The following is a written transcript of my video announcement of my candidacy for president here.
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I have today announced my candidacy for president of the United States under the banner of the Libertarian Party, the third-largest political party in the country.
Why am I running for president?
One big reason is that I want to bring an end to the killing machine that the federal government has become under both Democrats and Republicans. We don't know exactly how many people this killing machine has killed in the last 60 or 70 years, but it certainly has to number in the millions. That's nothing to scoff at. When it comes to killing, there is no doubt that both Democrats and Republicans have made America number one.
Let's look at some examples of this federal killing machine.
America’s Socialist System of Immigration Controls
Let's begin with immigration.
Every year there are immigrants who die as a result of America’s system of immigration controls that Democrats and Republicans have foisted upon our land.
They die of asphyxiation in the back of tractor-trailers.
They die from drowning while trying to cross the Rio Grande, such as 25-year-old Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez, whose body was found on the American side of the Rio Grande, along with the body of his toddler daughter.
They die of thirst crossing lonely deserts in Arizona and New Mexico.
There are also immigrants who die because they've had a bullet fired into them by some Border Patrol agent.
I grew up on the Texas-Mexican border. I spent almost half my life there. I've seen these deaths ever since I was a kid. In fact, all my life I've seen this immigration crisis. It's ongoing. It's never-ending. It's perpetual.
There's a very simple reason for this. This is a socialist immigration system. It's socialist because it's based on the core socialist principle of central planning. You can ask anybody in Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea what happens with central planning. They will tell you it comes with crises and chaos. That's what we've had on the U.S.-Mexico border for decades — crises and chaos as a direct result of the Democrat-Republican socialist immigration-control system.
People in socialist countries will tell that that in addition to death, privation, crisis, and chaos, socialism also comes with a police state. That’s why people in the American Southwest have suffered under an immigration police state for their entire lives.
This immigration police state comes with fixed highway checkpoints, where immigration officials stop vehicles and search them and demand to see people's papers, even though the occupants of the vehicle have never entered Mexico. These checkpoints are inside the United States, several miles from the border. One can also find these types of domestic highway checkpoints in communist and totalitarian regimes.
U.S. officials also use roving Border Patrol checkpoints, where Border Patrol agents drive around and stop whoever they want and search their vehicle. When I was in high school, I was the victim of one of these roving Border Patrol checkpoints.
They also engage in warrantless trespasses and searches of ranches and farms along the border. No search warrant at all. They just go in and start searching. If a landowner places a lock on his gate and fails to give a key to the Border Patrol, they just shoot it off and enter onto his property, without a warrant.
They have immigration officials boarding Greyhound buses without a warrant, demanding to see people's papers, just like they do in communist countries.
And then there is that ubiquitous Berlin Wall that former President Trump constructed along the border after stealing land from landowners through the abuse of the power of eminent domain. It's a wall that President Biden, to his shame, has kept in existence. That wall is a disgrace and it’s an affront to everything America stands for, including the Statue of Liberty.
There's only one solution to this ongoing immigration crisis, chaos, death, and police state. That solution is not “comprehensive immigration reform,” one of the most ludicrous terms in the Republican-Democrat political lexicon. This is not a “broken” system, as they sometimes suggest. This is an inherently defective system. Socialism is an inherently defective system. It cannot be made to work.
The only solution to America’s decades-old, never-ending immigration crisis is economic liberty — that is, free trade and open immigration — the unrestricted, free movements of goods, services, and people across borders, just like we have with our domestic state borders.
Open borders are our heritage. America lived under a system of open immigration for more than a hundred years. It was one of the most wonderful economic systems ever developed in the history of mankind. And it worked. Open immigration was one of the major factors for the tremendous increase in the standard of living of the American people in the 19th century, especially for the poor.
We need to restore our heritage of open borders — genuine open borders We need to abolish, not reform, the Border Patrol and the entire immigration bureaucracy. We need to dismantle all governmental controls on the free movements of people across borders.
Leaving people free to cross back and forth across borders is the only way to bring an end to the perpetual crisis and chaos on the border and the deaths, suffering, and police state that come with the Democrat-Republican socialist system of immigration controls. Open borders is the only immigration system that is consistent with moral principles, economic principles, and religious principles, including God’s second-greatest commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Invasions, Wars of Aggression, Occupations, and Undeclared Wars
Another part of the federal killing machine are the invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, and undeclared wars against other countries, especially Third-World countries. We don't know exactly how many people the federal killing machine has killed in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past 20 years, but it has to number at least in the hundreds of thousands. That’s incredible. Keep in mind that these killings are illegal under our form of government because there has never been a congressional declaration of war, as the Constitution requires before the president can legally use his army to wage war. The killings are continuous. They never stop. Even though the federal killing machine has been thrown out of Afghanistan, it is still in Iraq. And it is still killing people in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and other parts of the world.
When people retaliate against the killing machine with terrorist strikes, Democrats and Republicans exclaim, “Oh, they just hate us for our freedom and values." Of course, that is just deceitful nonsense. It's precisely because of their federal killing machine that people get angry and hateful toward the United States and retaliate with terrorism.
The threat of terrorist retaliation has enabled U.S. officials to initiate their “war-on-terrorism” racket, which has accelerated the destruction of our freedom here at home with such totalitarian measures as the Patriot Act and mass secret surveillance. It’s a racket that enables the huge army of so-called “defense” contractors to continue feeding at the public trough, which they've done for decades, stretching all the way back to Vietnam War. After the killing machine invaded Vietnam under the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, it killed more than a million Vietnamese and sacrificed more than 58,000 American men of my generation.
Those 58,000-plus men died for nothing. Oh, yes, I know: They say the Reds were coming to get us and that the dominoes were going to fall if they didn’t kill all those people and sacrifice all those soldiers in Vietnam. They also claimed that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow. They exclaimed, “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” But it was all just their crooked and corrupt racket called the Cold War, the racket that enabled their army of voracious “defense” contractors to feed at the public trough, which they continue to do today, as reflected in the more than $31 trillion in debt U.S. officials have loaded onto the backs of American taxpayers.
Today, owing to its interventionist antics in Ukraine, the federal killing machine is getting us perilously close to life-destroying nuclear war with Russia, just as it did in the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The National-Security State
The root of this federal killing machine was the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state form of governmental structure. It's a totalitarian form of governmental structure. It wields omnipotent powers, just like in communist and totalitarian regimes. Omnipotent government is contrary to the principles of a free society.
Our heritage is a limited-government republic. That was our founding governmental system. America had just a basic relatively small military force. That’s our our American ancestors wanted it. They hated and fear standing armies because they knew that standing armies were the greatest threat to the freedom and well-being of the citizenry.
We need to get rid of the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and the vast military-industrial complex, together with its army of voracious “defense” contractors. We need to bring all the troops home, dismantle the killing machine’s empire of domestic and foreign military bases, and restore a limited-government republic and a basic military force to our land. That's our heritage. That's the only system that is consistent with a genuinely free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society.
Sanctions and Embargoes
Another part of the federal killing machine are sanctions and embargoes. One of the fascinating things about sanctions and embargoes is that the mentality that goes into this part of the federal killing machine is the same mentality that goes into terrorism. Terrorists target innocent civilians as a way to achieve a political goal. That's what sanctions and embargoes do. They target the innocent population of a country in order to achieve a political end in that country, such as regime change.
They kill lots of innocent people in the process. In 1996, Madeline Albright, who was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and, therefore, the official spokesperson for the United States to the world, was asked whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children — yes, children! — from the sanctions were worth it. She replied that the deaths of those children were, in fact, “worth it.” Not surprisingly, not one single Republican or Democrat, including her boss President Clinton, condemned or even mildly criticized her, undoubtedly because they all agreed with her.
By “it,” Albright meant regime change in Iraq — that is, the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, and his replacement with another US-approved dictator. That was their goal. That's why they were killing those hundreds of thousands of children with their sanctions.
The irony is that Saddam Hussein, who they were now calling the new Adolph Hitler, had been a partner and ally of the federal killing machine in the previous decade under Republicans, when he was waging his war of aggression against Iran. The federal killing machine was helping him kill Iranians because U.S. officials hated Iran for having ousted the brutal pro-U.S. dictator that the CIA had installed into power in Iran in 1953.
Consider the brutal economic embargo that they have had against the Cuban people since 1960. What's that all about? "Oh, Jacob, the Reds are coming! The Reds are coming!” It's ridiculous. The Cold War supposedly ended in 1989, and yet they still have this brutal Cold War embargo that targets the Cuban people with death and suffering, in the hope that they'll rise up in a violent revolution, oust the communist regime, and replace it with another U.S.-approved dictatorship, like the one that preceded Fidel Castro.
Sanctions and embargoes violate fundamental principles of morality and just conduct. They have no place in a civilized society. We need to bring this part of the federal killing machine to an end.
State-Sponsored Assassinations
State-sponsored assassinations are another part of the federal killing machine. Almost from the day that the CIA got established in 1947, it was planning on conducting state-sponsored assassinations of anyone that it considered was a threat to “national security.” Their power of assassination is omnipotent, just like in communist and totalitarian regimes. The federal judiciary is not going to get involved because federal judges are too scared to enforce the Fifth Amendment, which expressly prohibits the taking of life without due process of law. For its part, Congress is owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by the military-industrial complex and the CIA. Moreover, no president since John Kennedy has dared to take on the national-security establishment, and we all know what happened to him.
The evidence also establishes that they orchestrated, conspired, or planned to assassinate other political leaders, such as Congo president Patrice Lumumba, Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, General Rene Schneider in Chile, Cuban president Fidel Castro, and democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende.
Today, the Pentagon and the CIA, with the full approval of both Democrats and Republicans, regularly assassinate people in the Middle East and Africa. Under the Trump regime, they assassinated an Iranian general named Qasem Soleimani, notwithstanding the fact that Iran and the United States are not at war with each other. It was legalized murder, plain and simple.
And it’s time to face reality when it comes to the national-security establishment’s program of state-sponsored assassinations. It’s not just foreign leaders they have assassinated. There is now no reasonable doubt, especially given the clearly fraudulent autopsy that the military conducted on President Kennedy’s body on the very evening of his assassination, that they took out Kennedy, just like they take out foreign leaders. That’s the reason the CIA continues hiding its assassination-related records. They know that those records provide additional pieces of circumstantial evidence that establish criminal culpability on the part of the national-security establishment. That’s why the CIA pressured both President Trump and President Biden to continue the JFK-assassination cover-up by keeping its 60-year-old assassination records secret on grounds of “national security.”
They went after Kennedy because Kennedy has been the only president to have the courage to stand up against the federal killing machine and was determined to bring it to an end. That's why they had to stop him. That’s why they decided that he was a threat to “national security,” just as they did the same with Lumumba, Arbenz, Castro, Allende, Schneider and other leaders they have conspired to kill. We need to confront this part of our dark heritage as a national-security state, and we need to bring state-sponsored assassinations to an end.
War on Drugs
Another part of the federal killing machine is the war on drugs, which both Democrats and Republicans have foisted upon our country. It's been going on for decades. Consider the countless people it has killed with turf battles and gang wars, which always come with a black, illegal market.
Consider what they've done to Mexico. They've destroyed it by converting it into a land of violence. There have been more than a hundred thousand people killed or disappeared in Mexico, not because of drugs, but because of the drug war. It needs to come to a stop.
Mexico was once one of the loveliest countries in the world. Americans loved traveling down there, driving their cars, and touring the country. Not anymore. Americans would be crazy to drive in the northern states, where all these drug cartels are.
Those drug cartels are a direct result of the war on drugs, just like Al Capone was a direct result of Prohibition of alcohol. As soon as they ended Prohibition, all those alcohol cartels went out of business. That's the only way to put these drug cartels out of business.
There's only one solution to this, and that solution isn't cracking down on the drug cartels, which is what Democrats and Republicans continue to do. All that does is produce more violence.
The only way to terminate the drug cartels is through the legalization of drugs. That puts them out of business immediately. They cannot compete against legitimate pharmacies and other businesses selling drugs that are not corrupted.
We need to legalize all drugs, including marijuana, fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine. Drug addicts and drug abuse don’t belong in the criminal-justice system. They belong in drug rehab centers. Legalize it all, and let pharmacies and other businesses provide for the supply of drugs. That would immediately bring an end to all the violence, the deaths, and destruction of liberties that come with drug Prohibition.
There's another point we need to keep in mind about this drug war. It's the most bigoted government program in the federal government since segregation, possibly even more bigoted than segregation was. Everybody knows that this program is falling disproportionately on blacks. Those judges and cops who are racially bigoted use it as an opportunity to exercise their bigotry in a legal and legitimate manner and even get praised for it.
Those cops who are bigoted arbitrarily stop blacks and subject them to searches and seizures, in the name of enforcing the war on drugs. They humiliate them with ridiculous questions, or they engage in no-knock rage as an excuse to kill blacks. Asset forfeiture enables them to stop blacks traveling down the highway and steal their money from them. Or look at the inordinately long jail sentences that are meted out to blacks by bigoted judges at both the federal and the state level. We need to bring an end to this bigotry and to all this death and suffering. The way we do that is by ending the war on drugs.
The big problem we face, of course, is the fact that drug cartels as well as people in the drug-war bureaucracy, especially the CIA, are benefiting financially from the drug war. The last thing they want to give up is their drug-war cash cow.
This is one big reason I am running for president — to bring an end to the federal killing machine that Democrats and Republicans have foisted upon our land.
The Welfare State
Then there's the welfare state side of this morass, which is also contributing to the out-of-control spending, debt, and monetary debauchery that characterize this welfare-warfare-state system that Democrats and Republicans have brought into existence. I am talking about welfare-state programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education grants, food stamps, public housing, corporate bailouts, and every other program that takes money from one group of people and gives it to another group of people. The welfare state is the perfect embodiment of the socialist concept, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Why do people in the federal killing machine love the welfare state? Because they know that governmental welfare keeps people mollified, pacified, weak, dependent, scared, and suppressed. In that way, they won’t object to or protest against what the federal killing machine is doing. It's like a giant welfare opium den where everybody is smoking their welfare opium, are really happy and content, and can't be bothered by conscience when people, including children, are dying because of immigration controls, sanctions, invasions and occupations, state-sponsored assassinations, and the drug war. The mindset is: ”Oh, just leave me alone. I just want to lie here and keep sucking on my welfare pipe."
They have destroyed family values with their crooked, corrupt, and fraudulent Social Security system. They say, "Oh, our socialist retirement program is based on care and compassion." Give me a break. The IRS isn't care and compassion, and neither is a Social Security bureaucrat. Children helping parents on a voluntary basis in their hour of need — that's care and compassion. Americans lived without Social Security for more than a hundred years. That rejection of socialism instilled in our American ancestors a sense of family values, where families come together to help each other out on a voluntary basis. It also nurtured a sense of caring for others, again on a purely voluntary basis. That's what we need to recapture in this country. We need to ditch Social Security and every other socialist program.
We also need to ditch Medicare. It destroyed the finest healthcare system in history. Prices were low and stable before Medicare and Medicaid. This is what gave rise to the perpetual healthcare crisis and soaring medical prices. We need to get rid of this socialist program. We need to ditch it entirely and restore a totally free-market healthcare system. It is the only way to get our healthcare back on the right track.
Soul-Searching and Faith
We need to recapture a faith in ourselves, others, families, church groups, neighborhood groups, and charitable organizations. We need to recapture a faith in freedom. We need to reject the faith in the coercive apparatus of the government that has been inculcated in modern-day America..We need to restore faith in God instead of a faith in Caesar.
And we need to do some serious soul-searching and serous self-examination in this country. We need to talk about where we started out as a country, how we've gotten to where we are, and what we need to do to get America back on the right track.
We need to look at our founding principles. We know there were some bad founding principles — slavery, women's rights, and others — but there were also some good founding principles, including sound money. We need to restore the good founding principles — such as people keeping everything they earn and deciding for themselves what to do with it. Then, charity bubbles up from within through the voluntary actions of people who are deciding what to do with the money that they're earning in their employment or elsewhere. We also need restore the good founding principle of a limited-government republic. In this way, we start focusing on the principles of a genuinely free society and commit ourselves to restoring them to our land.
If we do this — if we engage in this self-examination and we start focusing on the restoration of the good, sound founding principles of our country — America can lead the world to the highest reaches of freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world that mankind has ever seen. I hope you'll give my candidacy your consideration and your support.
My website is www.jacobforliberty.com. I'm Jacob Hornberger, Libertarian candidate for president in 2024.