10/20/09 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to introduce my friend Will Grigg.
He writes the incredibly awesome blog Pro Libertate, which you can find at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
He hosts his own weekly radio show, and he's the author of the must-read Liberty in Eclipse.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing great.
Thanks so much for having me on again.
It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Listen, I really appreciate you joining me on the show today.
Before we get into all this hoorah going on up there in Montana, I wanted to mention this to you.
I saw this on TV the other night here in Los Angeles on the local Fox News.
It turns out this kid was hearing voices in his head, suffering from schizophrenia.
His mom called the local health services, and they were apparently overmatched by the kid's paranoia.
So they called the sheriffs out, and first they maced him, and then they tased him, and then they shot him to death.
And, you know, to hear TV news tell it, they're like, well, the APD murdered another one of us today, and all right, here's Tom with the weather.
And just to paraphrase Bill Hicks there, no big deal, just another day in Los Angeles.
And I was thinking, I know you've been paying so close of attention to this over the past couple of years especially.
Have you worked out the mathematics of, on average, how many innocent, unarmed Americans are murdered by police, their protectors, their security force in this country, say, per week or per month?
Do you know?
I'm still trying to collate the data on that, but it's a very safe estimate to say you could round it up to dozens a week in this country.
Somewhere in this country, people who have not been convicted of crimes, have not been accused of crimes, or are merely suspected of crimes, are summarily killed by police.
And the case that you describe is a really good example of something that just drives me insane, and that is the reluctance of the media to describe accurately what happened here.
Think of a case, as in so many others, they're doing stenography rather than journalism because the police department will say that so-and-so was tased, or so-and-so was shot, and then they will leave it at that without, of course, describing this as a homicide.
Or, in other cases of this sort, where somebody dies immediately after a taser strike, and there was a case just like that yesterday involving a 16-year-old man, if I remember correctly, a 16-year-old youngster, I should say.
They'll say that he was tased, and then he died, and there's a disconnect between the one event and the other.
He was tased, and then he died from what?
Was he hit by falling space debris?
No!
He died as a result of being tased by the police.
And another thing that you hear often is this idea that there's this nonsensical diagnosis called excited delirium, which is a condition that only strikes people when they're under assault by law enforcement officers, usually with a taser.
And they die of a heart attack, or they die of a stroke, or some other condition that is directly attributable to the physical trauma of being electrocuted, and yet they've created this separate category saying, well, he didn't die of the specific taser strike, he died of the related excited delirium.
As a matter of fact, in the case of this Cardall fellow who died in Utah a number of months ago, he was the son of Dwayne Cardall, who was a local media celebrity there at KSL Television in Salt Lake City.
He was somebody who had mental illness.
He was suffering from severe bipolar disorder.
He had issues with his medication, and he had a breakdown, and his wife made the mistake of calling the police.
Please, people, don't call the police and expect that you're going to be helped.
They showed up, and within a few minutes, he was dead.
He was subjected to a couple of taser strikes.
The very first thing that the police officer said when the EMT showed up was, well, apparently it was excited delirium.
No, it was being shot multiple times with a device that emits 50,000 volts of electricity.
Well, so that's the same, that excited delirium.
That's what happens to someone when you strap them in the electric chair, right?
Exactly.
They died of excited delirium.
That'll be the official cause of death in the coroner's inquest of your typical execution now, probably.
Man, you know, this poor dead schizophrenic kid here, his mother said to the camera, well, you know, I just think, or maybe it was the sister, I think these cops need more training, more, that, you know, and it's a basic quantity-quality problem, and, you know, maybe it just kind of slipped out that way or something like that, but it doesn't seem to me like there's a lack of training.
It seems to me that the training has changed and that these police are told, it's sort of like, I even remember Will being a kid and first kind of understanding the law about killing someone in self-defense and how there's a certain line where if you kill somebody, you won't go to jail for it because if they were trying to kill you first, then it's okay and whatever.
And I remember some of the kids, and hell, maybe even me, kind of seeing this as like when you can kill someone, right?
If they're climbing in your window in the daytime, you can't, but at night, you can.
And it sort of seems like this is the mindset of these cops, is like, here are the lines where once this line has been crossed, once this thing is activated, however you call it, now you may kill them.
And that's exactly what they do.
At the first chance that they can, they kill somebody.
Well, it seems not only that they're looking at the bright line distinction here and thinking of it in terms of a trigger, a triggering mechanism, but it seems as if they're constantly trying to goad or abet people into crossing that line with the comportment, with the behavior, with the accoutrements that they wear, which are now clearly the type of thing that a paramilitary operator will wear as opposed to a peace officer.
But the entire attitude is to be provocative and to provoke people into doing things that justify the use of aggressive force, that supposedly justify the use of aggressive force, including lethal force.
The case that we're talking about here in Los Angeles where this poor schizophrenic kid ended up being shot, there's just simply no way that somebody who is not a criminal suspect, you're dealing with somebody with a medical condition here, and within a very brief period of time, the police following this training, and you're right, it's not a qualitative problem, it's a qualitative problem.
It's what they're being trained to do rather than how much training they received.
But they went right up the escalation ladder up to and including the use of lethal force against somebody who was not a criminal suspect, but somebody who had a health condition that made him possibly dangerous to himself, but only incidentally dangerous to others.
And there was no mens rea here, there was no criminal intent on the part of the kid.
He was somebody who was acting in a condition of diminished capacity.
And yet, in perfect form, they illustrated the fundamental truth about government law enforcement, which is that these are people who see themselves as the edge of the state's blade.
They're people who see themselves as clothed in the authority to take a human life at their discretion, and they will exercise that power when they consider themselves entitled to do so.
And the really dangerous thing is that they're developing a badly overgrown sense of entitlement.
Yeah, well, now, this is all just a symptom of something else or something.
And I want to talk to you all about what was going on with that town in Montana and all that.
It seems like, you know, maybe sort of a segue here is, or I guess I wonder whether you think, is this like an economic thing?
Because I guess, you know, we've been living through, up until a year ago, massive bubble times, so-called good times.
And yet we've been, you know, really since Waco, we've seen cops put on more and more body armor and get bigger and bigger guns every year this whole time.
Is there some kind of real agenda to militarize our police?
Or it's just this is what happens when you have an empire, you have all this military surplus, you have a drug war.
And, you know, these things just kind of build on themselves until every little town has its own SWAT team.
I mean, you could see why someone would assume that.
Some think tank somewhere must have come up with, listen, we're going to turn all of our local police into paramilitary forces.
I don't know, in preparation into merging them with Homeland Security or what, you know?
Well, there's certainly a little of all the elements you described at work here.
But the fundamental problem here is that the United States is an empire.
And empires are at war with their own subjects before they're at war with other countries or other people.
In order to maintain the cohesiveness of policy and the type of primacy in armed musculature, if you will, that is necessary to carry out an imperial foreign policy, you have to have domestic regimentation.
This is a principle as old as Cicero, and it's something that Edmund Burke pointed out.
During the American War for Independence, Edmund Burke was actually sympathetic to the American colonists, saying that he feared Britain's power and Britain's ambitions more than that of any other power in the world.
And those ambitions being manifested in terms of trying to suppress the demands being made by the American colonists that their rights as Englishmen be respected.
Edmund Burke was pointing out that you couldn't be an empire abroad and be any kind of a free society at home.
And of course, we're supposed to be a republic rather than an empire.
But the fundamental task of government, when you take a look at it in terms of the imperial priorities, is to maintain power through force by subjugating people both at home and abroad.
And government in an economic sense is an exercise in pure consumption.
The only things that government can actually make are corpses out of living human beings and criminals out of innocent men and women.
And these two things go hand in hand when you're talking about imperial foreign policy and domestic, if you will, prison policy.
They're part of the same complex, the same military, industrial, homeland security, incarceration complex.
And that's really a bubble that's still being inflated.
That's where most of the capital is being soaked up right now is in terms of the tasks of regimentation, force projection, and internal incarceration.
And what's going on in Hardin is an example of something that really started about 10 years ago where you had these so-called private incarceration institutions, the so-called privatization of prisons.
Actually, it started about 20 years ago, but it really started catching fire in the mid-1990s.
Well, it's been a big thing in Texas.
I think Texas really led the way with Wackenhut and all that.
Oh, yeah, Wackenhut.
And you take a look at the people who are invested in that.
Good grief, Dick Cheney, when he's not been in his undisclosed location in that little metal egg that Darth Vader sits in, he was investing his money in the Vanguard Group.
That's right.
I forgot about that.
Wasn't there an indictment or something?
Yeah, the indictment was handed down in November of last year, almost exactly a year ago as a matter of fact.
God, I haven't thought of that since then.
I guess nobody else has either.
Well, yeah.
Think of it for a second.
This guy was promoting the whole garrison state, the whole homeland security state, expanding detention.
And detention is an industry that doesn't just include the incarceration of convicted prisoners or the temporary jailing of people who are being put on trial for crimes.
Detention includes people who are here who are, as I like to say, immigrants who are here without official government permission or people who are suspected of being the same or that new category.
People who are suspected of being unlawful enemy combatants or people of interest in terrorist investigations.
Cheney was pushing all these policies while he was investing in the Vanguard Group, which is building all these detention facilities.
And it's part of this matrix of corporatist entities that are really involved in the same kind of a scam and scandal that we saw in Hardin, Montana.
You have people who are attached to this core plan corrections group down there in Argyle, Texas, who went there and did a feasibility study.
They hired a group, I believe, from Tennessee to come into the feasibility study to inveigle themselves with the good graces of this economically deprived county.
And they got the county commissioners all hopped up on the idea that this would be basically free money.
Just go build a prison.
If you build it, they will come.
The revenue will arrive.
And you can issue these bonds that will pay for themselves without raising local taxes.
And, of course, these people all got a cut up front when they were building the prison.
The people who built the prisons, they're part of that same prison industry.
That's a project, one of the big projects done there in Texas.
They got their money up front.
The people who did the feasibility study got their money up front.
And suddenly this town ends up with a 464-bed so-called jail, which is actually the size of a prison.
It's huge.
It's just bizarre and almost absurd.
When I went out there and took a look at this facility, it is probably at least six or eight times bigger than any county jail I've ever seen here in Payette, Idaho.
Payette, Idaho being the county seat of Payette County, the way that Hardin is the seat of Bighorn County, Montana.
We have a county jail.
The county jail here in Payette is one part of City Hall.
And it's roughly the size, I think, of maybe a one-eighth section of that jail that they built, this 464-bed so-called jail that's actually a prison.
But the idea is they were going to fill this up basically with the slop off from either the state corrections department there in Montana or they would be getting out-of-state prisoners.
At one point they were talking about getting detainees from Guantanamo Bay if they were to shut down the detention facility down there.
But they built this essentially because they were assured by people who were in this business of detention, this government-funded, this federally-funded business of detention, that this was a no-miss way of building up the local economy of a depressed town in a depressed county.
And from that flowed this entire bizarre antic parade of characters and con artists that made the news so interesting over the last couple of months and that made life for people in Hardin rather miserable.
I mean, it was just in a way very tragic and heart-rending to see these forlorn people talking about how their little town had been made a global laughingstock.
I mean, I was there with an associate of mine who would go to a local diner or would go visit some of the other businesses that always say, Oh, are you here to pile on?
I'd say, No, we're not here to pile on.
We want to know what's actually happening here.
And a couple of them would say, Well, we're a global joke, aren't we?
We're a big joke.
And I said, Well, no, it seems to me that your county commission is.
Well, you know, there's some important things going on here.
First of all, as you say, the place is basically destitute because, well, for one reason that we can all point our finger at, clearly the business cycle caused by our national government's control of our currency.
Of course, the trillion dollars plus a year spent occupying the world by the Pentagon and so forth.
This is an empire.
I don't know if you saw The Simpsons last Sunday, Will.
I didn't.
Well, they went to the ultimate fighting thing.
OK.
And Lenny and Carl are leaving.
And Lenny says, Yeah, you know, this is just like the Romans.
And Carl says, Yeah, but their empire was falling apart.
And Lenny goes, Yeah, stupid Romans or something.
And they high five.
And it was funny anyway.
So the point is that this is what's going on is here's this town has no economic opportunities whatsoever.
You know, their local little town council spinoff sees an opportunity for some revenue.
And the fact that it would be, you know, holding other Americans in cages like animals, that doesn't bother them.
That's the way we do things.
No problem there.
And so what happened was they fell for a con artist.
They they were so desperate for bringing some money into that town that they let.
Well, I don't know exactly how they got the prison in the first place, but then they let this con artist come.
And that was where they're piling on came in.
This guy came and saw how desperate they were and figured out how to funnel a bunch of some of this money to himself anyway.
Well, what happened is that they fell for another con artist first, the first con artist.
And if he wants to sue me for defamation for describing as such, feel free.
James Parkey of Corplan Corrections is the fellow who went in and sold them on the idea of building the prison in the first place.
It seems to me that that's the big fraud of which the so-called Captain Michael Hilton and so-called American police force fraud is sort of a satellite.
It seems to me that by the time that this guy who calls himself Michael Hilton came waltzing in with his little fleet of three leased black SUVs with decals announcing that he and his associates were now the police force for Hardin, that really that was sort of the end game to a fraud that actually began several years ago, back in 2003, 2004, when Parkey and Corplan showed up and said, why don't we build a prison?
This is basically found money.
It's basically free money.
You can go out and you can issue these revenue bonds in the municipal bond market, which, by the way, according to people who analyze these things, is so utterly riddled with fraud.
It makes the regular bond market look downright chaste and pure by comparison.
But you can issue these revenue bonds, and you can build this jail, and then really it's just like water witching, or it's just like the story of the guy who wanted to make some stone soup, and he put a stone in a pot, and then suddenly everybody started pitching in, and they had this wonderful stew by the end of the story.
This guy's a rainmaker, like the character out of The Music Man.
Everybody talked about Michael Hilton as being like that so-called professor from The Music Man, but once again, he's sort of a junior league con artist.
He's a small-bore con artist compared to a high-caliber guy like this James Parkey, who's done this all throughout the country, particularly in the South and the Southwest, and up even in places like the Northeast, where you have all these factory towns shutting down because the industrial economy has been strip-mined.
Or even in places like Northwestern Oregon, there are a couple of towns where they have these so-called private prisons built.
Even a place like Orofino, Idaho, they used to have a timber industry up in Orofino, and it's been shut down by the federal government.
All these people were thrown out of work, so basically the two things that are sustaining the economy in Orofino, which is a beautiful place, by the way, are the state mental hospital and the state prison, which was built there about 15 years ago.
This is a common story that's recurring time and time again throughout this country.
As you point out, this is a big business.
Putting people behind bars is a big business.
The thing that struck me about Hardin and the fact that they decided to get their foot in this business is how they went whole hog by building this grotesquely huge facility in this thinly populated but geographically very expansive county, where the biggest crime problem is dealing with the occasional Otis-type drunk who ends up slumped by the side of the road on a Friday night.
I went and spoke with the undersheriff about that, and he said, basically, we don't have a crime problem of the sort that many people would worry about.
We don't need a drug rehabilitation program like Hilton had supposedly promised to build in Hardin.
But they built this 464-bed monstrosity, and it reminded me of a line from Armando Valladares' memoir Against All Hope.
Valladares was a poet who was imprisoned by Castro in the early 1960s for being a political dissident.
He told the story of how, I guess, during the Spanish occupation of Cuba, when there was a Spanish colony, that a ruler had built this grotesquely huge jail that nobody could conceive of being filled any time in the foreseeable future.
And they asked him why he'd do that.
He said, well, somebody will come along who will fill it up, and that somebody, of course, was Fidel Castro.
And the same thing has happened with Hardin, and the same thing is going on right now.
It's just interesting to see, first of all, the fact that the United States is now the world's biggest jailer.
We have something around 3 million people behind bars right now, which is the highest figure, not only per capita, but the highest figure in absolute terms in the world.
And secondly, the fact that they seem to be building surplus capacity into the detention system.
And it's that latter fact that really troubles me, because they're going to have to fill these things up.
As I pointed out, the one thing the government does very well, apart from killing people outright and destroying property, is devising ways to make criminals out of the rest of us.
And so it seems to me that they're building more capacity into the system than they can use right now, and that means that there's got to be something done in order to make good on those investments.
Well, gee golly, Ned, don't you know that the government has a solution for that problem as well?
And that consists of criminalizing activities that have nothing to do with harming other people or other people's property.
Well, you know, the root of so much of this is corporatism.
And it seems like if you have a free society, people are going to be prosperous, and then their greed is going to match their wealth, and we're going to get sucked back into this thing.
It's like we have as much government as we can afford at any given time.
It has nothing to do with ideology or beliefs or whatever anymore.
And it seems like it's just my fault for being born so late into this thing.
I mean, we're talking about something that was, I think you would agree, quite aptly described by Garrett as ex-America, what, 65 years ago now?
He said this is it.
Don't look forward in fear of the revolution.
It already happened in the night singing songs of freedom the whole time.
Remember, you were cheering for it as it all went down in the 1930s.
That was when America finally shed the last of pretending to go by the Constitution and that kind of thing.
And I'm reading Charles Goyette's new book, which is so great.
It's coming out on the 29th, the anniversary of the 29th stock market crash.
It's called A Dollar Meltdown, The Impending Crisis.
This is about the crisis that is going to happen.
In fact, the Ron Paul blurb at the top says Goyette does a great job of explaining why America faces a looming financial crisis.
And no, this book wasn't written two years ago.
This is new.
This isn't about the crisis we're dealing with now.
This is about the next one that they're creating or setting us up for now.
And one of the things that Goyette says in here, and the book is absolutely brilliant.
You'll love it, Will.
I highly recommend it.
I'm getting a copy of it.
Oh, good deal.
Well, he says in there that America is not a kleptocracy anymore.
Because in a kleptocracy, you've got to keep the society wealthy enough that you can give your nephew a job stealing too.
And that what instead it is is America is a pinata party.
And what it is is everybody who has their little interest group, they get their stick and they take their whack at it to try to get as much out of that thing as they can.
But as we all know, the pinata does not survive the party.
Exactly.
And what's happened here really is they've built up an empire so big and so unwieldy and so in debt.
And so doomed to fail that apparently the people who are already the richest, most powerful, most politically connected people in our society have decided to go ahead and forget their nephew.
To go ahead and grab a stick and treat this thing like a pinata to get every last drop out of it they can before the whole thing falls apart.
Which it seems to me like this is the only way I can explain what's going on here.
They realize just what a lousy job they've done and that now it's try to just take as much money as you can before the whole thing completely falls apart.
And if that means getting a contract to sell iron bars to the new prison being built in the neighborhood, perfect.
That's a great way to get a transfer payment there.
Oh, I think that's a brilliant analysis.
And it really does underscore a point that I think we've made before.
Boy, that was a long setup.
Sorry.
That's okay.
I enjoyed listening to it.
I think that's very perspicuous.
The thing that I think that we've discussed before is that what's happening now in the United States is a variation of what happened in the former Soviet Union in 1990, 1991.
Just before their ruling oligarchy, the nomenclature of the Communist Party and the security organs decided to abolish their monopoly on power by diversifying into other front groups that retain in a more inchoate way the same monopoly of power.
That is they essentially deeded over to themselves everything of value in the former Soviet Union, which in and of itself within its own borders was an empire.
It had subsumed all these other countries and cultures and held them together by force, by terror, in the same way that the American empire is being held together by implicit terror, but by active bribery.
I mean, the formula is a little bit different with American imperialism.
It relies more on bribery and the threat of bombing than it does on the actual maintenance of terror as terror.
But when the former Soviet Union's ruling elite was getting ready for the big change and they knew that they had run their country into the mud and that the whole thing was going to fall apart because of the ineluctable logic of political corruption, they basically set up a mechanism where they could steal everything that wasn't firmly bolted to the floor and kept under armed guard.
We're seeing the same thing happening right now.
When it first dawned on me that that was what we were seeing, when I started my blog, Pueblo Retarde, I wrote a piece about pigmen going global.
And that, of course, refers to Orwell's Animal Farm and the scene at the end where the man looks at the pig and the pig looks back at the farmer and neither could tell which was which.
And that seems to be more or less the style of convergence that we're seeing right now.
It's not that we're seeing convergence between the United States and the former Soviet Union on the shared ground of Stalinism or some kind of post-Stalinist social democracy.
It's just blatant corporatist graft and full-bore thievery.
I mean, they're robber states.
The United States and the former Soviet Union are robber states.
They're trans-ideological.
They don't really display, except for the purposes perhaps of internal propaganda here in the United States, any kind of ideological claim to justify what they do.
It's just that you have people who are bent on government-aided and government-guaranteed and government-enforced graft ruling those respective political systems.
And they really behave in almost identical ways.
One big difference is that Russia actually has something of value to export.
It's got tremendous energy resources, and it's also got other natural resources that are wonderfully rich and plentiful.
It really is in many ways like the United States in that fashion.
And the next phase of this, Scott, that really fascinates me will be to see who will end up in charge of all of America's bountiful natural resources and energy reserves once the veneer is fully off.
We no longer have to worry about supplying some kind of a political rationale for the policies of the robbers who are running things.
Because the United States, I mean, the continental United States in particular, and our near sea coasts are almost without parallel in terms of the natural wealth.
You've got to believe that the people who are locking down this country and building this infrastructure of unalloyed repression, at some point will simply drop the pretense of being interested in humanitarian considerations and interested in the health of the environment, and they'll just start plundering the country and stealing it raw.
It will be interesting to see what will happen when that phase of the program rolls out.
Well, you know, it's funny.
You talk about the lack of ideology where it's just stealing at gunpoint all the time.
It seems like the biggest role of ideology is in preventing the American people from seeing what's going on in front of their face.
In a sense, it's tragic that we were born in such a great revolution with such an awesome Declaration of Independence and all these things, because instead of understanding that, hey, these things happen, man.
States are states and governments are governments.
Politicians are sick, evil killers.
It's always the same thing.
There's no reason to think that we're different or special or whatever.
Instead, we think we're different and special.
And so here, to many Americans, to hear the word empire, they assume you must be some kind of Marxist to even use that word.
What do you mean America is an empire?
I've never heard anybody say that before.
That's the most ridiculous thing.
You know, our great history is what's doing us in here.
Yeah, that is part of the tragedy of our circumstances.
It's interesting as well that if you take a look at your typical businessman or academic of a certain age who was brought up toward the end of the Soviet Empire, say somebody who's in his late 30s or early 40s, chances are he's got a much more usefully cynical perspective on government than your American of the same age.
In large measure, that would have to do, as you point out, with the ironic tragedy of being born in a country that had a revolution based on the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of what the individual earns through his own exertions and things of that sort.
And we've been cruising on the inherited momentum of a founding generation that, as far as founders of states go, was exceptionally good and noble.
That, of course, is to damn with faint praise because they did set up a government.
And a government is nothing more than the institutionalized repression of one person by a group of people in the name of a larger group of people.
But I do think that if you take a look at people who've gone through the experience of totalitarianism, they become post-ideological.
They start to understand the fact that however you try to disguise its ambitions, the government is basically a criminal syndicate.
And there are too many Americans who are still enraptured with the heritage of our country.
They're too enraptured to pay attention to the behavior of the government, which is ruling us.
And they don't understand that at all times and in all circumstances, it is the government that is ruling people that is the greatest threat to those people.
And Americans seem to be uniquely ingenuous in that respect.
And that's, of course, I think, one of the worst outgrowths of American exceptionalism.
We tend to be exceptionally gullible.
Listen, tell me all about this Oath Keepers thing.
What is this?
Oath Keepers is a group of people who are either current or former active-duty military, or current or former law enforcement, who have created really sort of an ad hoc national movement devoted to the proposition that their oath is to the Constitution.
It is not to any president or any chain of command.
It is to the Constitution, and that there are certain orders that are so manifestly in violation of the Constitution that they cannot in good conscience carry them out.
They will stand down, for instance, rather than carry out orders, if you're in the military, to behave as law enforcement officers within the continental United States.
That's, of course, against the Fosse Comitatus Act.
It's in contravention of the principle behind the Third Amendment of the Constitution.
And if you're in law enforcement, if you're a member of the Oath Keepers, then you intend to make it clear that you will not carry out orders to confiscate civilian firearms, as happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for instance, in New Orleans.
Okay, now let me stop you right there, and I'm sure there's more, and I'll let you go on, but I want to clarify a couple of things here.
First of all, one thing that confuses me is it seems like, from what I've read about it anyway, everybody's being signed up are ex-cops, and ex-soldiers, retired, veterans, people like that.
So what's the point of that?
Because they're not going to be asked to carry out anything anyway.
I've seen at least a couple of instances where people who are actually serving in Iraq have been wearing Oath Keeper decals.
So there are people in the active duty military who are part of that movement.
Well, shouldn't they be AWOL then?
I think so.
I mean, that's part of the paradox here.
I'm guardedly optimistic about it.
My big problem with it, as you point out, is that if people take this seriously in their active duty military, they're going to have to desert in order to be faithful to their professed principles.
Obviously.
Because you cannot be a constitutionally committed soldier and carry out the blatant theft of a country.
I mean, that just doesn't work.
I mean, the Constitution doesn't authorize the government of the United States.
However you read the Constitution, there's no provision in there that authorizes wars of aggression and conquest.
And this, of course, when we're talking about Iraq or Afghanistan, neither of these was a declared war.
Neither of them was a defensive war.
Neither of them was a suitable conflict in terms of either Christian just law theory or, from my perspective, more importantly, the biblical concept of under what circumstances defensive force is justified.
But more importantly, from the Oath Keeper's point of view, they're both summarily unconstitutional exercises of military force.
And so if you're a faithful Oath Keeper, really the first thing you should do is say, OK, we need to get out of here.
And if we're not leaving, then I am.
So that's part of the paradox here.
And the other part of the paradox as far as the Oath Keeper is concerned is that I don't like anything that tends to accentuate the mystique of the man in the government-issued uniform, or as I prefer to call it in my blog, a government-issued costume.
I think that there are people who choose that profession, whether you're talking about police work or the military, who do so out of genuinely idealistic motives.
But idealism is a very dangerous thing when it's coupled with power.
And I think that too often people tend to fetishize the uniform and the person who wears it.
And I think Oath Keeper plays into that mystique in a way that really undermines what they're trying to accentuate here, which is the importance of the Constitution, as opposed to the importance of the people here who have sworn a particular oath.
And behind all this is my nagging and unbanishable fear that the scenario described by Robert Heinlein that led him to write Starship Troopers might materialize.
And that is that when everything goes to hell in a handbasket, we're going to end up with a situation where people will turn to the military on the assumption that these are people who can really do things and make things work.
Right, this is the one government program we all know is just perfectly great.
Yeah, this is the exception that proves the rule.
This is the one that's actually run by people who know how to make things happen.
And there's already some kind of trial balloon, not necessarily from the Pentagon, but from some right-wingers who are pining for military dictatorship over there at Newsmax.com.
This Barack Obama is a Muslim, left-wing Christian, right-wing exiled Secret Service agent from Kenya, or whatever, who's usurped the throne and violated the Constitution with his welfare program.
So we want the Pentagon to go and remove him.
Yeah, that's actually – well, I don't know if ID is the right word to associate with the name Sean Hannity, but that was a transit impulse that lit up the otherwise unoccupied regions of Sean Hannity's brain tandem a few months ago when he was talking about – oh, actually, on his website, he had a number of possibilities.
What type of revolution do you like?
And the idea of a military coup was listed there as one of the options.
Look, I've lived under military occupation.
I don't really have much appetite to see it happen here again, or happen to me again, and see it happen here.
I was in Guatemala after the coup that overthrew Efraín Ríos Montt back in 1983, and I can't say that things improved.
I mean, the biggest difference is that dead bodies started to appear on the street, and you had to go through checkpoints everywhere.
And what happens if the United States goes this direction, I suspect, is that there are certain sections of the country where you're going to have people rise up, and you'll end up with a really nasty scenario, in my opinion, that would make Lebanon or Bosnia look like a slap fight.
Well, and this goes to the paranoia of the lefties, too, because – well, you know how it is with confirmation bias and old narratives with new life in them and whatever.
Everything makes sense, and you can't read – well, I'm reading this article in the ReviewJournal.com, and basically anything that touches at all on what could generally be called, I guess, the sort of populist patriot right wing, it has to mention Timothy McVeigh.
It has to say, remember, these are the dangerous, scary militia guys that we're all afraid of before.
And you know all the kind of left wing sites that I receive my tweets from on my Twitter account there.
A lot of this paranoia about the radical right wing, and of course anybody who is kind of a populist right winger is also obviously a racist, white supremacist, Jew-hating kook.
And of course Morris Dees in the Southern Poverty Law Center, who I always thought were great when I was a kid, the way that they sued the Ku Klux Klan right into bankruptcy and destroyed the last version of the Klan in the South.
And yet, apparently, according to them, you and me might as well be the Klan too, because we're sitting here saying sometimes we don't like it when cops electroshock people to death for no reason.
Yeah, we're worried about such things as the unnecessary violence against an incarceration of black people in the inner cities.
Or we would encourage a cop to read the Bill of Rights and remember what oath he took.
Exactly.
And the fact that you've got people, for instance, our dear friends over at the SPLC, worrying about the Oath Keepers, they're focusing on the wrong element of the equation here.
They're focusing on the fact that these people take the Constitution seriously.
But when they talk about Timothy McVeigh, they miss a key point, which is that Timothy McVeigh is what?
He was an ex, to the best of our knowledge, he was an ex.
He may have been for the length of his life, after age 18 or 19, but he at one point, let's assume that he did actually muster out of the army.
He wasn't a deep cover operative, let's just accept the narrative at the most commonly accessible level here, but he was an ex-government employee.
And these people went through a finishing school in terrorism called the Iraq War.
It was a government program.
It's the definitive government program.
It's the wholesale destruction of lives and property.
And they missed that element of the equation because these people want to believe that it's possible somehow to take government, which in its pure undiluted form is the power to coerce or kill other people in the name of some objective, and they can domesticate it and make it a tool of what they consider to be tolerance.
And so they don't talk about the dangers of accumulating power in government and then cultivating attitudes within people regarding the use of lethal force that are compatible with what government does.
They don't take a look at that element of the equation beyond coveting that power, I believe.
I mean, people like David Newart, who's a fellow Idahoan by birth, if not by culture and conviction, used to work with Morris Dees and people that sort of beating back private, small caliber hate mongers of the sort that infested the northern part of our state for a while.
He's somebody who champions hate crimes laws that would essentially destroy the double jeopardy protection in the Constitution because he thinks it's such a worthwhile objective to punish people for having illicit motives regarding race or sexual orientation or other categories that this justifies dispensing with one of the signal protections against the abuse of government power.
People like that are selectively myopic because they believe that as long as they're on the delivering side of the equation of government power, the government power will be used for ends that they consider to be self-evidently good.
And that takes me once again back to Lenin's equation of politics.
The fundamental question of politics is who does what to whom.
He said people always want to be on the who side rather than the whom side of that equation.
They want to be pitchers rather than catchers.
And so now that the left is in charge, you see Barack Obama institutionalizing all these abuses of the Bill of Rights and the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, better stated, giving new surveillance powers to the FBI, working with allies in Congress to make it impossible for us to have access to the records and photos of the torture that was being inflicted on detainees by the military.
He's talking about expanding the war into Iran, and he's already expanded the war into Pakistan.
Under his supervision, these bases are being built in Colombia to start up a new war down in South America.
Heavenly knows how extensive that's going to be.
And he gets the Nobel Peace Prize.
Within 12 days of his inauguration, on the assumption that his ability to give a stirring speech competently as he reads a teleprompter, somehow betokens his objective to bring peace and tranquility to the world.
And so now that that power is in the hands of Obama, or it seems to be in the hands of Obama, it's still in the hands of the same oligarchy of which Obama is just a figurehead, because you've got a more palatable figurehead for the ruling oligarchy.
The left has been completely anesthetized now.
And the right's talking about the idea of some elements of the right.
Let me refine that.
The Pinochet contingent on the right is longing for some kind of a coup to get that power back so that they're the who rather than the whom once again.
And the rest of us here who understand that the real danger is not who exercises power, but the fact that power is being exercised, are sitting back and trying to help other people understand that that is the danger.
Well, and you know, here's the thing too, man, is I'm a libertarian anarchist, and I would very much like to see the state go away.
I think the chronology I have in mind is people get it and insist on it, and we go back to the Articles of Confederation, you know, repeal the 21st century, then the 20th, then the 19th, we go back to the Articles of Confederation, and then we work toward getting rid of that, because we all understand liberty and it's the right thing to do and whatever.
I don't want to see a giant bloody revolution, because I don't think it's going to lead to anything good, and individuals have rights and all that kind of thing.
Well, I agree with that.
Who wants to see chaos?
But here's my worry.
As we head into this 10-year depression or worse, if we see the dollar completely break, we could see much, much worse than what we're looking at right now, which is already approaching 20% unemployment.
I've had real smart people who are kind of connected to other real powerful and smart type people say to me things like, you know, at lunch everybody's saying this is going to be like the 1930s, this is going to be like world revolution time again, set up to World War II era, everything changed kind of depression.
And here's the thing, when you talk about who and whom and how this political power is used, you know, I don't know, I wasn't alive in the 30s, so I guess I really don't know, but it seems like back then people at least understood that if we're going to have all this violence in our society, the way we do it is through our institutions, through courts, through representatives and elections and law, and we don't just let things go completely nuts.
I guess they really did let things go pretty nuts in the 30s.
But I wonder if the American people at this point, when you talk about the Pinochet contingent on the right, I mean, that's the talk radio right, that's the super majority of the right in this country, are the kind of people who don't even really, they probably never even really thought about what it means to have an election, to lose one, and then to bite your tongue, or not necessarily bite your tongue, but at least hold your horses and wait and you'll have your chance to win next time.
Like, you know, again, I'm a libertarian anarchist, I'm against all this in principle, but this is basically the understanding that we have in this country of having a social contract and a representative government, and it seems like people have less and less attachment to even the most basic understanding that like, hey, sometimes you lose elections.
It doesn't mean the Kenyan Secret Service got one over on you and you serped it.
You're a guy just lost.
And so, yeah, it's going to be bad, but that doesn't mean you need to go form a militia.
And the same thing for left-winger types who, you know, for whatever reason, you know, find themselves being infiltrated by the military and persecuted when right-wingers are in power.
The way we react to this, you know, until we can get back to the Articles of Confederation, is to, you know, vote libertarian.
Try to work against this tide, not to embrace it and try to use it back the other way.
Well, here's the problem that most conservatives don't understand.
The only conservative, and I mean by only, I mean only, conservative for whom I have any respect at all is Edmund Burke, whom I mentioned earlier.
And his most conservative sentiment in print, in my opinion, was in that letters to the sheriffs of Bristol that I cited, when he said, I fear our own power and our own ambition.
I mean, conservatism starts with what?
Looking at the beam in your own eye, to use the Christian expression.
And the problem here is that people don't understand that in a constitutional republic, if you win an election, what you should win, and all you should win, is the privilege of using the limited authority delegated to you by the Constitution to protect the rights of everybody, including those who voted against you.
That's your only privilege, your only power, if you win an election.
And so if you lose an election, you say, oh, great, now the people I don't support have the duty under the Constitution to protect my rights and property, and the world just keeps on spinning.
But the problem is that people look at government as this huge reservoir of power that they can use to do good, which they define as forcing other people to do their bidding.
The problem is that people want to live in such a way that they can compel other people to do their bidding.
That, unfortunately, seems to be encoded in our DNA somewhere.
I don't know why, but it seems to be there.
And until people understand that and understand why it is so dangerous to indulge that impulse when they have access to power, then the cycle you're describing, Scott, is going to continue until such time that you end up either with the system falling apart and people able in smaller polities to learn those lessons over again and put them into practice, or annihilation.
I mean, that's really how I look at it.
People have got to learn how to check rein their own impulse to dominate others, the libido dominante, the lust to dominate.
That really seems to me to be the root of all political evil.
Well, you're my hero, man.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate your writing, the way you write and what you write about, and your view and your insight on all these things.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been a blessing to be with you today.
Everybody, that's William Norman Grigg.
His blog is called Pro Libertate.
The web address is freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And he does his own weekly radio show, and you've got to read his excellent book, Liberty in Eclipse.