Document:Interview with Eric Garris March 2023
Interview of Eric Garris
Held on March 11, 2023
You started out as a Democrat in 1969 but became more radical and joined the Peace & Freedom Party. Please elaborate on your radicalism and why you left the Democratic Party.
Well, my activity at that point was not confined to electoral. So, when campaigns came along, I was interested in them. I actually did a little stuff for Jim McCarthy in ‘68. I was always interested in politics from my early years, and I was always fascinated with third parties. And so, I did research as a kid on that. I was doing more radical stuff that was non-electoral. For example, in 1969 I got involved in high school SDS (Students for Democratic Society), which was a very left group. Then it was pretty strong, but it was in the process of breaking apart when I joined.
I was involved in the peace movement, and I went to antiwar demonstrations and participated in Community activities. I lived in an area where the Peace and Freedom Party was founded, which is Venice, CA. And so, I met a lot of people that were moving from the Democratic Party to the Peace and Freedom Party.
I just found that working for establishment politicians in general was unsatisfying. We would either lose or - the people that I supported - would win and then immediately abandon their principles. It just became very, very frustrating.
Ultimately what I found - in later life - is that electoral politics is not very productive in terms of time, money, and energy. But back then I realized that the Democrats were just not committed to any particular principles. And so, I thought that the Peace and Freedom Party offered an alternative to that. And that's why I got involved in peace and freedom. Also, the Peace and Freedom Party people - in my area - were very, very involved in coalitions and did a lot of work to help me with that.
Is that what you mean when you talk about the ‘commonalities among ideologs of various stripes?
Well, back then it was strictly left. I would say at that point. I would say that I also met my first Libertarians in 1969. I met some in the community and also in high school. And I was more open minded than a lot of people on the left. And open to people that might not be strictly within all of the boundaries of what is considered to be the left. I was curious about people who had other views. That was where there was a lot of correspondence. In my high school there were some libertarians that got involved in the student rights stuff that I was doing and in the anti-war stuff that I was doing. And eventually I met more and more libertarians. And I worked with them on projects. Even though they were not technically considered on the left.
In 1971 you were in the National Peoples Party. In 1972 you became Southern Vice Chairman of the Peace & Freedom Party. By 1973 you had become a libertarian but were still active in the PFP. What were the philosophical factors that caused this transition - over a relatively short period of time?
Actually in ‘72, I would say that's when I really started my conversion to libertarianism. I met libertarians. I met people on the right. I worked with people in the John Birch Society and the American Independent Party. I would say the radical right. I was invited to participate in a very right wing virtual oriented action where I was a judge at a war crimes trial for members of the Council on Foreign Relations. I got involved and started learning about right wing conspiracy theories and ideas about how the elites are organized and how they control things.
Please expand on the ‘commonalities among the various stripes’ and how they are linked in your antiwar effort.
I saw a lot of commonalities between, say, Gary Allan on the right and William Dunham off on the left. I don't know if you know who either of those people are. But there were a lot of commonalities in the theories of the elites. And so, I just started questioning. What I thought and what I became, I would say that by the time that I was decidedly a libertarian. I realized I had been a libertarian for a while. Actually, I've probably converted several people to libertarianism before I decided I was a libertarian. I liked being open to discussion and friendly argument. Which is really important to help people develop.
And one of the big problems is that people self-define but then they don't question the entire ideology that they've moved into. If you're left, if you're a liberal, then you believe that following a set of things. If you're a conservative, you don't. Most people don't want to open their minds up, and that's the problem. Even more today than it was back then.
Do you think that's a battle between ideals, or does it have to do with personalities?
It's both. It's all individual. Everybody's an individual and that's one of the problems in the whole concept of collectivism. I see in every political category - including people who are libertarians. So many people believe that if you're right wing, you're this, if you're left wing, you're that. If you're libertarian, you're this... Everybody's an individual and there's a lot of flavors of things. It's very easy for people to stop thinking. And thinking requires an effort and a lot of people are lazy. I think that you decide that somebody is a particular way because of their views on everything else.
To give you an idea of something very recent. You look at the vote on the Syria withdrawal resolution from a few days ago that was sponsored by one of the most conservative - in a sense - members of Congress, Matt Gaetz. When it was first introduced, most of the Democrats were not even willing to consider it - even though they themselves had introduced something very similar last year. But fortunately, we were able to make some connections during the few days before the vote that brought, 56 - 57 Democrats to support it. And they were virtually all from the progressive caucus. And that's a very good sign. That you see anti-war Republicans and anti-war Democrats starting to realize that they can work together on these issues, without justifying or helping them in other ways.
But so many people hear names like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor-Green or Ilhan Omar or whoever, and they just have these ideas of what they are. And can't conceive that they could have anything in common with them.
They can't give them a political win?
Right. Well, there's that too. I remember back when Trump first was elected. Watching an interview (and this is not anti-war stuff). I was watching an interview where this woman was - I can't remember which news channel it was - but a woman had been working for years to try to open up the market for Canadian pharmaceuticals to be sold in the United States: because they were less expensive. In his early days, Trump said that he was going to try to accomplish that as well. But she was on the left. And she actually said in the interview that she was no longer working on that issue because Trump supported it and she said it was more important to not give Trump a win, then to actually win on the issue that she's been fighting for, for years. Most people are not that honest about their motivation. It was remarkable to hear that interview, but that sort of attitude - not voiced publicly - is all over the place. I saw during the early days of the Trump administration - when he was making more anti-war noises about withdrawing from Afghanistan and Syria and such - that you started to see a shift among Liberal Democrats and even people further to the left than the Democratic Party. Saying ‘well, Trump's for it, I'm against it’.
And for example, in my area, there were some peace coalitions - that had been around for a long time - that started changing their positions. You had a peace coalition locally that had a demonstration in favor of having a no-fly zone in Syria. You had others that just wanted to ignore the issues. The Monterey Peace Coalition - which had been around for like 50 years, I think - all of a sudden refused to participate in Syria's anti-war activities. Just on the basis that Trump was kind-of the loudest voice on that. They didn't want to be perceived as being pro-Trump.
Do you see that as one of the roles that your AntiWar.com plays is to bring those coalitions together?
Yes, in fact my goal in starting AntiWar.com was to create a website, a place, that would enunciate the anti-war positions from many different parts of the political spectrum. And so, as an example - early in our activities - we had writers (and also both financial supporters and public supporters) such as Daniel Ellsberg and Pat Buchanan, on our page at the same time. We would have people from across the spectrum putting forth anti-war views. And my goal was to make it so that anti-war - the anti-war positions - could be embraced by people across the spectrum or who didn't even fit into the spectrum, regardless of their views on other issues or who they were supporting for political office. And so, for AntiWar.com the goal was to make the anti-war position not only nonpartisan, but ecumenical and non-sectarian.
You ran for different political offices and managed campaigns. What was your experience like? What lessons did you learn that you could share with someone who wants to run for office now?
It was a job too. There were several years where that was how I made my living, and it was fun. Political campaigns are fun. And so that's one of the seductive parts about it. It draws people in because it’s a club and you're doing something - and you have wins and losses. It's almost like sports.
I ran for office far too many times. I ran for office 7 times. I ran twice on the Peace and Freedom Party, twice on the Libertarian party, twice on the Republican Party and once as a nonpartisan candidate. I would say that I'm not sure that I accomplished very much with any of those, but I enjoyed them. I enjoyed the campaigns. I would say the most interesting ones for me were the ones running as a Republican. I certainly got more attention than with the third parties. Again, it's very seductive, and it is very ego satisfying. It's not something that I think that this was something really important that I did.
I think that running for office too often is done by people for reasons that don't really have a conclusion. Having the Libertarian Party, you want people to run for office. And when I was in the Libertarian party - when that was my full-time activity (which was essentially 1975 to 1983) - I encouraged people to run for office. Even if they weren't going. It was important to build the Libertarian Party to have it noticed.
And I'm not saying people shouldn't run for office, but people should not just run for office because they are bored and it's something to do. They need to have some ideas of what they can accomplish. And what they're trying to accomplish. In the Peace and Freedom Party, for example, one of the things that I got was power in the political party structure because if you run for office in California, you get on the state and county central committees and have appointments - as if you're the nominee. So, it gives you a little bit of political power, and that's one of the things that we certainly considered when I was running. And encouraging other people to run in Peace and Freedom - and then later in the Libertarian Party - and actually later in the Republican Party as well. But I think that you have to decide what you're going to do with it.
I would say looking at the Libertarian Party historically, over the years, - I'm still a life member of the LP, but I've been registered Republican, and I've done other things and I was in the Peace and Freedom party. But you need to decide what exactly it is that you're trying to accomplish. As opposed to just, well, I'm running for office again.
I watched a debate between some Libertarian hopefuls for president that was on a podcast about a month ago and one of the guys running - I don't remember his name, and I'm probably getting some of these wrong - but he said, well, I ran for mayor, and I lost, and I ran for state Senate, and I lost. So now I'm running for president. Well, that’s not a great reason. What are you actually trying to accomplish? And I would say looking back at the Libertarian Party - even though the last two candidates for Presidents - achieved much higher vote totals and much higher vote percentages than anybody who had run before them. I would say that Ed Clark, Ron Paul and Harry Brown, had much more effect in building the party and the ideology than Gary Johnson or Jo Jorgensen.
OK, so let's switch gears here. Move up to 1979. Jimmy Carter as president reintroduces selective service. Why would he do that?
I don't know. The short answer is I don't know. The long answer is politicians always succumb to influence. Presidents always succumb to the influence of the people around them. And once you're at that level any sort of ideologies are gone. Any sort of principles are pretty much gone and you can see - that in most cases - if they're not gone immediately they disappear, fairly quickly. Look at Obama for example. I, and many libertarians and anti-war activists that I know were very hopeful about Obama actually scaling down US involvement in wars, closing Guantanamo, getting rid of the Cuban embargo, and that sort of thing. And of course, when he got elected, he didn't do any of those things, quite the opposite. He expanded all of those things.
Jimmy Carter - on the second day in office - pardoned all draft resistors and deserters. Across the board, that was one of the most amazing things that a president in my lifetime has ever done. And also, it had a personal effect on me because I was a draft resistor and so I was no longer in danger of being prosecuted. But by the time he was getting close to his first and only term, he completely turned around and reintroduced draft registration. It's almost mind boggling, but what can you say?
In 1979, you were the National Field Coordinator for Students for a Libertarian Society and ran a national campaign against the newly restored Selective Service System, cumulating in the May 1 anti-draft rallies in 75 cities. What was that like?
Well, in ‘79 I was working for students for a libertarian society. A lot of the activities I did were not full time. I wasn't working full time on Libertarian party electoral things. So, I was a staffer for Students for Libertarian Society. It was a Charles Koch funded activity and they hired me specifically to do anti-draft rallies in at least 50 cities on May 1st, 1979. And I was hired less than two months before the date. And it's certainly something that is obviously pre-internet. Charles gave us a quarter of a million dollars to do that project. It was an honor and a pleasure and exciting to be able to work on something so well-funded. And we actually accomplished that. We had rallies, as it turned out, in 75 cities on May 1st. And it turned out there was an anti-draft, anti-war national coalition and local coalitions that were built on that.
But I would say that, once again, libertarians failed to really capitalize on their success. Building the party and the ideas. Not necessarily the part of the organizations and the ideas. The outcome was disappointing in the long run, just as it has been I think for a lot of - not just libertarian - but a lot of political activities in general. That people achieve things and then they don't follow up. And that's my biggest criticism of the last two LP presidential campaigns. Because it's not just that Ed Clark and Ron Paul and Harry Brown ran good ideological campaigns, but afterward, the party used their success. Successes in building the organization and the ideology. And that this is not something that the Libertarian Party did in most places following up on the last two presidential campaigns.
In 1979, you were involved with the drive to get 80,000 signatures and were able to get the LPC permanently on the California ballot. Please contrast that time with the one-party system California has today.
It wasn't a signature drive at that time. California was a bit different, and the requirement in California was to register - to actually get people to change their party registration to the Libertarian Party. And we had to get 80,000 by January 1st of the election year, which was January 1st, 1980. Once again it was a very, very labor and financially intensive thing. And Charles Koch gave a lot of money to it. There were a lot of other things going on. There was a marijuana festival where we gave out free joints to everyone who registered libertarian in the weekend, and we got 1500 people. Just from that.
Yes, I was really busy. I look back at ’79 and it seems hard for me to imagine all the different things we were doing. Including San Francisco politics - we did quite a bit. We qualified an initiative in San Francisco to abolish the San Francisco Vice Squad. It was a very complex piece of legislation, and we ended up getting the support of the local Democratic Party and lots of other organizations and elected officials. And Charles Koch actually was the top financier of that as well. We didn't win. We got 38% of the vote. We won in every area where the vice squad had been active but lost in the suburbs.
We did a lot of things back then. And having the financial support of Charles Koch was certainly something that was very important. But also, our involvement in coalitions. The Libertarian Party in California was very involved in 1978 in Prop. 13. Which was an initiative to completely restructure the tax system in California. It was heavily opposed by most incumbent politicians but had tremendous grassroots support. Well, I don't want to dig too deep into it, but there was some really bad stuff happening where they were increasing property taxes horribly by just reassessing people's homes randomly. That's how the local governments are getting money. The proposition passed. And libertarians were very involved in that campaign.
In ‘78 the Libertarian Party was the first political group to oppose an initiative that was on the ballot to ban gay teachers from public schools in California (called the Briggs Initiative). When it was first proposed, polls showed that 70% of the voters supported it. And by the time the election happened it lost two to one. The Libertarian Party not only was the first major political organization to oppose it, they also were very involved around the state in various coalitions.
Ed Clark ran for Governor of California at that time. It was before the LP was on the ballot, so it was as an Independent, but he was clearly running as a libertarian. And he got 5 1/2% of the vote, which was phenomenal back then. And one of the main reasons was the LP's involvement in all these different coalitions.
I met a lot of people that were opposing the Briggs Initiative - who were Liberal Democrats - who voted for Ed Clark simply because he was the most vocal opponent. And because the libertarians had really - as Nicholas von Hoffman used to say, “they got their ticket punched”. They showed their commitment to the issue by being involved in these coalitions. And those activities not only got a lot of votes, but they also brought a lot of people to the ideology. I used to say - and I think it's still true - but it's a lot easier to turn a political activist into a libertarian than a libertarian into a political activist.
So, a lot of political activists go where the other political activists are. And that's why so many people who supported Prop. 13; so many people who opposed the Briggs initiative; so many people that supported the marijuana initiative in San Francisco in 1978; voted libertarian. The biggest event in Ed Clark's run for governor was the crowd of 10,000 people at the marijuana legalization rally in Golden Gate Park. And those people, many of them, voted for him for governor, in spite of the fact that they were not really libertarians yet.
From 1979 to 1983 you were on the Central Committee of the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus (the Raimondo-Rothbard one). Please expand on that. What is the Radical Caucus?
Yeah, I'm in the Radical Caucus. It went through a few changes during the time that I was involved with it. Our goal was to make the Libertarian Party more radical in being consistent, being more libertarian, and being braver about promoting that ideology. A lot of libertarians, and people in electoral politics in general, wanted to play down the things they think will turn off voters. Well, it's one thing if you're a Democrat or Republican and thinking that way - and although I'm not justifying them doing it - but it makes more sense for them than libertarians. A Democrat in a district might start out with 30% of the vote and then they're building up. Whereas the libertarians are starting from like 1%. And it's not like they have a lot to lose. They need to differentiate themselves from the major parties. And so that was one of the things that we were trying to do. We were trying to make libertarians more libertarian.
In 1974 I went to my first LP National Convention in Dallas. At that convention - on the platform - they voted down amnesty for draft resistors. They voted down withdrawal of American troops back to the United States border. And they voted for, or they voted down many, many things that today are clearly parts of the libertarian platform. There was a real fear - and I think there still is - among a lot of libertarian activists. They're more concerned with losing votes than getting votes. They think that if they can trick the voters into not realizing how radical they are, that that's the way to win. And it doesn't work.
I'm not saying there's not some libertarians who got elected to the School Board or City Council or something by not really being upfront about what they believed in. It's that what have you accomplished by tricking the voters, when you got yourself on the City Council. And then what do you do? So that's what the Radical Caucus was at first. I would say that from ‘79 to ‘81 that was really what we were doing. But I would say that from ‘81 to ’83 it started to go more in terms of sectarianism and winning control of the party organization. And that was not the goal initially. We certainly wanted to get our people elected to party offices, for example, and be major candidates. But really, our goal was to influence the activists that were already there.
The Mises Caucus
I would contrast - at least the earlier part of the Libertarian Radical Party caucus - with the Mises caucus. I would say that ‘81 to ’83 - we were very sectarian. The goal was for us to win and beat the other side in the party. And that was wrong. The goal should be to convert the other side. And what happened with the Mises caucus was they took the position that anyone who did not agree with all of their proposals or ideas should not be able to have a position in the party. And they’ve cleaned out the old activists. Isolated them into small local groups or even drove people out from the party. The whole concept of: Their hashtag I think was: ‘Takeover’ or something like that. I think that's not what you try and do to win. I mean that's what broke apart SDS, for example (Students for Democratic Society). It went from trying to change people to your point of view, to kicking out people who didn't have your point of view. Especially in something like the Libertarian Party which is small enough.
For example, in 1975 the rough guardian essentially took over the party structure and platform of the National Party but there was never an attempt to get rid of people, to remove the people that were not on the team, from their position. Some people got fed up and left. But that's it was minimal, and that's different. I'm proud of what the Radical caucus did.
In 1982 U.S. Senate candidate Joe Fuhrig- who was a well-known economist - was a radical. He was the Libertarian Party nominee for U.S. Senate. He got a lot of attention. And he did a lot of party building. And he ran a very radical campaign. But he also made a lot of Libertarian Party members more radical and more, it's not just radical, but brave that you can run for office and be clearer about what you believe in. And be more consistent. And not be afraid of hearing some voters. But the idea is that you want people to accept the philosophy and the ideas of libertarianism. Not that you want to trick them by hiding what you're really trying to do. And I don't see that happening so far.
And I don't know that it was Mises Caucus, per se, but the LP's involvement in the February 19th anti-war rally leadership was tremendous. In recent years, we never saw that thing happen with the Libertarian Party. It happened in the ‘70s. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s
You Mean Forming Coalitions?
Right, right, exactly. And they were new at it. I think they made some mistakes, but it was a great success. And it was successful in terms of trying to do the same thing that AntiWar.com has tried to do. Which is to make the anti-war movement less sectarian and more ecumenical. And so, I really have to applaud Angela McArdle, and the other people in the LP for stepping up. I compare that to some of the horrible foreign policy that's been exhibited by Libertarian Party leaders over the years.
I think it was in 2005 - 2006 that the Libertarian Party National office issued a plan for rebuilding Iraq that involved spending billions of dollars - to be delivered to the Iraqi government - to make it whole after the destruction of the US invasion. They were even using the silly Colin Powell ‘Pottery Barn’ thing about ‘you break it, you bought it’. And they said well - we broke Iraq and now we own it and we have to fix it. Well, you can't. You can't buy something that isn't for sale. And the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government were never for sale. When a bull is running around the China Shop breaking things, you don't train the bull to start repairing things. You get the bull out of the shop. There was not much attention paid on a national level to that sort of thing. But you do see a lot of libertarians who think that. We should be involved in helping elements in other nations to fight for freedom.
Ukrainian War
It's not that libertarians have different opinions about the government of Ukraine. But it's certainly reasonable to say: I think the Ukrainian people should fight for their freedom. But it's another thing to say: We're going to tax Americans, and reduce the freedoms of Americans, in order to advance one political faction in another country - where we don't really even understand all of the things that are going on there.
It's not isolationist. We are not isolationists. Libertarians should not be isolationists. They should be internationalists in the sense that they support the US being involved or American’s being involved in free trade with other nations. That's why opposing sanctions is so important and because sanctions are actually an act of war. But also, that we need to let people make their own decisions. If you start saying, well we're going to try and fix every war on the planet that's not practical or really doable. And we certainly have not tried to do that.
There's a lot of these wars where we are directly responsible. If Russia invaded Ukraine unprovoked, which, by the way, they did. Not because we provoked them. But even if you accept that. Well, what the heck did we do in Iraq? Even George W Bush, the Bush Junior, was giving a speech about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and he accidentally called the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. A Freudian slip, I guess.
In 1995 you co-founded Antiwar.com and it became your full-time job. In 2013 you sued the FBI for illegal surveillance of Antiwar.com. In 2018 you won a partial victory in the case and in 2019, you won your appeal in the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals - which many analysts have cited as a precedent for the rights of journalists and activists. Congratulations. Please share with us this story and what the suit was about.
There were a lot of elements to that, but essentially, we found out simply by chance, really. Because you don't usually find out if the FBI is investigating you. It's not something you might even know about until 20 years after you're dead or something like that, if ever. But we just happened to find a piece of FBI information from a Freedom of Information Act document from a completely unrelated case that mentioned the investigation of AntiWar.com. One of our readers sent that to us. And we went to the ACLU. And they said, oh well, we should do some Freedom of Information Act documents requests. And so, they started doing a whole series of them. But the FBI wouldn't answer. That was in 2011, 2013. The ACLU got a large law firm in San Francisco to handle the case pro bono, and they filed the suit against the FBI.
The first thing that happened was that we found out that I was on a terrorist watch list. And had been put on there by error. At least that was their excuse. The judge in the case issued an order to have me removed from it. And so that was our first victory. But then the case went on and on. It was grueling. I went through these crazy depositions with the FBI. And in late ‘17 or early ’18 we reached an agreement on two of the things we were suing on. We found out that they had stopped investigating us because they didn't want to tell us whether they were still investigating us. So that was one of the things that they were ordered to tell us. They gave us a bunch of documents that we asked for. And so, we lost. However, on the most significant part, - which was the Privacy Act - they shouldn't have even started the thing, because we were essentially activists or journalists, but we were both. In late 2018, the ACLU said that they were going to handle the appeal on that part of the case.
The appeal went to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. And we won a unanimous verdict. And the FBI was ordered to destroy all of the documents regarding the investigation of AntiWar.com. And it was a precedent because that had never been done before, and groups like the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Brennan Institute, and various other places, said that it was a huge win for activists and journalists. That's something that I'm proud to have been a part of. That precedent. And then - of course - they could have gone to the Supreme Court. But the FBI decided not to take it to the Supreme Court because I think they thought they would lose.
I'll send you a link to the hearing. Which is actually a very interesting video. It's an hour-long video watching the hearing of the 9th Circuit. And it was great. For Justin Raimondo - who was the Co-founder of AntiWar.com with me and was also my political partner in so many activities (starting in with the McBride campaign in 76) - the last thing that he got to see on television was that hearing in 2019, before he died.
Would you describe the FBI as the unaccountable deep state?
The FBI should be abolished. There's nothing good about the FBI. Anything good about the FBI - that people perceive - is a result of their own public relations campaign. Which they've spent a lot of money on. The J. Edgar Hoover years they tried to erase. They tried to erase some of the bad parts of it with that 60s TV show called the FBI. When in fact J. Edgar Hoover was helping to write the scripts and was banning certain actors from being guest stars on the show. The FBI has done so much to make themselves one of the most heroic elements of the federal government. And they are really one of the most evil elements of the federal government by far. You can take any period, any activities they've been doing, there's very little good they've done. And they've done some really bad things - they have assassinated political activists like Fred Hansen. Some people think they helped participate in the assassination of Martin Luther King. They certainly did a lot of things to try and kill him, even if they weren't the ones that did it.
The FBI became interested in Martin Luther King when he went against the Vietnam War. Up until then they left him alone because he only talked about civil rights.
Yes, exactly, and Fred Hansen. It was only the local police that were interested in Fred Hampton until he was a Black Panther leader. And they only became interested in him when he went beyond the Black Liberation movement and tried to build a coalition - or did build the coalition against police repression that included people that would now probably be called Neo Nazis. There are photos - you can Google Fred Hampton and Confederate flag - and you'll see him at events speaking where there's a Confederate flag behind him because he was head of a coalition that included right wingers, right wing community leaders. And that's what I feel that you're doing something right if the FBI is after you. There have been government agents who have infiltrated the Libertarian Party. Now, I've never seen any Freedom of Information Act documents that document the FBI's involvement, but there have been Freedom of Information Act documents documenting the IRS's. The IRS had agents inside the Libertarian Party and people should know that there are provocateurs and agents in every successful political movement.
The AntiWar.com’s mission statement is “This site is … read by libertarians, pacifists, leftists, "greens," and independents alike, as well as many on the Right who agree with our opposition to imperialism.” With a coalition like that, why is America still expanding its global military engagements?
There was something that I went over, and I just wanted to reiterate it. I mentioned how the Libertarian Party had been so active in political coalitions and that was - in my mind - probably the most successful time in terms of party building (in the late 70s and early 80s). But my own arrival as a libertarian was because I met libertarians in the movements that I was working on. The student rights movement, the anti-war movement, the marijuana reform movement. Whenever I would go to those places, I would see libertarians making a significant contribution and impact and so that impressed me. I think without that I might never have become a libertarian. I think I probably would have anyway at some point, but that is really what brought me to it.
How could I argue - you've got people on the side screaming: ‘Oh, don't work with those right wingers’ (and they're not doing anything) and the right wingers, they're doing stuff. It's the lesson that I hope the progressives - who are still anti-war (the few of them in Congress are) - and hopefully progressive elsewhere will learn from the February 19th rally and the Syria vote last week.
So that's the important thing that you're trying to portray is that you have to build a coalition in order to advance. Well, it's not just, OK, it's two things. One is to accomplish something you have to have a coalition. You can't just say only the people who agree with me on 98% or 100% of what I agree with are worth working with because you'll never win.
But also - in terms of actually bringing people to your point of view (which should be the lesson for the Libertarian Party) - is what's going to impress people. I said this before but - Nicholas von Hoffman (some of the older people will know who he is). He was in Martin Luther King's inner circle. He was on 60 minutes in the beginning. And he was the liberal who would speak out. And he was strong in the civil rights activist movement and various other things. He gave a speech to the Libertarian Party at the ’79 or ‘77 National Convention. And he talked about the importance of getting your ticket punched. Which means that activists are impressed when they see that the people who are saying stuff, actually do stuff. You don't just talk the talk, but you walk the walk.
I think that was a very good explanation of the coalition I was trying to get at. And that's also the point of starting AntiWar.com. We had multiple goals. One goal was to – not just build the movement - but to build the informational center of the movement, that was not just left wing. The other thing was to show that libertarians were the real leaders of the anti-war movement or should be the real leaders of the anti-war position. Because that's what will impress people.
And that's why people often see political activists or leaders who all of a sudden seem to switch their beliefs. People like Tulsi Gabbard, for example. All of a sudden people call her right wing, instead of left wing. People like Russell Brand. Other people who are in the public eye. And they think, oh, these people all of a sudden, they've switched. They're flighty, they're crazy. Well, no. They have seen the other side without the rose-colored glasses, without the filters of: I don't like them no matter what.
And it enables them to start changing their position. We've seen this with a lot of very well-known people. You even see it from some members of Congress. And this is great. Matt Gaetz, for example, has had a lot of interaction with libertarians and it has made him more anti-war and more pro civil liberties. And I think that's what happened with Tulsi Gabbard too, especially since the left started to shun her. But more importantly, the people on the other side - libertarians and conservatives - started saying some good things.
Gary Allen, ‘None Dare Call it Conspiracy’
Let me talk to you about other issues. I remember in 1972 I met Gary Allen. The older people will know who he is. He wrote a book called ‘None Dare Call it Conspiracy’, which was the campaign book for the John Schmidt’s, American Independent Party presidential campaign. And he is the one that did a redefinition of the left-right spectrum in the book. That changed the way most Birchers use politics.
He showed the traditional spectrum, which is that the left is communism and then slightly to the left, you have liberalism and then to the right is fascism. He said that's all wrong. Fascism and communism are on the same side. And he showed it in a diagram in this book. This book had a 6 million print run, was distributed all over the place. It showed communism and fascism on the left and anarchism on the right. And he put constitutional conservatives like 75 or 80% over to the right. And then he told me they're fine but see that side - he pointed to the anarchism - he says, ‘that's me’. And I wasn't a libertarian yet. I remember that as something that had an impact on me. The other cases where I met people - who were clearly on the right - but agreed with me on so much. That I had to consider how they arrived at those same positions that I had.
In your opinion, is there a correlation between the expansion in power of the federal government and America’s global military involvement. For example: Woodrow Wilson and FDR’s administration’s federal power grabs.
Oh, of course they go hand in hand. The status it's not just the deep state but the people who think that the government needs to solve all the problems. They believe that they should solve all the problems and that includes foreign affairs and domestic affairs. But they're also the people who get into power who are some of the most corrupt people. When you look at somebody like Anthony Blinken or Victoria Nuland or some of these people. When they say some of the things that they say whether they can truly believe, whether they know that they're lying or whether they've actually bought into it.
How are wars financed? What can be done to curb this activity?
When you have a Secretary of Defense - up until he became Secretary of Defense - on the board of Raytheon. It just came out that while he was Secretary of Defense, he has given $30 billion in additional contracts to Raytheon. It always was like that. But now more than ever before. You have the Congress and the news media being controlled by these military industrial complex players. And that they're doing it often. It's like, oh, well, you're going to get some extra money from this. It may not have started out as their goal, but then it becomes the most important part. And you have somebody like Nancy Pelosi, who as a congresswoman with a limited salary and a limited ability to make money outside of her congressional salary, becoming a multi- millionaire in Congress, just by trading stocks. However old she is, she's thinking ‘screw it if it's World War 3 I'll probably be dead by then. I'm going to make more money. And have more control at hand’. Whether you're looking at the war, control of the media, control of the health emergency, and things like that. And one of the things that they use is fear. Fear is very important. There's a lot more stick than carrot and Libertarians often fall prey to this, too.
I remember giving a talk to the Libertarian Party of California back in - oh, I'm going to guess -2007, 2008. And I was talking about AntiWar.com and foreign policy. And I got booed for a lot of things I said, by one of the party's founders. I don't want to say who it was but there was a party founder in the audience - somebody in the early days I was friends with, and somebody who's been in various high positions in the Libertarian Party over the years. And I think he's still active. He got up and he was yelling at me about how the biggest threat to his safety was North Korea, and how we had to just destroy North Korea, and that that should be the goal of libertarians.
Libertarians understand how dysfunctional the government is when it comes to the local fire department or something like that. But often - when it comes to things that scare them - like the possibility of being attacked, or the possibility of being infected by some horrible virus, or whatever - they start to say: ‘well Libertarianism is fine when you're talking about making the fire department more efficient or competitive, or privatizing something or other. But when it comes to the scary stuff, you still have to look to daddy government without realizing that it's the same government that is the worst at running everything.
And I'm not an anarchist anymore. I was in my youth. I do think that I'm an extreme minarchist. But I approach it from the point of view that: oh, these are the things the government should do. I think that libertarians should work to make government so tiny that you can step on it and squish it if you need to.
Donald Trump was viewed by many as weak when he held discussions with Kim Jong-un. What could have been done differently – or better? Or should he have stayed out of this entirely and just removed our troops from South Korea?
Donald Trump was perceived as being weak because there's some people that think you should never talk with the enemy. They ignore history. Let's look at Vietnam. Well, we ostensibly went into Vietnam to stop the communists from unifying and taking over the country. And we did. We went there. We lost 60,000 Americans and we killed somewhere between two and four million Vietnamese and Cambodians. And what happened? Did we get what we wanted? No. Yet Ho Chi Minh unified the country and made it Communist. And what do we have today? We're arming them. They're our friends. These things don't turn out the way that we were originally trying to accomplish.
Donald Trump was perceived as weak. I think it is hard to know what he thinks. Sometimes I think he's a little scatterbrained. But his instincts, at least, were to end this thing. And he talked to Dennis Rodman about his friendship with Kim. And he talked with other people who said, yeah, we can make peace with North Korea. And we can. Ratchet down all the tensions in that area. And all we have to do is talk with him. Donald Trump made one mistake. And that mistake was he took John Bolton into the room with him. John Bolton wasn't even supposed to be there. He just showed up and he asked Donald Trump, can I go in with you? And Donald Trump should have said no, but he said yes. And they were having a great conversation. It looked really good. It was being covered on live cable TV on all three networks. And it really looked promising.
And then John Bolton said: if everything works out, we'll give you the Gaddafi treatment. Or something to that effect. And of course, we know what the US did with Gaddafi. He agreed to all of our demands and then we invaded his country, and he was brutally murdered. Well, as soon as Kim heard that, the meeting was over, that was the end. So, he made one tiny but earth-shattering mistake by bringing John Bolton with them.
What followed - in terms of his foreign policy - was him listening to the neocons.
There was a lot of promise in Donald Trump. He said a lot of things that were very good. But I do remember at what point he announced that he was changing. And a lot of people didn't realize that this is what he was doing. But I think it was in his state of the Union, after one year, he said. When I ran for office, my instincts told me to get out of Afghanistan. And I almost always listen to my instincts. But now that I'm president I've talked to all these experts. And I feel the weight of the office and now I realize that the United States has to be at the forefront of international battles. I'm paraphrasing, obviously. And so that was the moment when I realized that we've lost him too, and this happens, of course, with everybody that is in that position.
Why did Bill Clinton expand NATO?
I don't know. I think Bill Clinton was already fairly much an internationalist in that sense. I'm not sure Bill Clinton ever said that he was for dismantling or getting out of NATO, but there were people that were in the Bush administration that wanted to get rid of NATO. And there was a lot of talk that we would get rid of NATO, and I think it's very possible that if Clinton had lost that election that we would have. That NATO would be gone. Barack Obama fell victim to the same pressures when he became president because he certainly said all the right things, although it's hard to know when somebody has sold out.
When Barak Obama ran for president, he said many things that led us to believe that he would end America’s wars and bring the troops home – especially after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. What happened? Why did he not deliver on his campaign promises? Should he return his Peace Prize?
Obama flipped on so many things. And he was so lauded by getting the Nobel Peace Prize before he had even done anything. He became so impressed with himself that the issues never mattered. Here's somebody who was well known as a leading pot smoker when he was in college and yet he didn't do anything to legalize marijuana. He ran on closing Guantanamo. He expanded it. He ran on getting rid of the Cuban embargo. He slightly eased the sanctions. He ran on ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He expanded them and he started five more. One of the things people forget - when he ran against Hillary in the primaries - is not foreign policy, but he ran against the health care mandate. And today, the health care mandate is the keystone of Obamacare.
Does the ‘permanent state’ perpetuate America’s heightened military engagement? Are politicians powerless to stop them?
Yes. I don’t think they are powerless. They're gutless. And so, you don't really know. They could look at things and say, ‘well, I don't want to end up like JFK. He started to question the CIA and look at what happened to him’. And I'm not saying that. I don't want to get into that. I actually think that it is true, but. Is it just the seduction you get when you get into the White House and say, ‘man I don't want to leave this wonderful place’. You get into the US Senate, and you say ‘this is where I want to be, and forget any of the ideals and issues and principles.’
At what point did Richard Nixon sell out? Because he probably had some principles at one point. At what point did these people abandon everything. People change over the years. People who were active - things about them change. But people who get into these positions succumb to the power, the money, influence. It's a combination of things. That's why it isn't any one politician who is the bad guy. Or even can turn into the good guy. You have bad guys and good guys, but the bad guy is the system. The system of big governments. Big military. Controlling people’s money, et cetera. Not everything but so many things are worse now than they've ever been in my lifetime. We are closer to actual nuclear war than we've ever been. We are closer to complete criminalization of free speech than ever before. There was the McCarthy period, but it's nothing compared to what's going on now. Look how much of the economy is controlled by the government than ever before, more than under FDR.
Who is Randolph Bourne and what is the Randolph Bourne Institute?
Well, it's not his institute, exactly. Randolph Born was an anti-war activist during World War One. He is famous for his anti-war activism and writing, and for his anti-state writing. And he was also famous as a disabled rights activist and an icon. I remember I went with a friend - who was disabled - to the disabled center and they had a college here. And there were pictures of famous disabled leaders on the wall. And there was Randolph Bourne. This is before the Randolph Bourne Institute. So, he's known for a lot of things. He also was known for dying in 1920 from what was called the Spanish flu. Which is a misnomer, really a bad misnomer because the reason it's called the Spanish flu is because Spain was the only European country that was actually reporting the statistics of contagions and deaths. In that flu and a lot of people don't realize that there's a lot of argument about COVID. There's the Spanish flu. Biological warfare. It's not clear. I'm not saying that they invented the virus, but the first outbreak was at an Army base in Kansas, and Woodrow Wilson decided to send all the infected soldiers to Europe to infect the enemy.
With every war America takes another step into statism with the centralization of political power that threatens individual liberty. Elaborate on Randolph Bourne’s concept that "War is the health of the State."
Randolph Bourne is most famous for his saying ‘war is the health of the state’. And that's true. During war is when you have the state taking more power. It's what the state uses to get the most power. It's more effective than anything else and quicker acting. If you look historically at the growth of the African state, certainly. So, there's that. At the end of the Civil war, at the end of World War One, at the end of World War Two, et cetera.
So, it really started with Lincoln?
No. It started with the War of 1812. During and after the War of 1812, there was a lot of buildup of state power. And you even had Thomas Jefferson - who had been president, he wasn't president anymore – who was in favor of the war. And most people don't know that one of the big goals was to annex Canada. And Thomas Jefferson said, annexing Canada will be as simple as marching in. He was wrong about that, but it always happens. Even in the Vietnam War there was some contraction of government power because it was so horrific and we suffered such a defeat, but ultimately it resulted in the growth of state power.
There are two sides. The constitutional, representative, and limited government, on the one hand. And the empire builders on the other? So, you think the empire builders are winning.
Unfortunately, I do. And these wars that we're involved in now, they are going to build up the state too. One of the arguments for limiting free speech is that you don't want to be able to have anyone say anything anti-war about the Ukraine Russia situation. That really is becoming something you're not allowed to say. And you have just tremendous crackdowns as a result of any sort of anti-war activity. So, he was very prophetic, Randolph Bourne. When we started AntiWar.com, we decided we wanted to have it under the aegis of a think tank, so to speak, even if the main activity was still the website. And we looked at different names for it. And I think it's often good to use a person’s name. Many were already taken. And I always like Randolph Bourne and Murray Rothbart, of course. We said what about Randolph Bourne. Our slogan can be ‘war is the health of the state’. And we looked and looked, and nobody had used Randolph Bourne as a foundation or institute or school or anything like that. So, we took that name.
Elaborate on the concept that non-interventionism abroad is a corollary to non-interventionism at home.
Well, they go hand in hand. First of all, the government screws up everything they do, either accidentally or on purpose. And so even if you think that something should be done doesn't mean that there should be government action or a law to have that done. I don't think people should smoke marijuana but that doesn't mean we have to have a law saying that they can't. Then it comes to foreign affairs, and it gets much more complicated. When you decide that you want to stop this internecine war between European powers. The US goes in, and it just makes it much more complicated and many more deaths. It's hard to point to any war that the United States has been involved in - we can argue about the Revolutionary War but that was before the United States. But since the Revolutionary War, I would argue against every war the US has been involved in, including World War Two. I think that even if the goal seems good, there are so many lies and so many things that are done by the government - and even with good intentions. It's like you're walking down the street and you see an argument between two people, and you don't really know who the bad guy is. And you get involved. You're taking sides in something that has nothing to do with you.
I would certainly debate anyone who said, ‘no this was a good war’. In earlier wars, much of it was about retaining government power domestically. Certainly, there's no argument that that was the goal. But the Spanish American war was clearly an imperialist war. We took a lot of territory in the Spanish American War. You can certainly see the results of the 20th century wars being the expansion of the state, both internationally and at home. And that's why ‘war is the health of the state’.
What are the core libertarian principles of AntiWar.com?
Well, AntiWar.com is not explicitly libertarian. I would say that most of the top leadership are libertarians, but they are libertarians who understand that it's not a libertarian organization, and we certainly have a lot of people involved. There are people that write for us and work for us that are not libertarians. One of our most popular columnists is Ted Snyder, who is not a libertarian. He's on the left. We have a lot of people who are on the right or the left or it's hard to say where they are. Look at our last fund drive. We ran a series of letters, and we had people from the right and the left. We had Roger Waters and Doug MacGregor both write letters for us. We had people who I'm not sure where you would place them, but who are foreign policy experts like John Mearsheimer, who has endorsed us.
And both Pat Buchanan and Daniel Ellsberg are very vocal and active supporters of us. And it's very sad to see both of them in their waning days. Daniel Ellsberg is going to be 92 next month and was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has been given a limited time to be on this earth. I'm hoping that the doctors are wrong. They often are. And Pat Buchanan just announced a month or so ago that he was discontinuing his column, which we have run regularly for over 20 years. So, it still is broad based. If you look at the people who are writing for us, you see these people from across the spectrum. I was happy to work with Matt Gaetz. And I was happy to work with the representatives of the Progressive Caucus on the vote on Syria last week. None of those people are libertarians.
Please describe the pressing need for "citizen experts" as the reason you set up Antiwar.com.
Well, people should be. That's the biggest goal of AntiWar.com is information because we believe that if people actually know the truth about the wars, and the government activities that are leading up to the war, that they can work in their communities to let people know about this.
People who go and speak at the Rotary Club and things like that are not going there because they're right wing or left wing or whatever. They're going there because they're members of the Rotary Club or they are members, or leaders, in their community. They are the people who can change minds. When we started AntiWar.com, we were mostly putting out a combination of things. It was information and opinions.
For the information we could rely on a lot of sources, including mainstream wire services and newspapers and such. Then we would have our opinion writers write about that. And today that's not true anymore. The Deep State has taken over so much of the media, including a lot of the alternative ones. That we've had to change.
It's not really our mission, but we've changed the way that we operate in that most of what we're doing is writing the news. We have Dave Decamp as our news editor. He's great. And a number of other people write news articles that say ‘look this was just reported, this is actually what's going on, and that you won't see the truth about so many of these events’, unless you read AntiWar.com. So, people who read AntiWar.com are not just political activists, but are regular people. Or maybe they're community activists who want the information. We have a point of view, but we're not lying about it and we don't run things based on our bias. If there's something that's good news and the U.S., did it, we're going to report it and say this is great. Not common.
It's really important for people to know the truth. It's remarkable that it used to be that you could turn on cable news or the network news, or you could read the major newspapers, and you get at least a smattering of it. And now you have the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, a good amount of Fox News – not all of it – telling lies. Total misrepresentations of what is going on. People are being attacked - not for what they're saying - but for even saying it. So, what we want to present are the facts, and our interpretation and analysis of them as well. There are facts that you will see on AntiWar.com that are not reported by 98% of the news media, which was not the case 20 years ago. Justin Romando in 2003 to 2006 appeared several times on MSNBC representingAntiWar.com and talking about the Iraq war, and the Afghanistan war. And today you'll have a panel on -well CNN is the most famous for doing this. So, CNN will have a panel of eight people and they all agree that the government is great, and they all deny the facts.
You state on AntiWar.com “the totalitarian liberals and social democrats of the West have unilaterally and arrogantly abolished national sovereignty and openly seek to overthrow all who would oppose their bid for global hegemony.” It is shocking what Democrats have done to support our Ukrainian proxy war against Russia. They label you a Putin stooge if you express any opposition to their foreign policy. What happened to the ‘non-interventionist’ ‘peace movements’ in the Democratic party? Isn't it really shocking that the Democrats support the proxy war in the Ukraine?
No, it's a shock that so few Democrats dissent from that position. But if you look historically at the Democratic Party, they have been a party of war. All the wars in the 20th century - until 1991 - were started by Democrats. But there are people in the Democratic Party that are non-interventionist and support the peace movement.
Can you name some Democrats offhand?
I'm just thinking that that the progressive Democrats would be like that. Well, it's not the case in terms of the Ukraine intervention. There have been many votes on sending more weapons and money to Ukraine, on more Russian sanctions. And no Democrat has voted against it. One of the early bills for spending - the first giant multibillion dollar expenditure of weapons and cash to Ukraine - and there were 57 ‘No’ votes in the house - every single one was a Republican. There was not one Democrat.
A serious thing happened last week that was unprecedented. One of the congressmen that lives near where I live, is Ro Khanna. He previously argued that we should never send Ukraine money because they were basically Nazis. He argued that like just a few years ago. And today he thinks that people in the Democratic Party shouldn't even be allowed to take that position. So, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) is one of the leading proponents of US intervention in that war. As I’ve said though, that it's very sad because I even saw that Bernie Sanders was supporting Joe Biden's position on the war.
A few months back it looked like we had a bill to get out of Yemen. It was going to be - I think - an amendment to the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) saying that the US should get out of Yemen, should stop supporting the Saudis, and stop supporting hostilities in Yemen. And we actually thought we might be able to win this one. And I was waiting and waiting for the debate to start. I'm watching C-Span and then all of a sudden Bernie Sanders comes out and says ‘I've made a deal with Joe Biden. We're going to withdraw this amendment. And he promises me he's going to have an agreement at some point in the future’. He sold out. That's sad. It's not the first time. I met Bernie once when I was a teenager, and I watched his career, and he's done some good things, but he's also acted as the leading sell-out on so many things. Even some things that I don't even agree with. Like Medicare for all or something like that. He's also abandoned those. He is essentially a politician. And he's been a politician for a long time.
Antiwar.com represents a pro-America foreign policy, focusing on a less centralized government and freedom at home. You are the real American patriots with "America first" in regard to a traditional republican government of non-interventionism. These statements seem like the current views of many. Have you noticed an uptick in support?
Unfortunately, the America first is something that brings to mind these days, Donald Trump. And while some of what he advocated as America first, we support, but we do not support restricting free trade. And that's really an important thing because sanctions and restrictions of trade are oppressive worldwide and they're oppressive at home. Like when you criminalize people’s ability to send some money to a friend in Syria or to talk to somebody in Russia. A lot of people who would say America-first are anti-free trade, or extremely restrictive on immigration. We don't take a position per se on immigration. I would say that most of us at AntiWar.com are very liberal on immigration policies, at least.
Your website states: “The War Party is well-organized, well-financed, and very focused…The antiwar forces, on the other hand, are not so well-positioned. Everyone is for peace, in theory at least, but there is no one group of Americans especially disposed to work for it, outside of small religious groups such as the Quakers and the Catholic Worker movement.” Why is that?
Well, the antiwar forces are divided. And you have a lot of people that are part of the old anti-war movement that don't want to work with people that don't agree with them on other issues. And you have a lot of people who are the leaders of anti-war who don't want to do anything to help the ‘enemy’ by acknowledging that they're right on war issues.
Even with the February 18th or 19th rally you had a lot of sectarian fighting among groups about whether they were going to support it. And I think that - I don't want to start naming specific names – but even among the libertarians there was debate on who could participate based on their politics. I tried unsuccessfully to broaden some of the speakers and involvement by other people and it was shot down. I think that it could have been bigger, but as it was, it was great. It was really great, and it was broad based, and if you go to the Rage Against the War Machine website, you'll see the variety of speeches of the people who spoke at the Washington rally. And that was exemplary. I think that was fantastic.
Do you think that something positive is going to come out of that as a long-term effect.
I hope so. I don't want to be overly optimistic, but I am optimistic, and I'm heartened by it. And I hope that that happens. We're fighting a real uphill battle on so many fronts. And the limitation of speech is really very scary. We have been targeted by groups that are well funded that say that we are spreading Russian disinformation, or various other labels that people will put on it. There's a thing called News Guard. And News Guard is funded by the Pentagon and other Deep State elements. They have been accepted by much of the news media and a lot of leaders for determining whether or not somebody is telling the truth. There's been a real assault on free speech and especially free speech in its absolute form, where people should be able to decide for themselves what they hear. And how they take that in. Yeah, people should be allowed to be exposed to a variety of points of view. And that's really the best way for people to make up their minds on things is to get all the information, but that's not something that is accepted across the board.
I would say there used to be more of that. The old saying. ‘I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the death you're right to say it’. I forget who said that originally. But you have demonstrations against free speech now, from progressives who used to be absolute about that. When I was a kid, it was the right wing - certain element of conservatives - that were liked that.
Antiwar.com is dedicated to building an awareness of the globalist and interventionist forces that would enslave us all in a New World Order. Please elaborate on this and what we can do about it.
Well looking at it now, I think that the new world order and globalists are just too much trigger terms. That I'm not arguing that it's not true, but I'd rather say that we are for individual and community control. We're for freedom of expression, freedom of trade. And so, in that sense we are very libertarian on foreign policy and on domestic issues. We have people that are all over the map who are part of the organization and supporters. We've been around since 1995, but we've really been around - as a significant organization - since ’99. And since then, most of our support comes from the readers. We don't get government money; we don't get big foundation money. From time to time, we'll have a rich person that gives us some money, but we really have relied, entirely - almost entirely - on our readers.
What advice do you have for young Libertarians?
Well, young libertarians who want to get into the fray as opposed to young libertarians who want to just sympathize. The ones that want to retreat and just take care of themselves. I don't criticize them. People need to do what they feel comfortable with in political activity. And this is something that I've thought all along. That there used to be a lot of battles between libertarians who were in different groups about what they should be doing. Should I be working in the Libertarian Party? Should I be working in the National Taxpayers Union? Should I be working on issue campaigns? Should I start work in my Rotary Club, my community, my church. Start a libertarian church. Whatever. Anything you want to do? You should not do it because I'm doing this.
It's very important if we're going to be victorious - both as the anti-war movement and also as libertarians – to have a broad base of different kinds of activists. And that's why citizen activists are important because you have to be in the real world and the real world is multifaceted and multimedia. And so, the important thing is to remember how important liberty is, and not to compromise, and not to make other libertarians compromise because you think that they're being too radical or too loud or saying it wrong.
You can have a discussion, but the other libertarians shouldn't be our enemies. They should be colleagues and brothers and sisters. Whether they're in the Libertarian Party or whether they're working for some think tank, or whether they're working for the Institute for Justice or, working for various marijuana drug groups or anything like that. It's all good. And they all complement each other - when they're not at odds.
Links provided by Garris in connection with this interview:
Podcast on the history of Antiwar.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ojBe2bun8&t=622s
Rage Against the War Machine website: https://www.lp.org/rage-against-the-war-machine/
Link regarding the case against the FBI:
https://www.AntiWar.com/blog/2019/06/12/antiwar-com-vs-fbi-appeal-hearing-in-the-9th-circuit-video/
YouTube of the 9th Circuit hearing (which is actually interesting to watch), as well as links to various articles that appeared during the course of the case. It does not include the verdict, but here are a couple of articles about the decision:
https://www.courthousenews.com/fbi-ordered-to-expunge-threat-assessment-of-anti-war-reporter/
Vital Dissent with Patrick MacFarlane: ‘The History of Antiwar com with Founder Eric Garris Ep. 229”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ojBe2bun8&t=1126s
Peace and Freedom
https://reason.com/1974/11/01/frontlines-51/
Editorial assistant for Reason Magazine monthly profile: https://reason.com/1975/03/01/reason-profile-6/