09/18/09 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

I hate cops!
I hate cops!
I hate cops!
Alright everybody, welcome back to the show.
Well, you've been here all along.
It's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM, in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'm happy to introduce my next guest, or actually my guest today on the show.
It's the great Will Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And he's the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing great.
Thanks so much for having me.
Oh, well, it's great to have you here.
Hey, listen, one more thing I should add to your bio there is that people can often find your articles at, or your blog posts at the blog at lourockwell.com on a pretty regular basis there.
And, God, you just scare the hell out of me, man.
Because, you know, I always hated cops, just like the song in the intro music there since I was a little kid.
But I think that's just because I was a skateboarder.
So all of my interactions with them from a very young age were kind of negative.
That's a very common sentiment among skateboarders, I found, for good reason.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's not too hard to figure out.
But the thing is, I think more and more everybody hates cops.
And I think that it's not even, you know, it used to sort of kind of be social embarrassing or whatever.
You're not supposed to say, yeah, I hate cops.
Of course I hate cops.
Because that makes you kind of weird.
But I don't think it's like that anymore.
I think everybody hates cops, and we should all just say it proud.
What the hell are they doing?
They've got no right to be cops over us.
They should all have to go get real jobs and leave us the hell alone.
Well, there was a time when the ethic described by Sir Robert Peel, when he created the first professional police force over in London in the early 19th century, prevailed among most American peace officers.
They were called peace officers at the time, because it was understood that they were just common citizens with a specialized function in society.
And that function was to backstop the public, inasmuch as the public was in charge of protecting itself against crimes against persons and property.
The assumption was that every individual human being has an innate right to protect himself against a criminal assault.
And when he needed help, there was a peace officer who was supposed to be a conspicuous presence, and his job was to help you protect yourself.
And that ethic has been completely inverted now, to the point where there's a string of precedents in federal laws, in federal judicial rulings, that say that an individual citizen has no right to assume that he can get particularized protection from a police officer, that there is no civil liability and there is no legally enforceable right, if you will, that dictates that a police officer will come to your aid if you're under attack, or if your rights or property are threatened.
And that, of course, begs the question, what are they there for, if not to protect us against criminal violence?
And the obvious answer, albeit one that's implicit but becoming more overt, I think, is that they are there to maintain the power of the regime over us.
As you pointed out, there are cops who are over us, rather than peace officers who are among us.
And it's gotten to the point now where it's becoming very obvious, at this point where we're entering this deep economic trough, that really the primary function of most local cops is to find ways of getting revenue out of the rest of us, so as to maintain the financial base of whatever government employs them.
And that's why, just a couple of days ago, I wrote this piece about the so-called Slobado cops, or vampire cops, if you will, of Nampa, Idaho, that's a town about, oh, I don't know, a half hour or so down the road from Payette, Idaho, where I live.
A town of about 80,000 people.
I, as a matter of fact, have a couple of friends who work for the Nampa Police Department, ironically enough.
One was a high school football teammate of mine, a very talented guy.
And what they're doing now is they're part of a pilot project funded by the federal government with highway tax revenue, with gasoline tax revenue, basically, to use needles, that is to say, hypodermic needles, as a goad to compel people to undergo breathalyzer tests when they are stopped by a cop on suspicion of driving under the influence.
The alternative to taking a breathalyzer test is to have one of these fumble-fingered lummoxes who is not a healthcare professional, and he's not under Hippocratic discipline.
That's an important consideration.
Use a hypodermic needle forcibly to extract a blood sample for you, so as to carry out what I consider to be a facially unconstitutional policy to begin with, of extracting from you by force potentially self-incriminating evidence.
Okay, now hang on.
This next line is like, I don't know, 1989 me.
Yeah, right, Will Grigg.
Come on.
You're telling me that cops can pull people over and jab them with needles on the side of the road?
I mean, you're sure you're not talking about something going on in East Germany or something?
You're making that up.
Well, it's interesting.
By 1989, East Germany had sort of gotten over that.
If you remember, the wall was coming down in November of that year, and pretty soon there was just one great big Germany.
But it's ironic you bring up the example of East Germany, because about 1983 there was a state radio broadcast.
The so-called news organs of the East German regime proudly announced that they had met a, for them, historic high goal of blood donations, and the news article carefully qualified that by saying most of the donations were given by volunteers.
And, of course, at least some of them didn't volunteer.
Well, this is very much an East German-type program here.
And it didn't start here in Nampa, Idaho.
To the best of my knowledge, it started about 1995 in Arizona, and from there it spread, of course, to Texas, which is a state notorious for this punitive populism that keeps death row always very well occupied, and a number of other laws reflect that unfortunate mindset.
And in Utah, there were some police agencies that were carrying out the same program, and now it's spread to Idaho and a couple of other places.
It's all being abetted by the federal government, and, of course, the idea here, once again, is that it will enhance the revenue base of the local government.
And that is the primary function of local police now, to the extent that they are local, they're locally stationed, but they're really becoming more and more overtly federalized.
Well, wait, wait, wait.
Here's the thing, though.
I mean, there's got to be a line somewhere, though, right?
I mean, this seems like the kind of thing where, you know, Hank Hill would fight rather than allow that to happen.
Oh, I hope so.
And Hank Hill, of course, he's the guy who loves cops more than anyone else in the whole society, right?
But if a cop did that to Hank Hill, at some point there's a line where just the average law-abiding red, white, and blue American has got to say, no, wait a minute, dude, you're not going to jab me with that goddamn needle.
Yeah, I would hope so.
I'm hurting my language, Will.
Well, I appreciate that.
No, I would hope that this is the sort of thing that would, if you will, in a more metaphorical sense, pierce the thick skin of even a Hank Hill or somebody else of that sort who's sort of the Lee Greenwood-ized American or the Hannah-tized American.
There are many, many Americans, I used to be one of them, who were deathly afraid of hypodermic needles.
I recently spent a lot of time in the hospital being punctured on regular intervals.
I've gotten over that.
But I still wouldn't permit a cop to insert a hypodermic needle in order to extract a blood sample forcibly from me.
First of all, I'm a teetotaler.
I don't drink at all.
I don't take narcotics of any kind.
I don't even take aspirin.
And just on the principle of the thing, I would rebel.
And I know that many Americans have at least a latent problem with authority.
Good grief, how can you be an American if you don't have a problem with authority?
This is a country that was literally founded on anti-authoritarianism.
And you'd think that by now that it's become very obvious, even to somebody who's been tranquilized by nationalistic talk radio, that the government ruling us is at war with us.
It's at war, of course, with a number of other populations overseas.
But there's really an indivisible ethic here of bellicosity, if you will, on the part of the government.
They want to make people submit.
And they will make people submit by any means at their disposal.
And in this instance, you're talking about a policy which has to be considered unconstitutional.
How can you demand that somebody incriminate himself if you have a Fifth Amendment that prohibits that?
And, of course, every state constitution's got an analog to the Fifth Amendment.
And they're supplementing this with something that could be considered torture.
If you're playing upon the fears of a population in order to make them submit, that's a species of torture.
And this, of course, is backstopped once again by the supposed right of police officers to engage in summary street justice, as they call it, through electroshock torture, through the use of tasers.
In this piece I just wrote recently called Halot on Wheels, talking about all of these things where the assumption is that once you get behind the wheel of an automobile, that you basically surrender your rights because you're exercising a government-conferred privilege to be traveling by automobile.
There was a case in Arizona in which a man who'd already submitted to an arrest because he was visibly intoxicated.
He'd failed his field sobriety test.
And they still wanted to get some kind of supplementary evidence from him.
Rather than having him blown to a breathalyzer, they threatened to stick him by the side of the road with needles.
And he had a deathly fear of needles, and he resisted.
And so he was hit with, I believe it was 15 taser shocks.
And he ended up with these taser burns across the length and breadth of his body.
You look at that kind of thing and you think, good grief.
If, say, 20 years ago we had seen footage of this happening in Cuba or Iran or North Korea, that would be looked upon as totemic of a totalitarian society.
And yet it is happening somewhere in this country every day.
And people still get the idea that we have local police and live in a reasonably free country.
Neither of those propositions strikes me as true.
Right.
And see, this is the thing, too.
As the local police are all more and more under the influence of the national government and the whole concept of federalism is just completely mocked, especially where the rubber meets the road when you're talking about the guys with the guns and where the M-16s and Mayberry or whatever it's called, this whole thing.
At the same time, the coverage, the things that you write about on your blog, again, it's ProLibertate.
No, it's not.
It's called ProLibertate.
It's freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
These are almost all local police cases.
We're not sitting here talking about Waco, which ultimately, when you think about it, was only really noteworthy in that they fought back and there was this long siege and then eventually the big fire and it was so many people in one house and whatever.
But ultimately, what happens here, as you document on your blog day in and day out, I mean, if we did two hours, you couldn't possibly run out of examples for just the last couple of weeks, is Waco raids for the American people all day long.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Ironically enough, in the Waco episode, you had perhaps one of the few examples I can think of in which a sheriff, a county sheriff, actually did the right thing by trying to stand up to federal authority.
The local sheriff there.
Yeah, Jack Carwell was in it.
Yeah, he's a good man.
And he remembered at some point, he was part of a different generation of people who were laid back in the administration of justice.
He understood that he was there to serve, not to dominate, not to subjugate.
And he actually made an attempt to intervene to get the ATF and eventually the FBI to relent in their siege against these people who were being innocently targeted for an illegal paramilitary raid.
And then a 51-day siege that was basically a protracted exercise in psychological and physical torture as a prelude to what could be considered under strict legal definition an act of genocide.
They tried to eliminate an entire sect.
But Jack Carwell actually tried to intervene, and he was threatened with arrest because he was supposedly obstructing justice when, of course, under the old common law concept of law and order, the sheriff is the apex law enforcement official in a given county.
And so you have a handful of people who now are anomalous, and I think that's because the culture's changed.
I think that since the real so-called war on crime was inaugurated by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s as a wedge issue, that's the thing that really strikes me as nauseating here, is that he wanted to find some way of rattling the so-called silent majority, the hard hats against the hippies.
And the best way to do that was to make a war on crime a wedge issue and make, of course, the so-called war on drugs the defining element of the war on crime.
And that really began the hyper-militarization of domestic law enforcement in this country.
But that really is sort of a breakpoint, I think.
There were a couple of preludes to that.
The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration during the Johnson era was helping to federalize law enforcement, and then SWAT teams began to materialize in Los Angeles in 1968.
But there was some sense of restraint still and some sense of limits as to what could be done.
But when it became a literal war, and that, of course, is what we're dealing with here.
It's not metaphorical.
When they talk about a war on crime, the only part of that is metaphorical is the description of the target of the war.
The actual target of the war would be the liberties to the American public and the constitutional restrictions, such as they are, on the power of government.
That all started in about 1971 or 1972.
And there's a whole generation of people who are now in positions of administrative authority in police departments whose mindsets have been militarized and who are now creating these little adjuncts of the Pentagon all across the length and breadth of the country disguised as state and local law enforcement bodies.
Well, now, first of all here, tell me how conservative you are, and then tell me about the war on drugs.
And I want to set this up by telling you about an article I read at ExiledOnline.com.
All right.
They're really great writers over there.
I have a lot of fun reading that site.
And this is about Memphis and how they call it like a fourth world.
They wouldn't insult the third world by calling it a third world country over there in Memphis, Tennessee, right now.
So the whole, I guess, north part of the place, the cops do not go there.
The only time anybody calls them is to set them up for an ambush.
And they literally have ceded the power to the local gangs there.
There's no money.
The local factories pay people $8 an hour, and they're lucky that their job hadn't moved to China for that.
And what else are they going to do but participate in the black markets and unleash violence on each other in order to settle their disputes?
I mean, you've got to, please, tell people how conservative you are and teach them the economics of these black markets, especially in drugs.
My personal conservatism in terms of my morals and ethics and the way that I'm raising my children would be best understood, I think, if you have two facts in mind.
The first of which is that I used to be employed by the John Birch Society, which is considered pretty much the outlier at the furthest fringe of the conservative right wing, as it's defined colloquially.
And secondly, we were a homeschooling family of independent Bible-believing Christians attending independent evangelical churches.
Why independent?
Because I'm suspicious of denominationalism.
I really think that denominations are one of the ways that people's piety would be channeled into paths that are dangerous, not only theologically but also politically.
I think a lot of damage has been done that way.
I don't smoke or drink, as I mentioned.
I'm a euxorious husband of a wonderful wife and a grateful father of six children.
The fact that we have six children, I think, is another marker of my conservatism.
But with respect to the war on drugs, what you have to understand is that 110 or 120 years ago, when America was a much more culturally pious and, if you will, culturally Christian nation than we are right now, there were no national, no federal laws against narcotics consumption.
You could pick up a magazine that was targeting your typical church-going, mainstream American family and see advertisements for topical analgesics that used cocaine.
As a matter of fact, cocaine was widely advertised as being available at the local apothecary.
It was a matter of simplicity to go down there and buy it in any quantity that you thought was appropriate because the assumption was that people would exercise a moderate level of self-restraint using something that was admittedly dangerous.
The same was true with respect to various opiates.
Of course, what happened after the war between the states is that a lot of people ended up getting hooked on opium in various ways because of what had happened with battlefield injuries and the use of opiates as a pain reliever.
But that, of course, wasn't something that goaded the widespread criminalization of that substance.
Marijuana was perfectly legal in this country until the 1930s.
This didn't create a whole society full of drug addicts.
Addiction remained more or less constant.
It was about 4% of the population that would try it and become serious users of the various addictive substances and maybe a fraction of that would become hardcore addicts.
That's the same percentage that we find prevailing today after spending I don't know how many trillions of dollars over the last century in fighting various substances from alcohol to opiates to cannabinoids.
But what happens when the government gets involved in the so-called war on drugs is that they're involved in this immense scheme of price support for the criminal element which is involved in satisfying the appetites of people for consuming drugs.
It keeps the price artificially high.
There's a risk premium built into the price because you have people who are involved in smuggling rather than legal and open commerce.
You have people fighting for turf using the methods of violence and corruption as opposed to conducting peaceful buyouts that would be mutually satisfactory.
And the other thing that happens as well is that you have reciprocal corruption going on with law enforcement because the people running the prohibitionist side of the war on drugs don't want that war to end.
There are careers that are made.
There are institutions that depend upon the persistence of that problem.
And so there's this ungodly symbiosis between crooks in the political overworld and particularly the law enforcement element of the overworld.
And there are, of course, people involved in banking and finance that are deeply involved in this as well such as the brother of the former president of Mexico, Mr. Salinas.
His brother was deeply involved with the cartels in Mexico.
And Mr. Salinas himself, as somebody who held a chair on the board of Dow Jones, must have known what was going on.
But you have careers that are made in the prohibitionist end of things.
And, of course, there are careers that are made in terms of circumventing prohibition.
And it was ever thus.
I'm reading a book now about J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI called Puppet Master.
And before J. Edgar Hoover was made the director of what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, what was called the Bureau of Investigation, the people running that outfit were notorious for their kinship with and their corrupt business dealings with people who were involved in skirting prohibition.
And it's the same thing that's going on today.
Well, it's the same with the War Party too.
I mean, the Golden Triangle in Vietnam, all the heroin, all the drug smuggling by the Contras under the eyes of the watchful eye of protection of the CIA during the 1980s.
And, of course, who occupies Afghanistan now?
I mean, come on.
Yeah.
For that matter, take a look at the people who are running Kosovo.
The so-called Kosovo Liberation Army was a group that coalesced out of the drug-dealing underworld of Albanian nationalism, and they're connected with like-minded people in Afghanistan.
It almost seems as if our foreign policy in many ways was devoted to making sure that there are certain corporatist drug interests that are carefully ensconced in key positions throughout the Balkans and the Near East.
It seems that way, and maybe it is that way.
I don't know.
I'm cynical enough to think that might play a role in what's going on here.
But you mentioned the CIA.
Where do you think, of course, LSD came from?
I mean, there was a time in the 1950s when they held the entire world supply of LSD.
Kazinsky's just blowback from MKUltra's LSD experiments, right?
Very much so, yeah.
Well, and you know, let's see.
There's a couple of places I wanted to go.
I wanted to ask you about the class war, but before that, I wanted to… Oh, the real point that you're getting at here, or I think can be drawn here, is about the consequences for people like you, who, as you said, you're a teetotaler, and there are plenty of people in this society who don't participate even in the black markets that have anything to do with drugs or anything like that, and they are paying the consequences too, not just in terms of foreign policies, but if they have to meet a cop, he might very well have full body armor and a machine gun.
And things have changed for all of us because of this drug war.
That's exactly right.
I mean, the collateral damage is actually becoming, I think, the major issue here, and that is the fact that because the natural dynamic of the so-called war on drugs is to militarize the conflict, you have that becoming the standard operating mode for all law enforcement everywhere.
Every time I've run into a police officer in the last five or ten years, he's been wearing body armor.
He's not been wearing the Star Wars-style full body kit, but he's had a plate beneath his shirt.
It's obvious that he's wearing some kind of bullet-resistant apparatus beneath his shirt.
And I'm somebody who fits the profile, quite frankly.
I'm a large brown guy of Hispanic ancestry, and you see me driving a large van, and you may or may not know on the basis of my comportment or the way that I express myself that I'm a native-born American citizen born and bred in Idaho.
But if somebody simply encounters me in a situation where they're hyped up over some kind of a joint task force operation to suppress drug trafficking in a given area, that shaves the margin of safety as far as the civilian's concerned because the way that a police officer is trained to deal with a situation like that, officer safety is the prime directive.
And so as far as he's concerned, he's going to have to be in the position of making me submit and making sure that I'm taken care of in such a way that I don't pose a threat to him in most circumstances.
And once again, let me describe where I live here.
This is a rural community of about 7,000 people.
There is a multi-jurisdictional joint federal local task force here called the High Desert Task Force that operates on both sides of the Snake River in Oregon and in Idaho.
And there isn't a week that goes by that they're not kicking in doors and throwing people face down on the floor and then collecting a trivial amount of narcotics or controlled substances, methamphetamine being the big one here.
Methamphetamine, once again, is an outgrowth of the war on drugs.
This is a cheaper and more readily available substitute for another drug that had been prohibited and been made a target.
And you want to talk about collateral damage here.
You can't buy certain cold preparations during the winter here in the quantity that you'd need because methamphetamine can be synthesized from them, and so you have to sign a log and you have to be rationed.
You have to have this rationed by law.
And that's an issue for me because I've got a large family of young kids who tend to get sick in the wintertime, and sometimes I can't get them the good stuff.
They have to settle for something that's a little better than a placebo.
But this is happening here in Payette, across the Snake River in Ontario, Oregon, in Caldwell and Nampa, Idaho, where doors are being kicked in and heavily armored people are dragging people out of their homes.
And that does have a consequence when your common civilian, maybe somebody who's completely abstemious when it comes to drugs or alcohol, encounters a law enforcement officer.
Well, here's the thing, too, Will.
We ought to all understand this.
I mean, they show us, and we've talked about this before, I think, Dallas SWAT, and they drive it with their tank, and then they just attach it to the front of the house, and they pull the front of the house down.
This is their dynamic entry.
I mean, none of this is a secret.
None of this is outside of even, you know, you don't have to go to antipolicestate.com or something to find this.
They advertise it on TV.
It's supposed to be hilarious, we think.
Oh, yeah, it's celebrated on television.
Now, one more thing here real quick.
In the last few minutes here, I wanted to ask you about class war.
Now, obviously, from a commie point of view, class war just means rich against poor, simple as that.
From a Rothbardian point of view, class war is a legitimate subject, but there's a bit different libertarian spin on it.
It's about who's using the state against who.
And, of course, everybody's on welfare pretty much in this society.
For the first 100 years of America after the Constitution, you had to be rich to get on welfare.
And then in the 20th century, they basically bribed us with a little bit of our own money, and now we're all on it.
But it seems like, you know, I mentioned Memphis there and how it's this fourth world country now with just no capital.
I mean, what are you going to do?
If you just took a city on a map and you just said, okay, let's cut off capital to this city, well, what do you think's going to happen?
It's going to turn into total criminality and then militarized police and all of the rest of this.
And it does seem to me like there is a class war going on and that it is the billionaires that have the upper hand clearly in controlling the state, not the masses of people, you know, as in the propaganda.
And, yeah, it's true, there's Social Security and Medicare and all that is a big part of the budget.
But it seems like, really, the state is in the interest of the richest people.
And what I'm seeing before my eyes right now is a massive movement on the right, in a sense, against the state, basically.
But because they think the state might be taking their money and giving it to powerless, poor brown people, like Acorn is the devil poster boy or whatever, a bunch of powerless nobodies that nobody ever heard of get to be the devil.
And meanwhile, the people rallying in the street are actually rallying to the defense of the giant corporations who are using the state, again, not just, you know, evil capitalists with profits, but they're using the state to rob us of trillions of dollars.
They get to keep all their bonuses and all these things.
And, basically, it's like the mass movement against the state is to protect, you know, Dick Armey's corporate friends from it somehow.
Good grief.
I mean, the same people who were offended by Acorn, what strikes me as a very low-grade scam type of an operation, they're offended by the fact that Acorn has been caught wheedling some federal largess while Halliburton is getting how many hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to do that, plus many other things that are much worse in terms of their impact on the lives of innocent people both at home and abroad.
I mean, Halliburton is like Acorn cubed and then cubed again and then multiplied by the square root of infinity.
But the same people now who are rallying to the Tea Parties and some of these other Republican talk radio-dominated and organized functions have no problem at all with the corporate state as long as their people are in charge of it.
And that, of course, is a myopia here that's going to prove to be fatal unless people can develop vision out of the other eye and see the other half of the story, which is that the real question is who's controlling the state and how do we break the power of the state, period.
I mean, you hear a lot of lacrimose and melodramatic tribute to the power of bipartisanship from the people who organize these functions.
And then they turn around and they celebrate the worst elements of the state ruling is they celebrate the militarism of the state.
And they don't understand that there is an indivisible continuity between militarism abroad and militarism here at home.
These are people who find it scandalous that people receive welfare, for instance, but they don't understand that the military has always been the primary driver of the welfare state.
The creation of the welfare state here in the United States was a direct outgrowth of our interventionist foreign policy.
It started the same time we got involved in World War I.
It deepened in World War II when suddenly somebody had to take care of the war orphans because daddy was off to war and mama was off to assemble airplanes and tanks at the local affiliate of the merchants of death.
They don't think in terms of that sort because there's a certain cultivated myopia, once again, on the part of the people who are involved in this.
They don't think in terms of what the state does to everybody.
And they don't think about the necessity of protecting the rights of everybody against this monstrosity we call the state.
They're just thinking in terms of their own little cohort.
And I'm hoping that people will overcome that.
I don't know if that's an optimistic projection or if it's a Panglossian delusion, but I'm hoping at some point people will start to think in broader terms.
Yeah, well, and it seems like this whole police state that we're talking about is going to only get worse and worse as the economy gets worse and worse.
I guess, you know, I'm no genius about this kind of thing, but the Austrians make the most sense to me, and they're telling me, oh, man, this recession, they're just going to drag it out and drag it out.
It's going to be, you know, ten years at least or something before people are feeling right again.
Maybe they'll completely destroy the dollar.
We'll have like a complete breakdown of the division of labor here, that kind of thing.
And, man, people are being pitted.
It's like it really is more like the commies would construct it.
It's the richest people in this society are turning all of us against each other based on this stupid country rock and roll division.
And, meanwhile, we know who all the sons of bitches are.
Man, it's right there in the newspaper.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And, you know, divide and conquer being the oldest strategy, people are being pitted against each other on the basis of aesthetic considerations.
And, once again, I go back to the wedge issues that were pioneered under Nixon.
That's where the whole war on drugs came from, the whole war on crime came from.
You had Nixon representing plutocratic interests, the same kind of corporate interests now that are dominating both branches of the establishment party.
I don't consider the Republicans and Democrats to be different parties.
I consider the appendages the same ruling elite.
And they practice the same politics of welfare, warfare, the same politics of corporatism as opposed to free market capitalism.
And they find their constituencies.
They cultivate their constituencies.
They feed them on the basis of resenting the other people rather than loving liberty.
People don't love liberty as much as they hate the other faction.
And that is the situation in which liberty is going to be extinguished unless people somehow come to their senses.
Yeah.
And, you know, the thing is, too, especially when it's a right-wing talking point, even though I don't think there's a lot of real understanding there, I think that we ought to really be able to come to a left-right libertarian consensus that what we face is fascism.
It's not quite, you know, guys in gray uniforms marching up and down the street and what have you.
But the economic construction we're talking about is mercantilism at war.
It's empire and this massive state capitalist structure that we have, this crony capitalist structure that we have.
And so, really, it seems like the only lie we really got to knock down, and you're really in the best position to do it, Will, or, you know, to work at doing it, is knocking down this construction that Barack Obama is some, like, afroed, black power revolutionary from, you know, activists from below somehow.
Like, he really is some kind of revolutionary socialist.
When, no, really, Virginia, he's actually a corporate puppet fascist just like George Bush and Bill Clinton and George Bush and Ronald Reagan and the rest of them before.
He's no different in kind, or he wouldn't have been allowed a job in the first place.
That's not so hard.
Not at all.
I mean, the salient characteristic of Obama's administration thus far has been his utter continuity with his predecessor in every particular.
I mean, he was a year ago talking about the supposed critical need to have the TARP program passed to bail out all these plutocratic robbers on Wall Street.
He was somebody who went into great detail talking about what a terrible deal this was, and then he pivoted on a dime and without breaking stride said, obviously, this is something we have to pass.
And he surrounded himself with people who were among the architects of our financial meltdown.
With respect to civil liberties, he's endorsed every one of the most abhorrent policies of his predecessor while giving pious speeches for the benefit of some people who think that he represents something a little bit different.
But he's somebody who is just basically a more anodyne personality than his predecessor.
He speaks in complete sentence, which is a bit of a relief, I suppose, after dealing with George Bush's mangling of the English language for eight years.
He does seem to have a better family life than Bill Clinton, but the point is that in terms of his policies, he's not appreciably different from any of them.
And he's accentuating what began over a year ago with respect to the full bore conversion of our economy into outright corporatist, if you will, fascist collectivism.
But the people who were rallying once again at Washington last week and the people who are now becoming the salient of the Republican counterattack would have us believe that this is all something inflicted upon us by Obama.
They don't remember.
I mean, they obviously don't have a short term memory adequate to remember that this all began under George W. Bush.
And you have a handoff of the baton that was utterly seamless.
Yeah, it certainly seems like it.
I was about to say something really smart and I forgot what it was.
I have that problem all the time.
Anyway, I got to tell you, man, I really appreciate your blog and all your writing.
Thank you.
And I appreciate your time on the show today.
Well, thank you so much for the opportunity.
It's always wonderful to talk to you, Scott.
I think you do a wonderful job with this program.
Indispensable.
Well, thanks very much for that.
All right, everybody, that's Will Grigg.
The website is ProLibertate.
That's freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And the book is called Liberty in Eclipse.
You can also find him regularly at the blog at lourockwell.com.