09/02/08 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

Alright folks, well as many of you know, the National Socialist Workers Party is holding their convention in Minneapolis, and they toned it down a little bit.
They didn't want to seem insensitive during the hurricane, but they're going ahead and throwing their party up there.
At the same time though, Dr. Ron Paul is holding his rally for the Republic right down the street I gather, in order to, well I guess shove it in the Republicans' face that we hate them, and we don't support them, and that they're wrong about everything, and you know, that kind of stuff.
And it turns out my good friend Anthony Gregory made it to Minneapolis, he's been blogging about his observations of the party going on there, the rally for the Republic, at the blog at lewrockwell.com, lewrockwell.com slash blog, and I guess beyond that I ought to tell you he's a fellow at the Independent Institute, and also writes for the Future Freedom Foundation, and other places.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
Hey Scott, it's great to be back.
Hey, how's it going up there in Minneapolis, man, sounds like you're having a pretty good time.
Yeah, it's going very good.
I'm here in the Target Center, the big day is today, the rally is going to begin in about an hour.
I just was at Ron Paul's press conference, I walked out of it, but what was really interesting there was he's still being asked the same silly questions, like, are you afraid you're going to hurt McCain, you know, stuff like that.
Oh, I'm sure he's really afraid.
Oh yeah, he's shaking in his boots.
But I'm having a very good time, so far I've been to some of the conferences on politics, and last night there was a great little concert-type event, Ron spoke at it, and there were a number of musicians, Amy Allen and others, and it was at the Sports Center in the town of Blaine, and that was really great, and what I really have come to believe so far here is that we are looking at this realignment that you and I are always talking about, and that you're always talking to Glenn Greenwald about, and that all of us libertarians and decent leftists and decent conservatives who, whatever our disagreements, especially on these kind of hot-button social issues, there are a lot of us who just want freedom, who want to see the wars end, who want to see the police state dismantled, who want to see the corporate state curbed, who just want some of our freedom back, and you know, we'll disagree on the precise destination, but finally we're seeing a movement develop all around that same direction, which is more freedom and less tyranny.
And you know, they would try to portray, I think, on TV, I mean, if they could even understand it all, or even really give it a shot, they would probably say that Ron, well, I don't know, because they get confused on the war issue, but I think they would probably consider him to be far to the right, they would consider the leftists who are not supportive of the Democratic Party to be far to the left, and that kind of thing.
But really, it seems to me, especially when you take a look at a character like Ron, he's actually not all the way to the right or the left, he's actually a real moderate, that's what makes him such a libertarian, is that he's really not for using force on anyone, and that's why so many people from the left and the right can rally around his same message.
It seems like, you know, when people divide themselves in left and right, that's only going to be, you know, kind of vague and, you know, an approximation at best, seems to me like there are a lot of people on the left and the right who see the real center as a place where they would like to be, a place where there's opposition to aggression, rather than the so-called moderates who are really the extremists, the centrists like, well, you know, conservative Democrats like Joe Biden, or liberal Republicans like John McCain, people like that who are the extremes in the center, we need a real moderate center to oppose them.
Well, Sharon, you know, these labels, all these labels have some use in thinking about these ideas, but they also have limits, and as you and I think at least some of your listeners know, I've not been a big fan of the conservative movement for some years.
It became ever more clear during the Bush years how bad the so-called right, as it's understood to be, is.
But I'll tell you, over here, there's a lot of people who think that what we are is we're the real conservatives, and there are other people who think that's not true at all.
And for the most part, all these people, they're getting along, because whether you want to say we're the real moderates or the real conservatives, or as I've said at times, the real liberals if you go back to what liberalism was about before it was corrupted by the socialists, however you want to put it, we can disagree about this, and we can talk about this, but the element in common here is freedom and peace.
And people understand that.
The media might say, you know, Ron Paul is on the far right, or he doesn't seem to be on the right at all, because he's against McCain on the war.
But what's really encouraging is we're seeing the important ideas come through.
So I'm willing to call us moderates, new leftists who understand economics, old rightists, whatever, you know, Americans, patriots, independents, classical liberals, radicals.
As you know, I'm an anarchist myself, but what's great is that, you know, if we get our freedom back, it's not going to be only people like you and me, though I'd like to think we could be some small part of showing the way to the destination you and I would like to go, which is pretty far radical.
But for now, there's a long trip away from this totalitarian trend, and Dr. Paul is riding a bus filled with a very diverse coalition of Americans who want to go in that direction.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I'm reminded of that South Park episode where they're fighting about the war and where it simply just gets divided.
The town is divided by country and rock and roll.
And if you like rock and roll, then, well, you're more or less a liberal.
And if you like country music, you're more or less a Republican.
And then any, apparently, agreement on any issue is simply expected to just fall into those categories and that kind of thing.
I think that's really our big problem is because of this two-party system, you get half the people who love liberty compromise in favor of the right, half the people who love liberty compromise in favor of the left, and the rest of us are, you know, kind of left here standing out all alone.
Well, you know, and what's great is that Ron Paul has been very good about explaining this kind of stuff.
He's not just up there.
Well, he's obviously hasn't just been up there trying to win, and he's not even just up there trying to push his particular platform, but he's giving kind of a lesson on philosophy and what it means to believe in freedom in this country.
He was asked today at the press conference a rather conventional question.
I don't even remember what it was.
I apologize for that.
But he answered it, but he began to talk about how the problem is they've divided freedom.
They've split the people who want freedom.
So we have, you know, many conservatives do want all sorts of their freedoms back, but they don't believe in freedom by and large for, you know, foreigners who are attacked by our weapons, our military.
They don't believe in personal liberty, civil liberty, a right to control your body.
And at the same time, people on the left, they tend to be better on all of these questions, but they don't see it as a unified package.
And Ron Paul has been explaining, the thing that's really great about this is he's brought this diverse group of people together with disagreements on all sorts of issues, minor and not so minor, but he's also educating and radicalizing his movement, and explaining that really the center of this movement is libertarianism.
And you might be more of a paleoconservative, or you might be more of a, you know, somewhat old-school liberal who wouldn't agree with the paleoconservatives on everything.
You might be whatever you are.
He is trying to make the central kind of sticking point of this the idea of liberty itself and freedom from government itself, and it's quite a wonderful thing.
And it's great that this is still going on.
You know, they asked him why he was running.
Now it seems pretty clear he's not going to be president, but he still has, you know, 10,000-some people in this room tonight at the Target Center.
And there are still a lot of people interested in him, and this is because, you know, although as you and I both agree, Ron is quite a great spokesman for liberty, it's not, it's never really...
You know, Obama said recently that what people never, what the conservatives, what his critics never got was that it's never really been about him, Obama.
Well, I don't know how true that is, but we know that in a very real sense, Ron Paul doesn't believe this is about him.
It's about the promise of a free America.
It's about being able to keep the fruits of your labor, to not be spied on without a warrant, to not be, you know, locked up into our prison camps at home for victimless crimes, to not be bombed by U.S. bombs in an undeclared war.
And he sees it all as the same, you know, basic principle, and he's helping to radicalize and educate this very diverse coalition of fellow travelers for freedom.
Well, I hope you have a chance to give him my line.
I hope he uses it.
I think it would be funny.
I know that he wouldn't, you know, really make an attempt to continue running for president at this point or anything, but it could at least make a funny line, I think, that Obama and McCain, Biden, and who knows about this Palin lady, but who cares, that they're all close enough together that what really ought to happen is that Obama and McCain ought to run together, and they could be the war party, and then we could have actually a two-party system in this country and have the Democratic Republicans, the Jeffersonian Republicans, form around Ron Paul, and then we'll have one party that believes in taxes, tyranny, and mass murder on, you know, from now into infinity, and then we could have another party that believes in liberty and a limited constitutional government protecting the Bill of Rights and that kind of thing.
Well, sure, you know, and I think that many, probably most Americans would be receptive to this, which is why the majority of eligible voters don't vote, and they're not really interested.
It's not because they don't care about their country, but because they know that with some minor differences, and maybe some not-so-small differences abroad in any given election, it's hard to know, you know, which candidate is going to be worse, but they know that in the end, both parties are virtually identical.
I mean, the bottom line is, if there's going to be only two big parties in this country, Obama and McCain should be in the same one.
Now, they should perhaps be in different factions of the same party.
They do have some disagreements.
Heck, I would bet they'd disagree even more if they were in the same party, so one of them got the nomination, and then they'd all fall in line, but yeah, I think that it's very true that if Obama and McCain were running on the same ticket, certainly I felt that way in 2004, when Bush and Kerry would speak.
Yeah, the Skull and Bones party.
Right, right.
Now, I think that Obama's a little bit... he tries to have it both ways on a lot of issues.
He tries to cut taxes and raise taxes, cut bureaucracy and increase the size of government, wage more war but be more peaceful, and so forth.
I think McCain is a little bit more consistently bad on issues like war, whereas Obama is bad, but sometimes he pretends that he's not for war.
And in some ways, you know, you've got to appreciate McCain's honesty, that he's never made anyone question his willingness to go drop bombs and invade countries.
I mean, when you say this is true, he's pretty clear about at least that part of his platform.
Right, he's flop-flopped on everything else, but not mass murder.
He's always consistent, consistently for mass murder.
You're right.
Those two parties are part of the establishment.
They're the same party.
You know, Butler Schaefer likes to say they're two wings on the same bird of prey, and I've heard you talk, I think, with Lew Rockwell about that.
And you know, this is cliche, but sometimes you've got to repeat them, because it's so true.
And one problem with Obama is I think he started to make people forget just how warmongering and corporatist the Democrats are.
I think in the last couple weeks, maybe some of his progressive supporters might have become a little bit, they might have realized this a bit with his warmongering a couple months ago with his sellout on our civil liberties on the FISA bill.
But all in all, the game, the name of the game of those two parties is to trick the population into thinking they're different, to split America.
And Ron Paul, you know, he's not about splitting or dividing.
He's about uniting around the one value that at least ostensibly defines us as Americans is that we believe in our freedom and we respect the freedom of others.
Well, speaking of which, and I know you've got to go on, I need to let you go, but answer me one more thing.
I've seen some shocking video of Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!
, being arrested.
I've seen goons dressed up like, you know, Emperor Palpatine's clones from Empire Strikes Back going around bludgeoning people, raiding people's homes and locking them inside.
I don't know if you've been reading Greenwald's blog about people basically held hostage in their own homes, surrounded by cops and searches without warrants, lawyers going to jail.
Is this just the left wingers being picked on up there?
What about the, how are the cops treating the Ron Paul kids?
And the flip side of that, why are you guys out there backing up those leftists when they're getting their civil rights violated?
Well, you know, some of us are.
I met a young Ron Paul supporter last night who, when she heard about these raids against the so-called anarchists, now, of course, I disagree with some of their politics, but if they're being peaceful, that's that.
And surely what they're saying that these protesters are doing is very exaggerated.
They say that the, I've heard, they were trying to spread rumors that they're blowing up buildings.
I heard these rumors over here through police, police talking about these rumors.
And I immediately thought, well, you know, in the history of America, so-called anarchists have what, destroyed maybe 10 buildings compared to the Republicans, thousands of buildings they've bombed.
But putting that aside, this young Ron Paul supporter, this young lady, she went to go videotape at least to see these crackdowns, to went to St. Paul and to look at all these people being rounded up and arrested on basically no charges, you know, preemptively struck by the police state over here.
And she ended up getting pepper sprayed.
So a lot of the Ron Paul supporters here have been wrapped up in this convention, and they haven't made their way over there, but I've met at least a few who have, and a few who've paid at least a minor price trying to just stand up.
And of course, she's a, she seems like a very civil person.
She said she just wanted to videotape what was going on, and she ended up being collateral damage.
So, uh, the people here are very sympathetic.
Even the conservatives here, very upset about the, uh, the crackdown on the, uh, left protester.
Well that's good to hear.
And you know, this is a pet peeve of mine because this is amendment number one.
They, it is against the law.
It is actually, I don't know, a crime.
I'm not sure exactly if the bill of rights amounts to, you know, criminal statutes or whatever, but they are forbidden, the government, they are forbidden from violating people's right to speak freely and to assemble peacefully, period.
It doesn't say, Oh, I mean, unless they feel like it and don't want to give you a permit and feel like letting siege to your house and not let you out of it in time for the protest or it doesn't know.
What it says is that, uh, they are forbidden from doing those things.
Well, it seems that, uh, most, most of the major, what we see when the police do something like this.
So Glenn Greenwald says this is one of the, uh, most horrendous examples he's seen in, in living memory.
This is really up there.
Um, yeah, they, they definitely dispense with the first amendment.
They don't really care about the bill of rights at all, as you know, and they don't care about the principles of, of liberty.
And you know, I, I, I, one of, uh, a Ron Paul, a supporter who's, uh, an anarcho-capitalist, she, I heard she was talking to the police and said, you know, I'm, I'm an anarchist.
I'm not dangerous.
Um, but, uh, they didn't, they really didn't, they didn't like that.
And I mean, she got out okay, but it's, it's kind of, it's kind of creepy because there was a time in this country that simply being called an anarchist, you could get in a lot of police trouble.
Some people have been deported during the, in the wake of World War I, people were deported for being anarchists and not every single one of them was violent and they deported people to Bolshevik Russia.
And so they, they fit in better there now, um, thankfully I don't think they're mass deporting people for their political opinions yet, but it is a scary, it's a very scary thing that the government can say they're anarchists on the loose and people feel like it's the boogeyman.
Right.
And feel like they're justified then in violating those people's rights as though they're all simply outlaws themselves.
And this is something that I don't agree with some of what they do.
You know, when they break a business windows, I think that's a crime and I don't think that the police handle the crime the right way, but I, I don't adore everything that they do and I don't even think most of them are anarchists.
But if you want to talk about the real criminality, it's the archists, it's the, it's the statists, it's the people who are supporting the regime who support the most political violence, not the people who are peacefully opposing the regime.
Well, you know, what's funny is I got the C-SPAN 2 stream going here in my peripheral vision cause I'm waiting for the rally for the Republic coverage to start and I'm watching Bush up there giving a speech and people waving signs that say a safer America and, and, and cheering.
They loved this Bush guy like he was Barack Obama or something.
They still do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's really, what's really odd is to see McCain have to shore up support for himself by showing the conservatives that he really is more like Bush than they think he is.
And I mean, what a frightening prospect, you know, more of a warmonger arguably than Bush, more of a big spender than Bush, more ideologically opposed to freedom and its rhetoric other than Bush.
But don't worry, though he's worse than Bush in some ways, he's at least just as bad as Bush on everything else, so the conservatives should feel good about him.
Yeah.
I'm much more confident now.
Well, you know, there's this thing in the Financial Times today that points out that, you know, at least George Bush has a sunny disposition.
At least George Bush figures that everything's going to work out all right and maybe that's what helps get a lot of, you know, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered.
But it's kind of better than just waking up on the wrong side of the bed every single morning with this apocalyptic view of sacrifice and, and, you know, collective will that it's got to be exercised.
And that's kind of the way McCain looks at things, much more dangerous of view than than even Bush's.
Right.
I've heard I heard one conservative looking at it more in terms of domestic policy.
He said McCain is like Bush, but without the commitment to small government.
Yeah.
Or the debt, their sincerity, honesty of inquiry.
Right.
No, no, no.
I agree with you.
I mean, again, we can't predict how presidents will behave in power.
Power is very well, it does predictably corrupt, but we don't know what's going to happen when or if McCain wins.
I tend to think he probably will win.
But we we but from the looks of it, it's almost as though I would prefer four more years of Bush than McCain out, man.
I might even prefer four more years of Bush to Barack Obama.
At least he's tired.
Everybody who loves Bush is in this room right now on C-SPAN too.
The rest of us hate him.
We're probably better off like that.
Right.
And hey, keep in mind on C-SPAN too, there are also dozens of Ron Paul supporters there too.
So not everyone in that room loves Bush.
Even at the Republican National Convention, there are people who support Ron Paul's version of fiscal conservatism and prudence in foreign affairs rather than Bush's belligerent nationalism and profligate spending and total disregard for our civil liberty.
Hey, kid, thanks a lot for coming on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
And I'll talk to you soon.
All right, everybody, that's Anthony Gregory.
He is a research fellow at the Independent Institute, also writes for Jacob Hornberger over there at the Future Freedom Foundation, and you can find him on the blog covering the Ron Paul revolution at the LewRockwell.com blog, LewRockwell.com slash blog.