All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Robin Korner.
He's a 30-something British permanent resident of the USA.
He's the founder and publisher of WatchingAmerica.com, an organization of 400 volunteers that is dedicated to translating and posting in English news and views about the USA from all over the world.
And he writes for The Huffington Post.
Welcome to the show, Robin.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, how are you?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us today.
You bet, my pleasure.
All right, so you quite famously, in Ron Paulian circles anyway, wrote this piece, If You Love Peace, Become a Blue Republican, just for a year.
State your case.
Well, two or three, what is it now, three or four years ago, we all got very excited because we thought that Obama was going to be the anti-Bush.
If you remember, many independents and people on the left, many liberals, were upset about all of the killing in foreign lands and the wars against countries that didn't threaten us.
We were upset again about the cronyism.
And under Bush, we talked a lot about Halliburton.
And we were also upset about the complete takedown of the Bill of Rights, the abrogation of very basic American liberties.
The Fourth Amendment is one that I think has been particularly put in trouble.
And so we all cheered Obama, not only Americans, but actually much of the world, because the election of Obama seemed to indicate that Americans had worked it out.
And we were looking for something new.
But now, of course, we see that Obama does all of the above.
We've had the extension and the increasing of the Patriot Act.
We've had yet more wars under Obama, not even with the approval of Congress in some cases.
And while I can talk about Halliburton, we're now quite rightly talking about Goldman Sachs and the rest of the crony crew.
So it seems to me that if you voted for Obama for good reasons, for the right reasons, the ones I've listed, as I would call them, then for consistency and to remain in good conscience, there's only really one place you can go now, and that is Ron Paul.
And that was the case I made.
And in the article that kind of took off, I said, look, I know that a lot of people who voted for Obama, to them, the Republican Party stinks, you know, the neocon, the religious right.
And, you know, there's a good case to be made that the Republican Party, as established, does stink.
But, of course, to do the right thing and to vote for the right candidate on principle is much more important than the particular party label that is attached to that party.
So I said, you know, if you want to give your kind of keep yourself separate, but become Republican to make sure Ron Paul gets the nomination, and then I hope the presidency, you could call yourselves blue Republicans, blue being the color of Democrats, of liberals in the United States.
And I think that little moniker, that little label, really caught people's imagination.
It's somewhat subversive of the left-right paradigm, which I think is very important and very nice.
And so, you know, here we are, and now I'm talking to you.
Right.
Well, you know, this is something that I've been, well, and antiwar.com, of course, in general, has been about for a long time, is this political realignment, where, you know, right now, the American spectator, the right-wing magazine, they're trying to say, what a liberal Ron Paul is because of the positions that you just mentioned.
But, you know, to hear Paul himself tell it, it's he doesn't like bipartisanship, but he loves coalition politics.
And, you know, that makes a lot of sense to me that, you know, never mind the political class in D.C. and New York, you know, in the media and all that, the rest of us can find that whether we're libertarians, liberals or progressives or conservatives of one stripe or another, that we all really, many of us anyway, agree on this most important issue of all, the world empire.
And it's perfectly conservative, perfectly libertarian, perfectly liberal to be completely against this and to recognize it as the source of so many of our problems, no matter which point of view you're looking at it from.
I love the way that you put that, because I happen to agree it's a source of some intrigue to me that where we are now in American politics, the Constitution is attached to notions of conservatism.
So we talk about constitutional conservatives, but we don't talk about constitutional liberals.
But if you actually read the Constitution, and I recommend that any American do that on a regular basis, you can see that it was a profoundly liberal document.
And interestingly, though, the people who were writing it didn't view themselves as progressives.
They viewed themselves as conservatives, but conserving liberality, conserving a liberal politics, basic liberal values that they thought was their right as Englishmen, you know, just a few generations beforehand.
So, and I think it would, I think, therefore, that what Ron Paul represents as a constitutional candidate is quite interesting, because I actually think, properly understood, the Constitution could be a point of, a point at which the left and right can come together, and can mutually recognize that the left-right separation that we've, you know, this game that we've been playing is really an illusion, because the Democrats and the Republicans, perhaps more accurately called just the elephants and the, you know, elephants and the donkeys, because it seems that that's what they usually are, agree on most things that matter, whilst appearing to oppose each other.
And, and now, I think, America is slowly waking up to the fact that what they really care about, what Americans really care about, and should agree on, are all of the things that the, that kind of oppose what the two-party duopoly has been doing to us for decades.
Right.
Yeah, the more, the more extreme the so-called moderate center is up there in power, the more obvious it is that actually the centrists in power there are the extremists.
They agree about everything horrible.
It's, it's those who agree about every, that what they're doing is horrible, who are the real moderates out here.
Ron Paul, people say what an extremist he is.
All he wants to do is stop counterfeiting money, stop slaughtering Pakistanis, etc, etc.
Yeah, yeah.
Stop jailing innocent people.
Yeah, stop murdering and stop stealing.
Now our political class is making people who believe those things, that we should stop murdering and stop stealing, out of the extremists.
And the moderate, the moderates are quite comfortable with murdering and stealing.
I think it is the sign of a, you know, of a derelict paradigm.
And I think we're living in interesting times, because we may not be at critical mass yet, but we're heading rapidly in that direction.
Yeah, well, you know, if I could, I'd try to talk Dennis Kucinich into running against Obama.
And then when he soundly defeats Obama in the primaries, then he and Ron Paul, after winning the Republican nomination, could then run together.
And then we'll have a brand new two-party system, us and them.
And then it'll be, you know, the people who care about the Bill of Rights and who want to end to corporate welfare and want to end to American imperialism.
We'll all take one of the parties, call them, say, I don't know, the Democratic Republicans, like Thomas Jefferson's party back in the days.
And then the other group will be the war party.
And we'll all know who they are, and we'll know their names.
And then we'll have a real democracy in America.
You know, I love that.
And it's quite interesting, because we have a, the Blue Republican article that I wrote, spawned a Facebook group, which now has more than 4000 members.
And it's growing quite rapidly.
And not long ago, I did a little poll question, completely unscientific, but it got hundreds of responses.
And I was asking the group, these people who were voting Republican, who were becoming Republican specifically for Ron Paul, if they had to choose between Dennis Kucinich and another Republican, Mitt Romney, who would they choose?
And quite remarkably, of the hundreds of people who voted, who answered that question, not one would take Romney over Dennis Kucinich.
And all of these people on the Blue Republican group who are now Republican, said they would take Kucinich, another Republican, if they voted for Kucinich.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, we got to take this break and your phone's messing up.
We'll start that last little part over again when we get back from this break.
It's Robin Korner from the Huffington Post, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Robin Korner about his Facebook group, the Blue Republicans.
That's at Facebook.com/Blue Republican.
And his very interesting and compelling piece at the Huffington Post, HuffingtonPost.com.
If you love peace, become a Blue Republican just for a year.
And of course, the subject here is getting our priorities straight.
What's most important?
We've got to end the wars.
Then we can reinstate our Bill of Rights.
Then we can end all this debt and deficit spending and price inflation and all the rest of what ails us.
We've got to stop the war.
We've got to stop finding each other so disagreeable about our other issues that we cannot work together on this.
It's got to be done.
And now I got to ask you, Robin, do you really think you can convince people who are, you know, never voted Republican proudly, never voted Republican in their life to sign up and go vote in a Republican primary for the only peace candidate running in 2012, Ron Paul?
Well, it's certainly happening.
I mean, I see a lot of movement on the Blue Republican Facebook group.
That's growing fast.
I've received a lot of messages and a lot of comments under my article.
I mean, I wasn't the first person to come up with this idea.
There are great, you know, private Americans all over the country that have already done it.
There are a lot more doing it now.
The question isn't if it can work.
It is working.
The question is, do we get to critical mass fast enough for the election?
And I think that if Ron Paul does get the nomination on the Republican side, I think he's going to win the presidency.
And I think it's very possible.
But it's only because there's so much uncertainty.
There is so much that we don't know.
And I think people, Americans, are getting to the point of realizing that the problem isn't just to have individual bad leaders, although we do.
It's that the system, as it's currently contrived, is incapable of delivering solutions.
You know, I think America is very ready for a phase change, for a paradigm shift.
You know, to say, finally, left versus right, as we discussed earlier, you know, doesn't scratch their itches.
Well, and you know, even if people still out there, you know, still love Barack Obama, still are loyal to him and are still certain that they would vote for him against any Republican, including Ron Paul.
Just think of the importance of having Ron Paul as Obama's opposition, as compared to somebody like Rick Perry or Mitt Romney.
Right now, all of the political pressure on Barack Obama is to never cut and run, to bomb, to expand, to, you know, put JSOC in even more countries, to keep Guantanamo open, or else he's a Muslim and he's selling us out to the terrorist enemies and all these things.
All the right wing attacks, the war party attacks that liberal Democrats have to face.
And then they, you know, not that he doesn't want to, I'm sure he relishes it, but there's all that political pressure to make him prove he's tough, etc.
Well, what if all of the right wing attack message on him?
What if the campaign was all about how he's not peaceful enough?
What if all the pressure on Barack Obama was to really follow through with his promises and end these wars because he's being mercilessly attacked for the right for not ending them?
And that's, it's an entirely different question of how the 2012 campaign would play out, even if Obama did win and Ron Paul lost.
It would still be a hell of a lot better than a campaign than having him defend himself from charges by Rick Perry that he's been in power for four years and hasn't nuked Iran yet.
I agree with you completely.
I mean, given that there really isn't anything to play for on the Democrat side, I don't see why a principal Democrat, liberal, progressive, the lover of peace would not try and influence not only this election in exactly the way that you said, but that would change what the Republican Party is.
I mean, the jolt that that would give the identity of the Republican Party back in a direction, back into kind of the identity that it used to have in many ways.
You know, a healthier, non-interventionist conservatism, a peaceful conservatism.
I mean, that's a much better spectrum on which to conduct American politics going forward from the presidential election, whoever wins.
So I agree with you completely.
I don't see any reason why any lover of peace or indeed any serious principal Democrat would not become a blue Republican to make sure that Ron Paul wins his party's nomination.
All right.
Now, just in case you're a secret libertarian sleeper agent pretending like you're a liberal over at the Huffington Post, let me attempt to criticize you from the left and criticize your position from the left.
You support Ron Paul, but he's a horrible, mean, white, right winger Christian, and he's to the right of Jesse Helms and he hates poor people and he hates everything that's good, true and beautiful.
How do you defend against that?
I mean, it's complete tripe, isn't it?
It's a shame we even have to do this, but okay, you know, I'll play the game.
If anybody actually takes the time to listen to what Ron Paul said, it's so easy to do because, you know, he's done hundreds of interviews maintaining consistent positions, you know, which are all on YouTube or whatever it may be.
He makes the point that his libertarianism is incompatible with, well, let's say, take the racism because you mentioned that one.
And I think that is true.
If you have a politics that is all about the rights of the individual, seeing people, seeing the rights and responsibilities as attached to individuals rather than groups, you cannot consistently be a racist.
And, you know, if you actually look at the things that he's been caring about, sometimes alone, among all his political colleagues for many years, take the war on drugs, take the justice system that incarcerates hugely, proportionally more black than any other ethnic group in this country.
Ron Paul has been calling that out for years.
And, you know, I just don't think it holds water.
I also do think it's important to mention for people on the left, with whom I agree, particularly on issues like that Ron Paul's politics is quite different from the politics that we've experienced in America in the last 10, 20, even 30 years, because what he is not trying to do is shape the country in his vision.
So, for example, he is pro-life, and his personal belief is that abortion is wrong.
I disagree with him on that.
But the reason I am not, therefore, scared of a Paul presidency is he does not believe it is the federal government's job to ban personal choice-making, right, whether it be abortion or anything else.
He doesn't want to interfere in personal choice-making.
He doesn't want federal bans on abortion.
He doesn't want federal bans on gay marriage.
So, the interesting thing about Paul is his personal opinion about specific political issues is going to have a lot less effect on America than we are used to.
And I think...
You know, I'd like to point out, too, that on economics, he says all the time, you look at what the Federal Reserve does, it's dumping on the poor people in order to save the very richest, politically-connected people on Wall Street.
That's always his message, is that it's the poor who are being ripped off by all this inflation.
Absolutely, that's a very important point to make.
Ron Paul is always trying to make the point, which is hard to do in soundbite, that the monetary system is geared systematically to move wealth from American workers to the people who create money, who create money as debt and charge interest on it.
The system is rigged to move assets to them.
And you've mentioned inflation and the manipulation of currency.
To really understand that, you have to stop and listen to one of Ron Paul's two- or three-, four-, five-minute monologues that he sometimes does.
These issues are more complicated than can be described in a 30-second answer to a simple question.
Well, I had a short one, which is, I know people believe, and I can totally understand how a liberal would believe, that here Ron Paul wants to set the corporations free to do anything they want to us.
But if you listen to what he says, he wants to set them free to fail.
He wants to stop allowing the state to protect the richest, most powerful corporations from the forces of us, the marketplace, trying to put them in check.
Absolutely.
Let's be very clear that it was both the left and right that consistently voted to bail out the banks.
And it's both establishment Republicans and Democrats that have happily gone along with our financial system throughout the last century.
And Ron Paul has not.
Ron Paul has been calling this out throughout his political career.
He predicted the mess that we were in, and he said it would be a travesty.
And so it is, and that it would hurt the poorest among us the worst.
Right on.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your efforts along these lines.
Again, everybody, I hope you'll check out, well, if you're a liberal, we don't need any false flag libertarians over there, facebook.com/blue Republican.
And check out Robin Corners' great piece at the Huffington Post.
If you love peace, become a blue Republican just for a year.
Thanks so much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
It's been great.
Check out watchingamerica.com, his website too, y'all.
