Hey everybody, there was a glitch in the recording, so the very beginning of this interview got cut off, but it's Jack Hunter from the American Conservative Magazine and co-author of The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Senator Rand Paul.
Right, well, so tell us about the foreign policy section.
Well, it's the longest chapter in the book.
I think most of the chapters are about 5,000 to 6,000 words.
It's well over 10,000 words.
I mean, what different angle can we talk about?
We talk about blowback and how that leads to our problem with Islamic terrorism, something people like Peter King and certain committee hearings they have up there on Capitol Hill can't seem to get through their head.
We talk about Reagan's actual record as opposed to what the neoconservatives try to paint him as.
Was he a non-interventionist?
Absolutely not.
He also would have never gone to war in Iraq.
He was not a George W. Bush neocon, so we sort of address that.
We talk about the military-industrial complex, President Eisenhower's famous phrase, and how basically what he was worried about when he left office with his farewell address has come to fruition, and not only that, is defended by many conservatives as something conservative, something Republicans used to warn against, like Robert Taft, who we also mention in the book, who was sort of the standard-bearer for the non-interventionist, old, traditionally conservative position.
So we cover a lot of stuff, and the chapter is called A Conservative Foreign Policy.
That would probably be stuff that a lot of your listeners out there would find to their liking.
That's very interesting.
I sure appreciate the sentiment there.
I'm watching Dennis Kucinich, who is actually speaking right now in the fore of the U.S. House.
He's sort of running the show there as they debate his get-out-of-Afghanistan resolution, which is co-sponsored by Walter Jones, Ron Paul, James Duncan, and I think a couple of other Republicans.
There needs to be more of them.
Yeah, well, there certainly does.
Well, here's the thing.
There's this great article I want to mention to people.
I saw you put out on your Facebook yesterday, Jack Hunter Goes to Washington in the Charleston City paper.
That's where you're from, and I guess you write for them, too, right?
Yeah, I've been a columnist for them since about 2007.
It's an alternative weekly.
In any major city, you have your alternative weekly, your village voices, your creative loafing, those type of papers.
And in Charleston, we have the Charleston City paper, and it's fairly liberal, as most alternative weeklies are, and I'm the token conservative columnist.
Right, like the LA Weekly or the Austin Chronicle, that kind of thing.
Exactly.
Right, okay.
Mountain Phoenix and that sort of stuff.
Well, and you make it really clear in here that – well, actually, I think it was really the best definition I've heard, where you said the Tea Party movement is the talk radio audience.
That's what it is.
But now, instead of just completely going along with whatever Rush Limbaugh and Hannity lead them into, they're kind of awakening and getting a little bit smarter than that, and that it really seems like you're saying you see this Tea Party movement as some clay that you can really work with, that you can help define and lead toward, for example, a Paulian foreign policy.
That's exactly right.
Look, I've been a self-described conservative for 20 years.
I'm 36.
I was listening to talk radio when I was 16, 17 years old, when Rush Limbaugh really rose to prominence.
And that audience, you know, what made him so popular and the guys who would follow, who would sort of mimic that style, the Sean Hannity's and all the rest, that audience is the Tea Party audience in the sense that they realize that something has gone awry with their country.
They don't like what Washington, D.C. does.
But what we've seen since the rise of talk radio is basically these hosts, in the name of populism, sort of redirecting that anger back into the Republican political machine, somehow convincing these people at the grassroots that John Boehner really means it this time.
Mitch McConnell, sure, he might not have done great in the past, but boy, we're really going to get those Democrats.
The beauty of the Tea Party movement is they're finally seeing beyond that.
I've sort of made the joke to a few friends that there's no reason that Rand Paul, for example, shouldn't be on Rush Limbaugh's radio show.
It's a great platform.
It's what Rand writes about.
You're talking about serious conservatism.
Why wouldn't he be on his show?
Well, Limbaugh's explanation is, well, I don't do guests and so on and so on, but he does make the rare exception, the most recent exception was he had on Karl Rove for an entire hour.
So Karl Rove is okay, but Rand Paul is somehow beyond the pale.
That's sort of my point about talk radio and as it relates to the Tea Party.
The Tea Party audience is the talk radio audience for the most part.
It's not just that.
It's actually beyond that to a certain extent to the extent that independents are upset about a $14 trillion national debt.
Many people who voted for Obama don't like what they're seeing.
But by and large, it's grassroots conservatives who are finally seeing through the charade that the GOP establishment are liars.
And I think that's a wonderful thing.
They need to see that.
Well, but then the problem is they have to be in that big tent Republican Party with those liars in order to be in power at all.
How many Tea Party, so-called Tea Party types are there in the House and the Senate now?
And how many of them are what you would consider pretty true to, well, your values anyway?
Well, I can't put an exact number on it.
The midterm election certainly gave us a new crop.
I think the Tea Party members of the House and the Senate represent the divide within the Tea Party, especially as it relates to foreign policy and civil liberties and those issues.
Look at the example of the Patriot Act where you had Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and a few others voting against it.
You had Marco Rubio and some other Tea Party candidates voting in support of it.
If you talk to the Tea Party at the grassroots, some of them have one foot stuck in that Bush Republican mentality where they think things like the Patriot Act are a bad idea.
But a lot of them, and perhaps a majority—I haven't seen any polling on this, and I based a lot of this on the Tea Parties in my own state—are fearful of a government that has the kind of power that a Patriot Act would get the federal government, particularly when the Department of Homeland Security is issuing warnings about Tea Partiers possibly being extremists, if you will.
Now, I'm not saying that there's not a bunch of hypocrisy thrown in there, but at least they're trending in the right direction.
The Tea Party is a big, interesting mess right now.
And what I mean by that is they're all unified in the sense that they want to cut spending and do something to scale back that monstrous bureaucracy up there in Washington, D.C.
But they're going to have to confront all the contradictions, particularly as it relates to support for Pentagon spending and our wars and things like the Patriot Act.
And they're beginning to confront them more than ever.
Most of the headlines you've seen in The New York Times and The Washington Post about Pentagon spending says, GOP establishment butts heads with Tea Party, with the Tea Party then portraying them as being for cutting Pentagon spending and the GOP establishment, of course, not wanting to touch it.
So it's a very interesting dynamic there, and I think very encouraging.
As a conservative who's been trying to get these people to wake up, to be comprehensive in their conservatism for so long, yes, you have to look at Pentagon spending.
No, we can't be in Afghanistan, Iraq, and neocons.
No, not Libya either.
And all these places, if you're serious about constitutional government, more people than ever are starting to realize that.
That's good.
Yeah.
Well, I've got to tell you, I always like right-wingers better when Democrats are in the White House.
In fact, I kind of wonder, you know, it would have been great if Harry Brown had won the election in 2000.
That's who I voted for.
But, you know, even if Bill Clinton had just been able to serve a third term and 9-11 had happened on Bill Clinton's watch instead of the Republicans' watch, and to have the out-of-power right skeptical of Clinton and Al Gore running wild with their new terrorism law and their plan to attack Iraq and whatever, it would have been nicer.
I don't know, because the Democrats aren't nearly as effectual with that whole only-we-love-America-and-everyone-else-is-a-traitor-and-we're-going-to-Iraq-or-else-you're-friends-with-Saddam-Hussein kind of attitude.
They can't pull that off as well, you know?
You're exactly right.
The pre-existing political dynamic determines their attitudes, which I find particularly detestable.
You know, I'll bring up the example in the late 90s.
Sean Hannity was deploring Clinton's wars in Kosovo and Somalia and Haiti.
Rand includes in the book Hannity basically saying, why would President Clinton go further into Kosovo when we have no exit strategy, there's no clear goal, why would you put our troops at harm's way, yada, yada, yada.
Rand makes the point that it's similar to the criticism of Afghanistan today.
I think it's horrible to make the decision to send troops over there, and it's okay if a Republican does it, but not if a Democrat does it.
That is detestable, I'm sorry.
All right, well, hold it right there.
It's Jack Hunter.
He's leading the Tea Party toward peace.
He's doing his best.
Read this new piece out of the Charleston City paper, Jack Hunter Goes to Washington.
It's really good.
He's co-author of Rand Paul's new book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington, and he writes for the American Conservative Magazine.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger from the American Conservative Magazine.
That's amconmag.com.
He's also a radio show host in Charleston.
And what radio station is that?
Sorry, I don't have it.
WTMA Talk Radio here in Charleston.
It's been around for 75 years.
We just celebrated our birthday.
Wow, there you go.
That's very good.
All right, so your latest piece in the American Conservative, Jack, is called Peter King's – well, maybe it's not your latest.
The latest I saw, Peter King's Radical Ignorance.
And I think this goes to something you were talking about just a minute ago, which is that the right wing in this country, the kind of little guy Tea Party movement and the big player types are going to have to confront American foreign policy and the truth of all these things.
And this piece is really about blowback and why Republicans want to keep blaming Islam instead of blaming American foreign policy for creating enemies against us.
And it seems to me like this is all going to come to a head in the race for president, whether Barber runs or not.
I'm betting dollars to dimes that Ron Paul is, and there's going to be a fight.
And it seems to me like this is going to be a chance for realistic people – I won't say the realists, don't trust them – but realistic people to win the argument about how we got into this mess.
Because it seems to me as long as the right wing in general buys into the party line that they hate us because we're good and they hate us because their terrible religion makes them hate good things, then we're going to be in this forever and ever, man.
Well, that's exactly right.
We saw a fight in 2008 when Ron Paul ran for president.
The difference in the potential fight for 2012 if Congressman Paul runs for president is that more people will be on our side.
And when I say that, I'm talking about Congressman Paul and my side and your side, Scott, the non-interventionist side of sanity when it comes to foreign policy.
And the reason more people will be on our side – in 2008, the Republican Party, during those primaries, their complete identity was attached to Bush in support for the war in Iraq.
That's the reason we saw Joe Lieberman, for example, given a primetime speaking role at the Republican National Convention and Ron Paul not even letting a door.
That's not the same environment in 2012.
The main focus for the grassroots right and for voters in the Republican primary is spending and the size of government.
Is war on the table and in the mix?
It absolutely is, but it is not what defines them anymore.
They're willing to listen to other arguments.
I think Rover Norquist made a very good point recently when he called for conservatives beginning to debate the wisdom of pushing forward in Afghanistan.
He said something to the extent, to his neoconservative critics who were criticizing him for even raising the question.
He said, you know, if George W. Bush in 2005 or 2006 had decided to come home from Iraq then, maybe four neocons would start whining, but the grassroots would have pretty much gone along with it, the Republican base.
They wouldn't have said, oh, this is an unconservative run.
They would have said, well, that's what – they would have followed his lead.
Only the neoconservatives would have raised hell.
That's what we're seeing right now.
You don't see Tea Partiers out there saying we need to go bomb Libya or go into Egypt and support Mubarak or any of this other crazy nonsense.
You see neoconservatives and Republican politicians doing that.
They don't have the support they once did.
Is it there?
Yes, but it's severely diminished.
And when we go into these 2012 primaries and begin making our case more realistic, non-interventionist case, quite frankly, we're going to have a lot more allies than we did in 2008.
That's a good thing.
Also, politics is about getting people to trend in your direction.
It's never perfect, but it can certainly get better.
Yeah, well, and here's the thing, too.
Something that's going to get worse, according to, well, what makes sense to me, but also people who are always right about things like this, like Ron Paul, is the economy.
And it seems to me like America's in a pretty dark place.
Everybody seems to feel real lost about – everybody agrees that we're on the wrong track.
It's like Bovard says about watching drunks fight in a bar.
They swing and they miss.
Everybody's angry, but they're not sure about what, really.
And I'm really worried about all the demagoguery, especially on the right, whether it's homosexuals or whether it's Mexicans or whether it's Muslims.
As long as it's somebody weak with no power, then they can be scapegoated for everything that's wrong.
And it seems like what we really need is that anti-demagoguery on the right, people on the right saying, nah, Muslims, let me tell you about Muslims, all right?
And it's not that they're the terrible enemy to be afraid of and to persecute.
I mean especially as the economy gets worse and people are broke and people are angry and they can't even pay the cops that they usually use to keep us all penned in.
Things could get out of hand real quick, and I would rather see people demagogue up rather than at the weak.
We've got a bad history of that kind of thing in this country.
We should always demagogue Washington, D.C. first.
I don't care if you're talking about borders or Islamic terrorism.
Most of our problems emanate from Washington, D.C. first and foremost.
What we saw last week or two weeks ago, I guess now, with the spectacle of Peter King's, I guess, what did he call it?
A conference on the radicalization of Muslims, and they were concerned about that, the congressmen.
What we saw was basically them looking at the symptom without addressing the cause.
They were looking at the effect of domestic Islamic terrorism without bothering even to consider what might cause it.
I made the point in my column, would we have a discussion about illegal immigration without discussing the economic factors that are the obvious magnet for so many illegal aliens?
Would we have a discussion about why American air travelers are frustrated with airport security without examining the recent TSA policies that are the source of so much frustration?
Would we try to have congressional hearings to investigate why so many Americans are upset at their government while ignoring a $14 trillion national debt that upsets the Tea Party?
No, everybody would consider that absurd.
Yet, here's Peter King and some other congressmen trying to figure out what causes domestic radical Islam, and we're seeing an uptick in it very slightly.
The situation with Nidal Malik Hassan in Fort Hood, of course, Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square would be a bomber.
They're trying to determine what causes that.
Well, both of the people I just mentioned said that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were their primary motivation.
Indeed, most of these people we catch who are planning to do something or almost all unanimously say the wars overseas and American foreign policy is what primarily motivates them.
Well, you know, I noticed one time too, Jack, that time and again when they're entrapping some innocent guy into a terrorism case, that's the line they use is foreign policy, not don't you hate primary elections and R-rated movies.
They say don't you hate what they're doing in Afghanistan?
Now, say something stupid into this tape recorder.
Well, that's exactly right.
But if Peter King is sincerely interested in diminishing the threat of domestic Islamic terrorism, he should ask himself, why did we not see these sorts of things five, six, seven years ago?
Why was this a fairly relatively new phenomenon?
What has changed?
Well, our foreign policy has been escalated, and we've been entrenched in Afghanistan for a decade.
You can't stop a lone individual.
And you're correctly right.
A lot of these people are in trap.
But you can't stop a lone individual from getting radicalized on the Internet and doing something crazy.
Are we going to have a national police state that's just keeping out everybody?
Well, we know that's what the neocons want.
They love the Patriot Act and Real ID and all the rest.
But you can't do it.
But what you can do is look at the cause.
You look at the motive in a murder case.
Why do these people do this?
Is there something we could do to prevent it?
Well, if we're fighting a war in Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism, and all it does is create more terrorists, both the domestic and abroad, are we really fighting a war on terror, or are we fighting a war for terror?
It doesn't make any sense.
And those are the questions that Peter King and that conference hearing and everybody else in Washington, D.C., will not ask.
And it's dumb.
All right.
Well, I'm really happy to know that going forward, as this fight on the right takes place, that your voice is loud and clear and heard within, and it's really good to know.
Thank you very much for your time, Jack.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Always good to talk to you.
Everybody, that's the Southern Avenger, Jack Hunter, the American conservative co-author of Tea Party Goes to Washington.
We've got a new piece about him in the Charleston City paper.
