest hero in American history He's certainly my greatest hero and being a skater and a libertarian I have a lot of heroes Seriously, I have a bust of Ron Paul in my office His name is on the super majority of my shirts Dr. Paul is the best kind of libertarian He always knows his facts and opposes the very worst things about our government the most and first and he always tells the truth As Anthony Gregory says Ron Paul makes Thomas Jefferson look like James Madison And what is Ron Paul's libertarianism, but true American? liberalism that Jeffersonian liberalism untainted by socialism and progressivism and only a little bit of conservatism and That's okay because Ron Paul's conservative personality his purest capitalist economics and Republican Party political affiliation helped him during his presidential runs in 2008 in 2012 to open the minds of millions of Americans to adopting an anti-war position They had previously been persuaded could only be held by hippies and Hollywood know nothing know it all liberals Have y'all ever seen the great documentary for Liberty how Ron Paul watered the withered tree of Liberty By rye and keeler her It's more than a documentary about Ron Paul's 2008 campaign It's about the birth of a whole new libertarian movement in America It's more and it's better than you would think. It's really a wonderful film. I hope you'll all look at it The key to it, of course Was Ron's clash with Rudy Giuliani over the causes of the war on terrorism in the May 2007 GOP debate The USA started it Dr. Paul insisted Prescribing Americans the most bitter pill But millions of people rallied to his message. They knew it was true They hated the war, but they didn't want to identify with utopian and helpless hippies or Michael Moore the gluttonous Hollywood millionaire communist hypocrite Ron Paul told them they didn't have to if you like your identity you can keep it So Let me ask you and I've been giving a lot of speeches since the book came out and to a lot of libertarian party groups I'd like to ask how many people here are libertarians because of Ron Paul Oh, man. Well, it is a Ron Paul event. Okay And now how many of you are libertarians because of the Giuliani moment the fight between Ron Paul Rudy Giuliani in 2007 okay, we have a few and at every speech I give where I ask that question hands go up And you'll see in that documentary for liberty just how important that was Now my Giuliani moment story is actually from 10 years previous in 1997 I was up late in the middle of the night. This is when Ron Paul had just come back to Congress from his semi-retirement and return of medicine and I looked and it was C-span reruns three in the morning or something and there's this little old congressman Saying mr. Speaker. I have here in my hand proof published in the British papers today That president George Bush. This was senior Was selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein even during Operation Desert Shield in the build-up to the war in the fall of 1990 and I like to enter this into the federal record there, sir And I thought oh my god. I can't believe this a congressman just accused George HW Bush essentially of treason on the house floor and then I looked at the bottom and it said Ron Paul are Texas and I thought no way you got to be kidding me and in fact in 2007 when he started running for president David Beto and I started writing articles together to run at Lee Rockwell comm Supporting his candidacy and one of the things I did was I went digging through the speeches and I found that speech from 1997 and I really had remembered it right That there he was that courageous to to accuse a Republican president Not just violating the law but violating the very concept of what most people would think it would mean to be the president of the United States And I've been a big fan ever since in fact I used to drive my cab around and I would give copies of his speeches to the people of my cab You can imagine right? Hey, did you know there's one good congressman no really one and he's really good and There were these two speeches they went together the first one was a republic if you can keep it and The second was called. Sorry mr. Franklin. We're all Democrats now and This is some good times there that's in several and you know one more story in 2005 Just before in fact the day that Katrina hit New Orleans Which was really the beginning of the end of the credibility of the Bush administration But that day it was Ron Paul's birthday party and they held the barbecue as they do usually most every year for Ron Paul's birthday party And he got up there and he gave an anti-war talk to a room much smaller than this This is before the presidential campaigns the room was entirely full of almost all just local Republican voters and constituents And he got up there and he gave him an anti-war talk and he said listen I know the president is from Texas. He's in my same party. I feel a lot of pressure to support what he's doing I know a lot of you people support what's going on in the war But I'm here to tell you it just isn't right and then he went through and he explained how America started the terror war how the September 11th attack and the rest of them were blowback from American Imperial policy in the Middle East and I sat there and I watched a room full of Republicans nodding And they knew that even if they didn't agree with him 100% they knew he was telling the truth They knew that they trusted him They knew that he was doing what he thought was right and that was good enough for them Good enough to really move that needle and you know what? I have to think that after a week of George Bush and his government doing nothing to help the drowning people in New Orleans That those same constituents must have been thinking back on Ron Paul's speech Just as so many other Americans were looking back at the Bush government and wondering whether these guys really know what they're doing Like they said they did in the first place And it was really something to see anyway And also want to say about Ron Paul I've interviewed him on my radio show 30 times now since 2004 And he always knows what he's talking about on any issue no matter what it's not just that He knows about economics that he knows about libertarian political theory, but if I ask him about Korea He knows everything about Korea if I ask him about Afghanistan He knows everything about Afghanistan if I ask him about Iran's nuclear program He knows everything about Iran's nuclear program He really is an expert and of course always tells the truth Now you might remember from the clash with Rudy Giuliani The argument was two parts the first part was they hate us because we've been bombing them for 10 years before 9-11 ever happened That rang true and people got that immediately But then he said something that confused people even supporters. He said but now bin Laden is glad that we're there Now we're doing exactly what he wanted by invading and People thought well, I don't get it You're saying they attacked us because they want us to leave now. You're saying that they're glad that we're there Well, he was right about that. I'm gonna share with you this one small part from my book It's fool's air and it's on sale now audio book available If you think you could stand nine hours of this In 2010 this is when bin Laden was still alive his son Omar who's one of his non-terrorist sons Hamza is the bad one Omar bin Laden gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine He said my father's dream was to bring the Americans to Afghanistan He would do the same thing he did to the Russians. I was surprised the Americans took the bait I so much respected the mentality of President Clinton. He was the one who was smart When my father attacked his places, he sent a few cruise missiles to my father's training camp He didn't get my father, but after all the war in Afghanistan, they still don't have my father They have spent hundreds of billions Better for America to keep the money for its economy in Clinton's time America was very smart Not like a bull that runs after the red scarf. I Was in Afghanistan when Bush was elected My father was so happy This is the kind of president he needs one who will attack and spend money and break the country I'm sure my father wanted Senator John McCain more than Obama in 2008 McCain has the same mentality as Bush When the reporter asked Omar bin Laden if he thought Osama bin Laden would launch any more attacks against the United States He replied I don't think so He doesn't need to as soon as America went to Afghanistan his plan worked He's already won. And so this really goes to show the important point As Dr. Paul said in that debate if we think we can just go around the world doing what we want and not have to suffer the Consequences not to study the truth of what's really going on that we do that at our own peril and that's the situation that we find ourselves in today where after 18 years our government is still following Osama bin Laden's script and Reacting exactly in the way that he wanted to All right So of course it was not all about the wars Though that was the key Ron Paul before during and since his presidential campaigns and if he saw his speech as a little talk last night It was really great Ron Paul stands for what is after all the essence of the American creed Unalienable natural rights for all people and during his two campaigns He gave what amounted to the greatest ever speaking tour on behalf of peace liberty a free economy sound money and the rest Those campaigns certainly did more to advance the ideas of liberty than anything else in our lifetimes perhaps in history He changed the world His warnings about the then coming 2008 crash also has helped to prevent the worst anti-capitalist narrative from becoming dominant They did try to blame George Bush's laissez-faire free market policies But it didn't really stick Because of the work that Ron Paul had done in attacking the economy from the free market point of view before the crash ever happened And Part of this was because dr. Paul put on this massive propaganda campaign for freedom right when Americans really needed it the most Okay, might have been a couple of years early But still what dr. Paul did was remind American society that liberty brings us together That it allows us to tolerate each other's differences of opinions and actions freedom is what we all have in common It's at the end of the day what we all care about the most and agree about Freedom of religion freedom of speech a free press guns fair trials for the accused protections from torture the right to keep what we earn to take care of our families and our businesses But in America today the failures of the Bush Clinton Neo-liberal centrist consensus in the post-Cold War era have become too dire to propagandize away in Reaction the worst of the left and the right are becoming more socialistic and more nationalistic Then of course they react against each other even more And it really is a shame The neo-liberal so-called moderate centrists have just about ruined everything They take our libertarian concepts of self-government and property rights and pervert them into an international Crusade to install a global regime of what Bill Clinton called free markets and democracy meaning really policies that favor American business interests and Installing and backing compliant governments around the world with bloody force if necessary We libertarians have Murray Rothbard the neoliberals have Thomas Friedman He says global trade and capitalism can only exist with the mailed fist of the US government to enforce it It turns out the government is looking for work. And so they agree with him And what they've done is they've killed millions of people They've spread chaos across southwestern Asia wasted uncountable trillions of dollars disgraced all of our names and did it all in the name of the American way Dragging the good name of individual rights market economics and regular elections through the mud Just as so much of the rest of the world are also undergoing major reactions Against this peculiar American freedom of the neo-liberals Corrupted by money power and the ideology of American exceptionalism Which claims that murder is just fine when US government employees do it in the name of freedom and progress They've dealt these concepts significant blows But Charles growth hammer and the unipolar moment are both gone The world wonders what is next The horrors of the totalitarian states of the last century show us what could happen If humanity embraces new consolidations of power by strong men of the left or right against the crumbling American order But there is hope for America After all at the root of modern liberalism is the belief in equality and freedom for all and At the root of American conservatism is the attempt to conserve that same old liberalism of the American declaration Under these traditional viewpoints the USA isn't supposed to be a world empire anyway It's surely the path to our self-destruction So the American people and our country are actually giving up nothing that we should want to have When we give up our world empire In peacetime as dr. Paul said last night so many of the rest of our problems will be much easier to resolve I look at the division in the country now Between left and right and obviously there were lots of problems in the 1990s too, but I chalked the current Level of division and vitriol between left and right in America up to George Bush's decision to evade invade Iraq in 2003 half the population Damned and cursed the other half for refusing to support America's war to defend this country From Saddam Hussein who attacked us on September 11 and The other half of the American population went no you dummy Saddam didn't do it or the war would have started a year and a half ago and the level of Hatred between the two sides in fighting over that and of course once the torture scandal broke and Bush and the Republicans Insisted that the entire American right line up to support their torture policy just helped to double You know that feeling of division that the left and the right the blue and the red no longer are members of the same country anymore And this is why Ron Paul's message is so important as the centrist so-called moderates Really the worst extremists of our era are discredited and fade away Dr. Paul shows the country why our radical opposition to the disastrous policies of the liberals and conservatives is the true moderate middle of American politics in a moderate is Walter blocks middle name kind of way The reason we all fight so terribly is because the government has made it so there is so much at stake By insisting on the depoliticization of American life, we will see so many of these conflicts fade away Now is the time for our movement to supplant the consensus of the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who are running this country into the ground with libertarians Trying to call their most destructive policies to a halt We have already seen some advances on this front do a no small measure to the catastrophes our opponents have created The politicians are the enemy, but the masses of Americans really aren't so bad When the gap between the truth and the conventional narrative is so vast and When the gap between the truth and the way things should be are likewise so vast This is the best opportunity for libertarians to not only recruit new people to our movement But to help lead the best of the left and the right to help them to get their Priority straight to help us end the very worst things our government does first justice dr. Paul does Okay now Jeff wanted me to talk about my own experience in alternative media So I'm going to do that. Otherwise. I would just continue talking about how much I love Ron Paul for the rest of the day Or maybe to talk to you about Iraq war three again But this realignment between the best of the left and the right this has been my mission since I started on pirate radio in Austin in 1998 To try to bridge that gap between the populace left and the right to fight the elite and protect freedom. I Admit it hasn't worked that well, but I'm trying I've never really tried to join up with mass media My first show was say it ain't so on the community pirate radio station free Radio Austin 97.1 FM in Austin Which was mostly hippies and earth-first environmentalists and some right-wing militia guys We're all fighting the power and exemplifying that same spirit That same agenda here After the FCC cracked down on free radio Austin some friends of mine started another pirate radio station chaos radio 95.9 FM which lasted through almost all of the George W. Bush years This is where I started the interview show under the name of Philip Drew back in 2003 I also used to call congressman Paul's weekly update recorded message 888 3 2 2 1 4 1 4 and Play that live over-the-air every week and Jeff. Where's Jeff? I'm sorry. I did lie to you a couple of times A Jeff wouldn't let me interview dr. Paul on pirate radio. So I told him it wasn't Hey, it was wartime It still is All right, then of course there's anti-war.com where the show has been featured since 2007 This is where we get most the most bang for our anti-war buck probably anywhere and all credit to Eric Garris Jason Ditz Justin Romando, Angela Keaton, Margaret Griffiths and the rest of the crew there at anti-war.com and Possibly interesting to you guys curiously even to me I guess is that I've been on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles for seven years now now Every single other host on there is a leftist. I'm the only libertarian on there my show is called anti-war radio I'm on every Sunday morning and Even though I don't quite fit in with the rest of the crew there They don't mind my point of view on other matters They figure I guess that even though I'm bad on everything else at least I'm really good on war and It goes to show that that's their priority it is Pacifica after all it was founded for anti-war purposes generations ago and So they still have their priorities straight and allow me to do my show there At first it was hard for them to understand that I'm not from somewhere to the right of Dick Cheney But they figured it out. It took them a while Okay, now something that's been very important to all of us Of course has been the advent of Facebook and Twitter And a huge effect that they've had on the internet for good and for ill The promise of these sites of course is the potential for a great expansion of all of our audiences Though from the beginning they've also been a double-edged sword Killing great comments section communities and blogs from all places on the political spectrum. I Get fed I got fed up and quit Facebook back in 2014 when they first started really changing the algorithms to punish alternative media I Would post an interview of Ron Paul and get just a few likes and shares Whatever exactly they thought of me I was sure that more than just a couple of my six thousand friends and followers would want to listen to and like such posts The people who hung around on my Facebook page the community of people of friends there vanished Facebook started demanding money to show my posts to anyone. I called their bluff and walked away Now Twitter is doing the same thing to their timelines and are banning people with unpopular opinions The centralization of the internet onto these sites is already showing its major weaknesses That one can be made to disappear from discussion at the whim of a few Silicon Valley executives In bed with the government and corrupt think tanks like the Atlantic Council Which is funded by arms dealers and foreign governments primarily to promote the permanence of the NATO Alliance Don't like their policy? Then you're a Russian agent and have to go Honestly, I was really happy to quit Twitter I was wasting far too much of my time for far too little reward on that site Cold turkey was the only way to go My temporary ban along with Dan McAdams during the Peter Van Buren troubles a couple of months ago This gave me a good opportunity to finally do so a Worst stage of internet oppression now looms First they came for the extreme right and the truthers De-platforming them as they call it from virtually every web 2.0 service and even including kicking them off of major corporate servers like go daddy.com At this rate banning their servers from access to American ISPs Banning them from the internet entirely is not far off Nor is the targeting of libertarians and leftist alternative media sites many of which have already been D-ranked by Google and ghosted and banned by Facebook and Twitter Facebook purged at least dozens maybe hundreds of libertarian-minded political pages like those of cop watch and the anti-media just a couple of weeks ago in Reaction to these in reaction to this we have seen the advent of a few alternatives such as mastodon and mines Perhaps one of these will take off Perhaps someone will invent a standalone app that negates the need for us all to join any one site in order to network with friends family and ideological fellow travelers and opponents Now here is why all this matters so much This week the New York Times finally ran two major stories on the suffering of the Yemeni people at the hands of the American Saudi war there The administration now finally says it's time to start wrapping things up after three and a half years of slaughter at the end of 2018 Public pressure Including perhaps especially through social media has really helped regular people from the right left and libertarians to force at least some congressmen and senators to introduce resolutions to try to stop this war and Finally for the New York Times to admit how bad things there have gotten The fact that the Saudi crown prince tortured and murdered a regular writer for the Washington Post The same way that they and the United Arab Emirates have been torturing and murdering Yemenis for the past few years Also seems to has helped to have helped to raise awareness of the tragedy of the US's war there as well, of course But right now We're still dependent Our pressure from below can push but it takes the New York Times and the Washington Post and the pressure on them by us For their change in narrative to really change the narrative where it counts in DC Sorry to report that's true, but I think this week's New York Times stories Help to prove it Right now I'm actually trying to get away with reforming the transcript of a talk. I gave on the internet To turn that into my next book about the war on terrorism And I'm thinking about getting another old-fashioned daily radio show So I'm not really sure if I'm using these technologies, right? I Seem to seem to have gotten a better reaction from the book then 5,000 interviews over all these years So I guess people really do still you know crave the deep dive and the old technology to get the real truth through But as the great comedian Bill Hicks once said you do what you can So let's all do what we can to spread the message of peace and liberty while we still can You're all ideological capitalists and I supply books Say his law says that you have to demand them. I'm pretty sure that's how that works Thank you all so much