Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/23/25 Ben Cohen: DOGE Needs to Focus On the Pentagon

Episode Date: January 26, 2025

Scott interviews Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s fame, about his new project DOGE vs. Blob. Cohen explains how the project aims to get the Trump administration’s effort to cut government to prioritize the absurd amount of unnecessary spending going to the Defense Department. He and Scott discuss the project, reflect on the state of the American antiwar movement and consider Scott’s pitch for a new ice cream flavor.  Discussed on the show: DogeVsBlob.org “Our Real National Security Budget” (Andrew Cockburn’s Substack) Ben Cohen is an American businessman, activist and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; 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

versus blob yeah it's doge versus blob dot org uh it is a online contest uh on x uh to uh kind of let the ex people know that uh if they're really looking to cut waste and cut uh you know federal spending

uh the place that has the most waste, the most federal spending is the Pentagon budget. It accounts for 50% of all discretionary spending. It is the only federal department that cannot be audited because it's so poorly managed. And the way Doge v. Blob works is that you can submit nine posts a day about this issue. The way to start is to go to the Doge versus blob.org website. And we're just looking for people to create memes about the absurdity of the Pentagon budget. We don't have a military industrial complex anymore.

We've got an overkill industrial complex. And I just want to give you one example of the mentality. You know, there was this one nuclear bomb that we dropped on Hiroshima. It killed 100,000 people immediately, left another 100,000 seriously injured, burns, amputations, blindness, deafness. And the current US arsenal is the equivalent of 50,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs, you know, capable of killing millions and millions of people that are, you know, mother's father, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters, people just like us. And now the government is planning to spend

another $2 trillion on a whole new generation of nuclear weapons. So, you know, that's one example of the most wasteful department in the U.S. government, and just to bring it to a, you know, a level that we run into every day that's a little easier to understand. This is the department, the Pentagon that spends $10,000 for a toilet seat, $4,000 for a half-inch screw, and $5,000. for a soap dispenser. I mean, the price gouging from weapons manufacturers is unbelievable. It's, you know, I'm really glad that Doge is taking this on. And but they got to understand just like Willie Sutton did that, you know, he went where

the money is. That's why he robbed banks. And anybody in business knows if you're going to cut waste, and uh fraud and abuse you attack the biggest source of that waste and abuse first and that's the pentagon yeah well you know uh winslow wheeler recently he's an expert on all this pentagon spending and he recently calculated that the true pentagon budget is 1.7 trillion dollars per year when you throw in the VA and the cost of all the care and feeding of the nuclear weapons which are under the Department of Energy and all those other things.

And when you really add it up, there's a great article by Andrew Coburn, our real national security budget at Spoils of War. Two trillion. Here we come. Yeah. It's really close now. It's incredible. I mean, you know, the numbers we're talking about are inconceivable.

I mean, I didn't have any idea about it and I can still barely understand it. but, you know, eventually when I was running Ben and Jerry's, it got up to a level of $300 million. And that's when I first, and it was huge. And that's when I first realized how much a billion is. It was three times the business we were doing. But, I mean, that's just one billion. We're talking about 900 billion,

and as you say, fully loaded over a trillion. It's an unconceivable amount of money that gets wasted on overkill in the Pentagon, but could be used for most any need that you've got at no additional taxpayer expense. I mean, what? You got a housing crisis? We can take care of that. You got a problem in terms of jobs. We can take care of that. You got a health care system that doesn't freaking work.

You can take care of that for that kind of money. You know, if you go back what I guess 10 years or so during the Obama times, late Obama, Rand Paul and some others had that thing, the sequester, that was supposed to put some kind of limit on Pentagon spending. And at some point during that, I should go back and find this footnote so I can remember the general's name. But there was a general that was testifying before the Senate. And he said something very close to. look senators i can defend the united states of america for a couple of three hundred billion dollars probably right we can afford that pretty easily but you want me to be able to essentially be the dominant force everywhere on the planet able to respond to any hot spot at a moment's

notice at all times anywhere in the world forever well that's going to cost you extra and so you know there's your margin right there there's your one 1.7 trillion right there is dominating the entire planet Earth, not defending the United States at all. That's absolutely correct. And what do you know the rest of the people in the world hate it? They think that the U.S. is the biggest threat to world peace. You know, we wouldn't want it if some other country was trying to control us.

we've got those 800 military bases around the world what do you think they're there for i mean the you know russia has what like 20 uh china has under 10 uh it's to as you say it's to it's to dominate the world the world hates it we get involved in these ridiculous wars that cost us huge amounts of money and lives our lives and the people who are killing over there and what ends up happening is it makes it less secure because we're creating terrorists faster than we can kill them i mean it's absurd when i think americans all across the political spectrum now after living through this whole generation of the bush and obama wars and then biden's catastrophes in ukraine and in palestine as well and you have all these natural disasters and you have

bridges and dams failing and things that you just can't disguise like Joe Biden being too old to be the president you just can't disguise it anybody's you know ante who's not sophisticated can tell you that well the dams aren't supposed to be failing the bridges aren't supposed to be falling down and did I just hear him say that we spent 200 billion dollars to get Ukraine into a war we knew that they'd lose and this was the new you know came out in a report in time magazine just the other day that the Biden administration said, and they did climb down on this publicly previously, but they're reiterating now the outgoing Biden team that, you know, our plan was never really to help Ukraine win the war. We knew they couldn't win the war. We were just, you

know, trying to make it last a long time to be costly for the Russians. But that's not what they said at the beginning. The Russians to be, to be really profitable for our weapons manufacturers who you might say are driving the whole thing because it's followed the money. Yep. And it is. It's just like Garrett Goretts said where in the American Empire, all of the money goes out and nothing comes back in. So all these arms manufacturers that you're talking about getting rich, they're getting rich off the American taxpayer. It's not like we're really looting Ukraine. I guess Car Gill and Archer Daniels Midland are going to run off with the grain and whatever. But for the most part, America's not really like collecting tribute. It's the American

people who are paying tribute to the empire to go and rule other people's countries. Yeah. And, you know, at the, at the, this war didn't have to happen. Uh, you know, I think, I think Trump has said that. Uh, Russia was very clear. We don't want, uh, adversarial weapons right on our border. This is just what the US said when we're there, there was the Cuba crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so they're just saying the same thing. We don't want adversarial weapons aimed at us right on our border. And what were they asking for?

They were saying, we don't want Ukraine to become part of NATO. I mean, we would say the same thing if some country was looking to put weapons on the Mexican border. the war could have been prevented they were options they were various opportunities to negotiate before the war and right after the war began and the u.s shut it down well i hope at the end of the interview i can get your mailing address because i'd like to send you my new book that i wrote all about just that wow yeah love to see it um hope you like it um so yeah that's completely right And by the way, I just thought this was so funny this morning when I was preparing for the interview, the American hero, Matthew Ho. And I mean that in all seriousness, the great whistleblower of the Afghan War.

And your associate at the Eisenhower Media Network contacted me and asked if I would want to interview you. So I was getting ready for this. And he had sent me a Fox News article that said, you know, Ben Cohen is pretty firmly identified as a progressive. however ironically he opposes the war in ukraine and that was in a fox news article and i just thought what a wild and weird time we live in what do you think about that uh i think that uh people who believe in the same thing people who agree on the same issue

regardless of whether they're labeled as uh progressives or conservatives or Republicans or Democrats, they should work together on that issue that they agree on. That's what, I don't know, that's the only way you get things done. And what? The absurdity that, you know, a progressive isn't supposed to work with a conservative because they each think the other one has cooties. I mean, I don't buy it. But it is sad to the way that it's in.

Inescapable, right, where war is associated with the Liberal Democratic Party in the United States now in a way that, you know, Janice Joplin and hippies and the anti-war left used to be back in a previous era. It is amazing to me that in many respects, Republicans have become the new peacenics. You know, I mean, Cato has always been great. on this issue. They've always been against the waste and the fraud and this idea of American hegemony that if any country starts developing economically, that country is an enemy to us. If any country has a different form of government, that country is an enemy to us. to us. And it drives this huge defense budget. And it drives the reality that, you know, outside

of postal workers, 70 percent of the entire federal workforce works for the Pentagon and national security agencies. It's, I mean, it's a militarized, country that somehow thinks that if you have more weapons and you have more wars, that's going to generate peace and that's going to meet the needs of our people. And it's, you know, it was, you know, Jamie I, Jamie Diamond recently compared Elon Musk to Einstein. I would not agree with that, but it was Einstein who said that you cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war, that the very effort of preventing war requires more faith, more courage, more resolution than making war preparations. And that would create a safer world for us. Yeah. And you know, I don't know the

extent of his business and how it all works with SpaceX, I'm sure he must launch military satellites into space for them, but he doesn't seem to be seeking to compete to make ICBMs and this kind of thing. So that's an open market. He's leading to others, I guess. I mean, there's an issue that, you know, Silicon Valley wants to become the new weapons manufacturers. You know, I mean, it's pretty profitable feeding at the Pentagon trough. And, you know, so Elon and those folks, you know, they're wanting to replace kind of the legacy weapons manufacturers with, you know, more high-tech drones, et cetera, unmanned vehicles. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team had Expand Designs, 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. Tom has 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.

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Well, so that gets us back to the contest here, right? Because this is this whole Brave New World that we're talking about. Everyone always gets mad at me like that only means Huxley, but that actually comes from Shakespeare, the Brave New World thing. And it can mean a lot of weird different things. And, you know, because it's a little bit different than Orwell reference, but it's always, you know, some kind of major technological change and shift in the way we all have to live our lives now because of the way new gadgets have come into being like the way AI is now is obviously going to push all kinds of changes and all these things.

But one thing that's happened for good and for ill, there's definitely downsides to it. But in a way, political language in America has devolved to this, maybe it already was just this bumper sticker format of people fighting through these pictograms, right? through meme warfare and it's huge and important i mean i'm a witness to the last 10 years of the meme wars out there in social media and to the victor go the spoils i mean it is on and it is important and so it seems um you've really uh you know clued in on that keyed in on that that this is what we want to do we want to have a meme war over doge's priorities it's certainly a lot safer. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so the website is doge versus blob.org and you can submit up to nine posts a day. And every day, one post is selected at random. You win a thousand Doge coin. And I'm going to select two grand prize winners that are going to win a shitloaded Doge coin. Okay. And the contest goes on every day for the first hundred days. Okay, that's great. And because, you know, as we were talking about before,

the national government is huge. And so he might have way too much on his plate. Maybe we need to help him focus. Because after all, everyone who knows anything about it can tell you, aircraft carriers are obsolete. We don't need our aircraft carrier battle groups at all. And you know why? Because the standoff range missiles that the other side possess are enough to prevent our planes from getting within range of their ships and their nations.

That's it. That's the equation is their ballistic and their sea skimming missiles are enough to keep us too far away to launch our F-18s. So check and mate. So what are we doing? Why are we still making these things? you know, I'm sorry, I gotta mention this. I'm almost certainly was Peter Schiff who came up with this and he's not great on everything,

but he is an Austrian school economist in a way. And he said, listen, if war is so good for the economy, you know what we should do? We should just create these giant naval battle fleets and then we should just sail them out to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and then just sink them and then just do it again and again and again. We'll just build all these shit,

we'll just sink them and just keep building them, building them. Doesn't that sound like a horrible waste of wealth and resources? Okay, now that we're clear on that, hey, how about these things are useless anyway? You try to bring an aircraft carrier into a war with China, the war gamers have already concluded. They won't be able to bring them to bear at all.

They won't be able to do anything. They'll have to stay out of range of the entire conflict anyway. Or they'll be sunk, or at least crippled. And then the same thing with that 35. Everybody knows the thing's a turkey. It ain't fast. It ain't stealth. It can't turn. It can't climb.

It can't out-fight an F-16. design in the early 1970s. Yeah, and it spends more time in the shop than it does being able to be in service. Yeah, the whole thing is a joke and everyone knows it. And everyone knows it. So isn't it one of these things that isn't that kind of what this second Trump era represents in a way, right, is that the dominant TV narratives are just not going to play, that actually other people are going to have a say now and we don't have to.

to go along with them. And if everybody knows that aircraft carriers are obsolete, and if everybody knows that the F-35 is a turkey, then why are they still holding a gun to our head and forcing us, extorting us to force us to pay for these ridiculous legacy systems designed in a previous century? You're absolutely right. If you're going to go after waste and excess spending,

the Pentagon is where you've got to go. anything else is small potatoes. And the reality, as you pointed out, it's spending that's wasted. It doesn't get us any benefits. You know, whereas if you think about investments that we make in education, every dollar that you spend on education returns tenfold that amount in terms of tax revenue over the life of the child that you educated. Okay, well, that is a downside to educating people, but I understand what you mean, though. But let me ask you this. Do you have a previous relationship with Musk of any kind?

Have you all ever met? No, no, never met. So I think maybe this would be a great opportunity to do that. And you wage your own me more on Twitter that, hey, pay attention to me, man. Everybody knows me. And I got this great contest going. you have you're using his very favorite uh bitcoin knockoff here in doge coin that he is you know often celebrated and i'm buying his doge coin to give out to people yeah and you're what you're doing is totally in the

spirit of what he's doing right you're not challenging him in any negative way you got this great meme contest go uh pardon me you got this great meme contest going and um so i think this is a great idea and i think you ought to be able to make the most of it and and i know that twitter i don't know how much they love Dogecoin, but I know they love making memes anyway. And then there's all the other, I don't know if you're doing this on TikTok and Instagram and whatever as well, multiplying your benefits out there to the different social media ecosystems. But they say they're even scaling back censorship on Facebook these days. That's what I've heard. Yeah, I think this is focused on X. And we just want to get across the idea that, you know, Elon ought to be able to

understand everybody in business knows that when you have to cut budgets, you start big and then go small. And the Pentagon is the biggest, harriest waste that you can find in the federal budget. Yep. And, you know, this is totally in keeping with Donald Trump's policy anyway. It's, you know, we don't have Ron Paul up there who would really want to scale it all the way back. But it's perfectly in keeping with Donald Trump's, the spirit of his campaign and even his inaugural address there to even go so far as to bring our troops home from Germany, you know, England, Italy, Japan, Korea. And as he often puts it, these are first world countries. They can pay for their own defense. There's no reason that we have to have military bases in those countries.

And they could still be our friends and we can, everything can still be fine. but we could just come home from everywhere and save all that money that we just don't need to spend. And so, yeah, save all that money and create less enemies around the world. Yeah, absolutely right. So, listen, I think this is a great idea. I think it's so great that you're putting up the Doge coin and doing this on X. I really hope that he pays attention to you. I have one great entrepreneurial idea for you.

And I know, because I read when you got in trouble for being good on Palis, Palestine a couple years ago or so that I read that you guys had sold the company to a bigger company. So I don't know exactly, you know, your decision-making power on these issues anymore then. But I have a suggestion for a new kind of ice cream. We'll call it anti-war.com. Ooh, dot cone. See, it's so good and so obvious that me and one of my guys, Will Porter, we both thought of it independently. of each other. Isn't that the perfect name? And by the way, Eric, Will, if you're listening,

Eric can vouch for me that I made that up separately from you, dude. But I believe you that you also made it up. But I don't even care what the flavor is. I just think that's a, actually, I have a couple of ideas if you want to get into it. But I think that would just be a great way to bring attention to the site. And you know that you can always count on Eric Garris, myself, Dave DeCamp, Kyle Anselone, and the crew at anti-war.com that no matter who's in power, we're going to always stay a hundred percent anti-interventionist in that just in romando fashion so uh just an idea that that's beautiful nice work on the flavor name i like the domain name too daft cone what a great idea isn't that great uh yeah i i'd love to no i don't have any uh authority i don't have

any responsibility. I am an employee. Oh, you are an employee still, so that's okay. You could call a meeting, maybe. Yeah, they, they, they tend to let me talk. They don't necessarily do what I'd like them to do. But, uh, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll definitely pitch the, pitch the flavor. And, uh, yeah, it'd be good to, uh, you know, work together on, uh, figuring out what it might be. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, well, listen, so our guys are emailing with each other, but I'll have, I'll try to get your email address here so we can get in direct communication. Maybe we'll have a good time with this. All right. That sounds beautiful, Scott.

Great. And I'd love to send you my book, too, if you want to read one. Yeah, thanks. I would love to get it. Okay, cool. Well, it's so good making your acquaintance here and great interview and great project. Everybody go to Doge versus Blob. it's VS, not spelled out.

Doge versus blob.org and submit your memes today. Thanks again. All righty. Take care. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on K-PFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com,

anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.