All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today is Karen Katowski.
Her website is karenk4congress.com.
She's the famous Pentagon whistleblower who explained all about which neocons ensconced inside the American Pentagon lied us into war with Iraq with a bunch of bogus nonsense about weapons of mass destruction and friendship and ties between Al-Qaeda and the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein.
You can find her great archive at lourockwell.com.
And there's a ton of great articles by her there, of course, and all over the place and also about her.
Particularly, I'd like to recommend to you the Lie Factory by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest.
And then I guess also go to C-SPAN or just search for C-SPAN Q&A if you need to.
Brian Lamb is the name of the interviewer there.
I think the founder of C-SPAN and Karen Katowski spelled like Kwiatkowski or just pretty close.
Google will find it for you.
And the C-SPAN Q&A of hers, really the single best debriefing of this lady's experience as a lieutenant colonel watching the neocons lie us into war in 2002 and 2003.
And now, like I said, she's running for Congress.
Karenk4congress.com, Virginia's sixth district.
That's the northern Shenandoah Valley.
Correct.
Welcome back to the show, Karen.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for that great introduction.
And of course, you know, one of the things your listeners will know about the sixth district of Virginia, other than it's in the Shenandoah Valley, is that our current 10-term incumbent representative is Bob Goodlatte.
That's Mr. Stopa.
Oh, no.
He's the one that introduced it in the subcommittee and gave it to Lamar Smith, who then sponsored the bill.
But it was actually his, Bob Goodlatte chairs the Intellectual Property and Internet Subcommittee under the judiciary.
And it was his shop, his place, that put this together.
Now, is there like a big high-tech industry there in the Shenandoah Valley?
There is some, because we have a lot of universities.
But the main driver...
Well, first off, he took most of his money, like all of them did, from Hollywood, from the pharmaceutical industry, and to some lesser extent, the auto parts industry, basically looking, what I call rent-seeking, basically.
Let's change the law so I don't have to compete.
But in any case, we do have a company here in Harrisonburg, a very famous company, called Rosetta Stone, headquartered in Harrisonburg.
And of course, they make their living with language CDs, and I'm not sure if it's DVDs too, but they have a concern that these things are easily duplicatable and that people take their stuff and resell it and copy it, and that's a valid concern, but just like so many companies in the past, and even other countries like Japan, when faced with the threat of copyright infringement and violation, what they do is they innovate.
They change their business model.
And I don't know if you use Microsoft or not.
I mean, it's hard to avoid it.
Yeah, you have to, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, but the way Microsoft used to distribute their software, we all remember, we're old enough anyway, that they used to send little CDs and stuff.
And you could pass those around and share them with other people.
And they changed that model because they wanted everybody to buy their own.
That's their right, that they want to sell stuff.
And so they changed their software distribution model initially just with code numbers to activate and later with actual, you know, from the cloud downloads kind of thing.
And we accept that is okay.
That's the way they do business.
It works.
And, you know, they innovated.
I hate to say Microsoft innovated.
I'm not a huge fan, but they innovated and they competed.
So that's the answer to the problem of copyright violation.
But we have a guy, and there's lots of them in Congress, Bob Goodlatte's one of them, who believes that, you know, if people donate money and they want legislation written, well, my, by golly, they ought to get that legislation written, right?
They paid for it.
They ought to have it.
Well, that's right.
Well, now, so what about the people of the Shenandoah Valley, though?
Are they up in arms about this SOPA thing?
Do they know what that means and what's the big deal?
They do know what it means because we also, in addition to technology here, we're big farmers is what we are, farmers and there's older people and service industries, but we have a great number of universities.
And so with all your universities, you get your little technological corridors and your growth of innovative and entrepreneurial type stuff, a lot of it being in the information systems arena, engineering and technology, alternative energy, things like that.
We really have a lot of that here.
The people here who are under the age of 35 are repulsed by Bob Goodlatte.
And I'm, you know, I'm actually embarrassed to say that because I'm in the 66th district and it's really, really bad to have this guy that we all hold in contempt.
And it's not even on whether it's conservative or liberal, it's that he does not understand the nature of the free market.
He doesn't understand the nature of the internet and he doesn't respect or understand what it is that most of us do in the world that we live in.
Now, I'm not under 35, but I, I sympathize, you know, I understand and embrace that way of doing business.
Anyway, those guys are sick of him.
The college students have totally turned away.
In fact, one of the, um, you know, we have Liberty University.
Have you ever heard of Liberty University?
Yeah.
And that's Jerry Falwell's university?
That's Jerry Falwell's university.
It is a huge thing, much bigger than it was when he started it.
I mean, it has grown like a weed.
Uh, it, it's got a huge online community.
I think 65,000 students or something take online courses there.
Of course, a lot of that is funded by the federal government through the student loan program, you know?
So it's just like all other universities.
It's got its hand deep in the till, like all the universities.
I mean, this is a real, this is a bubble.
In fact, the, the higher education bubble we've talked about, I mean, you know, we can talk about it, the real thing, but all of those kids, uh, especially the Liberty kids.
And, and we also have, uh, other conservative schools here.
Uh, there's a, uh, I think a Mormon school here, Southern Virginia university run by the Mormon church.
And it is very conservative and we have Christendom college, uh, in our district or close to our district, uh, soon to be in our district with the new lines and that college is a Catholic college.
So we have lots of conservative kids and college Republicans and that kind of thing who typically can be counted on to support a Republican incumbent.
But Bob shot himself in the foot with SOPA.
These guys aren't going to, they're just sick of it.
So, uh, yeah.
So that's all good for my campaign.
I can't take any credit for it.
Um, I am on the right side of the issue as I naturally would be.
Well, sure.
I mean, besides Mitt Romney and what's going on with him over there at the, on the presidential level, this should be a good year for regime change on the house of representatives level.
Karen, I think you can do it.
I, well, I'll tell you what, um, I was just writing to a guy on Facebook message, a friend of mine up in Massachusetts, who I knew in the military and that he keeps tabs on the, on our campaign, he's donated to us and that kind of thing.
And he, uh, uh, we were talking and asked how it was going.
And I said, well, it's like, we're doing a, like an IFC fight, you know, mixed martial arts.
That's what we're doing.
Um, and, and when you're doing that against somebody who thinks that he is having a, I don't know, a sword fight and we're doing mixed martial arts with our own set of rules.
Um, you know, somebody is going to get hurt and it ain't going to be us.
So, uh, that's how we're running this campaign.
We have, uh, it's very interesting.
It's actually a lot of fun.
And as I'm thinking about it, you know, all the things that we're doing and of course we're learning, I'm not a politician, I've never campaigned for any political office before.
So a lot of this is new to us.
But what we're able to do, because he is locked into a path of government regulation of government spending.
This is a guy that has voted for, I think the past 11, uh, debt ceiling increases, including 2.4 trillion last, last July.
So this is a Republican who votes to borrow more money every time they ask him to.
I mean, this is the kind of guy he is.
So here we are, you know, we're, we're, we're able, he can't, he can't do anything.
He can't talk about what he does.
He can't talk about what he wants to do.
He can't talk about what he didn't do.
When he opens his mouth, you know, we kick him in the jaw.
So, and we do that every time.
Um, it's, it's really kind of fun in a way to, to be able to, uh, uh, be the David against this Goliath because well, you're going to need resources.
And the best way to get resources is to at least make people believe that you're already really making headway with the resources you got that you have a real shot at this, that they can be part of a winning thing, not some protest.
Let me tell you, let me tell you, um, just this past week.
I think two days ago, uh, one of the main bloggers over at bearing drift, which is a Virginia political blog, but it's for Virginia bearing drift is like the Republican blog.
And, uh, two days ago, guy posted, he said, he said, did what he said.
And they don't, I do not know this person.
He does not know me and he is not a supporter.
Okay.
He said three months ago, Karen Katowski's campaign was a long shot.
Now this is shaping up to be one of the most exciting races in Virginia.
Um, cause they don't, we don't have a lot left to look at.
There are a few primary challenges in Virginia.
And, uh, so they're looking at ours and everything we do get this ground and everything he does loses him ground.
Um, he's lost the under 35 vote for sure.
That's done deal.
So all we really have to do is what we've been doing and that's grassroots campaigning and bringing the people out.
All right, hold on.
We got 10 more minutes of this after the break.
Karen K for congress.com.
Karen Katowski.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Karen Katowski, heroic Pentagon whistleblower, former Lieutenant Colonel in the U S air force.
And now a candidate for the U S house of representatives.
And I'm biased as can be.
Cause I think Karen, didn't I tell you to please run for Congress like seven years ago or something?
You know what?
Thank you.
You did.
And I said, no, no, no, no, no.
For so many times, but this particular guy deserves to get taken out.
And it's right here.
Local.
It's something I can make a difference with, but let me tell you, I knew you had some stuff, like, what are we doing?
Website is not probably not have everything on there, but we've got some upcoming events and of course we've been doing some things.
I took a bonded term limit pledge.
You got a little bounce to that with that.
And that's, that's where I do a promissory note to pay.
And my, I designated the Mises Institute as my recipient.
If I turned out I'm lying, it's kind of a gimmick cause I'm not lying.
And I don't intend to stay for, for more than three terms and probably not that many, but anyway.
That's the kind of thing that touches a lot of people in our district, because this guy ran on term limits 10 times ago, 11 times ago, he ran on term limits.
And of course they all know him to be kind of a liar in that regard.
So there's some people that that's the only reason they're going to vote for me.
Just term limits.
It seems really simplistic.
Um, we, um, have an office opening up in Harrisonburg.
We've already opened it.
We have our open house, um, this Friday afternoon.
Uh, and I want to tell you what I also did last Saturday, which was kind of fun and it wasn't done really strategically, but we had been at a gun show that weekend, but we had to break away from the gun show to go to the sixth district unit Republican meeting of all the top Republicans in the sixth district.
They have a meeting every quarter.
We always attend.
And so I went open carry in the meeting and, um, trust me that that was talked about far and wide within, within an hour of that meeting, people were calling.
So it's, it's, uh, you know, simple things, uh, kind of, uh, you know, people aren't used to that kind of, uh, you know, really honesty and constitutionalism, just the fact that we're, and we're, and you know what, I'm doing it from stuff.
I learned from you, Scott, you know, antiwar.com, living, living it the way it should be lived and just, you know, I'm not, I'm not near the risk taker you are, but you know, I'm taking some risk, you know, and I want to tell you too, I'm not so sure about that.
I think I would say the exact same thing to you.
I just, I don't know.
I don't, I, I, I'm just the announcer over here.
I don't, I didn't do nothing.
Oh no, you're a radical.
You're a radical guy and they inspire me, but, um, I, we are going to do, uh, you know, in Virginia, you know, we only have two, uh, primary Republican presidential candidates on our, on our ballot.
It's Ron Paul and Romney.
These are the only two guys that got the 10,000 certified, uh, uh, but about petitions, you know, the petitions that they needed.
So there is a huge strategy here in Virginia amongst Republicans, which they talked about at the last meeting.
And you can read about it anywhere you want to within the Republican circles.
And that is in order to give Virginia delegates at the national GOP convention, some sway, some, some power, uh, they are actually pushing all Republicans if they so desire to vote for Ron Paul, because they're only bound to support Paul in that first round at the national convention and they want to be playmakers.
Of course, many Republicans here, you know, they, some like Romney, some like the other two guys and, and some like Paul, but since we only have a two man horse race in this on March 6th on super Tuesday, uh, you know, they're pushing for Paul.
So there's a huge likelihood that Ron Paul is, uh, is going to beat Romney in this race.
And I certainly, if it was my choice, it would be Paul, you know, all the way.
I am a great fan of his now on the 20th of February, I believe that it's the 20th.
There's a veterans for Paul March in DC.
You probably know about it.
Kokesh is doing it.
Uh, yeah, I heard a little thing, but I'm, I've been away, but okay.
I don't know much about it, but I am going to attend cause you know, I'm two hours West of DC, so it's not a hard thing.
So we're going to do that.
And I think they may have already done one March or I saw there was a YouTube, but I didn't watch it.
So maybe that was just a promo for it's still upcoming or I don't know.
I think it's upcoming.
Um, we did get an invitation and I might even get to speak and I'm hoping I do.
So, um, you know, I am doing that to reach out to that sector of, uh, you know, Republican and, and other voters, uh, here and to try to do what I can do to help, um, what I think is the best message.
I mean, and I use Ron Paul's economic platform when people ask about, well, what can you do?
What can you do?
Cause you know, I'm certainly not promising to bring back more federal goodies to the, to the district.
I mean, I I'm, I'm opposed to that on principle, but what can't, what we can do, you know, I look at Ron Paul's, you know, restore America plan.
I look at the cuts that he's making, they seem to make a lot of sense to me.
And I can, I certainly have been, you know, talking about those when we talk about, um, economics.
Uh, so anyway, you know, we're having, we're having a great time.
We're doing lots of, uh, different activities about every month or so.
We have something that we think is very odd and strange that we know our, our incumbent opponent will not do.
So, uh, anyway, we're having lots of fun and, uh, I think we're, I really believe, well, you know, I don't want to be overoptimistic, obviously, you know, the deck is stacked against this for sure.
It's hard to beat an incumbent, but if any incumbent can be beat, it's, it's Bob Goodlatte in the primary in 2012 after he tried to force through SOPA and he voted for more borrowing.
So now I think we can just take it for granted, uh, audience bear with us that this guy's just the run of the mill Republican with the kind of voting record we'd expect from him.
But what about you, Karen?
What are you good on?
Cause you know, especially for the very libertarian, they're going to be very reticent to support any congressional, anybody, right?
So you're going to have to be really Ron Paulian.
Yeah.
Well, I, the one I'm running on really is what a lot of people run on, but I actually mean it.
And that is some kind of a strict literalist interpretation of the constitution.
Um, I'm looking at, uh, uh, we don't want, if it's, if the spending is not authorized, I mean, really seriously, I would love to be calm very soon after being elected to become known as the other doctor.
No, I would love that.
Um, because that's certainly what I aspire to be.
And I also think, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm also doing things like running on a, you know, flashing congressional pay perks, eliminating the retirement program, uh, in eliminating the, the idea that they are, they are not bound by the laws that bind all other American citizens.
You know, if they pass the law, it certainly applies first and foremost to congressmen, um, those kinds of things, but mainly just the constitutional platform.
If it's not a federal responsibility, it shouldn't be funded.
It shouldn't be pursued.
It shouldn't be regulated.
It shouldn't be done.
So, um, you know, there's, there's ways to push back on those things.
I, I've told people already in a couple of different speeches recently that I intend or I expect to be known as one of the least, uh, popular congresspeople among the other congressmen, certainly amongst the old crowd.
Um, I think one of the big problems and one of the reasons all those so-called tea party candidates were elected and only about a fourth of them stood to their principles is three quarters of those guys are like a lot of people and they would prefer to be liked by the people that they hang around with.
Instead of being of actual service to the constituents that put them there.
So, um, you know, I'm kind of looking forward to that, but, uh, you know, I'm, I'm going to be a strict constitutionalist.
I'm going to be kind of a, uh, tight fisted, a bad-ass, I hate to say.
And, um, and that's what I'm going to do.
And I hope to inspire other congressmen who know that that's the correct way to go, that, that, you know, if there's a whole body of thought that says you can't save this country and I'm not running on, I'm going to save the country, but I think we owe it to ourselves and our kids and our grandkids to, to at least try to, and I think the way you try to, is you start doing things right and you don't make excuses for continuing down the bad path that we've been on.
And that is a, you know, it's a path of spending.
It's a path of socialism.
It's a path of war.
Right.
All those things.
And I, you know, I think Ron Paul does a great job of explaining how this is all in America's best traditions, non-interventionism, our bill of rights.
You know, how can you say our bill of rights is a fringe position?
It's our bill of rights.
Exactly.
It's not fringe at all.
It's mainstream.
And I think if more people in Congress and elsewhere, but particularly in Congress, like Ron Paul has done, we'll stand up and, and make the case that this is the American tradition.
Non-interventionism is the American tradition.
You know, uh, the, the bill of rights, did he say the constitution, a limited decentralized government is the American tradition.
This is not radical.
Uh, unless, unless you say, you know, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, all those guys are radical.
It's not radical.
It's, it's actually the right thing to do.
And I think if a person or a few people up there will stand up and make that case in a, in a, you know, in a non-intimidating manner, just make it in an honest manner.
I think a lot of the guys and gals up there will, will fall into place and they'll, you'll help.
I think we, I think I can help them gain a little backbone, gain a little courage because they'll see me and I'll say, well, there's old Karen, you know, and she's pretty little and she doesn't have any political experience, but you know, she's, she's not getting beat up too bad for standing on principle.
So maybe I can stand on principle too.
And I'm hoping that I can help other congressmen do what they know to be true.
Cause a lot of them know what the right thing to do is, but they're just scared to do it.
And so, you know, there's a lot of good things that we can accomplish.
And we certainly, I'll tell you, we, we intend to win.
And, and if there's listeners out there that'd like to support the campaign, we've got a website, you've got addresses, you can mail checks, you can deposit online.
We would, you know, we need your help.
Um, we're running a frugal campaign.
It's an active campaign and it's a winning campaign.
And I think, um, and I'll, you can talk to me on the 13th of June, but, uh, I think it will be a, a making history campaign.
This is the first primary he's ever had.
I'll be the first woman elected as a representative for the sixth district of Virginia.
We're going to be, you know, we're going to be doing some good things.
I'm really excited about this, Karen.
I can't wait to watch you in the floor of the house on C-SPAN.
Well, I'll tell you what.
Yep.
Yep.
Uh, it's, there is, there's a lot of just wonderful things that we can accomplish.
We already are an audience who've read your articles over the years that lourockwell.com want to hear you read them out loud on the floor of the house on C-SPAN, it's going to be the best of luck to you, everybody.
It's Karen K for Congress, Karen Katowski, heroic whistleblower, Ron Paulian, libertarian running for the house, Karen K for congress.com.
Thanks, Karen.
Okay.
Thanks a lot.
Talk to you later.
