Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/22/22 Patrick MacFarlane on the Populist Right’s Taiwan Hypocrisy

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Scott is joined by Patrick MacFarlane, the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute, to discuss an article he wrote recently as well as the new direction he’s taking his podcast Vital Dissent. Scott and MacFarlane first dig into the growing tension between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan's sovereignty. MacFarlane points out that some of the best opposition to both the policies that provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and NATO’s subsequent response is from populist right-wingers. But those very same people throw all their logic out the window when the topic turns from Russia to China.  Discussed on the show: “Nothing But Welfare Queens: American Aid to Zelensky and Tsai Ing-wen” (Libertarian Institute) Vital Dissent Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. Follow him on Twitter @patmacfarlane_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Horton comedy. That's right, I'm doing an event with Robbie the Fire Bernstein here in Austin on the 5th of November as part of Robbie's porch tour. It's kind of an audition, actually. I'm trying to get the job to replace Dave Smith as Rob's sidekick. So show up and pretend to laugh at my awesome, hilarious comedy jokes. Robbie and another dude are also doing stand-up. Then Robbie and I are going to do a live podcast about libertarian themes and Star Wars and things. That's November the 5th.

Go to thefireticks.com to find out all about it. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show hey guys check it out on the line i've got patrick mcfarlane and he is the get this

justin romando fellow at the libertarian institute and you know he uh was the host of show Liberty Weekly that we host at the Libertarian Institute, but he changed it. It's now called Vital Descent at the end of history. Hey, shout out to Fukuyama there. I was harassing him for killing a bunch of Iraqis recently on the Twitter there before I quit. He deserves it. Welcome back to this show. How you doing, Patrick? Hey, you doing good, Scott. Thanks for having me on. I've had you on before, right? Yeah, yep. Okay. I thought so. Hey, um, so. So, listen, really great article here at anti-war.com.

No, it was at the Institute. Republished at anti-war.com. Same difference. It's time to cut Zelensky and Inwan from the U.S. dole. So, well, let's just start with the start.

As it pertains to the American public, Ukraine's response to the Russian invasion can be summed up with two words. Quote, Zelensky demands. What do you mean by that? Yeah, well, I, throughout this whole thing, it's really just been, you know, Zelensky banging the gavels for everyone, all the support that he can get, which I guess on some level I can understand is the leader

of a country that's being invaded. But there's even been a feeling in some of the latest push that Zelensky has had, some self-conscious self-reflection by the Ukrainians that, hey, maybe we shouldn't come across as appearing ungrateful for all of this help. Yeah, well, I mean, the latest, and they keep doing this, him and his deputies keep saying that it's time for America to bomb Moscow. I'm paraphrasing loosely, but that, you know, one of them said, I think it was the deputy said, if they even think about nuking Ukraine, the Americans should nuke them first. And then Zelensky was saying, I think, yesterday, whatever they do to Ukraine, America should, and the West, I guess he said, the world, should threaten to do to Russia and all this. Again, hey, I understand your perspective on that, but you might pipe down a little bit.

In fact, it would be reasonable for that to be the price of all this American support that you at least shut up with all that loud talking. You know, I don't know. Not that I'm for any of the weapons at all, but I'm just saying it's pretty crazy to, like, think of a guy like that digging your grave for you. You know what I mean? Yeah, well, of course. Yeah. And although, I mean, you could talk a little bit, and it doesn't really matter, but all this stuff about Zelensky being a comedian and all of his outrageous sketches from beforehand. And it really is just a cartoon world that we're living in, it seems like. Yeah. Well, he, I guess, looks good in a T-shirt if you're a chick or something. I don't know. Seems to work with the CNN ladies. Yeah, and all of the Hollywood actors and like Ben Stiller and all these people who have had this revolving door with Zelensky after the conflict started. But when it comes to this article, I mean, what I really was trying to do was try to, I mean, I'm more conservative and so I can speak the language.

And I mean, this is obviously, this is something that I believe myself, but I really tried to resonate with the people in this country who, some of the populist conservatives who, They frame things in terms of like the elites and the establishment Democrats spending us into oblivion and risking nuclear war. And I really tried to hold the mirror up to that kind of rhetoric to try to tell populist conservatives that, hey, look, I mean, the same thing is going on with Tsying Wen over Taiwan. And it's, you should oppose that for the same reasons that you correctly, at least in rhetoric, oppose all this aid to Ukraine. Yeah. Well, so, and look, I mean, not to pick on Zelensky either because what, he's just a politician. And it's true that it didn't like he invaded Russia, although not that he was making peace with the people in the east of his own country at the time like he was supposed to like he ran on. But he is the president of the country that's been invaded here. So, you know, screw Russia. It's not like I'm taking their side of where. But at the same time, nobody's asking America to support Russia. in the war. We're not paying their bills and we're not responsible for whatever sins that they're committing in the same way. So that's what the difference is. It's not a matter of good and evil. It's a matter of whose side is America on. And as you put it, what's good

for America's national interest here rather than, for example, the emotions of the anchors on CNN? Yeah, and I think it's important to make that distinction because As we see all of the rhetoric ramping up and it's happened, I mean, since February, since before then, really. And just to be careful with words because, you know, we're going into this situation where we're progressing into a real war footing in this country. And I think that speaking out against this conflict is going to go beyond just, you know, people calling you a Putin apologist. Yeah. You know, I think there is kind of a deal where the last time Americans saw a real war in terms of between states where you have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people dying by the day, by the week, that kind of thing.

It's been a few generations and people just don't remember. And it all just seems like kind of a movie and whatever's at risk. you know, I don't know. It couldn't get that bad. Whereas on the other hand, yeah, it really could. And especially, you know, I just read this thing by Lyle Goldstein all about how look, it's true that the Russian conventional forces are pretty weak, weaker than a lot of people thought that they were.

But you got to understand that that just makes them more dependent on their nuclear weapons if it comes down to it. And the Americans just like to brag and boast, and they don't like to think about the other side's point of view about stuff like this. And so then what do they have, right? They put more and more into their hypersonic gliders and their nuclear torpedoes and all that, because ultimately those are more cost effective than new tank divisions. Apparently, that's their calculation.

But the Americans are helping put them in that situation where that's what they're calculating. You know? Well, I think the interesting thing that we see, too, in regards to that is the return of the domino theory. And I know you've talked about this with guests recently, but I started a TikTok channel, which I, you know, trying to reach some of the younger people who are going to be cannon fodder if this were to go to some kind of global conflict. But a lot of the comments that I've gotten back have just been the return of this domino theory. And it seems like you're in this, you know, Schrodinger's Russia, where it's like we're stuck in this conflict where Russia's at the same time this huge threat to Europe, but at the same time can't even swing. wallow the Ukrainian military. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's sort of just like where entertainment news is easier.

Hitler analogies are easier than actually knowing what you're talking about. And everybody knows that the worst mistake anyone ever did was not invade Germany in 1933 as soon as that guy took power. And everything that they did to negotiate before the total. war was all the giant mistake of appeasement. And you can never do that again. And it doesn't matter if the analogy doesn't hold. I mean, take a look at

Vladimir Putin. It's a lot more like Hindenburg than Hitler. You could imagine somebody being far to his right, seizing power in that country, maybe someday soon, you know? But and this whole idea that, oh, yeah,

no, yeah, now he's just biting off a piece of Ukraine next he's going to march into Warsaw and then Berlin and all this. Come on. As you say domino theory, it's not, see, the domino theory that brings up Asians in a way that like makes it somehow a different argument. I don't know. Communism in Asia versus fascism in Europe. But the thing is the analogy just does not hold. But it's easy, especially for TikTok. You know, come on, what are you stupid? Everybody knows that you can to peace Hitler. And then, time's up for your video so that makes sense you know that fits yeah and for me especially

I guess you know the the whole TikTok thing has been useful because it's been training me to be more succinct or to at least take on the challenge of addressing these complicated complex topics and the span of a minute or something like that but yeah and so in this way the article like what I tried to do as well was to identify these two key figures, right? Bob Menendez and Lindsay Graham as being on the tip of the sphere, the spear for both the Ukraine situation and the Taiwan situation. And both of them notorious hawks for generation now. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And it's this Taiwan Policy Act that is the biggest. In my articles, you know, I've tried over the years to, well, especially the last couple months, to be a bit more. persuasive. And I think part of that is to give someone an identifiable action item. And one of the actions that I give to these populist conservative is you have to oppose the Taiwan Policy Act in all its forms. You know, Rand Paul is getting it right. And he's one of the Republicans who are opposing all of this aid to Ukraine. And he gets this right. And there's all this backdoor stuff about they're taking the Taiwan Policy Act and trying to sneak it in through the NDAA that's coming up here.

But in that, you get rid of a lot of the most confrontational diplomatic language about designating Taiwan as a major non-NATO ally and kind of issuing, I mean, in actual policy, issuing the One China principle, right? But when you sneak it in through the NDAA, you get, you get rid of it. of all that bad diplomatic language, but you have to double the amount of direct military support in order to... Yeah, I mean, to think that they can just change the policy, that's simply from one China to... Oh, yeah, no, one China, but except that Taiwan is a major non-NATO ally, like, say, Australia or something like that, really? Like Japan? That doesn't sound like a one-china policy

at all anymore. That sounds like an earthquake, and yet it just sounds, you know, you're setting up nuclear war, but just bearing it in bureaucratic sounding language, it's not even interesting. Oh, did you hear today they pass the boring old something act? And you know what I mean? Yeah, and it'd be nice if they could have, like, made the distinction. I mean, for China watchers out there, it's like, well, in 1979, we had the Taiwan Relations Act, but now the new turn is the Taiwan Policy Act. So, I mean, even I get them confused. you know, and talking on shows and stuff. Yeah.

Wow. And then so, uh, now what all, uh, weapons and, and things are in it, do you know?

Well, the, it was a little unclear because for a while they had proposed it, um, at least as an addition to the NDAA, but it, it does include 10, 10 billion dollars in military aid for Taiwan.

It would be given to Taiwan over five years in the form of, the foreign military financing, which is a State Department program that gives foreign government's money to purchase U.S. weapons. However, 300 million of the foreign military financing can be used each year to purchase military equipment from Taiwan's own industrial base. And the only other country that has that privilege in U.S. relations is Israel. And, of course, I'm quoting here from the great day of the camp at antiwar.com. yeah as we do well um all right so you know by the way there's a hell of a lot going on in

uh chinese news here um firstly you know you have the uh 20th communist party what's it called uh the party congress and uh the new central committee is formed and all this have you been reading about that yeah i did as much as i could this weekend. I rely on Peter Lee a lot for some of my China analysis. And there's a lot of hay that's been made, especially, you know, we're talking about populist conservatives here. They oppose escalation, at least in rhetoric, in the Ukraine situation with Russia. But they're some of the biggest hawks on China. And the way it's been portrayed in kind of right-wing media is that she has become the dictator because it's.

It's unprecedented that he has had a third term. So now he's another Hitler, at least in the West, or the East, excuse me. Well, look, it's already a one-party dictatorship. Well, I mean, talk about a distinction without a difference. I mean, I get it, though, that it's important that he pushed out all the other guys and put all his loyalists in charge and all that kind of thing. They're like saying it was due to illness, but it seemed like a deliberate humiliation of his predecessor. or they had them kind of dragged out of there, confused,

when it was going on and all of that. But I don't know. I don't think that makes China necessarily more threatening, if anything, from what I've learned about it, and, you know, all of his policies of his 14 points, what do you get that stuff from? That, like, really, he just wants to take more centralized control over the economy. which I guess in some ways has meant over in the past at least some pretty severe anti-corruption stuff.

But otherwise, I mean, it doesn't matter. Corruption or not, centralized planning is mostly, I mean, on some gigantic projects, I guess you're going to put up a dam or a highway or whatever. But for the most part, they just do nothing but misallocate resource. And they want to clamp down on all the ethnic minorities and force them to all be. become Han Chinese, which they all want to resist and all these things. Sounds like he really has his hands full. It doesn't sound to me like, you know, the more they centralized power in China,

the more of a threat they get to the outside world. That hasn't seemed to have been the case. Certainly the argument has been that, yeah, once the Maoist dictatorship failed, and Deng Xiaoping and his guys came to power. decentralized power and allowed people to own property and companies and make money that that's what made them powerful

so if she's going the other way then from even an imperial point of view oh good they're digging their own grave right I even look at what's going on with the lockdowns right now and there's a whole narrative on the right wing that

they tricked us those commie rat bastards tricked us into locking our country down and all this but look at what they're doing right now they believe in that stuff yeah they lock people in their houses for months and in their you know growth rate is lower than it's been since i don't know when but it's low i mean it's it's a totalitarian state well totalitarianism doesn't work well in terms of production capacity and so forth and i know that they're building up their navy but they're not building up a global navy they're building up a defensive one and i'm not the

expert, but Lio Goldstein and them say you can tell by which ships they're building. It's not like they're building 22 aircraft carrier battle groups like we got. Yeah, and this has kind of been the, you know, of course you have Navy officials from the United States saying that the United States should prepare for the possibility of China invading Taiwan as soon as this year. And of course, we only have, what, two months left in this year. And, you know, anything could happen. I suppose we kind of that with the Ukraine situation, but I would think that if China was preparing for what probably would be one of the largest amphibious invasions in world history, we might see it a bit more

in some satellite images, although I think the most likely situation is that China has some kind of unconventional attack if they do move on Taiwan, but most likely I would see a blockade of the island. And we saw that in China's response to Nancy Pelosi's visit at the beginning of August. Yeah. Hey, guys, sorry, I don't mean to go all FDR on you or anything, but here's the new deal. All the interviews are now going up first at Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Of course, they'll all be going up at Scott Horton.org the next day, and the archives going back to 1999. We'll still be free for you there at Scott Horton.org. But I got to generate revenue, you know. Hey, y'all. Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute

shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's Libertaselah.com. That's Libertas Bella.com. You guys check it out. This is so cool. The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out. He's been working on this thing for years. And I admit, I haven't read it yet.

I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it. It's called Why the Vietnam War? Nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61. And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in say 1964 through 1974 through 1974 but how do we get there why is this all harry truman's fault find out in why the vietnam war by the great mike swanson available now um no he keeps coming up so i'm gonna have loud goldstein on and ask him about because i know he's up on the very latest of chinese military deployments and interpreting them and all of that same with russia he came on the show and called

the ukrainian invasion right before it happened and all that so um very reliable guy yeah but uh i think i can't remember who it was it said that you know they got to do is just put on a blockade you don't even have to invade the place um although they if they did that they'd be daring the Americans to break it with their power, you know? I don't know. But, um, I don't know, man. I got to tell you, I'm not comforted having Joe Biden in charge. Not that I was with any of the presidents of my lifetime, frankly, but he's really bad. And, um, well, like some of them, he's really stupid, especially in his old age. I mean, he never was that bright. But he's so dottering now.

I can just see him being like, oh, yeah, attack Taiwan. Oh, wait, which one's Taiwan again? And just, you know what I mean? Just he's out of it, dude. I think that was, you said in a recent show, I think it was last week in interview where, you know, the prevailing narrative about Joe Biden, at least on the right, is that, well, he's weak. You know, if only Donald Trump were in office, and I think some people have said this, some commentators have said, Donald Trump threatened to nuke Moscow and he threatened to nuke Beijing.

And if he was only in office now, none of this would have happened because he would have laid down the threats early. But I think you would mention that the inverse narrative about Joe Biden would work better. And maybe it should work with the populace, right, is that, well, this guy is senile. He's nuts. He's crazy. He's being incredibly reckless with all of his policy. And in fact, that's what the actual policy, if you're not. you actually look at the policy, that's what it demonstrates that.

Yeah. At least W. Bush had this coherent communist theory of global revolution that he inherited from his Trotsky-eyed advisors. What's Biden doing, stumbling around out of the dark? Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. You tell them that I shook my cane in the air and hollered. You know, I don't think that's a very good way to make foreign policy, dude. Yeah, it's incredible. And, Yeah, I really hope that this piece, I was really pleased by the way that it turned out and in the reception that it got. And I really hope that the parallels should bear true. I mean, you got a lot of the same stuff going on with the pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine.

You got a lot of the same stuff going on in Taiwan. And I tried to highlight a lot of this rhetoric that Lindsay Graham and Bob Menendez had on the multiple occasions that they have personally visited sighing when. It may be two or three, I want to think. But they're there after the Russian invasion of Ukraine saying, you know, don't feel bad that we're focusing on Ukraine right now. We still have a lot of love for Taiwan. Don't think we forgot about you. And we know that the future is really here in the Indo-Pacific, right? this term that they've created

to describe the South China Sea in a way that doesn't revolve around China. The whole thing is completely bananas. You know, it makes sense to try to provoke them if you have some weird conflict of interest. But I think if you just grabbed a guy off the street, you know, a sane one at random

and put him in there, he'd go, well, look, we have this status quo that's held for 50 years. That, of course, it's one China, but geez guys don't fight and let's just leave it at that why would we not leave it at that and then of course they'll say especially if the war does break out they'll go see that's why we had to intervene so much on Taiwan's side before and after is because of this Chinese aggression and I get it that if it's just anti-war dot com saying it that's one thing but it's really no different than what George Kennan said about provoking the Russians in eastern Europe that there's no

need to expand NATO. And if we do, he said, this is what he told Thomas Friedman in the New York Times in 1998. If we do this, the Russians are going to react. And all the people now, all the people who are telling us now that it's no big deal, they'll be the ones then saying, see, that's why we have to do this, because that's just how the Russians are, and that we're the ones defending from Russian aggression when it's clear that they're the ones who provoked it. So here, instead of telling Taiwanese nationalists, hey, you guys should pipe you. down and telling the Chinese, look, they're not going to declare independence or we're not making any promises to them that might provoke them into doing. So you can rest assured about that

and let the status quo be the status quo. It's held for 50 years. It might not hold forever. But then again, you know, look at the map. Is Taiwan really more part of America than it is part of China? We're going to go to nuclear war for that. And again, You get into a major war with China, just like with Russia, that's going to go nuclear very quickly. And when you're talking about ships full of sailors going down to the bottom of the ocean, you're talking about emotions running hot as hell in every capital around the world. So, man. Yeah, well, when it comes to this, you know, the populist right, getting Ukraine more correct than others,

it really trying to pivot and tell them why the same reason they should oppose escalations with China, you'll get a few things differently, right? They'll say that, well, fighting a war against Russia over Ukraine is not in the U.S. interests, but confronting China in the Indo-Pacific is in U.S. interests. And you'll get some other things about how, well, no one's advocating that we go to war with China, it's just that we need to confront them and selling Taiwan, weapons and making it into a porcupine is not confronting, you know, it's not declaring war with China or

advocating war with China. In fact, that is in the U.S. natural interest, national interests, because, you know, the century, the next century, you know, China is going to rise and nothing will be able to stop them. Yeah. Essentially, it makes sense from their point of view, and you know they really do believe their own BS, that, of course, whatever we

do is defensive and it's only to protect and then geez you know if we cause a problem for our enemy then at least it'll be expensive for them we'll get a boost in spending for our favorite weapons manufacturers who finance all the think tanks and all down the line but again you know not to excuse it but you can blow up Iraqis and Afghans all day long and the worst thing that they could do is motivate some Saudis into hijacking one of your planes against here or something? Pretty bad that one time, but compared to what a nuclear weapon state can do. But they treat, you know, as Darrell Cooper said, they talk about Putin like he's Omar or Bakr al-Baghdadi, right, the leader of ISIS,

the renowned austere religious scholar, according to Jobi Warwick and the Washington Post, remember that. But they talk about Putin like he's no more legitimate. legitimate leader than Baghdaddy was and his, you know, pseudo caliphate there in western Iraq and eastern Syria. And, but that's probably not the easiest way to approach these issues. And same kind of thing here where they just, they act like they're playing chicken with somebody who really can knock their block off, you know? And in some way maybe, I don't know, this is just speculation, but it seems like the ultimate aim is regime change in Moscow and in, Beijing at the same time. And maybe

giving Putin and giving Qi these situations where they're forced to act and they act and then fail is supposed to be some kind of a catalyst for doing that. And so this pet theory I have about

maybe the United States wants to entice Beijing to try to make a move on Taiwan. But there's a whole bunch of counterfactuals that go to that too. But it's just my own pet speculation. all right tell us about vital dissent yeah well so i i changed liberty weekly to vital dissent and and the reason why i did that is because there's a whole lot of people who could be

opposing this dangerous escalation this new great power competition who maybe are turned off by the liberty branding and so my perspective isn't changing of course you know i'm i'm the justin raymondo fellow at the libertarian institute i am a libertarian all those opinions and analysis isn't going to change. But I want to be more appealing to people who could be on our side who maybe aren't strictly pure anarcho-capitalists. Yeah, well, good. That's always been my philosophy.

It's the philosophy behind anti-war.com is to be as ecumenical as possible. As Eric likes to brag, we'll run Pat Buchanan and Daniel Ellsberg, not just on the same day, but right there next to each other, famous nemeses from the Nixon era, right? But if you're good on war and there's not too much global warming stuff in there, we'll run it. And so, and we're trying to speak to the whole country if we can. So, and frankly, I think, you know, the Institute, we're all pretty hardcore libertarians. But I think overall, pretty much everybody's,

focus is on trying to reach the general public rather than, you know, internal libertarian debates, of which there are plenty and which are very important, too. I just think that's mostly not our bent at the Institute. We have a bit of that, but, so, no, I think that's great. And so tell us what kind of topics you got in line. And what kind of podcast is this going to be? Is this going to be sort of like a radio show type deal? Or this is going to be one of those long-form, true crime deals. Yeah, well, I want to have the best of both worlds. I'll still be doing, you know, key interviews with experts as I identify or people that come on. I think generally the topics are going to revolve around opposing grain power competition, but it's also going to focus on, you know,

killing in war is another topic that I've covered in depth through the show, but also, you know, state malfeasance, state and corporate malfeasance. Like, I have a, you know, And this will be part of the show, too, these major documentary, scripted documentary-produced episodes that dive into certain topics. And one of the topics that I'm taking a look at is the plutonium injection experiments that happened as a parallel to the Manhattan Project, where all these Manhattan Project scientists dosed up American citizens with plutonium, injected them without their knowledge or consent, caused, who knows how much harm, because these people just kind of, you know, they went their separate ways. these victims. Oh, man, why you got to bring up old shit? No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, well, I mean, there's plenty of new stuff, but I think, you know, all this goes.

It's a little bit of plutonium, man. Come on. Where we are today. Yeah. No, it's crazy. It's like niacin. You need that stuff. It's in your Cheerios.

Yeah, well, there was this other experiment where they fed children like radioactive oatmeal, these orphans. So there's a whole lot of really dark stuff. to be covered there. And so I want to shed some light on it. Yeah, man, that's great. And, you know, that was some of the things that formed some of, well, I was already like this since I was a little kid, who were we kidding? But it was important stuff I paid attention to in the 1990s was some stuff by Bill Curtis on investigative reports. I mean, a lot of this came at during the church committee hearings and the M. Keltra and stuff, Rockefeller Committee hearings and all that.

Bill Curtis on investigative reports on A&E had a whole thing about how they were deliberately poisoning the people of New York and San Francisco with germs and the light bulbs of the subways in New York and dumping a bunch of bacteria over San Francisco and radiation experiments on people and, of course, you know, the MKLTRALSD stuff and whatever. It's pretty law-breaky type experimentation on Americans like, you know, and this is, you know, the nth degree of all this, of course, is the torture state.

Like, Alfred McCoy shows how the Soviets, not like they needed that much help, but the Soviets and the Americans both imported Nazi torture techniques, and then both brought them to Korea. And we're like, this is how you do it, and copying each other. And then that was then what they based the Sear program on, was the Kami torture techniques in Korea that they already, you know, had in their manuals anyway, that then the later torture program was based in great part on that sear techniques, the anti-torcher resistance techniques. So this is how you do it then. But all

that came through the commies and the Americans from the Nazis. Yeah, well, I think it's really important to focus on this kind of stuff, because if I could tie it back into the greater moment that we're in right now is this autocracies versus democracies kind of talk that's emerging from the blob, you know, this idea that, you know, if a bunch of people get together and they say a thing should be a certain way, well, that's infinitely better than one party state or someone like Putin or she doing the same thing. But we see that, you know, no matter what the system is, there's always these atrocities that are committed behind closed doors and even openly or across the world where the American people, you know, are too apathetic to really

know about it. Yeah. Man, there was that whole thing about the town in France where they gave them all acid and then they blamed it on the moldy bread or some kind of thing. And people went completely bananas. They like spike their water well with acid or something. There's some really crazy ones. Yeah, or the one of my things that I've looked into is the zinc cadmium sulfide aerosol dispersal experiments. I think it was in St. Louis and There were a bunch of cities in the U.S., you know, flyover country, kind of smaller, smaller metropolitan areas where they had huge blowers on the back of these state Army Chemical Corps vehicles. And they sprayed this biological tracer all through these cities. And there was a lawsuit that where people, you know, in inner city communities have been getting cancer at an unexplainable rate.

And they tried to sue. and, of course, you can't sue the U.S. government without its consent. So that was dismissed. Yeah. Even though that's right in the First Amendment, the rights of petition for redress grievances, but they just changed the meaning of the word petition from sue their sorry asses to sign your name on a little piece of paper begging. Yep.

Sovereign immunity. Yeah. Yeah, dude. All right. Well, I won't keep you any longer, man, but I appreciate you writing for us and doing your great podcast. I look forward. Is Vital Descent already started?

Yep, it's VitalDescent.com. And you got your first show, I mean? Yeah, yep, yep, it's out. Okay, great. Well, I'll be taking a look at that, VitalDecent.com. All right, well, thank you very much, Patrick. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Scott.

All right, you guys. That's Patrick McFarlane. Of course, you can find his show also at the Libertarian Institute and the right hand margin there, and he's our Justin Romando fellow, libertarian institute.org slash Patrick. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPS

FK 90.7 FM in LA. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.