04/23/09 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Let's bring on Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute.
He also writes for LewRockwell.com and for Antiwar.com and Strike the Root and the Future Freedom Foundation.
And he's my good friend.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
It's good to be with you, Scott.
And, you know, I think that the, you know, it's a generalization, but I'd say that the right believes that the state is God, and the left doesn't believe in God.
Instead, they believe in the state or something like that.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
So, in other words, same difference.
Right.
For the left, the state is the left God.
For the right, it's part of their religion.
It's part of the Holy Trinity.
All right.
If anybody wants to get involved on the show and talk with Anthony Gregory, the subject is the left, the right, and the prospects for liberty.
The phone number is...
And I'm sorry I didn't get to cover all the breaking torture news and all the other important news today.
Maybe we'll find time tomorrow.
But right now, I want to ask you, Anthony, about...
Well, let's stick with the liberals for a minute here.
And, you know, I hate to be a collectivist, and I know you do, too.
And there's really no such thing as the liberals.
There's just liberals, and they're all individuals.
And the same thing for leftists, who will tell you they're not liberals.
They're leftists, and there's a difference, even if the right-wingers pretend there's not one.
Anyway, I kind of just want to know what you think about your observations, what you've seen among liberals and leftists, who, after all, have been...are pretty strong allies against the Bush regime over the past decade.
So how are they shaping up now?
How well is the left doing now that Barack Obama is the president of the United States, Anthony?
Well, I have to give some credit to some leftists and some liberals who have been keeping it real.
You know, of course, Glenn Greenwald.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Rachel Maddow take on Obama every week for continuing the Bush policies, or most of them, regarding civil liberties.
So I think that some of the left deserves credit.
But all in all, you know, the average person who identifies with the left side of the spectrum and is not really an active blogger or anything like that, I fear that many of them have kind of been co-opted by the regime.
And of course, this happens every time the parties switch their places in terms of who's in power.
I mean, I live in Berkeley, and I've noticed that you see a lot more nationalism, a lot more faith in the nation-state.
A few years ago, there was a radical, you know, disassociation and feeling of discontent with Washington, D.C.
And now you see the people who wear Che Guevara's shirt, who, you know, for all of his flaws, at least Che was opposed to the U.S. empire.
And now they're wearing Obama's shirt, who is the head of that empire.
And they are supportive of a lot of the foreign policy.
You know, by exploiting the humanitarian needs in Afghanistan and talking about intervening in Africa, as you mentioned, the liberal internationalists are really just kind of taking over where the neocons left off.
And the anti-war movement has been sapped of much of its strength.
And it's kind of worse overall than it was under Bush in terms of the political dynamic, because now we have the right, which is protesting taxes, but saying Obama is weak and soft on terror.
And we have Obama, who's not weak and soft on terror, whatever that means.
And we have the left that's a lot less critical.
So in terms of civil liberties and war especially, there's a perverse sense in which we're worse off now, although there have been a few superficial and diplomatic changes, which I think are positive, or at least not negative.
I think overall we have a bigger challenge in getting American people to recognize.
But maybe in the long term, as people see that Obama is just the third Bush presidency, that maybe this will be good for bringing on that realignment that you and I like to talk about, where we want all the bad guys on the left and the warmongers on the left and the warmongers on the right to all be on one side, and then those of us who generally believe in peace and freedom to be on the other side.
That sounds right to me.
Somebody wrote in the comments after a recent Glenn Greenwald interview that that's just a pipe dream, but I guess it depends really on how you define it.
To me, I can't imagine that it would ever happen that the hardcore pro-civil liberties peace left is going to really mesh together with the kind of paleo-con, anti-war right.
On the other hand, though, what seems important to me is that libertarianism take the place as the center.
Right now, what we call a centrist is really not a moderate, but an extremist.
They're moderate because they have no principle at all, or whatever.
They blow with the wind, so you couldn't call them a hard leftist or a hard rightist, but they are for everything that is bad.
What I want to see is libertarianism become the new real center, the real moderates, the people who want to not do something evil as opposed to do something evil.
That way it seems like if we can kind of change, as Rick McGinnis from TheLibertySticker.com always says, if we can change the political conversation and put a Ron Paul view in the center rather than a John McCain view in the center, then later on it seems like the effect from there could really help to, first of all, marginalize the McCaniac extremist so-called moderates that we have as the center now.
Also, that I think would be maybe a good way to lead the right and the left and to help get the best parts of the right and the left to have the most influence.
Well, you know, I once saw someone characterize both Ron Paul and McCain in the same piece as moderate Republicans.
And I guess the reason why neither of them, according to the current left-right spectrum, falls neatly on one side is because McCain is a warmonger and a socialist, and Ron Paul is neither a warmonger nor a socialist.
And so that makes them both moderates, because they don't fit into this incoherent scheme.
But I will say I think that there's a little hope, actually, for the paleocons and civil libertarians on the left to get together, more hope than there has been in decades.
Because, first of all, I think the culture war, as much as people keep trying to reignite it, I don't think it's working on the more sophisticated paleocons or the more sophisticated Glenn Greenwald-type liberals.
And furthermore, we've seen them working together.
I mean, you saw some conservatives join up with the ACLU post-9-11.
You see the Bruce Fein types and left liberals willing to get together and say, yeah, you know, we agree on more that's currently very important than we disagree.
One of the wildcards, or much bigger than a wildcard, has been the financial collapse and the bailouts and stimulus program of the Obama administration.
And, of course, economics tends to divide people who might agree on civil liberties and even foreign policy.
But, in the long term, maybe there's hope here, too.
Because, even on the economy, there's a lot of people on the left looking at Obama and thinking, you know, overall, certainly his Wall Street policy has just been more corporatism.
It's just been more, you know, entrenchment of economic power in the hands of an elite, of a corporate oligarchy, which is necessarily going to come out of the government trying to get more and more involved.
Because it's always going to move toward fascism.
It's not going to move toward pure socialism.
Because when you have anything like a capitalist economy, and you have a big government getting more and more involved, well, that's the formula for fascism.
And we're not supposed to call Obama fascist now.
See, that's what's interesting.
You know, Jon Stewart.
I think it's perfectly fine to call him a fascist, as long as you've spent the last eight years calling Bush a commie, which I have.
Right.
Or, you know, a fascist.
Well, I call them that, too.
But see, and actually this goes right to the heart of the thing.
Sorry I interrupted you on the Jon Stewart point.
You can get back to it if you want.
But it seems to me that, you know, the leftist or liberal, cynical critique of Obama, the people who have the clear eyes to see on the left, are saying this guy, you know, if they're not using the F word or whatever, they're at least saying this guy is a corporatist.
This guy is clearly just a front man for Wall Street and the military industrial complex and everything else, just like the rest of them.
And they're kind of throwing up their hands, as you said, seeing him as a continuation of George Bush's policy.
Whereas on the right, it seems like the opposition to Obama is just in this ridiculous fantasy land where Obama is not a fascist front man for Wall Street.
He's some kind of communist revolutionary for the little guy who wants to overthrow all the people with money or something.
He's a Marxist revolutionary.
And, in fact, I heard he's not from here.
And also that he, like, has all these different religions I don't like, such as left-wing Christian and right-wing Muslim.
And all these just, you know, completely, you know, land of make-believe, ridiculous kind of perceptions.
And I just wonder, does this just prove how stupid and useless conservatives are?
I mean, you know, Ryan McMacken wrote a great article about conservatives for LewRockwell.com.
He posted up about it on the LewRockwell blog today.
And he talked about the e-mail he got from these people.
And, man, this is what makes me think, you know what, there's not even a good part of the right to appeal to.
These people live in crazy land.
Well, I think the way, you know, I'm a hardcore anti-rightist, as you know.
And I think that the way to look at it is, no, the right is evil at its core.
But the right has always had to, just like the left, appeal to some values that we agree with.
I mean, if they were championing not just war, but higher taxes, more government, gun bans, and if they were championing a more consistently fascist program, at least if they were openly championing it instead of endorsing it slowly, the Republican establishment would have a harder time maintaining its stranglehold over middle America.
I mean, in other words, I think there are good people who have been duped into believing in the myths of a low-tax empire.
And that's what they believe.
That's what they believe.
And, of course, the critique of Obama is contradictory and nonsensical.
You know, he's overturned everything since Bush, even though he's just continuing it.
I heard Sean Hannity say he undid eight years of Bush's war on terror policies, everything he did for eight years to keep us safe.
Obama's overturn, which is...
Oh, man, if only that were true.
Oh, yeah, that would be the greatest triumph of liberty to happen in America, at least since the abolition of the draft.
Yeah, maybe since the abolition of slavery.
Well, you know, when I go to the airport, I don't notice the TSA not there.
I notice those ridiculous color-coded alerts are still around.
Of course, the mass murder is still there, but that's obvious.
And, you know, the state secrets and the violation of Habeas Corpus at Bagram and turning Bagram into the new Guantanamo.
I mean, Sean Hannity, is he just lying, or does he really believe this low-tax imperialism?
They want to say that Obama is a socialist tyrant, strong-arm totalitarian, but at the same time they want to say he's a pacifist, wimpy liberal who refuses to expand and extend and flex government muscle abroad.
Right, I mean, this goes back to my point, is that the right-wing argument is always completely incoherent and nonsensical.
And, you know, again, in Ryan McMacken's blog today, and Lou Rockwell is just a perfect example of this.
Everybody has their own.
But all the letters to him about his article that he wrote about conservatism say, oh, yeah, well, I assume that you agree with everything that the Democrats are for then.
And, oh, yeah, well, I don't think that you're right.
And, you know...
Yeah, but I must say there are a lot of people on the so-called left out there who are just as stupid or just as...
Yeah, that's true, that's true.
All the time, you know, ever since Obama's been president, and I've criticized him, and his policies, I get emails all the time that says, you know, you never criticized Bush, or you Republican apologists for the last eight years have destroyed this country, and we don't want to go back to that.
Well, going back to what?
I mean, again, we're continuing all of it.
There's some differences.
You know, they're revealing some of the memos.
They're changing the language that they use.
But that doesn't mean much for the guy who's in a dungeon somewhere.
You know, you've got to admire the elite of this country, whichever ruling class happens to be in power at any given time.
I guess the factions fight and whatever.
But in the broad sense, keeping the people divided by left and right is as brilliant as it is simple.
I mean, here the state always wins.
Liberty loses 99.9% of the time.
I guess there was one exception the other day in a Supreme Court case, but then again, I didn't really read the thing, only the headline.
But, you know, as long as half the people, generally speaking, can be lulled into thinking that everything's fine now because the last guy's gone, and then back and forth again every four or eight years, it's just like Quigley said back in 1966.
You know, this works perfectly.
There's no reason for them to ever change it.
I mean, right now there's a Republican Party in this country that is run, apparently led by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell, and they cannot be replaced, as lousy as they are.
No one can take that spot from them, apparently.
I mean, they'll still be in the minority for a while at this rate, but they're the only other game in town.
Well, you know, if the Republicans realized why they got trampled, or if conservatives realized, they might rethink their current orientation and not blame Obama alone.
But, you know, conservatives especially, from a very short-term memory, there's no, you know, this economic disaster we have right now, which a lot of Republicans want to downplay, because their point is that Obama's exaggerating it.
But in fact, I think, in a greater sense, the establishment's underplaying it, because they don't want to fess up to what they've caused.
And people forget that it was the Bush administration that did this.
They created the biggest bubble in the history of the world.
They set us up for another Great Depression.
They shredded our civil liberties.
They killed thousands of our young Americans and a million people abroad.
Of course, you know, eventually Americans are going to get sick of that and turn against it, but they're trying to revitalize the same incoherent and monstrous policies of the Bush administration and hold them up as the genuine alternative to Obama socialism.
But they're really not that different.
I don't know.
They're really not that convincing either.
Hey, the phone number here's...
I think one thing that kind of makes me hopeful, Anthony, is that a lot of people don't even know what left and right mean anyway and don't even care.
And so, at least to that degree, they're not suckered into it or part of it in any way.
Well, that's true.
You know, the mass of people who are apathetic are actually doing much less damage than the mass of people who are active and wrong.
So we can thank goodness for people who don't care at all.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people who don't really care, but what it leads them to do is always support the president.
This is the frightening thing.
You know, you look at...
Bush had very low voter approval for a lot of his presidency, but for some of it, or for a good deal of it, it was well over 50%.
I mean, even putting aside right after 9-11.
Yeah, it wasn't until Katrina that, at least in media, and I think probably in general in the population, where it wasn't the case that you're the jerk if you don't like Bush.
Now you're the jerk if you defend him.
Or if not that, at least, okay, you're not necessarily a jerk if you're against him or disapprove of him.
Right.
But really, all the way through the end of the summer, 2005, anybody who knew better was basically considered beyond the pale.
That's true.
So let's say that somewhere, you know, after the Iraq war began, his approval was 60%.
And let's say that Obama hasn't really slipped much below 60% since he took power even at his worst.
This means that there's like a good 20% of Americans who like both Bush and Obama.
I mean, that's the kind of thing that frightens me.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm going to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem with the current so-called center, the moderate.
Well, now tell me this.
What do you think about the Tea Party thing?
Because, you know, obviously the term everybody's throwing around is AstroTurf, as Dick Army, and Glenn Beck, and all these fascist frauds try to, you know, take their little political organizations and bankroll these things.
And yet something tells me that there actually is, beyond just Clear Channel Radio and Fox News audiences, that, you know, what was going on?
Did this start with the Campaign for Liberty and the Ron Paul people, and then it got hijacked?
Or was this always something separate?
Or what exactly?
Go ahead.
Well, in 2007, there was a Tea Party.
There was a Ron Paul revolution event.
And at that kind of event, I doubt that you would see the type of belligerent nationalism, demonization of the other, and partisanship that characterized many of the Tea Parties this month.
These Tea Parties, you know, there's a lot of truth to the AstroTurf critique.
Of course, you know, there are a lot of activists who showed up who are not red state fascists, who are not totalitarians, who are not quite as hypocritical as Hannity.
But, yeah, it was co-opted, and it was turned, in many cases, to the service of evil.
But it's hard to say, you know.
It reflects something good, but I don't think everyone who showed up at all of those events was a right-wing hypocrite as we would define it.
Maybe a little bit, right?
Yeah, just the people with the microphones.
Right, it's kind of like the anti-war thing.
You know, the Marxist groups always dominate.
They control who gets to speak.
The speakers go up there and say, we want peace, which means we want universal health care, and maybe to intervene in Darfur.
Yeah.
All right, wait, wait, hold it right there.
Let's go ahead and take this call.
Somebody calling in from the 732 area code.
Hey, I'm Scott, he's Anthony Gregory.
You're on the air.
Hey, Scott, it's Corky.
How are you doing, guys?
Doing good.
Welcome to the show.
Good.
Anthony, nice to talk to you.
I have the opportunity.
A couple things that I wanted to comment on.
One is one of the things that you're talking about now.
One of the things that really was very disappointing for me was watching Rachel Maddow and that Anna Marie Airhead America girl just really do the job on the tea parties.
I mean, I felt like I was watching pro wrestling there, and they had taken on the persona of the bad guys and they're sucking us all in as the good guys.
Like a bait and switch, huh?
Absolutely.
Yeah, well.
I won't watch her anymore.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Well, see, the thing is, it's hard to tell.
I mean, I obviously don't like her as much as I did at the height of her criticism of Bush because she was more on it.
When I was expressing encouraging words, it was more the few clips I have seen, a few clips that were pretty good, and even one I saw before the tea party.
I saw her talk about the tea party, and she was a lot more nuanced than some of the other commentators, but I didn't see her covered since then.
Well, here's the thing.
I've got to jump into this conversation because I watch her show every day, and the thing is, when it comes to economics, I just hit mute or else my head will explode.
I don't have the sufficient maturity to be able to deal with those kinds of emotions, so I hit mute at that part, but her stuff on the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, her cynicism about the withdrawal from Iraq, and her coverage of the war crimes issues is the best on TV, and Phil and all the rest of you ought to thank your lucky stars that anybody is talking the way she's talking about war crimes every night on that show.
Yeah, well, again, it just seems like these guys, their stripes change.
It seems like they get assignments, like Glenn Beck got the assignment of, okay, you go guard the Ron Paul group and take over it if you can, and I just feel like it's the same old crap with these guys.
They're all bought and paid for, and if they really spoke their minds, they'd be thrown off the air anyway.
Well, that's probably true, although I think that Nadal's problem basically is not that she's dishonest at all.
It's just that she's a liberal, and liberals see the world in a weird, twisted way, and so that can't help but come through on the show.
You know what I mean?
To agree with you a bit there, Phil, the particular segment you're talking about where they just made fun of the whole thing was pathetic, but the day before that, I think, and in fact a few days before that, that was the first time, as far as I know, she ever mentioned Ron Paul, and it was her basically telling the story Anthony just told, that this started out as a movement for sound money and peace, and that now Dick Armey shows up and tries to pretend it's all about him, and she even had Steve Gordon on to explain that, you know, we've done this before and had Dick Armey and those guys show up, but nobody went to their rally.
It was all about the peace and freedom people and whatever.
Before that one particularly egregious bit, she was pretty good on the issue, Phil.
Yeah, I'd keep her on the suspect list, Scott, and keep an eye on her.
Oh, yeah, definitely do that.
I want to talk about one other thing.
Real quick, though, because we're almost out of time, and I've still got to get Anthony back in here.
The hypocrisy of the Jane Harman scandal.
Jim Traffikant sits in prison for petty charges.
Jane Harman's still free.
Just comment on that.
Good.
Anthony, do you know about Jim Traffikant?
You want to go ahead, or I've got something.
No, you go ahead.
I mean, I don't know as much as you do, I'm sure.
Well, I know that Jim Traffikant hates the IRS as much as any man in this country, and that ought to be enough to spring him from prison right now.
And I know, secondly, he's the only Democrat in Congress that I know of that stuck up for the Branch Davidians, which gives him another gigantic pile of credit to me.
I also know that directly after he was convicted, this congressman, who defended himself and whose defense was, the Justice Department is out to get me.
You've got to see through these lies.
Well, two days later, when the sequestered jury was no longer sequestered, or I don't know how sequestered they were, but they were obviously forbidden from reading the paper, when they were let out and were finally able to read the paper about all the evidence that had been excluded from the trial, they tried what so many juries try to do, too little, too late.
Say, hey, we want to take that back.
We didn't mean that.
Well, too late.
He's rotting in prison.
You can buy your free traffic ant sticker right now at libertystickers.com, by the way.
Yeah, and that's my point, Scott, is he's in jail.
Why is he still in jail?
And this woman here is basically a traitor.
Yeah, well, and we'll see, too.
More and more information is coming out.
All right, thanks very much for the call, Phil.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, now, Anthony, any closing comments here as we wrap up?
We've got about a minute.
Oh, I just, you know, I think that in the very short term or in the next few years, things are pretty grim.
I think that the economic situation and the imperial situation are bad as ever.
But I think in the very long term, having this incredible change, superficial change between Bush and Obama, the biggest cosmetic change probably ever in presidential politics, while still irritating people for having the same policies, it might be very educational in the long term.
So my long term optimism is also as strong as ever.
All right, everybody, that's Anthony Gregory.
I forgot to mention at the beginning, quite importantly, he's the editor in chief at the Campaign for Liberty.
He writes for the Independent Institute, for the Future Freedom Foundation, for LewRockwell.com and AntiWar.com as well.
A very bright light in the libertarian movement.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, kid.
Thanks, Scott.