09/02/10 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

Who, me?
What?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
All right.
I'm here.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott.
All right.
Now's the part of the show where I get to welcome my friend Anthony Gregory.
Hey, kid.
How's it going?
Hey, Scott.
How's it going?
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, man.
How's things over there?
Up there, I guess.
Pretty good.
Well, you know, it's just the summer finally started in the last couple days.
It's getting warm.
So, it's Bay Area weather.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I went up there in July last year, and it was 45 degrees out.
Yeah.
Very strange thing.
Anyway, yeah, it's nothing like that here.
But, yeah.
All right.
So, anyway, do you guys know who Anthony Gregory is?
Hopefully, you do.
He writes for LewRockwell.com.
He's got an article on there today.
He's also something or other at the Independent Institute, one of the mucky mucks there.
And he's working on a book right now about the writ of Habeas Corpus.
That'll be the best treatment of that subject ever published, I'm certain.
And you can also find him at Strike the Root, where he's in, what do they call it, the guest editor there sometimes.
Yeah.
And all kinds of other things like that.
You ought to check out AnthonyGregory.com.
He's got links to all the most valuables there.
And now, Anthony, your article today on LewRockwell.com is called The Persistence of Red State Fascism.
So, first of all, what's red state fascism?
And then, what's so persistent about it?
Well, I'm of course biting off Lew Rockwell with this phrase that he coined in 2004 in identifying just how authoritarian the conservative side of America has become under Bush.
And this was, I think you'd agree, this was a pretty seminal article that he wrote, because it was really made very clear the line between what conservatives believe in the era of Bush and what we libertarians believe.
And the persistence of the red state fascism is just this piece I wrote talking about how horrible it is that even with the election of Obama, although in some ways conservatives are not quite as pro-government and quite as bad as they were at the height of Bush, they're still very bad.
And while it's kind of just a depressing reflection on how, from a libertarian standpoint, from a pro-peace standpoint, there's not that many people to cheer for other than some of the more principled writers and activists all over the spectrum, including the libertarians themselves.
Well, you know, it's this wonderful scam they call the two-party system, one party to supposedly represent the liberals, the other the conservatives, and then we can switch them off every eight or even four years if necessary, without ever leading to a substantial shift in policy.
That's what Carol Quigley wrote about ten years before I was born.
And that's the way it's been working.
And, you know, in the 1990s I saw, and I know you saw too, I got started hating government young, both of us did, the right wing in the 1990s, I'd say through 1997, hated the government.
You know, G. Gordon Liddy and them coined the phrase the jack-booted thugs to describe the ATF, the federal police, law and order enforcer types, right?
But it was a right wing thing to say, no, cops can go too far sometimes, and you know what, freedom is more important than the state, and things like this.
And there really was a very populistic, if not very libertarian, but somewhat libertarian kind of rebellion on the right, the Tea Party movement of that era.
And of course, you know, the media would only focus on the most extreme elements of that for propaganda's sake or whatever.
But then in 1998 they invented the Lewinsky scandal, and it was wonderful.
And they said, you know what was wrong with America in the 90s wasn't the national government.
It was Bill Clinton.
That guy's such a juvenile, and don't you just hate him?
And can't you just wait?
Don't you think it'll be great when we get some adults in there?
And then everything will be fine.
We'll bring change to Washington, D.C.
And that was the slogan of the Bush team in 2000.
And they came in, and now everything was completely different, and all the right wingers who hated the state became these red state fascists.
Well, that's true.
I'd say that certainly they used Clinton all throughout the 90s.
There was a tension in the conservative movement.
Should we focus on Clinton, the man who was supposedly disgracing the White House?
Or should we focus on the White House itself and how it was the disgrace?
And this was always a tension.
I will say that even as late as 98 and 99, there was some radicalism in the conservative movement.
In the Kosovo War, there was not nearly the anti-war movement anywhere that there should have been.
But I think conservatives, including the politicians, were better on that war than the left liberals.
Not the radical left, but the milquetoast left.
And I specifically remember when Columbine happened, it was conservatives who would say something like, well, Clinton's killing this many innocent people every day, or more.
So instead of focusing on taking away our guns, let's rein in the military.
I mean, this was what conservative institutions were saying.
They were opposed to nation-building and all the rest.
I think that even at the very beginning of the Bush administration, the conservative movement wasn't as bad as it became.
I think that the beginning of the Bush administration didn't seem to be on track to be much worse than the Clinton administration.
It was just kind of, you know, whatever.
Average Republican administration.
But then 9-11 brought out the worst in the conservative movement.
And I fear that the worst of the movement has yet to subside.
That they're still like they always are when they think American culture or the American nation-state is under attack.
And then nothing else matters.
We need to worship the state, worship the military, support the troops, which means sending them to go kill and die in completely immoral wars.
This is conservatism, and it always has been conservatism, but certainly it ebbs and flows in terms of how bad it is.
And what I lament in the piece today is that it has not improved nearly enough with Obama in power.
Well, you know, I think one thing that's really happened to the conservative movement is that, you know, what passes for intellectualism in the conservative movement now is the American thinker blog.
You know, where that guy's never been right about nothing over there, I don't think, which I haven't read the thing in a long time.
But like, boy, you talk about wallowing in ignorance and hatred and stupidity.
And now there is no more William F. Buckley who, you know, tried to set a standard of like, hey, it's important to, you know, be interested in the history of mankind at all or something like that.
No, now we got Jonah Goldberg running the conservative movement, you know, the intellectual side of it.
Sure, and you know, it's a sad thing that...
And he's a dummy, that's my point.
I mean, we've talked about Glenn Beck, and I actually think, I talk about this in the article, how frightened I was by his big rally this last weekend.
But it's sad that in some ways Beck is more intellectual than most movement conservatives, because he at least attempts to talk about history in a somewhat thoughtful way.
I'm not, you know, endorsing everything he says.
But, you know, he at least has the pretense of thinking, all the while saying that, you know, he's not an intellectual we should look to.
But it's a sad thing that he is what people are drawn to, and that he's not even the worst of it.
If you look at, you know, the right-wing press today, what's the big issue?
It's still, you know, they're not talking...
Once in a while they talk about how Obama is sending us into calamity and all of this.
But they're still obsessed with things like the mosque.
I mean, that's one of the biggest issues still, is let's stop the mosque.
Let's use the force of government to prevent people from preying on private property, which is an affront to everything that this country stands for that's good.
Everything about the American, you know, tradition that's worth preserving.
It might be the last thing that was worth conserving.
We'll be right back.
It's Anthony Gregory on anti-war radio with you guys and me.
That's forum.lrn.fm Hey everybody, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
It's anti-war radio.
Talking with my buddy Anthony Gregory about red state fascism in the age of Obama.
Wouldn't it be nice if the opposition party out of power at any given time really meant what they said about, even just the Bill of Rights, forget the rest of the Constitution.
It hadn't been such a thing since at least TR.
So, you know, but the Bill of Rights, man, fair trials and protection from torture.
And, you know, the right to speak freely and assemble peacefully in these kinds of protections, man.
We're going to go ahead and get rid of that too.
We can't even get the party out of power to have their head together about the Bill of Rights, Anthony.
That's what it seems like to me.
Well, I think that's true.
I mean, you, of course, you're mentioning the protections in the Bill of Rights that conservatives tend to be weaker on anyway, just ideologically.
But I think one problem...
Yeah, they want to go on and on and on about how they're coming for the guns when they're not coming for the guns.
They know that there's already 500 million guns in this society and that they can't take them.
And just the act of registering them means that they...
Just the stack of hard drives of the registration means they take one look at that and they know they can't take our guns.
Give me a break, dude.
It's the rest of them that are under the most threat right now, the other nine.
Yeah, but I will credit the conservatives.
I mean, if it weren't for them, maybe they would try to take the guns.
So the reason, you know, it's kind of like a...
Why is it that they don't try to take the guns?
Well, I'm from Austin, and in Austin, even the hippies have giant rifles that you've never seen before, man.
Yeah, but Austin is an anomaly within the country now.
Well, yeah, that's probably true.
There are hundreds of millions of privately owned firearms, though.
No, I know, I know.
And I'm just saying that it's a good thing that Americans are jealous about the...
I wish Americans were paranoid about their First Amendment rights and their Fourth Amendment rights because conservatives are paranoid about their Second Amendment rights, that's all.
There you go.
Because some people say we're paranoid.
They say, oh, they're not going to come round up the Muslims.
They're not going to...
But it's hard to know what's paranoia anymore, because if we had talked about how we'd have secret trials, presidential rights to assassinate anyone, torture, warrantless wiretapping just done, willy-nilly, essentially by the military wing of the state, if we said all that ten years ago, people would say that we were crazy, right?
But now, not only was this law everything the Bush administration did, but now the Obama administration's doing all of it, and so now it's just the bipartisan nature of America that we are...where, you know, these police state practices are just normal.
And this is one problem with having the left in power.
Civil liberties takes a major hit, because when the people out of power are the conservatives, they're only so good at resisting civil liberties encroachments.
I think the left is more adamant about it when they're out of power, and so it's just... it's messed up, because the people who would be talking more about torture and indefinite detention, a lot of them have stopped talking about it.
Of course, all of the great writers that you and I both like, they still talk about it.
The ACLU still talks about it.
Glenn Greenwald still talks about it.
But the progressives, they've kind of sold out, at least somewhat, because they want to defend their president.
They like the president's domestic policy.
They like the stimulus.
They like the healthcare.
And so they're a little bit cautious about pointing out that Obama is an imperialist war criminal, just like Bush.
And then now we have the right, which doesn't think Obama is an imperialist war criminal.
They think he's non-imperialist enough.
And so this is just... it's a terrible dynamic in which to define ourselves, as it concerns civil liberties in particular.
Well, I guess there's also the thing, too, where as the parties in power switch and the lingo switches from the jargon of state justification to, well, maybe not so much or whatever.
I mean, you're right that obviously the vast majority of right-wing criticisms of Obama are completely wrong-headed and off-base, as bad as he is.
But at the same time, being libertarians and being above and outside this ridiculous left-right spectrum, we get to collect those who wash out when the switch happens, too, right?
So I get emails that say, yeah, man, I guess I was a lefty for a long time.
And then it seems to me like the Ron Paul libertarian types are the only ones who really hate war, and really it's not about which politician they favor.
They really hate war.
So that's where I am, man.
I'm with you guys now.
And same thing hopefully on the right.
More and more of these guys are going to realize that the real...well, the intellectual heritage of people who hate the state are classical liberals, not conservatives.
And that if they really hate the state, then they've got to admit that it's time to change their mind about some things, if they want a little consistency in their life and whatever.
So every crisis is an opportunity, like Condoleezza Rice and Rahm Emanuel said, right?
Well, sure.
And I think you touch on an important point there, that although there are many leftists and even some conservatives who are just kind of unusual conservatives who do hate war, I think that we hate war the most.
I mean, I don't want to get into some sort of childish contest about this, but I've heard liberals accuse libertarians of not really caring about the war except maybe because it costs money.
And maybe this is true.
Some people would call themselves libertarians, but I mean, we've talked about this at length, Scott.
War is the total negation of everything we stand for.
It always is the total negation of it.
There's nothing about war we like.
Yes, the taxes alone make war pure evil, but then infinitely worse than that, war is the mass murder of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of innocent people and there's nothing that's conceivably worse to the libertarian mind.
I mean, it's like the entire destruction of every principle we hold dear all at once in a concentrated and yet very huge manifestation.
I mean, it's just, what's worse than war?
And so we hate war so much that it is particularly frustrating for us to see conservatives kind of give half a critique of nation building because they don't think we should spend all this money on this war.
Or left liberals who throughout the Bush years, even most left liberals, they said, oh, we shouldn't be in Iraq, we neglect Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was the real war.
Well, look at what's going on.
Iraq, certainly the war hasn't ended there, but it looks like the future of US foreign policy is more in Afghanistan and that's where the bloodshed is going to be, that's where the resources are directed and destroyed.
And this is the liberal war, this is the war.
Now, of course, today, many left liberals are still better on this war than the conservatives are, and that's one reason I'm so hard on the conservatives is because even when they're out of power, they're worse on war.
But if you really hate war this much, how could you, even if you're for national health care, how could you support the guy implementing it when he's blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands?
I mean, you know.
I'm sorry we have to leave it there, Anthony, but we're all out of time, dude.
We've got to go on to the next interview, but I really appreciate your time on the show today.
I hope people will read The Persistence of Red Statism.
You had one about blue state fascism as well, and they're all there, and they're all about fascism.
And they're at LewRockwell.com slash Gregory.