05/24/07 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

And the greatest chance for peace comes from a society for peace.
This is a speech that is in good company with some of the more remarkable orations by ancient statesman like Cicero.
And I think that the speech that was just concluded here from last night is that type of an oration, something that hopefully we'll be able to tell our children about in a much freer country than the one we're living in right now.
You have John Quincy Adams occasionally.
Yes.
There aren't many who ever gave a speech like that from the floor of the House of Representatives, Will.
That's exactly right.
And given the depth and breadth and extent of the power wielded by the regime in Washington right now, and the paucity of effective opposition to that regime within our government.
And I don't want to dwell on what might be considered an oristic distinction between the regime and the government.
There are some people within the government who are still representing the public, and to that extent I'd say we still have the government as opposed to the permanent regime.
But given the lack of people in positions of responsibility who are willing to speak the truth about what's going on, and the power that's exercised by the regime to the detriment of liberty everywhere, I think it's by no means an exaggeration to say that Ron Paul's address was Ciceronian, both in terms of its substance and in terms of the drama it represents.
We look at what I would consider to be the corpse of a republic that we would seek to reanimate.
Yeah, and you're right, it's the contrast.
If he was giving this speech during the War of 1812 or something, he's got a point, but it's not like we've been through 20 wars and lost half the liberty we had at the time with each one yet by then.
But yeah, I'll tell you what, I apologize to you, Will, I actually brought you on the show today to talk about the Democrats, but I don't want to talk about them.
I mean, look, what Ron Paul just said, if anyone, and if you're just tuning in and you missed it, go to antiwar.com and watch, it's the Google video, watch the speech that Ron Paul gave, I believe yesterday, on the House floor, called On Patriotism, and then tell me about a Republican or a Democrat you support.
Tell me about any other politician in this country that, you know, the difference is so dramatic.
It's like, you know, the difference between skydiving and swimming or something.
Ron Paul and the rest of these guys.
Yeah, it's the difference between prime rib and tofu.
Yeah, thank you.
I was looking for some kind of amount.
Well, the thing that I find most refreshing about all of this, and you're speaking with somebody who is a professional pessimist, my wife likes to say that my favorite expression is I am not optimistic.
But what's so refreshing about this, Scott, is the fact that Ron Paul, with the spirit of meekness, which is not the same thing as being a wimp, a meek man is somebody who is not overly impressed with himself, but is willing to stand resolute in defense of principle.
The Bible tells us that Moses was the meekest of all men.
Moses was not a pushover.
And Ron Paul, with great meekness and great composure and a certain avuncular dignity, is quietly speaking the truth, and it is resonating with people, including, I would be willing to wager, millions of people who are otherwise not particularly involved in the political process precisely because they are weary of being force fed this pasteurized processed cheese food type material that is called modern politics.
They're looking for something more substantial than that.
They're not even getting cheese, they're getting pseudo cheese, if you will.
And when somebody comes along and is willing to talk with them in terms of principle about things that have a direct impact on their lives and on their prosperity and on their rights, what little of the latter two we still have, people are willing to listen.
And it's trans-partisan, it's trans-ideological when you can see people like the panelists on The View, daytime television, who I was previously unaware of until they started to talk about Ron Paul and their comments, started to make the rounds on YouTube and the other electronic zombies.media that are available today.
When you see the reaction that these people have to somebody who's willing to speak the truth about the war in Iraq and the consequences it has for our liberty and independence and our prosperity, something's happening that is worth paying attention to, and I think it's a very heartening juncture in our history to that extent.
Yeah.
And really, because of this one guy.
I mean, the first time I ever met Ron Paul in person, I interviewed him at the 2004 Libertarian Convention.
Anybody wants to check it out, it's at scotthortonshow.com.
And he came and sat down in my hotel room and was friendly enough to give me a good 20 minutes or so.
And my last question for him then actually came from retired Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kotowski, another American hero, who suggested that I ask Ron, what hope do we have when there's only one of you?
Why are we even bothering?
Shouldn't we all just be out at the lake when we've got one Ron Paul in a country of 300 million people?
And his answer to that was, hey buddy, if you'd asked any of us, any of us, in 1985, or told us that in four years the Soviet Union would begin to crumble and that in six it would cease to exist, we would have thought you were daffy.
The Soviet Union was going to exist for another hundred years and it was something we were just going to have to deal with.
And you are not, your job is not, this is what he told me, your job is not to go around predicting how bad things are going to be.
Your job is to tell people and teach people about liberty and to give them a place where they can find out about liberty and not to predict the future because you have no idea what's going to happen, young man.
You just keep doing the right thing and let everything else worry about working itself out.
I've not heard that interview, but in my mind's ear, as it were, I can hear him saying those words to you.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, yeah, I'm sorry I can't do a very good Ron Paul impression.
I'm not nearly humble enough.
Well, nobody does a good Ron Paul impression.
He's sui generis.
But the point he's making is one that I just love and is the foundation of his campaign right now.
Freedom is the common ground.
Right.
And chances are you're going to be drawing one out of a family, two out of a city, as it were, to allude to the book of Jeremiah here, from the unlikeliest places apparently, people who are actually concerned about freedom.
They've dispensed with the labels and with the arbitrary political affiliations that have been assigned to them, and they're taking offense over the fact that the people who are presuming to plan their future have already picked out which political team they'll play for.
And they're gravitating toward this man because he's talking about freedom, which is the forgotten subject in politics most of the time.
Certainly now in this day of high authoritarianism and bellicose nationalism, when somebody actually talks about freedom and liberty protected by the rule of law, he'll seem like an eccentric at best.
And it's not really sticking to Ron Paul, all these efforts to introduce him as a fringe paranoid delusional person, somebody who should be wearing the latest in tinfoil headgear or something of that sort.
Efforts, predictably, are being made by the rabid folks who compose George W. Bush's increasingly cultic and ever-dwindling core of jihadist supporters, if you will.
Those efforts have been made to depict Ron Paul as if he were some kind of a hater.
I know that the New York Sun, which is sort of the vocation bail boxer of the neoconservative movement, was trying to accuse him of being anti-Semitic last week, and the guy who threw that accusation in the wind had to back down.
Oh, did he retract that?
Yes, he did.
Really?
Yeah, that would be Mr. Stanger, I believe, Ryan Stanger.
I saw the accusation.
Yeah, and he had to step off and take that back and qualify his comments.
He said, I don't think what he said is right, I think it was wrong, I think it was morally reprehensible, but on balance I have to say that I don't think that Ron Paul is an anti-Semite.
No, and in fact, if you watch YouTube of this guy on the House floor, if you're as lucky as me that you get to meet him and spend a few minutes, this guy doesn't hate anybody.
No.
He doesn't.
I mean, I'm here to tell you, Will, I hate George Bush.
I do.
I ain't going to try to hide it.
If I had Darth Vader powers, God help the people who inhabit Washington, D.C.
If I could really go and do what I felt like and thought I could get away with it.
God help those people.
But Ron Paul doesn't have a hateful bone in his entire body.
He is the kindest old grandpa you could ever meet in your life, and I really mean that.
He is a really, as you say it, he's meek.
He's not better than anyone in his own view.
One of the most remarkable things I've seen in the last couple of months was a photograph that was shared with me when I was in Los Angeles last weekend for the convention of the United Republicans of California, UROC.
They're a group that calls themselves the Republican wing of the Republican Party, meaning the small R Republican wing of that organization, and they endorsed Ron Paul, which I thought was quite remarkable.
Unanimously, I read.
Unanimously, exactly.
No serious dissent, no equivocation.
Ron Paul is their guy.
But one of his volunteers, a very nice lady who had moved to California from Illinois, had been at the, I believe it was called the Elephant Club, a bar shortly after the first Republican debate there at the shrine to Imperator Renovus Magnus, the Ronald Reagan museum there, the presidential library.
Just a perfectly abominable spectacle, that museum.
That's not the sort of thing that a true republic would erect in honor of somebody who had been a president for eight years.
Yeah, do you remember the onion headline was Reagan Pyramid Almost Complete in Los Angeles?
Yeah, George W. Bush was going to have a scientist back with sand and buried with the lifeless body of a sparrow.
It's the same idea where you have Air Force One, literally an Air Force One dangling from the ceiling of this cavernous auditorium.
It really puts you in the mind of ancient pharaonic Egypt.
But Ron Paul went to the republic, or forgive me, I believe it was called the Elephant Club after the debate.
And while he was there, he ended up in a conversation between what appeared to be a Muslim imam and an ascetic Jew.
And he seemed to be talking with two of them.
They're apparently, forgive me, standing if I remember the photograph correctly, but they were apparently having an amicable conversation as he was sitting there talking with them about their views of the world.
And this supporter Ron Paul said, well, this is what he's talking about.
He says that the future of a peaceful and free world would run through the path of open-ended, even-handed dialogue, the idea that there are better ways of dealing with these problems than bombing people or bribing people.
Simply sitting down and trying to work out some kind of a modus vivendi as an honest, even-handed broker would be a far better alternative to the interventionist policy that we have right now, which places such a premium on bribing authoritarian leaders and bombing people into submitting to them.
And I thought, in a nutshell, that's what Ron Paul's revolution, if you will, is all about.
Treating people, individual people, as unique creations invested with rights that we should respect and dealing with them on that basis, seeking for mutually beneficial common ground.
And that's a revolutionary point of view in light of what's going on right now, where really the descendant form of collectivism in our country, once again, is this bellicose corporatist nationalism that is represented by the other Republican contenders to a greater or lesser extent, whether you're talking about Mitt two, three, many Guantanamo's Romney, or whether you're talking about Mr. McCain or whoever was the Vietnamese sent back in his place, who seems to be perversely determined to sow misery and bloodshed everywhere in the world, or Rudolph Giuliani, who is living down to every Italian stereotype of thuggish authoritarianism that the mind could conjure, or whether you're talking about small-bore jingoists like Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter.
Tom Tancredo, if I remember correctly, is the guy who said that we ought to bring Jack Bauer into the real world to wreak havoc on people and to inflict misery on the enemies of the state, Jack Bauer being sort of the televised avatar of the Nietzschean Uberman, or somebody who's beyond good and evil and thus capable of killing innocent people without compunction and so forth.
I mean, that's where the Republican Party is right now.
They've become a party of new lists.
And in the midst of this, you've got Ron Paul, who's somebody who actually believes, unlike those who seem to enjoy professing their belief.
Ron Paul actually believes that our rights come from our Creator and that every individual has those rights and the government has to respect them, whereas the rest are willing to utter pious homilies about God, faith, and family, and then turn around and endorse policies that seem to be generated from the very abysm of hell.
So it's really an interesting contrast here.
I think that a Ron Paul presidency would do so much to heal the public opinion of the United States, of the American people, not just of our government, but now of us, for re-electing George Bush around the world.
I got an email from a fan of the show in Beirut, and I asked him, well, at first I apologized for my government backing Fatah al-Islam that is now already within, count them, what four months has already blown back in the face of the puppet Lebanese government there.
And I apologized for that.
Of course, everyone can read Seymour Hersh's article, The Redirection, about the CIA and the Lebanese government backing these al-Qaeda tied thugs who the Lebanese government is now fighting.
But I asked him how badly the reputation of the American people has suffered, and assuming a guy like Ron Paul or someone could come in and really turn our foreign policy around, what it would take to regain the reputation as that place where they have the Statue of Liberty, not that place where they come in and invade your country and tie your naked fathers on the floor on leashes like dogs, as is the way that they picture us now.
And he answered that it's not too late, but that it's getting there, and that what we need to do is we need to have a real turnaround.
And Ron Paul, as you said, is not a pushover, and as President of the United States, he would not be a pushover.
But what he would also not be is some arrogant son of a bitch with his finger in your face dictating to you, which is what George Bush is.
And I think that George Bush, simply because of his extraordinary lack of intelligence and understanding of history, has no idea.
He doesn't even understand that what America could have done on September 12th was take over the entire world with ideas of liberty and capitalism.
The shining light on the hill could be so bright that people are squinting and putting their arm up to try to block it out because of how wonderfully we proved that Washingtonian principle of the greatest use of power is the renunciation of it.
Yeah, if I have time for one quick story here, on September 12th or 13th, I can remember which, my family went to a homeschool conference in Absalom, Wisconsin, where we were living at the time.
It was the home of a professor at Lawrence University who, along with his wife, were practicing Quakers, and of course they believed in nonviolence.
And we were talking about the fact that immediately after the attack on September 11th, you saw the spectacle of the French press saying, they were all Americans, and the cold-streamed guards at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace were instructed by the Queen of England to play the Star-Spangled Banner.
And even thinking about that makes me choke up, the fact that we had such deep reservoirs of goodwill.
A million people turned out at a candlelight vigil in Tehran.
In Tehran, exactly!
And I was talking with the wife of this professor about this and taking a great deal of comfort and strength knowing that there were so many tens of millions of people, billions of people for all we knew, who were praying for our country and who were professing to love and admire us and to have respect for us.
And I looked at her and she said, now watch us blow this.
And I nodded and said, unfortunately I think you're right.
That didn't, of course, take a great deal of prophetic ability to foresee because that's the nature of our government.
When I was in Egypt in 1994 at a UN conference on population control, and what an incredible insult to hold a conference on population control in the capital of a Muslim country.
People from various Muslim countries would come up to me and bear in mind this is 13 years ago, and would say, somewhat concerned, what's going on with you people?
What's going on with your government?
Why are you acting this way?
And by this way he was talking about this obstreperous and sanctimonious foreign policy where we were telling these people that they had to change their cultures, they had to rearrange their family organizations, they had to accept these missionaries from feminist groups and anti-natalist groups and so forth, all of which were paid for by US tax dollars.
You know, we love your country, they would say, we're a little bit afraid of what's going on.
And I had to explain to them that there were those of us in the United States that were very much afraid of the same government that was creating misery for them as well.
And I came back from that conference, I was teaching Sunday school at the time, and I said, just watch, within 10 years we're going to be at war with the entire Muslim world, because we're threatening their families.
And it's when we threaten people's families that people are willing to kill and die, and to see themselves perhaps be used sacrificially if they have the chance of killing a few of us.
Oh, well that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of absurd explanations for September 11th, Will.
What do you mean when you kill somebody's kid or come and tell them that you're going to decide how many kids they ought to have or how they're going to live their life, that they're going to want to hit you or something?
Yeah, don't we know that they're lesser breeds without the law?
They exist to be used as our pleasure.
America as Jack Bauer.
Exactly.
Good and evil.
Exactly.
It's a horrifying prospect, but Ron Paul illustrates that there is another America out there, it is the old America, it's the old small-R republic.
It's the one that we want.
Exactly.
You know, I'm tired of all this politics.
I want Ron Paul to be the President of the United States.
I do too.
You and I have talked about this before.
What's the root word of liberal?
Liberty.
And what are the conservatives, the real conservatives who have actually read books?
What is it that they want?
They want to conserve liberty.
Exactly.
That is what we have in common.
Ron Paul, it's his number one best soundbite.
I hope they play it a million, billion times from the first debate.
The message of liberty is a unifying message.
It brings us together.
Enough of all this politics.
And you know what, really, I don't even want him in the White House.
I want him to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
But anyway, that's it.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Will Grigg, everybody, he is the editor of TheRightSourceOnline.com.
And also check out his blog, ProLibertate at FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com.
Thanks, Will.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, folks, that's been Antiwar Radio.
Here's some music.
We'll be back tomorrow, 11 to 1.