Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/13/23 Bjorn Handeen on Using Local Politics to End the Wars

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Scott talks with Bjorn Handeen, a long-time listener who is now the Idaho Republican Party Region 1 Chairman. The two talk about Handeen’s efforts to translate his knowledge of American foreign policy into results by focusing on local politicians. Unlike some of the big names in today’s Congress, politicians on the county and state levels are often totally uninformed about international issues, which can make them relatively open-minded if only you’re able to get in their ear. Handeen says you’ll be surprised how much access you’ll get to local legislators if you just start showing up. They talk about when democratic institutions can be an effective tool in the non-interventionist effort. And they also look back and reflect on Scott’s early interviews.  Discussed on the show: The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson  Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson  Newspapers.com “Korean War at 69: Truman, Treaties, and the Bricker Amendment” (Antiwar.com) Bjorn Handeen is the Idaho Republican Party Region 1 Chairman representing Boundary, Bonner, Kootenai, Shoshone and Benewah Counties. He’s also a longtime listener of the Scott Horton Show. Follow him on Twitter @BjornHandeen This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 2004. 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 dot com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing bjorn hand dean he is a republican party official from idaho doing some great anti-war stuff welcome the show how you doing oh thank you it's a great

or I've been a listener for a long, long, long time. Well, great. Happy to hear that. And I forget now, but the name's familiar from previous times. I'm not sure if we had email before or Facebook friends back in prehistory or whatever. But recently, you come recommended to me from Dan McKnight from Bringer Troops home. He said, you've got to talk to this guy. He's doing such great work with the Republican Party up there.

So, and then the first thing he sent me was a screenshot of y'all's Yemen resolution, which, well, go ahead and tell the story of that. You did a Yemen resolution in Idaho? Yeah, well, five years ago when that joint resolution came around the first time, we tried it at our local county, Cootney County, third largest county in Idaho, centered in Cordillane. and and it failed our county, just barely, but it failed to pass in our county. And now five years later, our resolution calling for an end to the war in Yemen, it passed unanimously at the county level. And therefore, we had the opportunity to bring it to be discussed by the state party of Idaho. and it passed the Rules Committee, I'm sorry, the Resolutions Committee,

but the meeting ended right before we were to vote on it as a whole body and have it be the official position of the State Party. But I'm told in the summer we're going to be able to maneuver to get that herd first. And now that wasn't a setup where like, oh, whoops, sorry we ran on time, they just really ran out of time? Yeah. Not accidentally on purpose. I would have had different priorities if I were in charge.

I see, but it wasn't, I understand what you mean. So, but still, I mean, that's pretty good and unanimous, you know, to start there on the county level is great. And so you're going to have another crack at it in the summer you say? We'll have another crack at it in the summer. Hopefully, it'll be a moot point and it will, uh, return to a constitutional foreign policy before then as a nation. Yeah, good luck with that. Well, and now, you know, the resolution in the Congress has been at least severely punted,

so the timing may be right there. I mean, Bernie Sanders, when he backed down, said, well, we're going to work with the administration on this, but geez, if they don't come correct, you know, within some kind of period of time, we're going to try this again. So in other words, summer sounds maybe about right that, you know, and we'll see what happens with the war over there. I mean,

there is essentially a pretty good ceasefire right now. The war is not all the way over and resolved, but, and it could start back up again. I mean, there's a real danger that it could, you know, get worse again. But there's a larger picture, too, right? You know, what's happening in,

in Yemen is just one echo of the larger picture. In fact, when I was presenting the resolution and talking about how James Madison felt about questions of war and peace, members of the party were shouting out to me, well, you know, what about Ukraine? What about this place? Syria, right? So the appetite is actually there.

And even in the establishment, Republican types, because I can we can pin this on Biden and Obama you know they they didn't oppose this at all yeah well listen I mean this is a huge shift in the

culture and we absolutely have to make the most of it that you know frankly a lot of the people who you know serve in the military in this country it's basically a family thing their father and their grandfather did and this is how they do it and

they're essentially conservative patriotic folk constitution bound and so you get so many of them killed for nothing their brothers and fathers back home now i mean surely no better thinking back on iraq and afghanistan now um so for them to be essentially like uh arms crossed not impressed by all the new reasons why we need to be intervening here there or the other place is really the best thing going on right now. That's the big difference. That's, you know, I started in politics, I guess, with Jesse and Ventura. But then Ron Paul, I really joined, you know, the actual Republican Party.

And, you know, we were viewed suspiciously. But everything's different now. Everything. Every one of your listeners can get involved somehow, some way, just like I did. You could say I started as a listener and then got involved in politics. Oh, that's interesting. That's cool, man. All right.

So tell me more about what's going on up there. Well, you know, that's the big push right now, right? You know, when we failed five years ago to get this resolution passed, the interesting thing is that, you know, we got in contact with then representative, Raul Labrador, and he actually did co-sponsor. So it was kind of a, we lost the county, but we, you know, won the big prize of getting our representative to sign on. And this time it's the opposite. They say, you know, our representative, Russ Fulcher is a good guy. And, you know, in many ways he is, but the most important thing going on in the world

is matters of war and peace, and he hasn't signed on. And, yeah, we've got to figure out a way to get our guys up to that level of elected office. Yeah. You know, there's a guy that, you know, has emailed me and mailed me from time to time. He's got the silver.

bullet plan which I agree with if you're listening out there guy Houston guy I agree with you that wouldn't it be perfect if we could get every city council to pass a thing saying they hate this every county board to say that our people don't want to do this anymore where you know and it makes sense that that's where people can get things done to start as you're saying is you know um any kind of meeting at all bring it up you know yeah any kind of public forum but the question is, is, you know how it is, they're only few, but they're highly organized and highly funded, and we're the masses, but we can never get our act together, right? So, but the question is, if you could just get a critical mass of people, you know, concerned about the same issue at the

same time, then eventually, you know, the market would take care of it, so to speak, right? Enough people would be pushing this on the county level, on the city council level, in the Republican party in the Democratic Party and all over the place in all 50 states and doing everything they can one way or the other in ways that we haven't thought of to try to figure out how to get it through. It's a matter of really prioritizing. And this is something that's been a real frustration, right, is that as I was just talking about this with Hunter Durences, that for well over a decade, the polls say that the soldiers don't believe in the war. This is going back to late Bush, early Obama at times, people were over it.

Hell, even in 2005, the soldiers said they wanted to come home from Iraq, you know, two years into the thing. Sure. Well, you know, gosh, they can beat us in any kind of strategy that money can buy, but they can't beat us in the strategies that money cannot buy. And that is Boots on the Ground organization that's showing up in person, two meetings. And also, that's really studying the issues. I've noticed Jim Rish, when you get our senator, and he's the ranking senator in the Foreign Relations Committee, right?

He's got no foreign policy background at all. He was a Boise District Attorney and then just kept rising up through the ranks. Do you think he really had time to sort through the issues and read Gareth Porter and Chalmers, Johnson? No, he doesn't really know anything about foreign policy. But yet there he is, one of the most powerful people in America when it comes to matters of war and peace. We can run circles around him. I remember they quoted me in the paper a couple of years back saying, if you don't read at antiwar.com, you don't qualify as having any foreign policy expertise at all. And so each one of your readers or your listeners are way more qualified to, have an opinion on foreign policy than most of these politicians who just get where they are through money. Hey, that's what Chalmers Johnson himself said that when I read anti-war.com every morning,

that believe me, that is better than the CIA morning brief. And I know because I used to write those. Nice. What a guy. Yeah, he was something else. I gave his books away at my wedding.

Oh, yeah. That's great. Yeah, someone was just saying, what should I read? get like a good big picture on here. Oh, sorrowless of empire, man, nemesis. Yeah. You know, for sure. Good old Salmer's Johnson, man.

Boy, you do go way back. That's great. Yeah, man. So the cultural shift and making the most of it, I guess, tell me what you see among the people there. Like, are you pushing on an open door? People are already, you know, ready to hear this. I'm pushing on an open door. I can't tell you what a shift it was.

From five years ago, even five years ago, things are changing, right? You know, Ron Pollers weren't anathema, but still, you know, the rank-and-file Republicans were not ready for a good foreign policy. Now, they get it, right? Things are changing. The only people that don't really get it are the people at the top. but we're running up that hill yeah that's really great so now are you going to run for office yourself oh i don't know um you know i a lot of times actual office holders need to um be so self-assured that even when they're wrong they don't act like it um i just you know i'm like a normal person

where i get nervous under scrutiny and and uh you know i'm i'm i'm too normal of person to actually inspire confidence in people I don't know well you know what I bet that's not true but I understand exactly how you feel though you know um one time when you were uh interviewing um not Gareth Porter uh the nuclear physicist the gene oh Gordon Prather Gordon Prather yeah you know you said um you know that he's a nuclear physicist but you can memorize the numbers as well and spin them back out and you know that's that's kind of me is you know i can i can remember a lot of what i hear and that's really important to help spread the word but yeah i'm more of a more of a word spreader not a not a politician yeah well and you know what that's okay too man um same here

we all have our roles that's right yeah and and it's important that you know they get the idea that, you know, it's not just other people on their same level, but out there in the town, out there in the countryside, in their state, this is how the people feel about it. Absolutely. Now, Dan McKnight, keep working on him because he should be U.S. senator from Idaho as soon as we can manage it. Oh, my God.

Can you imagine? Oh, yes, I can. Well, and that's really the only thing I know. about Jim Rich. I don't watch TV anymore, man. I just don't have the stomach for it. So I'm not as good on the Congress as I used to be. But this guy, Rich, the only thing really I know about him is that when he was the governor, Dan McKnight called him on a satellite phone from the top of a mountain in Afghanistan and said, listen, the regular army won't share. We don't have the equipment we need. We're out here in combat. And we don't have what we need to fight. And

the way I remember it, I think the governor came through for him and got on the phone to Congress and then, but that was the last time that he was good on anything as I think the way he described it. Now he's U.S. Senator and

he was just on the list to go to Davos and or Davos and then when people got upset about that he pulled his name off but you know, he's still yeah, he still represents that civilization more than

more than our traditional America non-interventionism yeah yeah he's pushing on go ahead oh I was just to say I think Dan said when he went to the Senate

the first thing he did was vote to fund the Afghan war and go along with all that stuff you know oh man it's such an easy thing to be heroic on but it'll cost you in terms of money but I don't know seems like well

pay off in votes then it's a balance i mean obviously need money to buy up tv time and all of that stuff too but maybe have some money but also inspire people to actually like you for doing the right thing for them one time you know i don't know that does never seem to play into their calculation seems like it always comes down to the money for the tv ads rather than having a reputation of actually given a damn about anyone or doing anything right you know you know as i've been reading a lot of old newspaper articles about politics on newspapers.com. It's really helpful. And this was a huge debate.

And when there were actual non-interventionists in Congress, when they were a power, right, the Bricker Amendment, you know, John Bricker and Robert Taft and even before, the thing is, those guys had, they were able to go around the money system because, you know, the primaries were, you know, a convention system, not just a direct primary. And it sounds bad. It sounds like, you know, oh, the people won't get a chance to vote. But, you know, sometimes, you know, mass media works, right? Mass commercials work. And therefore, whoever has the most money for mass marketing can get their guy elected. You know, we had more John Brickers and Robert Tafts.

when the primary system was held at a convention where, you know, the people who were interested enough to show up were the ones that helped decide who the nominee was going to be. Yeah. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, enough already. Time to End the War on Terrorism is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home.

Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. The audiobook. Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the institute, and they keep them running well. suggesting and making improvements all along.

Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Thomas done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level. and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link

in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, real history, real economics, real education. Book Club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday.

It's good to have. have a routine. And it's good for your eyes, too, because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam, eye exams provided by independent optometrists. It's really ironic, right? Because it seems like it's the other way around. Oh, no, that's just made it where it's all smoky rooms, deals in the background, and all of that. And if you have this primary grants access to all these people who otherwise wouldn't be able to participate and it's more democratic that way when really nah it just because the hand of the uh the will of the view determines the will of the masses

of barely interested people right right you can think of it like a union right a party is like a union that can counteract the organization can counteract the money of of the the top few that would otherwise just reach everybody through their monopoly of media control. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. You know, that's not to be like too much of a commie simp, but I understand the metaphor. Yeah. Well, you know, Idaho, incidentally, does have a really good tradition of non-interventionism, as I've been learning. And so it is natural that some of these things get more.

more play here in Idaho. Well, tell me about that. Well, I don't know if your listeners know too much about the Bricker amendment. That was like the high watermark of kind of maybe Pat Buchanan-style paleo-conservatism in the Republican Party. In 1956, a senator named John Bricker from Ohio had a constitutional amendment that would have made it illegal for anything. president to sign a treaty that abridges the rights of a, the constitutional rights of any

American, right? It would have been illegal. And it sounds like a good idea. It lost by one vote in the Senate. And, you know, both of our senators in Idaho voted for it. Most of the, you know, conservative Republicans voted for it. And after it lost in 56, it got reintroduced again and again and again and again until they, and it just kind of, you know, got fewer and fewer and fewer votes. And the last time it was introduced was 1999 by Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho.

You know, the last two decades, you know, in the 80s. in the 90s. Yeah, it was the Idaho people, Idaho Senator Steve Sims and Helen Chenoweth that would periodically introduce it. Kind of fascinating, really, but sad also that it just kind of dwindled into nothingness. Yeah. Well, you know, people want to learn more about that. There's a great article at anti-war.com by Joe Stromberg from April 19, 2003. Truman Treaties and the Bricker Amendment. Historical revision outflanked. It's really good stuff. You know, I remember reading that, actually.

I think that's what turned me on to the Bricker Amendment. I'm telling you that I started as just, you know, not involved in politics, I started consuming anti-war.com, and now I'm one of seven region executives on the Idaho Republican Party. That's great. Seems like you should be right. for us by now if you're all familiar with this Stromberg going back you know to the old days the old cause is the title of his old column for us yeah yeah well um you know i'm not uh i haven't been around long enough to have listened to your philip drew stuff but i'll uh i'll retroactively

start uh consuming that yeah there you stay up all night man play that get one of them players you could play it at a time and a half and you know I'm sorry because the uh I had originally saved all those in like way too high quality for the disc space back then

and I had a guy who hosted my server space he was like this is ridiculous and then he went and reduced him all to 8K and so they're just the audio quality on a lot of them is just terrible you know like maybe someday there will be a bot that can up sample them somehow and make the audio sound better, but they, yeah, we could upload them

all into AI and then, uh, and then we can make AI, Scott Horton, uh, interview, uh, people in history. Yeah. Somehow, like, remaster them, you know what I mean? And make them sound, uh, you know, high quality audio, because a lot of the audio on, on those older ones are really bad. Because, you know, I recorded them on, you know, I had a little mini disc recorder plugged into my cell phone, you know, on, on chaos radio in the garage there. That's where a lot of those were done. So, I wonder whatever happened. Yeah, yeah, you definitely were great improvisation, technological improvisation.

I remember you got to host the Phoenix Morning Show. and uh uh but your computer collapse so you uh but you had all these great guests lined up and and you you figured out a fix around it it was awesome that was an awesome day i remember that boy yeah you've been a long time so as long as we're reminiscent yeah what happened there was um jack blood had a com rex you know radio things you can do high quality radio basically over like a dsl line but custom-made made for radio transmission to get to host Charles Goyette's show. That's right, Charles Goyette, yeah.

Yeah, they had done it. They had practiced it, and it worked. They connected no problem. And then that morning, for some reason, his Comrex and theirs just would not talk to each other at all. So I hosted the show on a cordless phone, not even a cell phone, which was bad enough, but like on a cordless phone. Talk about 8K. That's probably six or something.

Right. And somehow made that work. That was a nightmare, man. Yep. Scott Hartons on. He was reaching too many people cut them off. Those are the days. And yeah, it was all about a run.

And yeah, I had like six guests lined up. I was going to hit all these different aspects. Yeah, it was like the wrong thing in one hour or something. You had the all star team all ready to go. That's so funny, man. I've forgotten about that. Yeah, this is nice talking to you, dude. Oh, man.

Yeah. You know, yeah, I remember your IRC channel. Is that still up and running? Oh, I don't think so. Sneaker, is that still a thing? He would know. If there's sneakers out there, he knows. All right, let me ask you a question about business here.

Yeah. Nice to meet you. But tell us about what are you guys doing on Defend the Guard? You know, that's, gosh, that is a Dan McKnight's Boise thing. So up in North Idaho, we haven't really connected. as we should have, right? I know Dan's got some state representatives that are really interested in it. And, you know, man alive, Dan McKnight, he has reached some people that we would not have found through normal kind of political activism channels.

And so he's getting these young vets that are hard workers, smart. guys, and, you know, those guys are going to change things. So, yeah, it's like maybe I should have been making sure defend the guard was brought up again. You know, that passed. Every time Dan McKnight brings it up at the state party, it's really well received. But then it kind of dead ends, right? The actual political leaders, you know, they don't really have to listen to the people within the Republican Party. You know, as far as that kind of concept of the party as the union goes, there's a disconnect now between what the, you know, what we're organizing for

and what the leaders that are elected can, will actually accomplish. Yeah. You know, this is something that came up a lot during the Yemen thing. And, you know, when, of course, Joe Biden came to the hill and cost Bernie Sanders, you know his margin 20 30 votes whatever Sanders didn't even hold a vote and everybody blamed Sanders which it was his you know he could have at least held a vote and let everybody debate it and give their speeches and stuff instead of folding before the night even got kicked off that sucked but it was really just Joe Biden killed it anyway the point is that people were saying you know

that it's just damn foolery to even try that oh you believe in democracy you think that it's going work, that they care about us, that they're going to do what we say and whatever way, you know, the presumption is you'd have to be a child to really believe that the people can have their say on anything ever or that it's even worth to try when my whole thing is I want to abolish the state because I believe in that stuff the least, but I'm still saying that that's what we got and they're the ones doing the killing of those people. And if you know anything about this war, then you know that anything that we can do to try to stop it is worth a try. And that's, you know, as far as it goes. But I think on the state level, you know, as we're talking about before

with the primary versus the caucus system type of a thing, on the state level, there is a point, especially in a state like Idaho, where, you know, it's not that populace of a place where if there's enough people who really come together and really are consistent and stay at it that they can rise up through the ranks, they can become that party leadership eventually. They can have their way if there's enough of them and they're willing to keep their eye on the ball. And, you know, I forgot what state it was. Man, I'm sorry, I just saw the thing. was it somewhere out west

I don't think so maybe it was Idaho I don't know but anyway somebody had a state where the governor tried to pass or the Congress and the governor signed

some gun control law and then like 30 out of 50 county sheriffs said well we're not going to enforce that screw you on a new gun control law I mean that's huge

and that's because at least on that one issue those sheriffs got their head screwed on straight and are willing to stand up and do the right thing. So it goes to show like there, some of them still are human in some ways, despite being government employees. And if enough actual people, you know, will stay committed to at least supporting the least worst to them on, you know, with real demands, with real ransom demands.

And like, we insist that you support these most important things. And if you do, you'll get our votes. But if you don't, you won't. And this is the benchmark. This is the thing that we care about the most, is this anti-war stuff or whatever the issue is, guns, whatever it is. Absolutely.

You know. So it's not a sucker's play. It's not a matter of like, now we're all in fourth grade. And we all are supposed to just believe that George Washington admitted that he chopped down the cherry tree. And democracy is this beautiful, wonderful, automatic thing. And all you got to do is just,

just vote and everything will turn out your way someday and whatever kind of thing like nobody believes in that it's not a matter of that it's a matter of fighting against what is wrong as best as we can that's it you know you know if you get involved you start going to the breakfast meetings and the luncheons and you will get access to these elected officials i you know i see rish i don't know maybe once a year um at at some event somewhere and i'm always able to give him a hard time about stuff You know, there was a breakfast meeting. This would have been maybe five years ago where he was talking about how horrible some of the videos were relating to the POWW treatment over in Iraq or somewhere and how we can't let that out. So I said, well, what about droning weddings? You know, you said that, you know, you're not, you're saying that's, you know, the use of drones is great. And he said, oh, I didn't say it was great. It's really bad for the dronies. We made this horrible dumb joke.

But like I forced him to at least acknowledge the contradictions in his logic. So we all can get involved and have action. access to these politicians yep and you know as bill hicks said you try he'd do what you can yeah that's what we're gonna do he was talking about convincing people to kill themselves yeah but you know just different strokes different folks all right that's texas yeah all right listen thanks for coming on my show this has been great oh man i could talk about uh uh uh scott horton interviews from the past all day long. Yeah, I should interview you about shows I've done.

No, this is cool, Bjorn. I appreciate all your efforts up there. And listen, if you have any trouble getting a hold of Dan McKnight, well, I can take care of that easy because, you know, the interview before you was Hunter Dorensis, who works for both me and for Dan. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, we'll get this worked right out.

Awesome, awesome group of people. thanks for what you do absolutely man thanks for doing the show appreciate thank you the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scott horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org