All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Jack Hunter.
You've probably seen him on YouTube, heard him on the radio and read him in the paper, if you live in Charleston, and he's also a contributing editor to both a talkies magazine and the American conservative and somehow filling in on it says here you fill in on the Savage Nation, the Michael Savage show.
I'm on Savage about once a week, just a regular guest.
Yeah.
Oh, I see.
As a guest, not as the guest host.
Right.
Yeah.
He just has me on as a cycle of different guests, but yeah, I got thrown in the mix somehow.
Oh, I see.
Well, that's good.
But, uh, I'm, I'm very happy to hear that, but I was thinking, uh, no, don't tell me that that guy's had a big change of heart and, uh, given up imperialism.
Uh, well, Savage is like a lot of conservatives right now.
What he'll say some things that would be more preferable in the foreign policy department, the URI, and then turn around and say the exact opposite.
Never rectified it too.
Yeah.
All right.
Enough about him.
So, well, actually, uh, he is the entire right and here's my problem.
And I know this is a personal problem.
Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger that I can't forgive, not just forget the Republican party and all them, but conservatives in America, a hundred million of them are so horrible, right?
Wing war and torture mongering.
Hypocrites called me a tray.
You know how many emails I got telling me how I was a traitor to America for not loving George Bush and his evil, aggressive criminal wars of mass murder.
And now these same people, uh, who I thought some of them, I thought were my friends in my anti-government sentiment in the 1990s, uh, who then completely, uh, you know, stabbed all anti-government mess in the back and, and became the biggest, uh, red state fascist status over the last, uh, you know, Bush terms.
Uh, now I'm supposed to believe like, uh, I'm supposed to just forget that these are the people who think it's perfectly okay for George Bush to torture people to death and dungeons in Thailand.
And now they're, um, I I'm supposed to be trying to reach out to them and, uh, explain to them about how you can, uh, not be a Republican empire at the same time and how we need to balance the budget and all these things.
And yet somehow I don't really want to welcome them into my anti-government anti-war movement when I think a lot of these tea party activists and the rest of them, they're just mad that somebody won the election other than the guy they voted for.
So now they're anti-election, you know, as just seems all very cynical, you know?
Well, none of what you said is untrue, but I think to not embrace these people or to not try to work with them is politically impractical.
Let me, let me explain my position there.
Um, you saw the same situation with the left where, you know, when Obama first began campaigning, he did it using anti-war themes.
Of course, you know, I think they did a poll for the daily coast and our national convention in Las Vegas where they asked them during the George W.
Bush years, you know, what are the number one issues of importance to progressives and liberals?
And it would always be the Iraq war and maybe the Patriot act number two, it was always foreign policy, civil liberties issues or what the election, the ascension of Barack Obama and the Democrats.
We've seen the anti-war left pretty much dry up.
Justin Raimondo writes about this frequently.
They go to just go away.
So they're just as hypocritical as the people on the right now who are saying, well, maybe, you know, we should look at reducing our budget.
The name is reducing the national debt.
Maybe Afghanistan is a war of Obama's choice, not necessity.
Um, they're completely hypocritical.
But I think that's true on both sides.
Would you be as reluctant to work with people on the left who once were on your, do you see what I'm getting at?
Yeah, no, your point is, like I said, I know that this is my personal problem.
I'm not supposed to hold grudges and be mean, but, you know, even the daily coast people and the worst flip of floppers on the left don't come out and say, yeah, it's perfectly great to torture people to death and no law out ought to ever bind the power of our commander in chief and the madness.
And, and quoting the book of Romans and telling me I have to render under Caesar and I'm a traitor to America.
I don't hear that from the left.
Right.
Well, you and I are in the same boat.
When I was saying the same things you were about foreign policy and are unjust in a moral war in Iraq, when all that was going on, they called me worse than a traitor.
They called me a liberal Democrat.
If you can imagine that the Jack Hunter is a liberal Democrat because I did not support a Republican president and a Republican administration, a Republican foreign policy.
And I said, that's right.
As a conservative, I can't in good conscious support any of this.
I would list the reasons on and on and on.
But here we are with a different political dynamic.
You have the tea party, you have all these things.
And I'm not saying that they're without hypocrisy.
They ooze hypocrisy.
The same people who had no problem with No Child Left Behind, the extension of Medicare Plan D, all this big government statism, forget about the wars and all that for a second, are all now for, you know, reducing the budget.
They don't agree with any of that.
And so on and so on.
There's a big question of Barack Obama was president.
Would they exist?
Of course, that's completely legitimate to ask that.
It may be true, but it is what it is.
That's the way politics is.
It's more emotion driven.
It's more partisan driven than it ever is logical.
Now, Scott, being a bright guy like you are, me not being too stupid, I hope I don't think it.
So anyways, it is our job as people who look at policy first, not party.
We don't care about Republicans and Democrats or even labels like conservative and liberal as much as we do policy.
Our job, Justin Armando's job, my friend with the American conservative, guys like Ron Paul, is to be leaders.
And what I mean by that is if you're a self-described conservative, I'm talking about just an average talk radio listener out there, a tea partier, they think of themselves as conservative and they will subscribe to issue A, B, and C that is recognized as recognizably conservative.
What I mean by that is, okay, I'm a conservative, therefore I'm for low taxes.
All right.
We can all agree on that.
There was a time in this country, going back to Robert Taft, and even in the 1990s, you just mentioned when Bill Clinton was getting us involved in Somalia and Kosovo and Haiti and all that nonsense, when part of the conservative makeup was to be allowed to be anti-war or, you know, during Robert Taft's time, it meant you had to be anti-war and a non-interventionist foreign policy.
It is our job to get back to that point where that's part of the conservative makeup.
And I think it's a battle worth fighting, especially when you're making headway, whether for hypocritical reasons or not.
As you've seen this week, even with Raimondo's article today about Grover Norquist, asking about the Afghanistan war, he being hypocritical, sure.
Is it a way we could sort of whittle ourselves in and maybe make some headway?
It certainly is as well, it's both.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I'm kind of sorry for starting off with such a bad attitude about the whole thing.
I mean, these people were my allies against Bill Clinton in the 1990s and I miss them.
You know, I'm not a right winger.
I never have been a conservative of any kind.
But sure.
But, you know, it was nice to not just have only libertarians against Bill Clinton.
There was and it wasn't all just against him.
It was against his government.
And that's really, I guess, you know, the next time a Republican gets elected, all my right wing friends are going to abandon me again.
So now I just don't even want to be friends.
You know, hurt my feelings and go and tell me that I need to render under Caesar again the next time there's a Republican in the White House.
I can't tell you how many times I bite my tongue talking to people on talk radio, whether here in South Carolina, occasionally going for Mike Church on Sirius XM, talking to people who I know damn well just five years ago would have been calling me a liberal Democrat or a traitor and are either agreeing with me or not giving me too much guff about my non-interventionist foreign policy views.
It's all I could do to bite my tongue.
But if somebody who actually wants to take this country towards a better foreign policy, I bite my tongue a lot.
Yeah.
Well, you know, here's the thing, too.
If I could get over my bad attitude and try to look at this from a positive point of view, it seems to me like we really could have a policy oriented, you know, issue oriented realignment in this country where left and right and liberal and conservative Republican Democrats start to mean very little to pretty much everybody and see if maybe we can get a new realignment based on where we come together on the good issues, usually where the left and right agree.
It's George Bush and Ted Kennedy passing No Child Left Behind or something.
But what if we could do a thing where the left and the right agree on ending the war, on ending the drug war, on, you know, reinstating the Bill of Rights, the Freedom Agenda Act type thing, ending all the corporate welfare for the bankers and the military industrial complex, the most important issues that, you know, the best of the left and the right agree on.
Maybe we could really somehow make an ideological, if not a party coalition around that.
And it seems like we are making progress.
I saw Ralph Nader praising Ron Paul like crazy on the Freedom Watch on Fox News for crying out loud.
Talk about living in a parallel universe or something.
All right.
Well, it's Jack Hunter.
He's the Southern Avenger.
He writes for the American Conservative magazine, does radio in Charleston.
And we'll be right back after this anti-war radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jack Hunter.
He's the Southern Avenger.
He writes for the American Conservative magazine and does radio in Charleston, South Carolina.
And do you still do those regular YouTubes, Jack?
I do twice a week.
You can find them at either SouthernAvenger.com or the American Conservative website.
I do them every Tuesday and Friday.
Yeah, right on.
Yeah, I always like that stuff, man.
You're right on pretty much everything, as far as I can tell.
And now I'm kind of upset because you leave it to some kook to go and shoot a congresswoman, to throw another monkey wrench in the healing of the left-right divide, which is mostly over nonsense issues and getting the best of the left and the right together.
The very progressives who we ought to be allying with on the Bill of Rights and peace and an end to corporate welfare are the very people who hate us the most, libertarians and Tea Party types, because, you know, somehow Sarah Palin and crosshairs and something about this kook shooting this lady.
But meanwhile, you know, it's not an ideological thing.
You could be any American and say, hey, $14 trillion of debt is too much and trillions of dollars of welfare for bankers who are already, by definition, the richest people in the whole world is too much.
And mass murder of another million people is a million too much.
You know?
That's exactly right, Scott.
And it's sort of bringing left and right together.
Better, should I say, having people open their minds from across the political spectrum to new possibilities.
It's interesting with my conservative friends, they're more willing to, you know, used to be, well, Jack, your foreign policy views sound like Ralph Nader or Cindy Sheehan.
I'd say, well, your foreign policy views sound like Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman.
They didn't really want to be associated with those guys either.
I go, you need to quit thinking in such terms that sometimes the far right and the far left are actually more reasonable on a number of issues than the sort of respectable center.
I think Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush disagree very little on foreign policy.
And there you are, the liberal internationalist and the, certainly the neoconservative.
So we need to get people thinking beyond these sorts of things.
I've found it useful recently to use non-foreign policy issues as a starting point with some of my conservative friends who all now, for example, want to audit the Federal Reserve.
They think that's a good idea.
The Tea Partiers, all of them, yeah, let's audit the Federal Reserve or end the Federal Reserve.
They all agree with that or so on and so on.
Well, in the U.S.
Senate in the last session, who were the co-sponsors of that?
Of course, we know Ron Paul sponsored it at the House, but the co-sponsors in the United States Senate were South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who is extremely conservative, and Bernie Sanders, who's practically socialist from up there in Vermont.
And yet no Tea Partier would say, well, I'm not going to be for auditing the Fed because Bernie Sanders is for it.
It's those sorts of examples that you could sort of play into foreign policy and use sort of the same logic.
And I found it very useful.
Right.
Well, and that's how I always thought about why Ron Paul's campaign took off.
I remember me and my friends were so mad that day that Giuliani implied that Ron Paul was on the side of the bad guys and whatever.
But it turned out that everybody loved that.
And that wasn't Giuliani's shining Reagan debate moment.
It was Ron Paul's.
And people, I think, basically, you know, to paraphrase their thought process here was like, wow, so I can be anti-war and not be like Michael Moore.
I could be like this friendly old Texas Republican who's as patriotic as apple pie and his 60 year marriage and all these things and still be against war.
OK, great.
And so they took Ron Paul's permission slip and it was, you know, said and done.
Well, that's exactly right.
I think it's worth pointing out as well as far as changing people's minds.
And, you know, a lot of conservatives were drawn to people.
Everybody, a lot of people were drawn to Ron Paul, not just those on the right.
But, you know, people said to me, well, Jack, you're a single issue guy.
Now, what do you mean by that?
You've always said that you will not support any candidate, left, right, Republican or Democrat supports what you like to call, point the finger at me, empire.
I said, that's exactly right.
They said, well, you're a single issue guy.
You don't worry about anything else.
Well, I would like to point out that all the spending worries, all the economic woes that we talk about all tie into empire is something you and I both know.
But better than that, I like to point out to them, my conservative friends that know you are a single issue voter.
And they're like, excuse me, how can you say that?
And I say, well, in 2008, I supported Ron Paul for president.
Why did I do that?
Because I want to reduce our national debt.
I want to reduce the size of government.
I believe in the Constitution.
I want to get rid of the Federal Reserve, so on and so on.
And I also happen to agree with his foreign policy views.
But you who supported George W. Bush or John McCain rather in 2008 are the single issue voter and they're still sort of bewildered, perplexed.
What do you mean?
Well, you hosted a Republican National Convention where a guy like Joe Lieberman gets a primetime speaking slot.
Do you agree with him on government run health care?
Well, no, they don't.
Do they agree with him and all these big government Democrat proposals we're seeing, most of which Joe Lieberman goes along with?
Well, no, they don't.
Do they agree with his, oh, I don't know, pro-choice views or belief in gay marriage to go the social conservative route?
Well, most of them don't.
But what was the one issue that those Republicans had in common with Joe Lieberman?
War and empire.
They were the single issue voters.
Why was Ron Paul not allowed in the door at that convention?
One single issue.
War and empire.
It took a backseat to everything else.
It was the war party.
And they need to be reminded of that.
The next time they try to throw that in my face or your face or Ron Paul supporters face, but that's all we care about.
No, that's all they cared about at the time.
And they're just now starting to wise up, sober up.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, right now we're having this conversation on what I hope is to be the eve of Ron Paul's second run for president.
And I still don't think the Republican Party would ever give him the nomination in a million billion years.
But starting off from the point where he left off last time and even better really, because now he's really won the respect of the media for being so wise and consistent and a friendly old guy this whole time, you know, in between since then, since they learned his name.
And, you know, what I really want to see is, you know, not necessarily Nader, but somebody like Nader and see, you know, all of the peace and liberty and, and, and the corporate welfare people bum rush one party and throw all the people who are bad on those issues out.
So we really finally have a two party system us versus them.
You know, no bailouts, peace, the Bill of Rights is one party and warfare, you know, imperialism and inflation and torture and all that can be the Democrats, whichever party it is, I don't care.
And then we can actually at least have a fair fight about this and have the lines drawn where they count instead of upon a bunch of cultural nonsense.
Absolutely.
And in the notion of hunting where the ducks are by using a mass political base, I would love to see somebody from the progressive side of things who takes the same view that Noam Chomsky and Naomi Wolf have recently, certainly men and a lady of the left who agree with the Tea Party.
I think they both said, you know, if we're not for working class people concerned about their future, what are what the progressive stand for?
Right.
The sort of agree with their message of we need to reduce the debt, tie in the foreign policy with all that.
I would love to see that.
We'll see if it happens.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I think the one of the best things that we already have going for us is that Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 that Ron Paul introduced that went nowhere.
But that thing is the repeal everything that David Addington got done in the 21st century act.
It's beautiful.
No more signing statements, no more torture, no more enemy combatant status.
Everybody's either a POW or they get a fair trial as a suspect in a courtroom and on and on and on and on and on.
It just repeals all of those overreaches of power, the domestic spying, everything.
And if Ron Paul can make that thing the center of his campaign this time, I think, you know, I like to believe that Americans can be shaken out of the stupor.
And well, he I think he can make that a major part of his campaign.
But the way he does it is this.
He's a constitutional conservative.
And when you start picking apart the Constitution, you know, you can get these people to sort of see things in a better light.
Right.
All right.
Cool.
Well, hey, thanks very much for saying smart things and tolerating me yelling at you here.
And it's been great having you on the show again, Jack.
Take care of yourself.
Always glad to be here.
Everybody, that's Jack Hunter.
He's the Southern Avenger on the radio in Charleston, South Carolina, and the American Conservative Magazine.
That's amcomag.com.
We'll be right back.
