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All right, our next guest is Will Grigg.
Thank goodness.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
Will, how are you?
Scott, I'm doing well, and I always appreciate the opportunity.
Yeah, well, I'm extra lucky.
I got to have you on the show twice in a row like this.
Well, so here's the deal.
There's a big controversy about an American sniper who got killed.
He was kind of a minor celebrity of some kind, and he got killed.
And then there's a big reaction.
Ron Paul sent out a tweet, and then people got fighting.
And I was thinking, well, you know who's good on Ron Paul and Jesus and conservatism and this specific sniper, Will Grigg.
So I thought I would have you on to comment and tell us what you think about all this mess.
First of all, I guess, could you explain the background of the situation we're talking about for people not familiar?
They'll find out why it's important here, I think, pretty soon.
Chris Kyle is considered to be the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history.
And a little more than a year ago, he published a memoir that I've reviewed in my blog, Pro Libertate, and my interest was piqued by the fact that he was even then becoming, as you say, a species of celebrity.
He's now, of course, a variety of martyr in some precincts to the right.
He thrust himself into celebrity by telling what appears to be a grandiose fib about an encounter he supposedly had with Jesse Ventura during a funeral for a fellow SEAL back in 2005 or 2006, in which Jesse Ventura supposedly went to a SEAL hangout and insulted all the SEALs present and said that he had wished that more of them had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And of course, Jesse Ventura, whatever else you think about him, would never say something like that.
But the way that Chris Kyle told the story, he sucker punched Jesse Ventura and then ran.
And when Ventura was asked about it, he said it never happened.
The owner of the bar will verify that this never happened.
There's no police report of what will be considered an unprovoked act of assault.
And he was offended for the honor of the SEALs by Chris Kyle's behavior because he doesn't think that a SEAL is the sort of a person who would sucker punch a man in middle age who's partially disabled and then run from the conflict.
And so out of zeal for the honor of the Navy SEALs and that fraternity, Jesse Ventura was demanding that Chris Kyle own up to the fact that he had told the fabrication.
As I understand, there was going to be a lawsuit filed or there had been legal action pending at the time that Chris Kyle was tragically killed at a shooting range in Texas.
But the thing about his memoir that I found really unsettling is the fact that he was being hailed for his courage and intrepidity because he would kill from a great distance from behind a barricade of shadows people who were defending their country against foreign invaders.
And nowhere in his memoir does he recognize the admitted courage of people who were fighting a desperate battle on their home soil with their faces to the enemy and their backs to their homes in the context of a war against a prohibitively stronger foreign aggressor.
As a matter of fact, there are a couple of instances where he heaps a great deal of abuse and vituperation upon people who had either killed or in one instance somebody had brutalized while he was helping to enforce a U.N. trade embargo.
He actually was part of a group that boarded a commercial vessel that was breaking a U.N. enforced embargo.
And when an unarmed captain who was much smaller than Mr. Kyle, Mr. Kyle was about six foot three and probably 230 to 250 pounds.
When Kyle boarded his ship, this man acting with desperate and doomed courage actually charged him.
This is an invader quite a bit larger than him who was kitted out in body armor and carrying weapons.
And Kyle hit him in the chest with the butt of his machine gun.
And that said something to the effect that he was stupid for resisting.
I don't think that's stupidity at all.
I think that's courage.
I think that's nobility.
But his was that species of courage that is manifest by killing people on the command of the state and generally in circumstances where he has once again a prohibitive advantage.
And so you could say that he was certainly fierce.
Apparently, he was shot on a couple of occasions.
And on one occasion, when he was taking six months furlough at home with his wife and children, there was a home invasion at his household.
And he reacted with proper courage in trying to find out who it was who'd invaded his property and threatened his family.
But he couldn't understand that he was acting out of exactly the same commendable impulse in that one instance that was displayed by the people who were fighting against the American invasion of Iraq.
He didn't understand that they were motivated by pretty much the same considerations that led him to grab his gun and try to pursue the individually characterized as the son of a bitch who invaded my home.
Well, that's exactly what the Iraqis were doing.
But he doesn't seem to have understood that.
And that, once again, is a type of bullying impulse that I think characterizes much, if not most, of the right and has for some time.
Now, and see, here's the thing about it, too.
I mean, a lot of guys, well, millions of guys by now served and serve so-called, you know, had a job in the armed forces in Iraq and or Afghanistan by now.
And so, you know, again, and you said it was a tragedy that he got killed earlier in the thing.
It's not like we're sitting here doing a victory lap or something that the guy got killed.
It's just not at all.
It's a it's a it's a controversy right now, because unlike the vast majority of those millions of guys who served over there or whatever, did their job over there, he went around bragging about it all the time and and, you know, was remorseless.
And I don't know if he called them, you know, Hodges, but at least call them savages and and inhuman and all these kinds of things, as you quote in your review of his book, which, again, I guess I didn't say this, but you wrote your review of his book back when it came out.
It's not like it was February 8th of last year is when I published it.
Yeah.
So anyway, but the point being that this is not just, you know, a soldier like in the mythology.
We're like, hey, you know, I'm just doing my job to protect America.
And sometimes we have to do some pretty tough things, but we do what we got to do.
Now, this guy, there's nothing humble about it.
This is a bunch of chest beating.
Yeah, I shot those guys in the back.
All right.
And how do you like that?
And they didn't have the right to live anyway.
And that kind of thing.
And then so Dr.
Paul, who I know you're a fan of, same as me, he put out this this tweet quoting Jesus saying, if you live by the sword, you'll die by the sword.
And so everybody on the right completely.
Well, I don't know everybody.
Many people in right wing media completely flipped out about this and right wing politics.
And I don't know if they even know that that, you know, that he's paraphrasing the King James Bible there or what.
But they just they just go after Ron Paul as though he's saying, you know, all soldiers deserve to die or something like that, which is clearly not what he was saying.
He was saying, you know, bad consequences fall upon people who go about carrying out bad acts.
This is the same syndrome, if you will, that was on display during the South Carolina debate during the last presidential campaign, where Ron Paul was booed by an auditorium full of pious churchgoing Republicans for saying that the United States ought to recognize and carry out the golden rule in our foreign policy.
And that underscores something that I've long believed, which is that the quickest and most efficient way to get into trouble, if you were a sincere Christian, is to quote the words of Jesus regarding war and peace and liberty and justice.
The thing that I find interesting about Mr. Kyle is that once again, he's being breathed in a certain type of martyrdom.
And there's an interview which is circulating right now that he conducted, I believe, last July at megachurch Madrasa, as I characterize these gathering places in Dallas, called the Fellowship Church.
The pastor is a man by the name of Ed Young, and I've, in a Facebook post, referred to him as the Reverend Polyester Facelift of the First Church of America, hell yeah.
Because in this conversation, there is no discernible recognition that Christianity has something to do with the teachings of Jesus.
It's entirely a state-focused conversation.
And to the extent that one can judge Mr. Kyle's religious convictions on the basis of that conversation, it would appear that his religion was completely uncontaminated by the actual teachings of Jesus, unlike the convictions of Ron Paul, who, as Christian believers, would be expected to do, wants to apply the teachings of Jesus to every dimension of life, including what is done by way of officially sanctioned violence.
But the conversation between Pastor Young and Chris Kyle makes it clear that there is nothing quite so high and holy as killing on behalf of the state, and there's no moral imperative more important than obedience to constituted authority.
And if you translated that conversation into German and factored out some of the colloquialisms that contaminate it, there's nothing in that conversation that would have been out of place in a German nationalist church circa 1914, 1915, or 1936, or 1938.
It's the same message, which is that the state is supposedly the manifestation of God in the world, as Hegel pointed out.
That's from the first book of Hegel.
It has nothing to do with the New Testament, with the Synoptic Gospels, or the epistles of Paul.
This is something that is a reflection of the modern secular heresy that deifies the state, and that grants a certain sort of sanctity to those who kill on its behalf.
And it's nauseating to somebody who actually believes in the message of the Christian Gospel, at least it should be.
Yeah.
Well, the Aztecs had that same religion.
It's not that newfangled.
Come on.
Exactly.
My Aztec ancestors would rip the living hearts out of sacrificial victims on the altars of Huitzilopochtli, and they would pronounce similar conjurations in the Nahuatl tongue.
It is, as you say, a portable message.
It's not something distinctive to what's going on in the Bible Belt today.
But once again, for somebody who embraces the golden rule, the non-aggression axiom, as Dr. Paul does, it really shows the great divide between our professed beliefs as a country, for the most part, and the actual actions that are carried out supposedly in our name.
Well, you know, people, they kind of believe what they want, and they hear what they want.
And so, I don't know, they filter out things that they know.
Like, Ron Paul never personally attacks anyone.
He never gets mad at anybody.
I heard him curse one time.
He said, jolly well, you better jolly well recognize that actions have consequences.
And I bet he prayed extra hard that night over that kind of thing.
You know, like, he really is earnest like his middle name.
Not like goes to camp, but earnest like the genuine sort of, you know, characterization, description.
So he wasn't trying to disrespect this guy or his family or whatever.
He was just trying to point out that, hey, you know, all this violence begets more and more violence.
And we sure do have a lot of violence around here.
And the guy that killed him, at least they're saying, had the shell shock from the war that he was in, too.
And maybe that had something to do with what happened there.
Maybe all that gunfire spooked him and he flipped out or something.
I don't know.
He was speaking diagnostically and not prescriptively, if you will.
He was talking about the fact that one of the lasting consequences of a war of choice, which, of course, is the supreme act of public immorality is a war of choice.
It's the crime that begets all the others.
But one of the lasting consequences of war of that kind is a large and growing population of people like the one who allegedly killed Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield, people who have had the humanity knocked out of them for the process of becoming instruments of state aggression.
And in a subsequent message, a follow up to his original tweet, Dr.
Paul specifically expressed what we know he always felt, which was the bone deep or marrow deep sorrow for Chris Kyle's wife and children.
And that's an unalloyed human tragedy.
Consider this.
He spent how many years over in Iraq on a killing errand on behalf of the state that presumes to rule us?
And he barely got to know his wife and his children.
And then he retires at her insistence and he becomes a contractor for the Homeland Security State.
He was training, in other words, military veterans to do domestically what they had been doing overseas.
Now, that's a very ominous aspect of this story.
But in the course of doing this kind of work, he ends up killed here in a completely unexpected fashion.
And so his children will probably never know their father.
I don't know the extent to which they got to know him.
I'm assuming that they knew him very superficially at best.
And so they've been deprived of their father because of what he chose to do by way of an occupation that I think had a certain addictive quality to it.
In this conversation with Pastor Ed Young, Chris Kyle made the perfunctory nod in the direction that war is hell.
But he said with a sense of visible exuberance that if he hadn't gotten married and didn't have children to take care of, he would still be over there because he loved it.
And I can say that's a form of addiction.
That's another dimension of what Ron Paul was warning against.
You know, you live by the sword, you grow addicted to violence as a way of dealing with problems that should be solved in other means.
And eventually it will claim your life.
And if it doesn't kill you outright, it'll steal irreplaceable time that you could use for better pursuits like being with your children and your wife.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think another big part of this and I've seen the polls lately and, you know, if you care, they'll bring a tear to your eyes.
Just ridiculous to see the conservative support for the Iraq war after all this time.
It's well over 50 percent, I think maybe over 60 percent.
Anyway, most conservatives are still in complete denial about Iraq.
And that's a big part of this whole thing, too, is when you're the one who read the book.
But is there anything in there about, yeah, at one point we realized that actually Saddam was great at keeping Al Qaeda down and never had any weapons.
And this was all part of Richard Perle's agenda from 1994.
And or anything where like the rest of the 300 million people in America, I thought they kind of well, maybe it wasn't what it was cracked up to be this thing.
Or I don't know how anyone rationalizes taking out our old friend Saddam.
You know, the Republicans, old friend Saddam, the way that they did at the time that they did and with the consequences as we've seen them play out over 10 years.
I mean, are you kidding me?
If Mr. Kyle was capable of that kind of reflection, it managed somehow to be suppressed while he was writing the book or having the book ghostwritten on his behalf, because I don't see any evidence of it in the pages of that book.
He goes into great depth and detail in describing the perceived savagery and the loathsomeness of the people he was liberating.
But by the same token, he boasts about having supposedly liberated them.
And this is an important aspect of the story that's lost on pretty much everybody who's undergone this process of radio-induced lobotomization that we call handitization.
If you've been exposed to handity or is ill, chances are that to that extent, your higher brain functions, your capacity for critical thought have been injured.
But they don't understand that what Mr. Kyle was killing on behalf of in Iraq was Sharia law, because the U.S. authored constitution that was imposed on that country after Saddam was removed destroyed the remnants of what had been a relatively secular government and imposed a fairly thoroughgoing Islamic regime of the sort that people like Chris Kyle were supposedly trying to destroy.
And they managed to chase from that country most of its Christian population, which under the admittedly brutal and regrettable reign of Washington's subcontractor Saddam Hussein had enjoyed a certain element of protection that they no longer have.
And you have, of course, over a million people who were killed as a direct result of the war, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who were killed by the murder embargo that preceded the second half of the Iraq war.
You have the destruction of an economy, the destruction of a civil society.
Once again, these things were all robustly imperfect under Saddam Hussein.
But under what prevails right now, you don't have anything that resembles liberation.
But it's interesting how frequently you find people like Mr. Kyle invoking this principle based on a perverted reading of Romans chapter 13, which, of course, is the favorite Bible chapter of authoritarian regimes everywhere, that it doesn't really matter whether what they're doing is morally right or justifiable.
They have to obey constituted authority.
And that's something that this pastor, Ed Young, spoke about in great detail was the ideal, the idea.
And it's, once again, something that would have been completely familiar to people who consumed nationalist pseudo-Christianity under National Socialist Germany, that there is a hierarchy that you have to follow.
And it doesn't matter whether you respect the person occupying the office.
You have to respect the office and obey whoever holds that authority.
And this is all being said in the context, of course, of Barack Obama being the figure we're supposed to refer to as commander in chief, whether or not we're in the military.
And it's important for people who may be bewitched by Mr. Kyle's likable persona.
He seemed to be affable and somewhat modest in the way that many Texas natives are.
The fact that he was an automaton, he'd made himself an automaton, he'd chosen to repudiate that capacity for moral discernment that makes us human when he decided to become a cog in the industrial killing machine of the state.
And if he is a hero, then Lon Horiyuchi must be considered a hero as well, because both of them, by way of a chosen profession, developed a skill for killing unsuspecting people at a distance.
And they used that against anybody who was identified as an enemy of the government that employed them.
And their most memorable kill shots both involved women who were defending their children.
Vicki Weaver in the case of Lon Horiyuchi and an unidentified Iraqi woman was the first identified kill of the 160 or so that are credited, if that's the right word, to Chris Kyle.
All right, now, and see, here's the thing, too.
Most of these attitudes just come from your environment.
If everybody around you at church, on the football team, your dad and all your friends' dads and everybody else that you know in your entire set of three or four suburbs around where you live all agree about this stuff, then there's just no question about it.
You know, whether it's, you know, attitudes towards Arabs in general or attitudes toward, you know, the Army and the Navy and all their commercials that play during the football game and whatever that kind of thing.
And to me, that's really this is just the one guy representing in this particular case the corruption of the entire right wing.
And I really maybe they were always just as stupid as ever.
I don't know.
But it seems to me, Will, like especially since Karl Rove, they were on a mission to make conservatism as dumb as they possibly could, because it's the only way they can get away with it.
You know, oh, yeah, your Second Amendment matters.
But none of the rest of them got that.
And they and and and to convince the people on the right to internalize that and say, yeah, we hate trials and we hate protections against torture.
We hate free speech.
And they've really just turned conservatism into I mean, was it is it that William F.
Buckley at least used to encourage people to have and look at books and now he's dead or what the hell happened to conservatism to make it just so ridiculous?
That probably has something to do with that.
I mean, Buckley, of course, is the one who 60 years ago, 61 years ago, redefined conservatism as the commitment to maintain what he called a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores for the purpose of fighting war against the Soviets, whoever would be a suitable surrogate for the Soviets.
In other words, he redefined victory here in terms of allowing totalitarianism to flourish as long as we were directing the energies that totalitarian regime at a suitable foreign target.
And so I really lay a lot of this at his feet because he created post-constitutional conservatism.
Whatever you think of conservatism or for that matter, whatever you think of the Constitution, which I think is an interesting but in some ways very flawed document.
The point is that before 1952 and 1953, when he had conservatives like Taft and Frank Jodorow and people of that sort who are more libertarian in their outlook and expansively skeptical of all government undertakings, there was some sense that there were to be limits on what government could do supposedly on our behalf when it came to wielding its defining attribute, which is legally sanctioned legal force.
And so Buckley did maintain some pretense here of a commitment to critical thinking and a commitment to literature.
And of course, literature, which requires active participation by the consumer of that content, is something that creates the facility to examine things critically.
And now in the post-Limbaugh era, Limbaugh actually being a relatively high mark of the recent era in terms of his relative sophistication, you've got people who are, I guess, purely ganglionic creatures of impulse here, and they just receive this instruction as to what are the proper hate targets, and they react on cue.
And the left is no better.
The MSNBC left is just as reflexive, just as collectivist, just as tribal in its impulses.
They just have a different set of hate targets with whom they're supposed to direct their rancor.
But all of it, of course, is built on the service of the cult of the state, the worship of the state.
What I believe was Toynbee called the worship of collective human power.
And as a Christian believer, it is intensely painful to me to see people who profess to worship the same Lord and believe in the same Gospel with their mouths carried out with their acts and in their capacity of citizenship, the propitiation of this all-devouring idol that is the modern state.
And particularly when they're making Chris Kyle out now to be somebody garlanded with the same halo that crowns the brows of those who died on behalf of the faith in ages past.
And this is an illustration of something I've said to a number of people in fairly deep conversations over the past several years, which is that I believe that God gave us the gifts of life and liberty and fellowship, and out of these wonderful gifts, man has fashioned the fetters of religion.
And I wish people could be more attached to the Creator rather than the creations.
And of course, they've become passionately attached to this creation of our own manufacture, which is called the state.
I don't see how anybody who, like Ron Paul obviously does, worships the Prince of Peace and understands his message of genuine liberation could have anything but outright contempt toward the state, which is an enterprise of pure, unqualified hatred and violence.
And every time Ron Paul speaks in radical terms like that, critiquing what the state does on the basis of his genuine Christian beliefs, he does something useful and thoroughly unpleasant, which is to say he turns to the surface the deepest convictions of those who profess to be conservatives and even some who profess to be libertarians, like the war parties, Pagliacci, Glenn Beck, who this morning has been lambasting Ron Paul for saying something that should be completely unexceptional and unexceptionable to somebody who professes to believe in Jesus of Nazareth.
He said, as he was rebuking a disciple who was raising a sword to defend Jesus in person, he said, put your sword away.
He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.
That was an instance where Jesus was actually foregoing the right to arm self-defense because of his mission to offer himself as a sacrifice.
But he spoke that in that context.
And on the other hand, you've got someone like Chris Kyle, who was wielding the sword on behalf of a criminal regime in the course of what was unambiguously a criminal enterprise, the war in Iraq.
And this pastor, Ed Young, actually had the temerity to quote the famous passage in the book of John about how greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his life for his friends.
And he said, you've actually lived this.
No, he didn't.
He did exactly the opposite.
He was not laying down his life for anybody.
He was taking lives on behalf of the state.
He was taking the lives of strangers on behalf of other strangers in the service of the collective.
But we've reached such a perverse turn in our cultural history when an apparently pious and sincere Christian pastor could pervert the scripture in order to uphold that type of demonic crime.
And millions upon millions of American Christians treat this as gospel.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, man, this whole thing about it's legit.
I mean, we're all raised this way.
I remember, I don't know how old I was, but certainly under 10, figuring out that, OK, well, so killing is always wrong, according to the supreme law of the universe and its final arbiter.
But if you're wearing olive green and it's a war like during World War II, when we're on the side of the angels against the pure evil, then in that case, no, it's perfectly fine.
And you just defer those decisions to the people who run the place and make those calls.
I mean, I think that I had a very average upbringing in that way.
And that that really is basically the same reasoning that everybody has.
Right.
Killing is always wrong, except for the if you're wearing green and and probably imagine a cartoon of a World War II G.I. or some kind of vagary like that makes it all OK.
Again, my thesis is that World War II is the new real founding myth of America.
But I just wanted to point out that a minute ago when we were talking with the other Scott Horton, the heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harpers and Columbia University and all that, he was saying that he actually cited Ruby Ridge to Lon Horiyuchi, who said that because I asked him the laws that make murder murder, it says here in the memo that, well, they don't apply to the government because they're the government.
And he said, yeah, exactly.
That's their theory.
Not that you can find it in the Constitution, but that's their theory that they got locked down pretty tight, that even if you're Lon Horiyuchi and you blow some lady's head off, because you feel like it, then you cannot go to prison because you're as long as you're on the clock, you have sovereign immunity.
Yeah, because the deified state and its vicar has granted you a plenary indulgence for the crime and sin of murder.
And that's an old story.
Of course, we read about the abominations that occurred during the Crusades and we ask how people could do such things.
We need not rummage around in the texts of medieval religious wars in order to find exactly the same things being done today.
And over the last few days, these proud evangelicals have been celebrating the supposed accomplishments of somebody who acted on exactly the same impulses and got exactly the same kind of spurious permission to do so.
And your problem, if indeed it is a problem, Scott, is that as a very young child, you were infected with critical thinking.
And I wish we could somehow make that contagious.
I wish it had become epidemic.
Well, it wasn't critical enough, really.
It was critical enough that I remember having a little bit of dissonance to overcome, but I overcame it just fine, because after all, explosions and guns and stuff like that are cool and I am a boy.
They make gigantic explosions, legit.
In fact, even, and I've confessed to this before, when I was 14, 15, whatever it was during Operation Yellow Ribbon 1991, I didn't care a whit about the Iraqis or how many of them got blown up or out, but I did want to see some explosions on TV.
And I think I was speaking for most 14 and 15 year olds in society, and unfortunately, a lot more than that.
That's true.
I don't know whether that's a design flaw or an asset, but that's something innate in the makeup of a human male.
And I, too, found myself entranced by some aspects of what the military does.
And I came very close to choosing the military as a career as a young man.
I'm glad I didn't.
But I remember vividly as a youngster, when I would be reading about war, asking myself, why would people do these things?
I mean, because this involves killing people.
And I was entranced by it, but for whatever reason, I was sufficiently critical to understand that there's something innately wrong about taking another human life.
And the thing is, Scott, I don't think for all the things that we read about in 19th century American history, with the brutalities committed against American Indians and other aspects that may manifest destiny as somewhat iffy proposition, I don't think that we were completely devoted to the cult of warfare and the cult of the state until after World War II.
And I think you're right.
That is the new founding myth of whatever America has become.
And that's one of the reasons why there was still that residue, even as late as the 1940s, 1950s, of genuine constitution-focused, liberty-minded conservatism, of whom Ron Paul was the most conspicuous, not the only, but the most conspicuous contemporary practitioner.
And it's always useful that he provides a way, if you will, a control sample to measure exactly what's going on with everybody else that calls themselves conservatives today.
And the one thing that they agree about is that although they will criticize in detail some of the things the state does, the most valuable thing the state ever does is to carry out its defining function, which is to kill people in large numbers.
That's the one thing the state can do that will always get the unqualified approval of the supposedly anti-government right.
Funny about that, huh?
And even when it's Obama, like you were saying, you got to respect the office of the presidency.
Yeah, but their critique of him is that he's not ruthless enough.
That's the thing that I find amazing.
This man's a dictator.
He wants our guns, but he's not killing enough people overseas, you know?
I remember there's an old Simpsons where the kid says, I'd rather take a order from Bill Clinton than, you know, a young army pride.
And I thought, well, you know what?
The military guys, they actually did make a big deal about how much they didn't like Bill, and they looked down on him for what a sleazebag he was.
But actually, they killed whoever he said for eight years in a row, and I don't think he ever stopped.
I mean, come on.
Bombing Serbian Christians on behalf of Muslim drug runners in Kosovo in 1999 being one example of what you're describing.
But I do think that it's interesting how you have a certain type of conservative who is much more concerned about what consenting adults do in the privacy of the bedroom than what people in uniform do by way of killing people in public on behalf of whoever happens to be in the White House at any given time.
I can't understand that.
I observe it.
I describe it.
I condemn it, but I can't understand it.
Have you ever met that Pat Robertson guy?
I'd like to ask him a couple of questions.
I have met Pat Robertson.
I wasn't terribly impressed.
Yeah, well, I wouldn't imagine unless, you know, you just saw his gold stocks and that kind of thing.
That's different.
No, but so listen, what I wonder is they always blame the hurricanes on homosexuality and stuff like that, but never on the cult of the state, never on the world empire.
And, you know, I mean, it is just that cynical and that blatant.
It really is.
They give a pass for mass murder and they focus on matters that really aren't any of their business.
And in terms of the impact on public policy, for the most part, I mean, there are public policy questions that are implicated here.
But just over the last weekend at church, we were studying in the book of Matthew some of the sayings of Jesus with respect to comparative evil.
And one of the things he pointed out is that you really aren't in a position to conduct an audit of other people's shortcomings and talking to people who are pious and religious in that day.
He went out of his way to say, you know what, if I had taught what I taught in Sodom, they would have reacted to my message, you know, all those teachings about, among other things, individual responsibility and justice and love and sin and redemption, humility and all these things.
He said, these people who consider themselves pious and so forth, it won't be harder for them on the day of judgment.
And using, of course, Sodom as the example here, which had a certain resonance with his audience.
But there's this real impulse, this punitive impulse that I can't quite understand on the part of populist American conservative Christians.
And they are perfectly willing to endure all kinds of privations and all kinds of compromises with principle as long as the quote-unquote right people are on the receiving end of authoritarian state violence.
And you know what?
The left wing is exactly the same way.
As long as Obama is the one who has control of the drones and as long as Obama is the one writing up the hit lists and not Mitt Romney, then the MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, Janine Garofalo left is perfectly content.
And they all missed the really important question here, which is, of course, once again, the golden rule.
And that's one of the things that Ron Paul does that makes him an irritant to both sides of that equation.
And that underscores, among many other things, his utter indispensability.
Yeah, well, and he just does really easy things like remind them of things that they used to cheer for.
Hey, George W. Bush said we ought to have a humble foreign policy and treat other people on Earth like their people.
You know what was wrong with that?
Then you cheered and then right.
Same people.
Come on.
And then they go, huh?
I don't remember that.
I know.
And I think that the thing that we're going to see as a result of this Chris Kyle conversation, at least I hope we'll see this, at least in some precincts here, will be some critical thinking, some detailed conversation about what actual courage consists of.
Because if Chris Kyle is to be considered courageous for killing people at distances greater than a mile, then why don't we celebrate the supposed courage of joystick operators who direct drones to fire missiles at distant targets?
You know, if one of these men, if one of these individuals, I don't want to call somebody like that a man, if one of these individuals ends up coming to an end similar to that of Chris Kyle, by what logic would we not say that he was a genuine American hero, that somebody who had sacrificed himself on behalf of however we're going to designate this collective we supposedly belong to?
And of course, just in the last couple of days, just in the last day, MSNBC got a hold of the 16-page memo outlining the supposed legal justification for the Obama administration to execute American citizens like Abdullah Al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old who was killed at a backyard barbecue with friends in Yemen.
And you have to ask yourself, OK, how are the two halves of this dialectic here, the status dialectic, going to deal with this?
I mean, on the one hand, the left likes to profess that it's committed to civil liberties.
So is it going to have problems with what the Obama administration is doing with respect to discretionary killing on the part of the president?
And on the right, they say that they really dislike Obama.
They consider him a dictator.
I think that's a defensible characterization.
But here they are cheering somebody like Chris Kyle, who really was doing the same kind of things.
And if you can cheer Chris Kyle, why can't you cheer Lon Horiyuchi?
I mean, Vicky Weaver is identified as an enemy and a threat to the public.
And he was carrying out his lawfully issued rules of engagement.
We knew that he had shot and killed her while she was holding an infant.
I mean, at some point, people hopefully will start having conversations where they start working these moral questions and understand that the common denominator here is the unlawful criminal violence that is embodied in the state.
And I'm hoping that there will be, to use once again a perfectly civil Christian term, a remnant that will emerge from this that will have challenged its assumptions and made some important moral decisions and embraced genuinely moral conclusions about all of this.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, actually thinking back on it, most of the right didn't care at all about Ruby Ridge.
The populist right did, the, you know, kind of outside of the establishment right did.
But, you know, Rush Limbaugh and all them were at pains to make sure everybody understood that they and the GOP always stands with the cops against the people with no exceptions.
And, you know, as Anthony Gregory says, liberals love government and conservatives hate liberty.
So they always compromise.
They always have a bipartisan consensus, which is to screw the rest of us.
That's the synthesis right there.
That's the synthesis.
Exactly.
Leftists love government and conservatives hate liberty.
So they agree.
They reach the synthesis in the middle ground here where we'll have a state that crushes out liberty comprehensively.
But just in large, at one point you made here, Scott, I remember vividly because, of course, I'm native to Idaho and at the time I was living in northern Utah, but close enough to Idaho, I was still considered part of Idaho culturally.
I remember the Ruby Ridge incident and I remember the things that were being said on talk radio and in most so-called conservative media by way of supporting the FBI in the horrible atrocity that they committed, the marshal service the FBI committed against the Randy Weaver family.
And I remember how in the aftermath of Waco, Rush Limbaugh and his silly old TV show, his only comment after the church at Mount Carmel was burned to the ground and dozens of people were immolated, his only comment was to suggest that Jana Reno should be put in charge of the U.S. government's treatment of the Bosnian Serbs because she'd proven herself by bloodying herself in battle against a designated enemy of the state.
And he was doing this, of course, to take a shot at Bill Clinton as being supposedly timid about bloodshed.
But that's the reflex, the reflex that we talk about that has been cultivated on the part of people on the state-centered right.
And it's not really changed that much.
There's, of course, an element of the right which has become more critical of the state and all of its works and pumps.
And we once again have the movement that was catalyzed by Ron Paul, not created by him so much as catalyzed by him, that can take the credit for that.
And so, once again, it's amazing how much trouble you can get in with professed Christians by quoting the actual words of Jesus and applying them to what the government does, as Ron Paul did over the last day or so.
But that can be a very healthy thing because at least some people are feeling the painful and unfamiliar sensation of actually thinking about issues, and that can only be to the good.
I wanted to ask you about the so-called PTSD, shell shock, that kind of thing, and what you think is behind that.
I know one veteran who told me that he had a really bad kind of waking nightmares, can't get the visions out of his head of some horrible things that he saw and did, I guess.
And then he finally admitted to himself that it was wrong, that he shouldn't have been there, that the things that he did to those people were wrong, and admitted, damn it.
And then once he did that, it helped him, and he was kind of all right again.
But that made me think, you know, not necessarily that's the solution to everybody, is just seeing it clearly for what it is, but that I wonder whether you think that really guilt about kind of somewhere in there, they know that this is not like fighting the Germans or the Japanese, where like, man, they really, you know, Germany declared war on us.
I don't care what the hell happened in the Pacific, you know, blast them.
This isn't that.
This is fighting civilians in their own neighborhoods, and when they grab a rifle and somebody calls them a militant, you know it's just Jim, the Arab with a rifle, man.
He's not a militant.
He's a person.
He's not a haji, you know.
And what happens is, well, I wonder if, you know, they call it PTSD, like it's all some kind of concussion, but I wonder if that's just to obfuscate the guilt.
I'm not a neurologist, and I'm not a psychologist, but I do believe there are clinically diagnosable conditions that result from being put in an emotionally freighted and dangerous environment like that and being subjected to unremitting stress in which you're at constant fear for your life.
Just the constant exposure to adrenaline is going to have physical consequences, so that has to be factored into this.
But, Scott, I agree with you.
I think that most of this has to do with the physical manifestation of trying to suppress a healthy moral impulse that, as a believer, I believe was designed into us.
I don't believe that we're merely matter in motion.
I believe that there's something innate to us which transcends the corporeal, and one of those things that defines us is this innate recognition of mutual humanity, and we have to be trained out of that.
That's what the military does.
Every military in history has done that.
You take that which makes us capable of conducting all those ennobling and genuinely human activities that actually conduce to peace and prosperity, commerce, agreement, peaceful mutual cooperation, you take those impulses and you forcibly suppress them, and then you deploy that individual against others who have not personally done him harm.
That has to have emotional consequences.
You're probably aware of the fact that studies have shown that only a minority of American troops in the Pacific during World War II actually fired at the enemy.
It's because it's really hard to overcome the inhibition against killing a fellow human being, and once you've overcome that inhibition in the context of warfare and then you're put back into a civil society or whatever, simulacrum still exists in the United States in 2013, and you're told to restrain that impulse, that's something that causes your personality to short circuit, either at the level of neurocircuitry or at something even deeper than that.
That has to have lasting consequences.
I don't care if you seem to be superficially normal, the heightened situation you've been in for a prolonged period of time is going to have these lasting impressions on your personality, particularly when you have people going through two, three, four, or more deployments overseas.
This all has to be exacerbated by an understanding that what they're doing has nothing to do with protecting their home and family, and they see people on foreign soil doing exactly as they would do in their own home if they were attacked by a foreign invader.
That's when the inescapable logic of the Golden Rule, I think, to use the Christian term, convicts them, and that has consequences.
I mean, even Raskolnikov and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment couldn't escape his conscience.
He thought he had escaped his conscience, and he found that it was still there.
He could ignore it, he could suppress it, he could deny it, but eventually it would make itself manifest.
And I'm not trying to say that everybody who's ever carried out the state's killing errand in any of these wars is to be compared with that fictional character, but I think that Dostoevsky spoke to something which is in the human condition, and we ignore it at our peril.
And God help us, many of these people who come back from these wars were being trained by the likes of Chris Kyle to become domestic law enforcement officers, and there's no good that's going to come from that.
Oh man, got that right.
Well, you know, what they do is, because I think they learn from those statistics about the previous wars and how reluctant people are to fire on each other, but what they do is they train just a few guys at a time and make everybody into a very small band of brothers, so that way when the sniper's shooting out the window, there's no comparison between the life of his buddy who he's covering and the guy that he's shooting whatsoever.
They might as well be from Mars, or they might as well be insects or something, because that might as well be his twin brother out there.
Exactly, and the thing is, in the moment, they have no recognition of the mutual humanity, but after they're removed from the battlefield and they have time for reflection, they end up understanding the true consequences of what they have done, and that, I think, is where the troubles really develop.
All right, well, I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but I like the way you say stuff, man.
Thanks very much for your time, Will.
Thank you, Scott.
You take care.
All right, everybody, that is the great Will Grigg.
Of course, his great blog is Pro Libertate, and the website is freedominourtime.blogspot.com, and really, I should say, too, that he is the foremost advocate on the side of the victims of primarily local police abuse in this country.
I mean, there are a lot of great websites along those lines.
I'm not trying to diminish any of them, but as far as continual essays about what local cops get away with against the people of this country on a regular basis, it's really something else.
It's Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com, and the book is called Liberty in Eclipse.
The Emergency Committee for Israel, Brookings, Heritage, APAC, WINEP, GINSA, PNAC, CNAS, the AEI, FPI, CFR, and CSP.
It sure does seem sometimes like the war party's got the foreign policy debate in DC all locked up, but not quite.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They put America first, opposing our government's world empire, and especially their Middle Eastern madness.
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