06/11/09 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Anthony Gregory is here.
He writes at the Independent Institute, independent.org, where he has researched something or other.
He writes at LewRockwell.com, the Future Freedom Foundation, and is the editor-in-chief at the Campaign for Liberty.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
How's it going, kid?
It's going good.
Great to be on the show, Scott.
Well, I'm glad to have you here.
I was really impressed by this article you wrote.
You know, not surprised that you would have wrote what you wrote.
This is called, James W. Von Brun, however you say it, and the Poison of Racist Collectivism.
Let's talk about this whole kind of right-wing extremism, rising narrative that's going on in the media right now.
There's been, you know, we just played the Bill Hicks clip in reference to the abortion doctor murder.
And now this neo-Nazi guy has gone and caused a shootout at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and killed a security guard before other security guards were able to gun him down.
And I guess I'm already seeing, really, all over the place, Anthony, liberals in the media saying, well, see, looks like that Department of Homeland Security report that everybody reacted so strongly against was right after all.
And we really do have a terrible problem with right-wing radicalism in this country.
What do you think?
Well, I think, first of all, the thing is, they say that the critics of that report were wrong all along.
But the criticism of the report wasn't that people like neo-Nazi criminals and murderous bigots and people like that aren't a problem.
The problem with the report was that it conflated a lot of different people.
It used a very broad brush to paint a picture of the so-called extremist right-wing, which included domestic terrorists and bigots and killers, with people who hold political opinions about government, including a lot of opinions about being anti-government or being opposed to the Federal Reserve or being opposed to gun control, none of which are compatible with the type of terrorism or violent crime that we saw yesterday, none of which are compatible with Nazi ideology, certainly.
And I wanted to point out that to the extent that we can look at someone's views and say they have something to do with Nazism, being against the government is diametrically opposed to being a Nazi.
I mean, Nazism is about the total state, and it's about a racist collectivism that puts racial groups above individuals.
And we, as lovers of liberty, as libertarians, or a lot of our kind of close fellow travelers who aren't fully libertarians but are pretty good, and constitutionalists, this ideology that we favor is the opposite of looking at people in terms of groups.
We look at people instead in terms of individuals.
Well, you know, the state doesn't.
That's the whole thing.
This wasn't just a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, although I'm sure they had something to do with it, but it was a report by the new federal police force, the Homeland Security.
And it was saying that if somebody has anti-Federal Reserve propaganda on the back of their truck, that that means, I guess, perhaps that they ought to be investigated.
And Anthony, didn't they just have a thing where maybe six or eight months ago the court ruled, and then the FBI put out new guidelines that it's perfectly okay for them to just start fishing expeditions now, that rather than solving crimes and prosecuting for crimes, that now it's okay for them to focus on people and try to find things that people are doing illegal here.
I mean, this is really a recipe for disaster, it looks like.
Well, and it's another form of collectivism.
That's the irony.
The DHS report, on an intellectual level at least, has a lot of the same problems and analysis that we see in racism.
Because instead of differentiating one individual from another and recognizing that there are more differences between individuals than there are between groups, probably, the DHS report casts a very wide net, including everyone from people who oppose Federal police power because they support the dignity and rights of the individual, to people who, if they do happen to disagree with the U.S. government, it's not because they have any principled objection to government or monetary socialism.
I mean, of course, Hitler was not really against central banking.
He was not against gun control.
So I'm not saying that there aren't unsavory elements out there who think that they might agree with us on one or two points about the government.
I mean, you know what they say about a broken clock, but these people are certainly, their ideology, to the extent that they do embrace Nazism or racist, violent, racist collectivism, they're completely incompatible.
They're at the opposite end of the spectrum.
And I didn't really want to, you know, get into political discussion about this when I first heard about it.
I just thought, wow, what an atrocity, what a terrible crime, and this is horrible, and this is a time to reflect not just on, you know, violent crime, but indeed it's a time to reflect on the fact that there are still people, thankfully it's very isolated, it's very rare, but there are people who are willing to commit vicious attacks on people for racist reasons.
And yet I noticed yesterday that so much of the left blogosphere was jumping on it as an excuse to bolster the Department of Homeland Security, which is very ironic given that this, you know, agency, this big government agency created by Bush and that started the work on this report under Bush, that they're going to support this kind of ideological profiling.
Oh, well, that just proves how credible the report is, that it was even the Bush administration that admits that all this is true about these right-wingers.
Well, yeah, and what did Bush say about the left-wingers?
I mean, under Bush, you know, anti-war activists, ACLU type, anti-war Christians, you know, leftists, normal Muslims, all these, you know, peaceful groups of people were lumped together, rhetorically and in terms of policy, in terms of surveillance, in terms of no-fly list.
We saw abuses of this sort of ideological profiling under Bush, against the left and toward the end against the right, apparently.
And we're seeing it under Obama, but the problem is that, one problem is that, you know, a lot of the right-wing talking heads, they're not exactly addressing this very sensibly and dispassionately either.
No, you don't say.
Well, I think that, I understand that conservatives, you know, mainstream conservatives, who I think unfortunately do, just like most mainstream liberals, they do actually embrace all too many tenants of fascism.
I wouldn't compare them to the Nazis, but they embrace some policies that I would consider totalitarian, but instead of noticing how similar they are, or at least the two political parties are, they want to look at everything in terms of left and right.
So you see people today saying, well, Hitler was a leftist, and Obama encourages anti-Semitism, and, you know, and you see the left- Well, that was the Rush Limbaugh response, right?
Was that this guy, somehow this neo-Nazi who went and murdered the security guard at the Holocaust Museum, was being influenced by the anti-Semite Obama, and was his, apparently, an Obama follower.
When in fact, all over this guy's website, I mean, obviously this is all incoherent, but Obama's a secret Muslim, and he was, you know, this guy was a birther, and all of this stuff.
And so somehow he's, you know, he thinks Obama's a Muslim and a Jew at the same time, or whatever is the reason he went and shot that guy.
It certainly isn't because he's an anti-Semite in the ranks of Obama supporters, come on.
Yeah, no, it's ridiculous.
And that had to do with Obama at least posturing with a slightly less favorable position toward Israel than the neocons want.
But, you know, this just shows the limits of the left-right thing, and it shows the inability of people to decipher one thing from another.
Which, again, is the core problem, at least on an intellectual level, with racism.
Well, yeah, this is what Eric Garris always says.
Eric Garris, the founder and director of AntiWar.com, always says, You've got to learn to discriminate.
Well, yes, in that the problem with racism is they don't discriminate one person from another, they just be skin color.
Exactly.
And, you know, a lot of people similarly, whether it was under Bush where much of the right wing was like this, or under Obama where much of the left was like this, where if someone opposes the government, they must be on the other side, you know.
If someone opposed Bush, they must be sympathetic to Islamofascism.
If someone opposes Obama, they must be sympathetic to Nazism, or at least there's a real concern there.
Of course, in reality, you can oppose Islamist totalitarianism and Nazism and Obama and Bush, maybe not in the exact same ways, but for similar reasons, they all represent ideologies that, to one extent or another, dehumanize the individual and try central power.
I guess in the case of Islamist totalitarianism, there's definitely the religious element rather than the secular status element.
But the point is, they all ignore the dignity and the rights of the individual.
Of course, you know, this murderer yesterday certainly wasn't respecting the rights of people.
And to say that there's a continuum between libertarianism and fascism, it's problematic to say that's the right way.
But under Bush, it was similar.
You know, a lot of you remember how we're libertarians.
We haven't really changed that much in terms of our political philosophy, but we were thrown together with normal leftists as well as extreme leftists, as well as people who so-called hate America.
Yeah, in fact, even U.S. Army Intelligence called me an extreme left liberal.
Yeah, right, see?
There's a perfect example.
And I recall being called a socialist and a leftist and a democrat.
Well, now, here's the thing, too.
Let me get into this, because I saw Rachel Maddow on the show.
And, you know, there's a lot of things I like about her.
She probably is my favorite person in the media.
But then again, you know, it's probably a good thing I don't have long hair anymore, because I'd be pulling it out a lot of the time, too.
And even before this, this Nazi at the Holocaust Museum was the assassination of this abortion doctor.
And already she was talking in terms of collective guilt and the right-wing extremist anti-abortion movement that's behind this guy and the terrible people that leave comments on the website supporting him and whatever, and basically using that kind of Bushian language of providing material support to terrorism, which could, again, mean anything, right?
In the terms of the Bush lawyers, a little old lady in Switzerland donates some money to a charity that ended up going to Hamas, so she gets to be an enemy combatant, too.
And, like, all of a sudden we start slipping.
And even though if Rachel Maddow or anyone else takes a breath and thinks about it, they know that, you know, regardless of whatever they think of pro-lifers and their movement, that, you know, 90-plus percent of them want to change the law.
They're not all a bunch of sniper rifle-toting murderers.
I mean, come on.
And yet somehow, you know, one of them, if you can even call it that, a person who has the same issues as them, murders a guy, and now all of a sudden the movement of, you know, their movement itself is somehow criminal.
And the thing is, this is at the same time that you have this guy who murdered an army recruiter and wounded another because he was anti-war.
And so does that mean that, you know, the whole anti-war movement and all the left liberals and what about all the bloggers that think progress and whatever, do we all have to be, you know, providing material support for this guy because we created the climate in which he was so anti-war that he committed a murder or whatever?
I mean, people, not just Maddow, but, you know, all the people in my email box telling me, see, the DHS report was right.
I need to stop and think for a minute just how badly they want a broad brush of criminality to be stroked across people of different political beliefs in this country, you know?
Mm-hmm.
And it is interesting that the report did start under Bush because to warn against people who are against gun control or central power or central banking, I mean, the Republican administration, the Democratic administration, they're so similar, right, in their policies, and they represent the establishment, and they, you know, whenever there's a horrific attack like this, the government wants to politicize it, and I understand why they would.
I mean, I wasn't surprised to see DHS do this kind of thing because they're a government agency, but it's sad to see so many people who are otherwise thoughtful bloggers and commentators jumping on to vindicate Bush's police state is really what they're doing.
They're saying that this agency that Bush created out of the fear and hysteria following 9-11 is vindicated, and that, you know, it's very short-term memory, too, because things like this always flip.
I mean, the people in power are always warning about left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists, and then by doing that they latch on to some admittedly horrific event often, and then they say, well, all of these people who oppose me are on this side, and especially the people who oppose me for radical fundamental reasons.
You know, what the government does is pretty extreme, too.
I mean, you know, you've got the wars and you've got all this horrible stuff, and of course the government itself is an institution of violence.
It's legal by definition, but what it does is violence, and, you know, as a libertarian, I'm opposed to all of the violence.
I'm certainly opposed to people killing innocent people, or even not-so-innocent people in the name of making some sort of political point.
Not only is it counterproductive, but I think it's gravely immoral and inconsistent with the principles I hold dear.
But, you know, whether it's violence in the name of the state or violence in the name against the state, you know, none of the terrorism can be defended, and it's really just kind of, it's beyond absurd and insulting.
It's disgusting that people would do that.
Your pro-life argument is certainly true.
The vast majority of pro-lifers, you shouldn't even have to say this, they don't support the killing of doctors.
There's not much that's pro-life about that, for one thing, as Bill Hicks astutely points out there.
And, of course, the vast majority of anti-war people don't support violence against pro-war people or anything like that.
And, you know, we saw this in the 90s, where they blamed Oklahoma City on right-wing anti-government thinking.
And then in the under-the-bush years, we saw it actually goes back quite a ways, where, you know, one president after another warns about, FDR warned about both the left-wing and the right-wing extremists.
Sure, and there are all different red scares and brown scares and whatever kind of scare they feel like pointing at all through history, especially in the 20th century.
There's always foreign enemies to fight.
That means that anybody who's opposed to that is a domestic enemy as well.
You're providing aid and comfort to the enemy, and so forth.
And, you know, it really does seem to me, it's only just the very beginning, but I'm already feeling that whole 1990s thing.
I mean, to hear the words anti-government flow off the tongue of Rachel Maddow in a sense that, you know, to be opposed to government is to be in a violent conspiracy of sedition and danger against the people.
Like, that's kind of the whole mindset.
And I'm thinking, well, geez, you know, H.L.
Mencken said that government must, by its very essence, make war upon liberty.
And so, I mean, what about that?
H.L.
Mencken should have been in a camp or something?
I mean, this is what America was founded on, was the overthrow of a government.
The whole principle that the founders supposedly left us was that free men allow government to exist to protect their rights.
And beyond that, there ought to be a revolution every 20 years or something.
And if you'd asked her a year ago, she'd recognize that.
But no, I'll say, oh no, anti-government, man, that's danger.
Yeah, like that guy who shot that doctor in the back.
Right, right.
And, you know, it's sad, because it wasn't that long ago at all, at the height of the Bush years, when Bush was doing the whole, you know, you're either with us or you're against us in the fight against terror, and, you know, spying on anti-war movement and all that.
When the West was getting pretty wise about this whole, you know, Big Brother is not civil society.
The federal government is not the American people.
You can oppose what this government does, even radically oppose very important things the government's doing.
And it doesn't mean you hate America, and it doesn't mean that you're any kind of threat to your neighbors.
I mean, you know, the V for Vendetta, when that came out, it was the right saying, oh my God, look at this anti-government, you know, pro-terrorist movie.
And, you know, much of the left loved the movie, because it was the Bush years.
And what's really startling to me is how quickly this has all changed.
I would have figured it would take a year or so into Obama to see the two sides, the two, again, I don't want to be collectivist myself, but, you know, the so-called left and the so-called right just posture so opposite to what they've been doing.
But there you have it.
I mean, it's just the problem with a problem when we chime in, you know, principled proponents of liberty, when we chime in on these questions of left-wingers attacking right-wingers and right-wingers attacking left-wingers on questions of hypocrisy, is that both sides are usually right about the other side being hypocritical.
Well, see, I used to think that that was really right, but you think about it nowadays, and I mean, I guess it depends which people representing the so-called sides you're talking about, but more and more I've been thinking of that Bill Moyers statement where he said, you know, in my lifetime I've seen it change, so that the delusional is no longer marginal.
And so now, well, for example, look at the McCain campaign last year.
Everybody who listens to this shows, no, I hate Barack Obama's guts.
I think he should be impeached and removed and put on trial for war crimes tomorrow, yesterday.
Everybody knows that.
However, the entire McCain campaign, you know, right-wing messaging, narrative building, whatever the hell you call it, last year, was that Obama's the secret Muslim, that he's also a left-wing Christian, and maybe a secret Jew, and he was born somewhere else, and he's some kind of Marxist revolutionary who's going to be anything but a front man for Goldman Sachs, just like the last five presidents before him.
Give me a break.
I mean, this guy is an imperialist, he's a nationalist, and he's inherited Bush's wars with gusto.
And yet we're supposed to believe, and the whole right-wing, many, many people on the so-called right in this country, they don't oppose Obama for things that are actually bad about him.
They live in a fantasy world where, I mean, hell, Anthony, if you really thought that Barack Obama was a secret agent of Osama bin Laden who'd somehow taken over our government, you might grab a rifle too, you know?
These people are out of their freaking minds, man.
Yeah, well, yeah, I agree that's true of most of them.
I think that a number of people on the right have some good critiques of Obama's domestic policy, and to their credit, as inconsistent as their principles are internally, just like there are some people on the left that at least apply their inconsistent principles to both parties somewhat consistently, I mean, there were some people on the right who were outraged about the end of the Bush years where the bailout started, and, you know, the Republican Congress voted against their president on that.
So I don't think it's fair to say that the entire right is in a total fantasy world, but much of what passes for the mainstream right and talk radio is still, you know, fighting the old culture war.
Well, I mean, pardon me, but let me go ahead and I'll just drop one footnote about what I mean.
There's an article by Daniel Lubin today about Frank Gaffney.
You can find this in the viewpoints at antiwar.com.
Frank Gaffney from the Center for Security Policy has an op-ed in the Washington Times going with this Obama is a secret Muslim from some foreign land who's somehow infiltrated and taken over the American state.
This is in the Washington Times.
Yeah, well, I guess that is crazy.
I mean, if that were true, I guess it would prove the right-wing critique that Muslims are not for peace after all.
Yeah, I guess it would.
Because Obama certainly doesn't have many compunctions about slaughtering Muslims.
But, you know, aside from all of that being absurd, it is a very big distraction.
What's been disheartening to me, though, is for, you know, close to eight years, at least a good six years there, I started to think, okay, so this is how the world is.
The left is very flawed in some reasoning from my perspective.
But on some of these questions of the total state and even some aspects of corporatism, but certainly on the war and civil liberties, they're so much superior to the right that that's the way to look at it.
But not only has too much of the left, and I'm not talking about the really good bloggers, but just, you know, the average liberal voter, I don't think they care as much about foreign policy as they used to.
And they've jumped on the pro-state bandwagon, that's for sure, and they support nationalizing everything.
But I was disheartened to see a lot of people who I thought would know better trying to vindicate this DHS report and saying, look, the American police state is right to warn about the right wing.
I want to make this point, too, man, and sorry for just editorializing all over your interview here, but, you know, the government started the fight at Ruby Ridge.
The government started the fight at Waco.
The actual number of right wing extremists, and even Oklahoma, that one's certainly debatable.
You know, I guess without getting too far into that, you know, there were FBI informants all over, and prior knowledge of that attack, it could have been stopped.
So I don't even know if McVeigh counts, really.
Maybe John Doe number two does.
But then you have Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber.
You have a couple of neo-Nazi types who shot abortion doctors and so forth.
But that's about it.
I mean, the Ku Klux Klan basically is out of business in this country.
The number of actual Nazis has got to be, you know, less than 10,000 or something like that.
There has never been, as far as I know, Anthony, in the entire history of the United States, an anti-Jewish pogrom in this country ever.
And the idea that somehow there's this rising army of dangerous fanatics, even if they do believe all this silly birther stuff, the idea that they're all going to do something with their rifles is, I think, just silly.
I mean, you know, the ATF attacked the Branch Davidians.
They weren't going to come and invade and conquer Waco.
You know, come on.
Well, yeah, that's definitely true.
I mean, the thing is, we wouldn't want to minimize these atrocious killings.
But even if there were a lot more of them, it would be disproportionate.
And see, right now it's supposedly insensitive to kind of put these things and talk about numbers, but the same was true with 9-11.
And actually, you know, given that by the logic of too many lefties today, if the occasional killing justifies a government really going after the right-wing extremists in this broad manner, then by that logic they're not just vindicating Bush's DHS, they're vindicating Bush's whole idea that, you know, the murder of 3,000 people in American soil justified anything and everything to go after, you know, Muslims, to make sure, you know, because Muslims might be Muslim terrorists.
And it's all very absurd.
I try to point out in the article that if we're going to be making political arguments after this shooting, then, you know, one question to ask is, why is it that the Nazis in America, this small group of people, are a relatively minor problem compared to, say, the real Nazis?
And there you see that the reason that the Nazi regime under Hitler, you know, was carried out, you know, a crime comparable to what happened yesterday, but several million times over, was because it was a government, because of central totalitarian, centralized political power.
And so opposing political power, opposing the centralizing, unlimited, unleashed power of the government, along with supporting, you know, the dignity and tolerance of individuals and their rights, that's the surefire way to really make sure that nothing like the Holocaust ever happens here.
I mean, we could say that Bush and Obama are bad guys, or we could say that they might have some good intentions, but they're building up a state that is very frightening, and the reason that we oppose it isn't just because they're taking away our liberties today, but you never know who's going to inherit that power.
So if you're really afraid, if you really are going to take the leap from, here's a neo-Nazi murdering an innocent person, and this is a big deal because let's look at what the Nazis did, well, there's always going to be some crazy people in the world, right?
There's going to be some people with sick minds who have views like Hitler's throughout the world, and the only real way to minimize their destructive capacity, other than promoting, you know, our own ideology of tolerance, is to limit the power of the violent state.
And that's an important point.
I mean, right now, some conservatives are saying, well, it's actually the left which is more like Hitler, and the left saying no, the right's more like Hitler, but the comparison's not very fair except insofar as both sides support an expansive warfare state, an expansive state at home, and a big criminal justice system that, you know, that ideologically profiles us and spies on us, and now both Democrats and Republicans seem to support indefinite detention.
So if you're really worried about Nazism in the real sense, not just the occasional horrible killing, then you have to oppose the machinery that enabled Nazism to take root and slaughter, you know, millions and millions of people.
That's Anthony Gregory.
He's editor-in-chief at the Campaign for Liberty.
That's campaignforliberty.com.
He's also a research analyst at the Independent Institute, independent.org, writes for lourockwell.com, and is a policy advisor at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Kate.
Thank you, Scott.