EP 81 WV Legislative update and war with Iran

0:00Hello and welcome to the Mountain State Liberty Cast. I am your host Thai Ward. Joined as always by Taylor Richmond. Hello, Taylor. Good morning, sir. Yeah, so we just got back from you. Well, you probably, you got back. Did you, you didn't spend the night in Charleston after our legislative day? Did you use you at home? I, I try to spend as little, as little as much time of in Charleston as possible. Throw down, throw back. Oh, come on. There's plenty of beautiful things doing Charleston. Go to all the stores that you have as well and working down. The mall's gone, man. There's no reason to go. No, the mall's not gone. I mean, there is like, I think like a Claire's in there. There's a Claire's. One of these are hot topics though. I don't know. I think Spencer's is still open. Oh, that's what I meant. Spencer's. I don't know why I said hot topic. Well, they had a hot topic too.

1:04But I think back probably closed. I don't know. I need to go in there and see all the stores. I would never go to anyway. So. I want to get kids that need. Yeah, kids that shop at things. No. You guys just hand, hand throw all your own clothes on the farm. They shop on the internet.com. I don't know where they shop. There's a website called the internet. Well, that's the funny thing is, you know, it's kind of taken the whole having to take your kids places thing away. Because, you know, it used to be, you know, when I was a teenager preteen or whatever, you know, your parents would. My mom would go to the mall, take us to the mall and I don't have any idea what she did there, but. We would walk around, you know, I mean, and. That's not really an option anymore. So. I mean, we could go to the mall and walk around with the old people that use it as an exercise facility.

2:06Stover sneakers. You're the old man for service makers. Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, I could definitely go and hurt my feet on the pavement. But yeah, this is just the consequences of late stage capitalism right there. That's what it is. Yeah, it's finally come home to roost. I was like when people say that is if they know what it means because I don't really know what it means. Like, oh, this is fine. The capitalism failing. I'm like, yeah, all that capitalism we've had. But yeah, the funny thing is since we're talking about the. The city's been. Bought that building and they've been talking about turning it into a sports facility for probably half a decade now. And the big thing was they bought the building, but didn't think about buying the parking garage attached to it because I guess the somebody else owns the parking garage somehow. And I think they finally got that figured out, but it's just been like the perfect example of government trying to do things.

3:09It's like the biggest and I'm sure you've seen this as well, but what are the biggest problems we have in West Virginia is these pseudo big cities trying to act like big cities. And they don't know what they're doing because they I guess they can't attract the intellectual knowledge to. Plan these things. Yeah, so. And you have, you know, the mayor mayor, good one. She's a lawyer. She's not a business person. So it's like you have all these people that don't really know what they're doing that have. Well, this is what other places have done. So let's do that. And speaking of which they they're the team. What was it? What was the Ohio plan they were trying to mimic? They call it team West Virginia. No, team West Virginia was one of the bills that was part of the jobs Ohio or something like that. Yeah, that's what that was the thing they were trying to mirror and they haven't even gotten that out of committee yet.

4:09I don't think. So I mean, it's that's one thing. I don't know if you've kind of gotten winded that as well as I think we may be talked about it last time. But the West Virginia legislature, they had this, you know, broad your hands. I'll have this big plan about this session being there. You know, whatever that term is, peace day resistance of economic planning and it's kind of fallen flat. They've gotten a few small business things through. And it's they've mostly come from individual delegates. It just seems strange that like that. I don't know if they just didn't have enough time to plan it or what, but I don't think really much has come out of this session other than, you know, more spending for these little bills. So I guess we'll have to see maybe again, I think last time I kind of said that. I don't know if I was who I was talking to if I said in the podcast or not, but it kind of felt like they're waiting till the end of the session to maybe drop some stuff to get it through fast.

5:16So nobody could object to it. I don't know what they're doing. But yeah, we got to talk to legislators on Thursday for our libertarian lobby day, which had a good turnout. What do we have about 10 people there? It's yeah, but it doesn't people. Yeah, it was like every quarter of the, or every corner of the state. I mean, we had folks from Wheeling and wherever Travis and in any live. He's in the Eastern Pay and Handle, Martin Aaron, Martin. Myself and Dustin from Morgan town and your holler and Eric and Carl from Buchanan. So yeah, I mean, and am I my good friend, Adam, who was really hitting the ground running with folks in Raleigh County. So yeah, we were, we were well represented. Yeah, and now to correct, I think Travis is from the Bunker Hill area of the Eastern Pay and Handle, which isn't technically Martinsburg. And they like to point that out. So the Appleman up there.

6:17So yeah, I, I don't know about you, but I don't really trying to, you know, encapsulate the feeling I got there. There was a few delegates that we talked to that are our stalwarts like Chuck Horst and Anders and a few others that, you know, it is what it is. And I will say that I was not assigned any of the easy delegates to talk to. I got to try. Yeah, I got to talk to the ones that, no, and it was okay. Because I mean, I think generally most of the Republicans, if we had more time to sit down and talk to them about stuff, maybe they would kind of, I don't know, be more receptive. But the general feeling I got was, they're almost there on some things. And then other things are probably never going to, we just have to get new people in there that have that, you know, Liberty, I don't know, inclination, I don't know if that's a way to describe it.

7:28But one, one example, I was talking to one delegate from. He was up around your area, actually. And he was. Valor. No, not him. No, maybe he's from Fairmont. That's right, because David Prince knew him. But we were talking about cutting taxes. And one thing I tried to do, because we had a little printout and one of the things was tax cuts and one of the things I pointed out to every delegate. And almost not a confrontational way, but kind of, you know, just presenting the idea of the tax cuts are great, because they'd all do the North South headshake with tax cuts. But then I would point out we've got to cut spending or none of this matters because we're these revenue in a couple of my even said, you know, the idea of responsible tax cuts makes my skin crawl because that means you don't plan on cutting spending. And one of them even said, well, you know, yeah, what we would like to do would be able to increase spending while lowering taxes. And I was like, and I was, you know, I kept my cool.

8:30But I'm like, okay, man, like, because that's the, that's the mindset of a lot of these Republicans that's been drilled into them from leadership and people they think no more than them, because they're not, they're like, you know, coal mine supervisors or teachers or something else. And they don't, they've not really done a whole lot of study on the economic principle, but they see other states, well, you know, well, you know, you're bringing these bigger manufacturers and these bigger jobs and they pay more revenue, and then you can cut taxes on the people. And that's the idea they're going with with these data centers. And while that's all well and good, you can't, as we've talked about many times, Taylor, and you pointed out that these places close. I mean, we've had, in West Virginia, we've had times when we had a lot of these places here, like the aluminum factories and the, you know, Jackson County, Mason area, and they close. And then what? And then that revenue's gone. And now you have this spending that you have to contend with. And that's what we're dealing with right now. And it feels like they just want to get back to the status quo and getting it through their heads that, you know, no, you can cut spending.

9:37There's a lot of stuff. And I gave them some ideas of stuff that I've just had. And, and, you know, he was receptive to it. And he even said, you know, there's a lot of this government that's, you know, redundant. And there's a lot of positions and things that the government does that it doesn't really need to do. And that would be a huge, you know, cut in their, you know, their budget. And that would help reduce the spending just easily for things that they don't think the government should be doing in general. The prod, the disconnect is getting them to actually do it because it's hard because people's jobs are connected to it. And that looks terrible when you're trying to run for re-election. So that was the only thing that really was a sticking point I found with a lot of what we were trying to present. Yeah, in the general, I just say, retort or response from most individuals, not just Republican lawmakers, but I think, you know, the general public is, OK, well, what do you cut?

10:38And it always leads, they don't want to, I don't say understand or realize or accept that there is ways to utilize spending cuts to drive efficiencies and improve process by operating, you know, like a business. Like I said, on talk line, a lot of these guys go down there and then cows and they say, oh, we got to run government like a business, but they would never run their business like they're running Charleston or like they're running the state through Charleston. They would try to look for ways to cut costs and save money and do things better and faster and more efficiently, but they don't do that with state government. They just see that OK, more, slightly more money is coming in so we can spend slightly more now than what we did. So yeah, I did get to go to some of the easier folks, like Chris Anders and and thank them. And you know, our goal for the day was, was multi-faceted.

11:40We did want to meet with the individuals who are part of freedom caucus or our sponsors are co-sponsors of legislation that are very liberty forward and thank them for what they're doing and being champions of good bills and then trying to return freedom to the state and small government and right size Charleston. And then there were some that delegates that either we knew through people that were going or they were told to us by other delegates and senators who were maybe on the fence for some of this stuff and we're kind of there, but not all the way on certain issues and try to, you know, present our position and let them know that there are West Virginians out there that do care about this that will vote accordingly. What we want to hopefully see them support these pieces of legislation. So that was where we spent several hours, you know, going around the Capitol and meeting with folks, but then, you know, also the major thing that was going on down there was the fight, the ongoing fight of the hope scholarship that was happening in in house finance. So a number of us weren't and showed solidarity with a lot of our hope families.

12:59Katie and some others who had been going down and sitting in these extremely pouring house finance committee meetings where they kept punting the discussion on changes to hope every day for almost a week and finally while we were there decided to take up the possible adjustments. I think we got a real win tie. I mean, I think the only change that appears to be going forward, the only change that came out of house finance was to move the payments to families from a front ended schedule to a quarterly cycle, which helps the actually helps in the funding mechanism of it. So it's not a immediate draw right at the beginning of the fiscal year, but it can be spaced out throughout the calendar, but also helps some of the families in a number of ways also. So I mean, obviously the legislative session has not over budget is not passed. We're not going to say that it's a full victory, but from everything that we're seeing, you know, but I'm not because we were there, but I think the show of support the outcry for hope that has happened from a number of individuals, including us.

14:09Has led to a current victory or crossing our fingers, but what looks to be a victory for hope for for this legislative session. Yeah, and I don't know about you, but only just to a man, every even that we went and talked to the education chair, and there was a few things that I didn't necessarily agree with him on, but he is his idea for hope. I mean, I pretty much every delegate was like the commerce or the fiscal finance chair was up over his skis with what he was trying to do with hope, and none of them really agreed with everything they were trying to do. And so that was a good thing to hear that they were kind of in, you know, a little bit of solidarity in general of supporting hope. And, but I think they all are justifiably concerned with the funding for in the future and having to deal with their constituents in public education. But I think people like Katie Switzer who are sharing a lot of this information about hope that the delegates should already know because the majority of them in office did vote for it, so they should know what they're voting for, but they don't most of the time.

15:21Yeah, I think it's on them to educate themselves and educate their constituency about what hopes scholarship really is and the truth of it and the numbers, and it's not almost any argument you hear about hope from anybody advocating that it be eliminated isn't just isn't true. I mean, it's not doing what they think it's doing. And the problem with public schools, which which I did get the education chair to admit and agree that the public school system needs to be addressed on its own. It's a separate issue and however much they want to connect school choice with the failings of the public school, it's and he said as well that there is a reason these people are leaving these schools and it's not because they want to abuse and neglect their children. I mean, when you have in Roan County, you went from I think it was 40 some people that were using the hope scholarship and maybe a hundred leaving the school system before, you know, our school closures and the hope scholarship was, you know, expanded to everyone.

16:29You had a smaller number of people leaving and then all of a sudden this year in Roan County, you've got 300 people leaving the school system and 106 of them are with the hope scholarship. So all 300 are somehow nefarious. No, they're leaving because you're taking their schools from them and the system isn't what they thought it was and a lot of people are just finally fed up. So it's a public school system that needs to be addressed and I'm all for that and I think you and I both have, you know, said here on here at Nosium is, you know, the perfect libertarian solution is that public schools wouldn't be a thing, but that's never going to happen and it's constitutionally mandated that we have that system and it's the system itself that needs to be reshaped and fixed and that gigantic code book that the education chair had sitting on its desk is even bigger than I thought it was. I mean, it's a double Bible basically of code for the school system and you wonder why they're failing and he happened to be talking to me because I mentioned Roan County schools about, oh, they've got all these administrative employees and they have too many for the mix that they have for the funding formula.

17:38So they got to switch some of them over to professional roles so that they they're classified correctly and all this and I'm like, yeah, I wonder why education isn't the priority. They're having to deal with all of this nonsense that, you know, it just doesn't happen in, you know, the private school scenario and from what I've seen from charter schools. They're not dealing with things this way and dealing with employees this way and it's no wonder they're not able to focus on education and talking about things with him about like this literacy initiative as much as we poked fun at it. You know, they're getting down to the science of reading and using finger quotes that, okay, sure, yeah, should this have been something they've been doing the whole time, yes, but they finally are doing thing little laws like changing the way that they do literacy curriculum and how they teach reading and they are seeing success, they're being classified by, excuse me, nationally as, you know, we're the fastest growing state in the country with literacy rates over the last four years since they passed that legislation.

18:40So it's something that's working and it's it's focusing on education and improving the education the students being produced not statistics, not numbers of fiscal numbers. It's are we teaching kids how to read it's getting better because of something to legislate your did so that's the kind of things that we want to see how the legislature is. Excuse me. Well, in the setting about the setting about the tie is that there's a number of those legislators and Republicans nonetheless who believe that that success would not have happened safe for, you know, the bill that they passed where I think it's, I don't say pretty obvious, but should be that those same successes would happen if to your point that people the teachers and the administration, the minimal administration that is needed to run a school could focus on actually teaching and not have to spin all these plates to appease the code book and all the legislation regulation that's put on top of them.

19:45Yeah, just because they pass one that broke through or, you know, somehow refocused the attention on actually teaching doesn't mean that that couldn't have happened and they cut, you know, a significant portion out of that code book and given time and energy back to the teachers to do what they actually, you know, are taught to do know how to do. Yeah, and the education chair, he seemed like a pretty, you know, reasonable guy and he kind of sees things. He doesn't like to sugarcoat what reality is and he, one of the things that they were talking about doing is changing from 160 180 day requirement to making it like a 900 hour requirement. And, you know, and he said, you know, it's probably too low and he was talking about, which I don't, that was one of the things I don't agree with them on. I don't think you need to have a kid in the classroom five even five hours a day doing learning, you know, the rest.

20:46But some of the day is inevitably going to be, you know, moving them around lunch, things like that. That's inevitable with the system where you're bringing kids in somewhere. It's going to happen. But, you know, real, real sitting down in the classroom learning time five hours a day. That's for a lot of kids. It's just not necessary. And, and while that's a disagreement, he understands that there needs to be more flexibility within the individual schools and the counties of how they use that time and so that, you know, if they're you get a bunch of snow somewhere they're not having counties are are going to be able to be flexible with how they use that time. And, which is good to hear, but he also said, you know, if you go to like a four four day four day school week, you know, whether that be on Monday or Friday, they don't go to school. He said that it's a real thing that there's a ton of parents that school is their daycare. And while we always want to say, well, school shouldn't be daycare. Well, guess what it is. And it's not, and for a lot of parents, it's not daycare because they don't want to deal with their kids is daycare because they have to work.

21:54And their kids go to school. That's the system that we have constructed. Right. And in the education chair. Yeah. And the education chair can't do anything about inflation and the fact that both parents have to work. That's another issue they they should address. But that's that's not right now right now is the fact that yes, if kids are in school, there's a lot of families that don't know what they're going to do with their kids in the daytime on that that fifth day of the week they normally go to school. So he said, look, we already pay these these service personnel. We've got all these aids that don't make as much as teachers and they're not necessarily as qualified as they should be. There's absolutely no reason why on that fifth day, you go ahead and make the meals, you have the minimal staff there. The kids that need somewhere to go, they can go there, they can do their homework, they can have activities for them to do, they can supplement their education there. And a lot of the kids that are struggling during the school week can get caught up on some things and maybe they have a math teacher there and they're teaching, you know, doing some tutoring and stuff like that.

22:58Ideas like that are things that I like seeing even though I don't necessarily agree that it should be a daycare and we just open up a school just to do it. But that's the reality of what's going on and addressing their constituents concerns and hearing the concerns and just in general them thinking about their constituents and not just, you know, this top down heavy focus centralized planning thing that they understand the concerns and they want to be able to address them accordingly. And I mean, that was a positive for me. I was trying to stay positive while with the we were there. And I think, you know, one thing that came up inadvertently from one of the delegates is they asked us, you know, what's your opinion on daycare. And it was one of the more, you know, Christian conservative delegates and he said that, you know, I don't really believe in daycare. And, you know, I brought up, you know, because he doesn't believe in daycare. Right. Taylor, there's a whole group of people that don't think daycare should be a thing because guess you take a guess what they think. The wire should stay home.

23:59Yes, the mom should be at home. If you're going to have kids, you should prepare and somebody should be home taking care of the kids. Hey, Taylor, I don't necessarily disagree and I reflected because he said I agree with libertarians on almost everything except for social issues. And, and one thing, you know, Carl Cole, which pointed out that nothing on that sheet has anything to do with culture or social issues because that's not what we think is going to. That's not the most pertinent thing to address here in the state. But I did say I'm like, look, man, my wife works like one day a week, sometimes every every third weekend, she has to work a shift on Saturday and Sunday. But she homeschools, she's home with her kids. I'm with you, buddy. I don't want to have to do daycare either. But we have, I have a mother-in-law that watches our kids that she doesn't work and she's able to do that. We pay her, um, gas money and a little bit of extra to do that. And, but some people don't have that opportunity. So, I, I used you several times, Taylor, so whether without your permission, I told the story that you told about the daycare that you went to that got shut down.

25:06And I said, what would you rather have happen is a subsidize these already failing daycares that are full or deregulate the market and allow families, even people that receive subsidy for low income, you know, daycared stuff. We're not going to get rid of that anytime soon. So if they're going to have that money, why shouldn't they be able to pay whoever they feel is appropriate to watch their kids to do so and make it easier. If a church already has an annex that has liability insurance, maybe we change the code and say, well, whatever would be required. I'm sure there's things that would have to be done to make them qualify as being able to have kids in their facility to watch them. You have a couple of ladies that volunteer, maybe they pay them a minimal salary, whatever the church wants to do. And then they can fit 10 kids in this annex or the church basement or whatever. And you've opened up the market and wouldn't you rather have a bunch of old church ladies watching these kids, then a giant facility full of kids in there.

26:07They're not, they don't even have time to interact with these children on a daily basis. That would be a way that government can open up this market short of subsidy. And almost every single delegate that I talked to that I mentioned that to they went, yeah, that's a really good idea. It is way too hard to open a daycare. So there is, there is places where we can get through to some of these delegates. And while you would think that's something they had already thought of, that's where we can step in and point out these things. Because that's where our mind is all the time is deregulation, free markets, and that stuff that gets lost in Charleston. Well, yeah, unfortunately, a lot of good ideas go down there to die, which changing gears a little bit. I want to do, I do want to talk about one of the things that we're still hopeful for that we saw die on the house side, which is delegate horses, open fields doctrine bill. And he was explaining to us basically that he, well, he and Anders believe there's probably enough votes on the floor to get it across the line if they actually got it out of committee, but the chairman of, I think it was under, I think it was under judiciary, right?

27:20He was acres basically attacked him on like, you know, why do you hate law enforcement? And, you know, this would prevent law enforcement from being able to do their jobs if they were chasing a hot and hopper suit and stuff along all along these lines, because it didn't specifically protect. And I can't say the word tie what's the word. Accident circumstances. Thank you. I don't know why that's my, my one, one of my few hang out words. But yeah, that because it didn't specifically protect those situations and have it listed in the code, it was poorly written and they basically killed it. But, which was just frustrating because as you always say, tie, they're either stupid or lying. And we're, wasn't really sure which ones because that is a. Superior, you know, statute or law, whatever, whatever you want to call it, where that bill would be, would try to come to the law enforcement's ability and quote unquote, right to pursue.

28:24And investigate ongoing or active crimes, if that were, if it actually were happening. So anyways, long story, all that to say that that bill died over in the house aside, but we believe, or they, they believe that it's being taken up in the Senate. Well, it's not, okay, just to, just to clarify that it wasn't his bill. It was his, his main open fields doctrine bill is in judiciary committee where we're likely to stay. But what this was was, and we, I don't know if we talked about this or not, but there was a bill in the Senate to, it was actually a good bill because it said that law enforcement. Right. This is the one that I was going to, yeah, you're going to say the, the, the camera bill. That's what it was is the camera bill that what the camera bill was, is that no law enforcement could place a camera on anybody's private property without a warrant. And, and here's the thing, the bill already says, or the property owners commission. Right. Yeah. And the bill already says, unless you have exigent circumstances, meaning in what that would cover, when I first read it, I was like, what are exigent circumstances to go and put a camera on somebody's property.

29:31But what that means is their body cameras that if you're in, which is, I mean, basically they're looking at technicalities that if a police officer has a body camera on, which we support, and they go on to somebody's property. Because some little girl screaming for help in the, in the bedroom, that they're now filming that property with their body camera. And so those are the exigent circumstances they're talking about. And again, what was that word, exigent circumstances, it was already in the bill. And what Charles was trying to do was add his open fields doctrine into that as an amendment. Basically, just to try to get it through, because this is how legislation works is, if you can't get your bill passed, you try to do things however you can. And the argument was, well, it wasn't basically germane to the main bill. And like you said, they argued it was going to not be able to keep them from entering a property at all, which just isn't true because exigent circumstances is already in the bill itself.

30:31And it's well-known established precedent that exigent circumstances and police officer has reasonable suspicion of something happening that's already the legal standard. So it's not like they're chained, they can't change that. It's already the standard. So it's not like it's going, they're going, a judge is not finally going, it's just suddenly going to say, oh, no, decades of established case law is no longer relevant because you put this one amendment into this bill. No, that's not going to happen. And then I wanted to point this out that this is the problem with a lot of our legislators is, if they're not an expert on a subject, they just shut their minds down and just listen to whatever the leadership is telling them. Because that's what happened because I had several delegates tell me that parrot that same line of, well, I like the idea of it, it was just poorly written and it wasn't, it wasn't right for this bill. Well, okay, I mean, maybe it should be its own legislation in a perfect world, but this is how this works. And no, it wasn't poorly written.

31:39Chuck has been studying this for years and years and years and he even came back and rewrote his own legislation because of issues that it had. And so this is a problem that we have is there's people that they will just do whatever leadership says. And I mean, heck, even if it does pass the, it's going to be scrutinized after, I mean, how many bills have we seen become code and they get tied up in court forever? I mean, we're seeing that with the charter schools right now. It's not like there's not organizations that aren't going to scrutinize these things and if they, the police unions, they're going to scrutinize this stuff and if it doesn't pass muster, it's going to get tied up in court. So it was just a good example of legislators, we're not sending our best and brightest up there, the Charleston. Yeah, but we are hopeful as you were, you were mentioning when I was, when I was getting to was that there is a bill also in the, in the Senate that Chuck and in others are hopeful that they can kind of backdoor what they were trying to do into.

32:47And hopefully that moves, you know, and secure this route and they have all the right language and so on and so forth. So our fingers are still crossed that we get that additional victory there. Additionally, looks like everything is good to go or, or, you know, nearing the finish line for the constitutional K for 18 year old. So that's another success. Yeah. But, you know, as I mentioned and I think we talked about previously, but I mentioned on the talk line and everything that, you know, because it's election year and people don't want to be too contentious or overturn any apple cards. There just wasn't a whole lot of legislation. At the time we went down there, which was only two days ago, that we're controversial that we needed to either try to support or try to kill this because all they're trying to do is get to November and get through some of their primaries and everything else. But next Wednesday is what they call crossover day, which means they have. So it's a deadline to get bills out of the house or side of the legislative that originates it. So if it's a house bill and it's not out of the house, it hasn't gone through third reading.

33:57Then it can't get over to the Senate. They haven't done that third reading in passage of the bill on the side that it started on it can't make it over to the other side. I've done that by Wednesday and it's basically dead on in the house or the Senate, depending if that's where it started. So it's kind of like this mad rush now the last several days to get things started and push through and read all three times. If it's going to have any chance of getting anywhere and possibly becoming a piece of past legislation. So we're seeing a lot of stuff begin to like come out of the woodworks for lack of a better phrase. Yeah, and defend the guard is one that's yet another year where it's going nowhere. So I just wanted to point that out. Yeah, I don't it's a I think it's getting worse instead of better. I don't know what. Especially with what's going on right now, move on. We want to talk a little bit about since it's Saturday morning, March or March live. February 28th. Evidently we're attacking Iran. So yeah, this is a day 13 of the 12 day war. We had a long long pause in it.

35:05Yeah, I just I just wanted to there's a quote from Donald Trump from Fox News from what he said. I guess yesterday United States military military began combat operations in Iran. Our objective is to defend American people by eliminating the threats from the Iranian regime. And so we've got to defend us, but wait, wait, Taylor from there's another quote from the White House from June 25th of last year. Iran's nuclear facilities have been obliterated and suggestions otherwise are fake news. So which is it? What's going on? So unfortunately, this is the continual moving the goal post that we see in not just the Trump administration, obviously we saw it with Obama and and Bush before him can't say Biden Biden wasn't really there or doing much, but thankfully, but the other the other two presidents.

36:12And he really moving the goal post on what we're trying to accomplish. So originally that the 12 day war wouldn't we went in and did these precision strikes and air quotes obliterated their nuclear facilities and capabilities was to prevent them from moving beyond there was a 60% inverse uranium or whatever what they're trying to do for civilian use. But prevent them from taking that any further. Okay, we obliterated. Okay, well, now because they're doing stuff that other stuff that we don't like, like killing protesters and just in general, pissing off Israel. We have to go back and bond them because they are also either capable or nearly capable or trying to be capable of constructing ICBMs intercontinental ballistic missiles. So the big, big scary missiles that can actually hit like New York and somewhere in the United States. So yeah, that's the new goal post was we had to go back and make sure they don't have those weapons and I'm sure, you know, if this is as again air quotes successful as the last strike and all we're doing is going and bombing them and coming back out.

37:24I'm sure there will be something else we have to go bomb, you know, probably in like October or a little closer to the election so that, you know, all the war hawks compound their chest ahead of the front ahead of the general. Yeah, election, sorry, not not a general. It's, it's really, I don't even know what to say, man, I mean, it's like beating a dead horse. I mean, it's, I'm sure we're going to hear all about it from Scott Horton when he comes our convention in March. But it's just another thing. It's, it never ends. The justification is what it is, but the, I mean, I don't, everybody talks about the War Powers Act and, you know, there's no imminent threat here. I mean, who's attacking us? Is Iran attacking us? I mean, the concept is that they could, they could make a nuclear weapon. Is that an imminent threat? Does that give the president the authority to attack them? No, it just, it doesn't make any sense.

38:24I don't, I'm, I'm hopeful that, you know, just like the, you know, 12-day war or whatever that they get, get it out of their system. I don't know regime change, whatever it is, to get it done and get it over with and we don't end up in another quagmire. And anybody who says that, you know, the idea that Israel has influence over our country and our foreign policy is a silly thing and we just need to get out of over that. The Neocons aren't in power anymore. I don't, it's, what, what, what do you need to see? I mean, literally the reports are the US and Israel are attacking Iran. Like, what, what more do you need to see? I mean, we're doing this for Israel. There's no way around that. Like, that's what we're doing. And this is the thing and you don't have to be anti-Semitic. You don't have to even hate the country of Israel. You don't even have to hate their government to see that this is a dangerous, dilatory relationship that we have that's getting us, it's dangerous contrary to what the president said.

39:33We, we know this, you know, Ron Paul educated on this us on this almost 20 years ago. This is what happens. This is the blowback will come. It's inevitable. And, and ironically, the stuff that Iran is doing that you and I wouldn't support, you know, funding terrorism stuff. This is all blowback from the actions we've taken over the last century. So this, it just never ends. And, and, you know, a lot of the, the mega blowhards were like a bit of phrase that, you know, because when, when this, when we were flirting with the idea or floating the idea of the 12th, they weren't taking out the nuclear facilities and all that, you know, there were some folks like Dave Smith and others who, you know, went on places like Pierce Morgan and other popular outlets and shows and said, you know, there can be serious repercussions with this. You know, we talk about the acts of evil and the fact that Iran is aligned or backed or friends with with China and, and Russia and some other, you know, bad actors.

40:38And the problem is is when you do things like this, you're, you're poking a bear. You're, you're playing a version of no pun intended Russian roulette. And yes, we were lucky that that time, you know, the day was wrong and there was no World War three because of it. So just listening to the news before coming on with you, they were talking about the fact that it wasn't terribly long ago with like the past couple of weeks or months, or a month that Iran was doing war game operations and drills with Russia and China. So, you know, it's not like it's not a known fact that they are, you call them allies, but at least the possibility that they get drawn into this thing and then what, then what do you do just because they had possibly some big scary missiles that they may, you know, throw up in the air. We have the capability to shoot these things down. I mean, obviously we don't want, you know, people that hate us throwing missiles up in the air. But is that worth the risk of possibly drawing in Russia and China into a hot war with us? And then that's, that's on the one side of the worst possible scenario, right, possibly World War three.

41:50But you still have some other ramifications they're talking about, you know, utilizing or leveraging the hoodies to go down and basically shut off the streets of Hormuz that would drastically drastically upset the global economy because it's the major funnel for oil. In and out of the Middle East and, you know, what does that look like? Okay, well now that we got to go attack them and basically go to war effectively with Yemen because what's left of Yemen besides the hoodies is not much besides the bunch of starving people that have been subjugated during our are supplying the Saudis and their war against them. So now you have another frontal war because we have to clear the streets of Hormuz. So all these ramifications, all these shoes that can drop all these dominoes, all because you want to flex for your buddy Israel. And, you know, take out their missile capabilities now. It's like, is that necessary? Like you have to, you have to consider the blowback. And if you're not, then, you know, you're putting the country in and possibly the world in a worse position.

42:56Yeah, and that's the, that's the main problem is you got all these people calling everybody doves and, and, you know, the most appropriate line for most of these people is, you know, I'd rather be a dove than a chicken hawk. I mean, I don't know. It's just bizarre to me this whole concept of people that never served saying that everybody is a chicken. Like, it's just so funny to me. I don't know. I don't see. I have yet to see and I pay attention. I've yet to see a reasonable explanation for why we're doing this. Like we know we've done this. If we were, if this was the new thing, I'd be like, well, you know, they've got a point. And everything they're saying is what they said about Iraq and Afghanistan and, and, you know, Somalia and every single country, Syria, you'll be a Libya, all of them. They all say the same thing. And it always ends up with ISIS running the country. Right. And then we have to pay. We have to go fund al-Qaeda to fight ISIS.

43:57Yeah. What are we going to do? We're going to stick this print that is the former Shah's son that's been, hasn't been back to Iran since he was a child. This is going to run the country. Like, what are we doing? Like, I don't, and again, you know, we got to do this regime. And Lindsey Graham said, you know, what are we, I think a reporter asked him about, I don't remember the exact wording, but it was basically like, well, what are we going to do to stabilize the country? And he said, well, why do we have to do it? Like getting indignant. Like, well, why do we have to have to do? I'm like, why do we have to do any of this? Why do we have to destabilize it? Yeah. You know, bizarre. Like just no self-awareness. Yeah. And it's one thing, you know, and I'm not that I'm necessarily obviously supportive of it, but it's one thing that for the United States to aid in some targeted strikes against Hezbollah or, you know, Hamas or whatever. And I'm not that I agree, but you can make a better argument for some very targeted special ops type of, you know, attacks on terrorist groups because right now and really for the past, however long, that's really been Iran's only kind of weapon.

45:13And I could understand a better that argument, but we are actually invading and attacking us another sovereign nation, which I understand if we would bomb those places, they they exist in other sovereign nations, but any who we are actually attacking not a terrorist organization or a terrorist camp somewhere in the hills of a country, but we're actually bombing Tehran, like the capital of another sovereign country. So it's on a scale much more significant. And I'm for me, and I think should be most people much harder to defend in principle of what we're doing and why we're doing it. And, you know, it's it's wild that, you know, you're saying we why can't we not that they're the suffering and the things are terrible that's happening over there and thousands of not tens of thousands of protesters are being killed. But Iran does not have the capability to go on its own. They're they got more shit on their plate right now to worry about them possibly trying to go and take out Israel.

46:17And as soon as they did as soon as they showed any possibility of doing that, you know, actually moving troops or what have you. Then okay, the bin our ally fine, but in the meantime, these preemptive wars are are. It's so easy for them to quote unquote justify, but then we'd never have any clear evidence that anything was likely going to happen, especially when you have a country who is trying its best just to maintain its power within its own people. Like I just can't it's so they make it sound so easy to understand, but it's like when you actually get into understand what's happening over there, you can't square that circle. Well, you sure can't square that circle. I mean, there's I mean, we could talk at nauseam about it, but it's just I think anybody who really pays attention to history and understands what what this means. I hope I hope it's it's nothing more than a few attacks, but I mean, if you they do destabilize the regime.

47:20What what happens after I mean, it's never again, it's history. It never goes well. I mean, what we did in Venezuela, we just gave the took the socials later and put another socials later in. So I mean, are we going to do that over there? I mean, what's the is the entire I mean, people forget that the Iranian people. Um, I mean, by all objective standards, I think a big majority of them supported this, this government, when it, you know, they elected a new president, I don't know how, how that works over there, or even if it's legitimate or if it's another, you know, fake, fake thing. But the, if somebody comes here and does what we're doing in Iran, do you think it matters? Do you think the Democrats are going to, you know, celebrate somebody bombing our White House, no matter how much they hate Trump? No, it's not going to work. I mean, the people aren't, I mean, maybe there will be people in the streets that are supporting us, but I don't think that it's going to be this general celebration. I mean, we were great, great, greeted as liberators in Iraq until they found out that, you know, we completely destabilized what government they had.

48:24I mean, I don't know what they expected it to happen there. I mean, and again, just like we talk about with our local governments, um, they act like all these people are these super geniuses that know what they're doing. But I mean, we've seen again through history, they're not any smarter than anybody else, and they really don't know what they're doing. So yeah. And just to close that out, I mean, you know, I heard Chili Moore cap up to say this the other day, being interviewed about the buildup and what policy was to become true to this morning was, you know, you had these people and they come out of the womb saying death to America, whatever the hell she said, something stupid, basically that they're taught at a young age, death to America. Well, I mean, I think Scott Horton talked about the actual language and what it actually means, but anyways, why do they, why do people in Iran hate us so much? Well, I don't know, Ty, maybe because about 50 years ago, we came in and had regime change in their country and throughout a relatively moderate leader who allowed a bunch of freedom.

49:32Comparatively, because he was not willing to play in the play in the sandbox with us, no pun intended, regarding the oil sales between us and in the UK, and he wanted to nationalize that so that they kept more of their oil money in their country. He said, oh no, folks, we can't have that. And then we put in or allow for basically a rather brutal dictator to come in and take over in this theocracy to rule over Iraq or Iran for the past 50 years. Now, yeah, maybe they have a reason to not like us very much. And just to assume that it's because, you know, we eat apple pie and listen to Britney Spears and watch baseball is a bunch of BS. It's because we go over and we meddle all the time in other countries. And when they get slightly out of line, according to us, we drop bombs on them. Like that's our our way to, you know, regulate other countries. It's rarely ever through actual diplomacy or, you know, any kind of significant economic processes. We just go and drop bombs and damn the consequences.

50:36Yep. And that's a yeah. That's the constant. You know, we didn't we're not putting in any ground troops. I'm like, who cares? Like what are you talking about? We're blowing up buildings. What does it matter how you use it? What military tactic you use? We are attacking a country that didn't attack us. That is unconstitutional. End of story. Well, this president did this and this president did that. Yeah, we've been violating the Constitution for a long, long time. And we finally had a president that said he was going to stop doing that. And here we are. So if you don't understand why people are upset by that, you're just not reading the room. And this is why you're going to lose the midterms because you don't get it. You don't understand what you voted for you. And you can listen to Israel and the Mike Huckabees and the Marco Rubio's and Lindsey Graham's all you want, but they're not voting for you. They're not the people that are going to get you impeached. The people that you're pissing off are the ones that are going to end up getting you impeached because they're not going to vote for you.

51:41They're either going to vote for Democrats or stay home. So good job, buddy. Congratulations. You did a good job. Like, well, I don't know what you think you're doing, but you're not reading the room. That's for sure. So, yeah, Taylor, I think that's, I mean, what work can we say about it? So, yeah, we're close to an hour. So, Taylor, are you getting excited for our convention in March? Well, I'm definitely even more excited now because Scott Horton's going to have a lot more to talk about. Yeah, he definitely is. And I don't think you'll have any problem schooling us on it. And I mean, I don't know. And again, it's, it's going to be kind of just a frosting kind of thing because he's, you know, preaching to the choir here. I think it's really, it'd be interesting to hear from him the analysis of, of the details of it because, you know, none of us can have the time to read the things and understand the things that he does about it.

52:43So, if you want to hear some good, get some good battle fodder to, to spew to your MAGA friends, come to our convention March 14th. 25 dollars to hear our speakers. It's not a big fee. You can come to the business meeting. You can vote if you're already a member of the party. And we've got some likely if you candidates are going to nominate do some business. And it'll be a good time. So, yeah, light comment and subscribe on the podcast. If you want to donate to the party or to the podcast, LPWV.org, hit that donate button. Give us a few bucks. If you, if you enjoy what you're listening to on the podcast, 25 dollars to join the party. Yeah, we're on Instagram, Facebook, X and email me Mount State Liberty, Libertycast at gmail.com, email the party info at LPWV.org. Until next time, don't hurt people and don't take their stuff.