Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/5/22 Laurie Calhoun on Zawahri’s Alleged Assassination and the Fanaticism of the Military Industrial Complex

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Scott talks with Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Laurie Calhoun. They begin with a discussion of last week's announcement that a CIA drone strike killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahri in Kabul Afghanistan. Calhoun explains why she remains skeptical of the CIA’s claims absent any proof. They then get into the article she published at the Libertarian Institute which examines the fanatical mindset behind war hawks and others who depend on killing for their livelihoods.  Discussed on the show: Site Intelligence Group “The MIC Cult” (The Libertarian Institute) “A MAD Heist” (The Libertarian Institute) Scott’s debate with Bill Kristol Scott’s debate with Cathy Young Defend the Guard Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow at the Libertarian Institute and the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, You Can Leave, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique. 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; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. 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

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.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, y'all on the line.

I've got Lori Callagoon. She's a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, and she's the author of the incredible book, We Kill Because We Can, From Soldiering to Assassination in the Dron Age, and also war and delusion, a critical examination, and on like that. And she's got this great one at the Institute this week. It's on the front page right now, the M-I-C cults. Welcome to the show. Lori, how you doing? Very well, thanks. How are you?

I'm doing great. Happy to have you on. Hey, great piece here, but before we talk about it, let's talk a little bit about Drone Striking Simon Al-Zawahiri, maybe. They say he was hanging out at Sarajadine, how are you pronounced? that Hakani's house in downtown Kabul, or I don't know downtown, somewhere in Kabul. And they blasted them. And, well, I don't know, your first impressions of that news, what do you think? Do you believe it? What does it mean? I honestly am skeptical about it. And for a variety of reasons. I mean, for one thing, we know that the last drone strike in Kabul about less than a year ago

killed 10 innocent people, they claimed with great confidence right after the strike that they killed someone who was about to bomb the Kabul airport, and then people on the ground investigated and discovered that, in fact, the victim was, the target was an aid worker, and the victims were 10 people, seven of whom were children. So that was less than a year ago. And so now we're told, you know, with great confidence again, that the number two al-Qaeda mastermind behind the 9-1-1 attacks has been killed, and he happened to be alone in a house on a deck. No civilians or even his family members were killed in the strike. I just find this suspicious myself. And when I heard that the Taliban was claiming that, in fact, there was a drone strike and the house was empty,

that just, you know, added to my suspicions. And then apparently some workers also in the area have said the same thing that the house was actually uninhabited. But I think in this case, will have some investigation on the ground, again, as there was last year. So I'm holding my conclusion on this one until I see more, you know, evidence. Yeah. Well, which is always wise to do. Something I have not done is see whether, you know, it's, I know they're a front for the Israelis, but they also just do work that I'm not willing to do, just the site intelligence group where they, you know, troll around all the jihadist sites all day or, you know, the chat rooms and whatever, trying to figure out what's going on. And they usually have, you know, somewhat, usually have somewhat reliable reporting on the latest Al-Qaeda press releases and that kind of thing when Zawahri puts out a new podcast or whatever like that. So I wonder if Al-Qaeda has confirmed or have you heard if Al-Qaeda has said that, yes, it's true. He's dead or denied it or anything like that. that? Because it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that they would deny.

Yeah, I have not heard this. I mean, as you probably know, in the Pakistani press, you know, a while back, he was claimed to be dead. He's been, I think, claimed to be dead a couple different times. So last year, they said he died of asthma or something, something like that. Although, and people keep bringing that up, like, oh, well, this proves that they didn't kill him now, but it's like, well, I don't know. They never provided any evidence then. It was essentially just an unconfirmed rumor then that he'd already died. Yeah, we actually don't know. I mean, if it turns out that, I mean, we may never find out the truth because if, in fact, he was dead and they struck an empty house, then there's no actual empirical evidence at all, either way.

So it's impossible to say. So I'm withholding judgment. I mean, I think they made a little bit of a big deal of it, which made me more skeptical because I felt like they're just trying to rehabilitate, you know, the dottering dementia victim's image, really. I mean, he comes out and suddenly all the media are saying he's a strong leader and like, wait a minute. So, yeah. Yeah, well, I don't know about he was a strong leader and, you know, I'm a big opponent of, I guess I know better than the decapitation strategy and all that. But he deserved to be arrested and prosecuted at least if they really knew where he was. And yeah, they're even saying, yeah, we don't have any DNA evidence and we don't think we're going to get any.

so unless they're really claiming that they had an asset or an agent and an officer of theirs with eyes on him on the house as it was bombed then there's no reason to believe i mean hell there'd be no reason to believe that but i'm just saying they would have no real reason to believe it unless they had sourcing that good so i don't i don't understand how there could be no DNA evidence. If there, if his charred corpse is there in the house, how can there be no DNA evidence? Clearly, they've been hunting this guy for 20 years. So that makes it even less plausible to me. Yeah. And then by the way, so I'm looking at the site intelligence group now, and they have Taliban denies knowledge of Swahari in Kabul, reiterates that the airstrike violated the Doha agreement. And that's essentially it. They don't have anything else about, uh, the drone strike here. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is an important case because we supposedly... Oh, I see. Actually, there's one more thing there, Lori, sorry, is Taliban

holds... Oh, sorry, Taliban opposition group holds the Taliban responsible for provoke in the U.S. and bombing. That's not much. Sorry, I thought it was the Taliban blaming IS there, which would be different. Okay. Yeah, no, but we supposedly withdrew from Afghanistan. So this raises the whole issue of the illegality of drone strikes in general in countries with which we are not at war. So it's another example of what, of course, has been going on in other countries such as Yemen and Pakistan throughout the war on terror. And I think it raises the question again of the U.S. government's assumption of impunity and killing anyone anywhere on the basis of whatever information they happen to think is sufficient, which is always circumstant. This is a special case because, of course, we have reason to believe that he did have, you know, something to do with the 911 attacks, but it doesn't, it doesn't matter because if he was, the person who was killed was a suspect. We don't actually know if it was him or not. So the people who are being denied the rights are like these innocent people who are killed left and right, every time they try to go after one of these guys. Well, and it sure does raise the question of where this drone took off from, right?

It didn't fly from the ocean over the mountains and all the way up to Kabul, right? It must have been launched from Kazakhstan or Pakistan. Imran Khan, the cricket star turned prime minister who refused to allow American drone bases there, you know, quite publicly, is now gone. I know. And so I guess that would be the obvious first assumption is that the CIA moved right. in there and set up a base, a reopened one. I agree, yeah.

Which, by the way, you know, Ted Snyder, who's a real hawk on these coups, I mean that in a good way, like an eagle eye on these coups, I should say. He really didn't think the U.S. was behind this one. And my Pakistani cab driver in D.C. told me the same thing the other day that he goes, I was like, do you think the U.S. was behind Khan being overthrown?

I know he was a thorn in their side, you know. And he just goes, no, no, no, you have to understand. There's like 16 parties in Parliament. You can't hold them together. He couldn't hold them together. That was all. And he said it wasn't even the pro-American parties that really were after him. It was, you know, just other forces at work this time.

Interesting. Even though it's always suspicious when somebody who gets in America's way, you know, falls out of power like that. Right. What a coincidence. Yeah, exactly right. These things do happen, though. know. All right, so listen, I really like your piece that you wrote for the Institute here, like all of them. This one is called the M-I-C cult, and you really go in, you know, pretty good

depth in your analogy here about how cults work. So can you just start with that? I mean, what's the difference between a cult and a bunch of people who listen to this podcast anyway? Okay, that's a good question. I wrote another article that relates to this. It's called an anatomy of fanaticism. I wrote it back in 2003, and I wrote it. I was talking especially about the Bush clan and how they pushed for war on the basis of all these contradictory claims. You know, so, and what I wanted to do then was compare the attacks of 911 to the invasion of Iraq and show that actually these are just two versions of the same tyrannical approach to conflict resolution. And what I find, you're right, that belief is essentially religious. So we all have beliefs, and we don't know which of them are going to be proven false, you know, tomorrow or whatever.

But the difference between people listening to your podcast and the cult members I'm talking about are that the cult members are ready and willing to kill people for their beliefs. So they lack what I would describe as a type of epistemological humility. They actually are so convinced in the truth of their worldview that they're willing to kill other people and annihilate other people's ability to have a worldview. And that's what I consider to be fanatical. And it's shared by both the hawks who are willing to kill countless innocent people

in the pursuit of their goals and the terrorists who are willing to kill innocent people, people in retaliation to the actions of a government. Yeah. You know, back when I was a bumper sticker salesman, I had one that had Bush on one side and Osama bin Laden on the other. And it said, when God is on your side, you can never be wrong. They all say, they all talk about God.

I mean, I have a list of these quotes in war and delusion. They all talk about God. Saddam Hussein said God was on his side, George H.W. Bush said God was on his side. Osama bin Laden said that God was. on his side. So that's the thing. And then they are united in this belief that they can kill people because God is on their side. But it's a contradiction. So that's what's really troubling is that they don't see the contradiction in what they're doing. So we're supposedly bombing people to democracy when in fact bombing people is an act of tyranny, which is the opposite of democracy.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and so, well, I don't know about that. It's the opposite of liberty anyway. Yeah. But I think it's also, at least contradicts the premises, the skeptical premises of democracy. I mean, you have to be able to articulate your opinions and viewpoints. And if you just, you know, decapitate people, which is what you do when you execute them and bombing and kills people so they no longer have an opinion, then you're attacking on one level democracy as well. well. All right. Now, there's the cult members who, you know, to different degrees include the American people at different times, depending on the crisis and so forth.

But you definitely have this cult in Washington, D.C., and in the halls of power. And, you know, within the class that, you know, I guess as Upton Sinclair would say, the people who rely, whose paychecks rely on them believing these things, where really no matter what happens. The military is always right, and it's always good, and its next mission is always pure. And it really does kind of come down to sort of like some Heaven's Gate type thinking, right? It does, because it doesn't matter what the military does. We give them more money. So basically, you would think, okay, so the mission in Afghanistan was somewhat of a failure. We threw all this money away. We killed all these people, destroyed the lives of millions more. And so the response

is not like, how do we, how do we address this? How do we change our policy? How do we start again? The response is just let's forget all of that and just like start again with a clean slate that we won World War II. That's it. So no matter what, I mean, there's no, like, it's interesting to imagine, like, what sort of scenario would lead to legislators voting to decrease the defense budget? What would the, what would the Pentagon have to do in order for them to conclude that it's time to decrease the budget. It didn't happen when the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR dissolved. It didn't happen, you know, when the war on terror was a total disaster. So what exactly would have to happen in order to motivate the politicians to decrease the defense

budget? Yeah, I think, as Ron Paul said, when the dollar breaks. It could be if the American people somehow like, you know, after a real catastrophe, if they're all galvanized in one way and not the other. I mean, usually something really bad happens. I mean, I don't know. The guy like Biden in the chair, he doesn't inspire much faith. Maybe people could say enough is enough. And I'm of the belief, and maybe this is childish and stupid, but Lori, I think that, you know, all those studies that say that public opinion doesn't matter. What matters is interest groups and just, you know, the science shows it and all that. I think that, you know, the Colin Powell, Casper Weinberger Doctrine thing there that said, you know, one of the lessons of Vietnam was, if we're going to start a war

and get bogged down a war, you've got to have the American people united behind us. And then W. Bush said, well, we'll just settle for the right, you know. But now they're trying to go with they'll settle for the center-left liberals. And I guess the center-right conservatives, too, but it's not much of a consensus behind their foreign policy now and it just seems to me like well I think the drone wars themselves right are a recognition of the fact

that if the American right wing doesn't want to support these wars and send their sons to go and fight in them then you can't you send the robots instead well that's right I mean this is part of the reason I suppose that the war machine continues to expand

is that it looks like there are no consequences for Americans anymore or there won't be in the not too distant future because it will all be automated. So they started with replacing live pilots with the drone operators, and it's just accelerating to the point where war becomes more and more fictional to the people. And so this is, I think, part of the reason why you see all these Ukraine flags being waved everywhere by progressives, by people who supposedly care about domestic issues, which, you know, are really in crisis in many cases, you know, health from health care to

homelessness, et cetera. And yet they're willing to sign off on these massive allocations of of money, which has to be printed before sending to, before being sent to Ukraine. I mean, the entire so-called progressive bloc voted for that $40 billion print money for Ukraine bill. That's just amazing. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books, real good ones. So far we've got Will Griggs No Quarter, Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine, and what social animals owe to each other, and four of mine, fools Aaron, enough already, the great Ron Paul, and my brand new one, hotter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one,

the voluntarious handbook, an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers. me. Check them all out at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. And for a limited time, signed copies of enough already and hotter than the sun are available at Scott Horton.org slash books. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com.

by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. And everybody knows, right? I think it was in the Times. It was certainly in the wind.

All this money's going straight to Raytheon and Lockheed and whatever. It's the reason for the policy. Everybody knows it. It's a big crazy conspiracy theory except that Ike Eisenhower, the five-star general term two-term Republican president in the United States, said that this is the way it is the fleas wagging the dog yeah and it's so much worse now because um as i suggested in the

article the the web has has grown to to the point where it has pulled in all these people who are now dependent upon the killing machine you know for their source of sustenance and so the bigger the web becomes the more people have opportunistic reasons for supporting it even if it's on an unconscious level. They may not really, you know, acknowledge this, but it's there. You know, a war is good because it's going to increase the value of Raytheon stock. Yeah. You know, it sucks, too, because you do hear regular people say, well, war is good for the economy.

But actually, I notice more and more, even though that is a cliche, burned into everyone's brain from the lies they learned about World War II, you know. Then sometimes they kind of mutter, except the economy sucks now. We've been at war for 20 years, so maybe war's not good for business. It's just good for some businesses, which is different. Yeah, I think it's conceivable. And I mentioned this in my penultimate article, which is a mad heist. It's conceivable that the situation will get so bad here domestically that people will start to wake up.

They'll be like, wait a minute, why are we paying for these ridiculous transfers of weapons to all these places all over the world, when in fact look at our infrastructure crumbling, look at the fact that we can't pay for gas and groceries. I mean, it's conceivable that if there are enough people suffering here, that they will start to express discontent with this approach. But it hasn't happened yet. Yeah. Now, so one of the dynamics of the cult, too, is not just the outside enemy,

whoever it is, but it's the traitors within, right? Snowball, the wrecker. and we have lots of those too, right? Julian Assange comes right to mind, Edward Snowden. I mean, they pushed for years in the Wall Street Journal and other places that, like, oh, yeah, everybody knows that Edward Snowden was a spy for China and Russia was our enemy. And that was the only reason he told the American people, any of these things that he told us, had nothing to do with decent motives and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence

or any of that stupid stuff. No, it's amazing. And it's sad how effective it has been the discreditation of Julian Assum. If you just ask a random person, you know, what they think of Julian Assange, they'll say, oh, didn't he, like, isn't he a rapist? You know, this is what they'll say. And it's tragic because he was the most powerful anti-war voice that we had in the first decade of the 21st century.

And they have completely silenced him. They took away his internet. Now he's just, you know, struggling to hold on to his life, you know. And it raises the question, you know, what happened in some of these other cases where He's been assimilated to someone like Anwar al-Aki, right? Anwar al-Aki was killed by drone in Yemen, a U.S. citizen without indictment or trial. But Anwar al-Aki had serious grievances with the U.S. government's prosecution of the war on terror throughout the Middle East in the way that Osama bin Laden did.

Of course, those are never excuses for what these people decided to do or promote. But they did have these grievances, which are similar. to the grievances of people like Julian Assange. The difference is Julian Assange is, of course, completely nonviolent. But they try to assimilate all these people. And so you realize that the actual problem with them is that they have anti-war, they have lucid anti-war positions. So that's why they really want to just shut them up, whoever they are. Yeah. Yeah, you know, Andrew Yang, I saw a clip of him denouncing Assange and saying, oh, yeah, you know, some of the stuff that he leaked was so dangerous and traitor.

I forgot what it was if he was making up the foreign power angle or just saying that it was, you know, so damaging to American security. But what is he even talking about? And the guy said, oh, okay, thanks for your answer. And didn't say, well, which hack, which leak? Because he didn't do any of the hacking. Which leak are you talking about? Are you talking, you know what I mean?

And does Yang even know what he's talking about? Is he going to say, I mean, I guess if you were Yang, then maybe if you knew what you were talking about, you would say, well, the Vault 7 thing. But the Vault 7 thing, even if that hurt the CIA, boo-hoo for them. That was so important for the American people to know. We had the right to know that, that the CIA has a domestic, electronic eavesdropping capability and that they implement this capability just essentially to rival a power. to rival the FBI and the NSA, and that they're doing it to us all the time. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I consider them to be a criminal organization.

I call them the caustic incompetence agency. But the truth is that Julian Assange made so many enemies in so many places that they've all united against him. You know, so basically, whether you're from the Pentagon or the CIA or the FBI or you just like globalism, all these people are united against Julian Assange. So he is denounced by all these people whom I would regard, I would characterize as minor cogs in the military machines. So Andrew Yang is one of them. He'll just come out and parrot these sound bites that he's heard somewhere.

But when a lot of people do this, then the population is like, oh, I guess it's true. I guess Julian Nathan really is a rapist, and he really did cause damage to the Republic. Like, you know, so unfortunately, the propaganda is incredibly effective. So this is why we left Afghanistan and then immediately just move on to the next thing. And there's no self-reflection. There's no attempt to understand what the logic of all of this is supposed to be at this point. Yeah. You know, it's funny I put out a tweet the other day about, you know, they never did kill Iman-Azzahari for 21 years after Bush let him go at Orborra.

but they did kill about 2 million other people. And I got so many responses. Like, what in the world are you talking about? What two million? Like, they have no idea how that could possibly be true. They just, they have no conception of the fact that we've been at war for 20 years in like eight countries and more, you know, and rack them up, count them up. There they are. Just starting with a million from Iraq War II.

Half a million from Syria, probably. you know, half a million or three quarters of a million from Afghanistan, half a million or probably three quarters of a million or more in Yemen, in Somalia, where the famine is not just manmade, but USA made, sorry, and has been for decades now, three famines in a row now, and the locust plague, too, is, you know, directly attributable to America's war in Yemen. And those excess deaths count the Sunni-Sheas civil war in Iraq. Both sides. Deaths count on America's hands.

W. Bush and Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfe wits. They're the ones who killed all of those people. There's no point in denying that. What's the point in denying that? No, uh, not a U.S. Army soldier fired every bullet that killed the two million people who've died in our terror wars. Yeah, great point. So what?

Same difference, obviously. Yeah, well, it's been fictionalized. So Americans don't understand what they paid for for the last 20 years. They have no idea because it's not reported. So all we get reported are these shiny dispatches from the Pentagon. Oh, we took out another bad guy, and this makes everyone feel good, and they go back to their shopping or whatever. I mean, that's how it's been covered. And so people really are surprised when you mention to them the magnitude of the carnage that we caused,

and they're not about to assume responsibility for it. So they say, well, they didn't mean to. It was collateral damage. But in fact, you know, you drop a bomb. You're going to kill people. That's it. Yep, absolutely. Well, and you'd think they'd have had that figured out by now that you can't just do that at no price.

That was what Ron Paul said in 08. If we think we just go around the world doing this and not have to pay the price for it, then, you know, you're implementing these policies at our own peril. Really think you just blow people up and it doesn't. matter? Sure so matters they blow us up. Why would that be? It doesn't matter when you blow them up, you know? Well, again, even like the reason for the war on terror, you know, they pretended that history started on September 11th, 2001. So nothing happened before that to make anyone angry, you know, so it's just completely incomprehensible. It came out of nowhere, you know, that these people decided to attack us. But if you look at what happened to Iraq, you understand,

Again, not an excuse, but it is an explanation of why they were so incensed, and it's called blowback. So, you know, that's what we can expect to see in the future if we continue to pursue these policies and destroy society after society. Yeah. Well, Lori, so we're stuck with this cult of power in Washington, D.C., who, you know, you cite Max Boot and Bill Crystal and the like, their faith cannot be shaken, and they have. the financial backing of the arms industry at all their think tanks and magazines and so forth. And so that's not going away. But what about the other 350 million of us? What are we supposed to do about this other than waiting around for total financial suicide, which is no recommendation? It's just the only answer we've come up with so far is, I don't know, try to discredit them, but what good does that do? It doesn't work on them. They're a cult.

Yeah, that's definitely true. And it can be a little bit daunting when you appreciate that fact. I watched both of your Soho debates, by the way, and both of your interlocutors were perfect examples of this, you know. So it's just you've decided that this is, that supporting the U.S. as a military power is like who you are. I don't know. It's almost like they develop a dopamine track, you know, so there's a war on the horizon and they're just, they're like a heroin addict, they're just going to get their fix. They're going to get their war. So it's really strange, but they do. They argue really vigorously and enthusiastically and apparently sincerely for every possible intervention and just forget everything that went on before, even when they promoted disastrous interventions. I mean, there are very few people who have had misgivings about their vocal support of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite the consequences of it. So what do we do? We keep trying to. to talk to people on the ground and in venues such as yours and get the people who have not

been sucked into the cult yet so that maybe we can get some change at the local level and then maybe at the state level. And in Washington, D.C. is maybe impenetrable at this point, but that's where we ultimately have to see change. Otherwise, this is just going to go on until until everything ends. Yep. Well, I hate to admit it, but it's true that in the background here, I've been having a little bit of a conversation on Signal with a guy who's a National Guard veteran of the Terror Wars, who's about to win a house race as a Republican, and it's going to be fighting for defend the guard legislation in his state house and doing everything he can to obstruct the war machine in perfect Virginia and Kentucky resolutions kind of way. here, which is, I think, absolutely the answer is, and goes exactly along with what you just said. What's a cult without their followers? Exactly. And I think that one thing that we can do to hopefully help is to focus more on the anti-war and try to bring in coalition. So try to

win over people. We have Matthew Ho, who's a progressive. He's a Green Party candidate. He's not a libertarian, but we have to find common ground with these people, you know, and not worry so much about the little other domestic things. This is the number one topic. We have to, like, stop this. And that means forming coalitions with people with whom we may disagree about this or that other thing. But there's no more important topic than war, because war is the annihilation of everything. You know, you don't have opinions, you don't have values, or you don't have policies once you annihilate entire groups of people. So it seems to me that we have,

I saw actually an article where they were talking about the anti-war forces from the libertarian and the progressive or left camp coming together. And we have to do something like that, I think, because if we just have this sort of, you know, in fighting, then we'll never make any progress, I think. Right. Well, and that is happening. And it's happening with the America First Right as well.

And that is truly our mandate as libertarians. I mean, we're a small percentage of the population, but we're right about everything. And meanwhile, the left and the right are right about one third of the time, maybe half on a good day. And so it's up to us to help them prioritize. And we don't have to turn them all into libertarians. We just have to get them to do what we want them to do and say what we want them to say. Like, let's stop all this mass killing and all this spending of all this money on all this mass killing and stuff like that. I mean, it would be helpful even if progressives in Washington would act like progressives.

Like, progressives used to oppose war. And now they're just like signing off on everything. So if they would actually focus on their supposed agenda, that would be helpful. But somehow they've been sucked into this cult. It's really sad. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, I sure appreciate your time on the show and your great writing at the Libertarian Institute.

As always, Lori. Thank you, Scott. aren't you guys that's the great laurie calhoun she wrote we kill because we can from soldiering to assassination in the drone age and also war and delusion a critical examination finder again uh this great article is called the m icc cult at libertarian institute dot org 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.org and libertarian institute.org.