I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Will Grigg.
He's the great writer.
Man, he's such a good writer, seriously.
Go and look at what he writes there.
It's Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com freedominourtime.blogspot.com Or just search Will Grigg and it'll come right up.
You knew that.
Welcome back to the show.
Will, how are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing very well.
You're very kind and it's always a pleasure to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
Folks, if you're not familiar, Will's thing is mostly he writes about local police abuse and, you know, their abject lawlessness and violent persecutions and murders of the inhabitants of these states.
Man, that's his beat and he does a killer job at it and I really do hope that you'll read what he writes.
Now, specifically here you've been writing about, well, not just the Bundy Ranch thing but related issues here.
Sure.
So I thought I'd have you on.
You have stuff at your blog, you have stuff at luerockwell.com who destroy their own lives, basically.
It prevents them, it subsidizes them from improving themselves.
Although, you know, it's not like he was really sticking up for poor black folks.
You know, he was sort of taking the opportunity to condemn them all, you know.
There was a section just before that, however, where he was reminiscing on the Watts riots and the disturbances of the late 1960s where he was talking about the fact that these are people who are understandably upset because they weren't free and that we made a lot of progress since that point and we shouldn't want to go back.
And he was talking about that readily.
Mr. Bundy, for whatever other virtues he might possess, is not really concise.
He's not somebody who speaks the sound bites.
And the stream of consciousness bit here that we saw at this presentation impressed me for one reason, Scott, and that's because the very ending he was talking about the fact that he'd worked alongside many of the so-called illegal immigrants from Mexico who were routinely vilified by people on the right.
And he was lamenting that they weren't there because he said they're good people, they're family-oriented people, they certainly work hard, they certainly pay taxes.
They may have come here against our laws, but it's a familiar three-step process where people are vilified, then they're isolated, and then they're annihilated.
And I'm really afraid that that's the direction this is heading here.
Once people dissociate themselves from him.
Glenn Beck this morning was doing his best William F. Buckley impression, saying, cut off the relationship with this man, cast him out of the movement, don't have anything to do with him, we don't need to be associated with him.
And when Glenn Beck and other people, Rand Paul among them, are moving away from this man and isolating him, the purpose, of course, is to leave him and whoever remains with him isolated and vulnerable so that the state can do with them as the people who run the state see fit.
And that really worries me.
Yeah, well, I mean, along those same lines, I thought the fact that they'd call him, I guess Harry Reid called him a terrorist, him and his supporters called him a terrorist, is more ominous even than calling him a racist.
And, I mean, you know me, I always defended Randy Weaver, and he was a legitimate racist, although he didn't work for a black guy at the local garage.
But, I mean, he was on the record saying, yeah, no, I do believe in racial separation and superiorities and this and that and whatever.
My family has homesteaded this land and it belongs to me.
He's not saying that.
He says that the land belongs to the state and the county, but, of course, the federal government created the state and the county in the first place, and on the condition that they accept everything the way the federal government has it.
So, at least in terms of the legitimacy of the state of Nevada, the federal government's claims are legitimate, too.
And he's not even really disputing that, it doesn't sound like.
That this is the commons and he wants free reign to it, but he shouldn't have to pay for it like every other rancher who leases public land.
He happens to think about race.
The second most important question to me is a matter that's gotten sort of shunted down below the fold over the last couple of days, and that is the rather tangled question of his family's grazing rights and at what time the family acquired grazing rights in Clark County.
That may not necessarily have a bearing on the constitutional matters, but he's been making certain extravagant claims about the length of time that the Bundy family has been homesteading and working the lands since the late 1870s or thereabout.
And the Las Vegas Review-Journal went back and pulled the files, and apparently there's some dispute about that.
I want to get that clarified from him, because I think that's an important issue with respect to his veracity.
I grant, given the somewhat convoluted nature of family pedigrees and polygamous Mormon families like the ones that settled Nevada back in the 1870s, it's entirely possible that there are ancestors of Clive and Bundy who were in that part of Clark County, Nevada.
That might be what he's referring to, but we need clarity on that point.
Now, with respect to the question of racial attitudes and the religious background of his views, as you mentioned, I'm of what some people might call mixed race.
I'm a large brown guy.
In the summer, I can pass for black.
I just recently found out I'm of Hawaiian and Cherokee Indian extraction, which is something that somewhat surprised me.
I thought I was Mexican for the first 50 years of my life.
Many of my in-laws are from Nevada, and I was raised in a Mormon home, and I was exposed to Mormon teachings about the origins of skin color, which I considered at the time to be very offensive and consider to be offensive now.
And I, as you say, Scott, probably have a higher threshold of outrage when it comes to certain types of language, because it had been part of my upbringing in southeastern Idaho.
When I was in a town of 14,000 people, 99% of whom were Mormon, and 99.9% of whom were white, there were certain attitudes I collided against.
I just learned to deal with them.
I recognized that people can say and believe offensive things, but if they're not picking my pocket or breaking my leg, then I can live next to them, live along with them, live alongside them, and probably do peaceful, constructive things with them.
And I do think that in terms of the property rights issue once again here, and the way that Mr. Bundy has gone about it, you do have a situation here where he is a nationalist, as I said, and a constitutionalist rather than a libertarian.
He doesn't want to abolish the national government.
He doesn't treat the grazing allotment as his property, but doesn't treat the grazing lands as if they were his property.
He disclaims that.
He said they should belong to a government that was created pursuant to federal action.
The larger constitutional question here, Scott, that many people, not merely Clyde and Bundy, have brought up is the fact that Nevada is effectively a colony of Washington, and that's something that has to be changed, whether or not they're on strictly fastidiously sound legal footing here.
The moral claim is very urgent, and it has to be addressed.
And one of the reasons why there's a certain amount of delight in the regulatory bureaucracy today is because Clyde and Bundy, until this morning or until late last night, was looked upon as a potential hero for the land sovereignty movement.
Now he's been displaced from that pedestal.
I think that's all to the good because you can trade him out for the Dan sisters and their brother, who are the Shoshone Indians, the western Shoshone Indians of the northwestern part of the state of Nevada in the Crescent Valley, who were treated exactly the same way by the BLM, the Clyde and Bundy family was.
The difference is that these are dirt poor, less worse than dirt poor people, who had an unambiguous claim to this land.
It had been in their family since time immemorial, and they were obviously screwed by the BLM and by a quasi-judicial body put together by the federal government for the express purpose of cheating Indians out of the land so that this land could be turned over to corporations like the Canadian corporation that took this grazing land that was supposedly being damaged by the horse and cattle herds of the Dan family, took this grazing land and gouged three open pit mines out of it and started leaching mercury and lead and other contaminants into the watershed and into the atmosphere.
That's the same regulatory apparatus that has been targeting the Bundys.
Oh man, it is too bad that the Democrats are in power right now.
Can you imagine if the Republicans were picking on Indians and the environment in a double whammy like that?
That was a George W. Bush program?
The Dem-Koch brothers or something like that?
Yes, that happened under Clinton and under Bruce Babbitt.
The BLM was sent in to take out the Bundys.
Oh, I didn't realize it was that far back.
The Dan family's ranch.
Yes, that was in the late 1990s, and it continued until 2003.
But we all get caught.
We don't get caught.
I know that you resist this undertow, and I do my best as well.
People get caught in the who-whom dichotomy here.
They never pay attention to the what.
In conversations I've had over the last couple of days with some of my friends of a progressive bent about the merits of the Bundy claim versus what happened to the Dans, they'll all say, well, I sympathize with the Indians, but Clyde and Bundy, he just strikes me as wrong about this.
This is how you fall into the who-whom dichotomy here.
Pay attention to the what.
The what is identical in both of those cases.
The Dan family pursued their legal claims through the Article III court system.
First of all, they were settled by the so-called Indian Claims Commissioner, ICC.
Anything called a commission was set up to facilitate a fraud.
Take that as an axiom.
This was disbanded about five or ten years ago, but the Indian Claims Commission said they didn't have standing.
They took their case all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court said, well, you don't have standing because the government sold this property to itself, and in doing so it extinguished your claim.
Then they went to the United Nations.
They went so far as to appeal their case to the Committee on the Eradication of Racial Discrimination, and they wrote a very pretty document laying out in detail the legitimacy of the Dan family's claims and grievances, and it did nothing at all because the United Nations is an assembly of governments, and unless you can get a coalition of governments together in order to beat up on a weaker government and steal property that that government claims, the United Nations isn't particularly useful.
It's at best useless and at worst very harmful, and so they literally did everything within their power within every legal system that has thus far been constituted, and they had nothing.
They were left with literally nothing, and it was the same Harry Reid who about five or six years ago as a way of consummating the criminal act that was done to the Western Shoshone just said, well, I'm going to engross a measure in Congress that would pay them $26,000 apiece for the ultimate resolution of all these outstanding claims.
Of course, that's not even a pittance compared to what the federal government is collecting in fees that they're charging to politically connected corporations to make use of this property that has been stolen from these people.
You know, the same Harry Reid who just said, well, let's sweep this under the rug and see if we can find some institutional palliative for this crime that was committed against these people.
It's the same act.
It's the same evil process.
And for some people, the Dans will be much more sympathetic than Clive and Buddy and his family would be, but in this speech that I saw, and bear in mind, this is the most damaging excerpt that the New York Times could find of what was a large speech that was delivered on the 19th of April.
In this speech, I saw somebody who was trying to overcome his background and reach beyond his comfort zone, beyond these ethnic and racial boundaries, these little ghettos into which our would-be masters want to assign us and make us live, and say we need to put these things aside and work with these people in order to confront the real enemy.
So I grant that he's in many ways an unappealing person to those of us who are small-l libertarians or freedom activists, peace activists.
He's somebody who's trying, I think, making an honest effort to overcome some of his baggage.
His claims may not be firmly nailed down and squared away in terms of his standing and his family standing on the land, but it's not necessary to treat him as a hero in order to understand who the real villain of the piece is.
And that's the part of the story I think that's getting lost today, and I think that's one of the reasons why the story was presented the way it was.
Yeah.
All right, now, so I read this one thing by a Democrat type, but he was a rancher, and he was saying that, look, all these ranchers, and virtually all the ranchers in the West and a lot of places elsewhere in America too, they're all on welfare.
They all use government land, and especially when you're talking about these ranches in the West, this guy would be out of business if he had to buy all the property he needed to graze all these cattle, or he would have to have a lot less fewer cattle.
And that if they did really privatize Nevada and kick the U.S. government out of it, then all that land would be fenced off and owned by somebody else, not him, and then he'd be doubly screwed anyway.
He'd be down to as many cattle as he can feed on his actual ranch, and brings up the question of whether he's better off with the status quo.
What do you think?
If he's better off with the status quo, if he's certainly acting vigorously against his own obvious interests, I do think that he's at least as familiar with the lay of the land, so to speak, as the person whose work you're citing here, Scott.
And if he's acting in contradiction to his own interests, then the stand he's taking actually strikes me as more commendable, because it's something that would be against his interests.
Well, assuming he knows it.
Assuming that he knows it, I think he does.
He's surrounded by people who've been deeply involved in this battle for a number of decades.
Well, I mean, from what I've seen of what he's said, he assumes that in his perfect world the feds wouldn't be around, but the land would belong to the state of Nevada, and they would let him graze for free all he wanted on that public commons.
No, no, he doesn't have any illusions about having to pay grazing fees.
That's something that I spoke with him about at some length, and specifically I wanted to pin him down about this.
He's not saying that he would withhold grazing fees from Clark County or from the state of Nevada.
He's aware of the fact that if he's going to be using something identified as public land, he's going to have to pay fees.
He just believes that the federal government is the wrong landlord.
You might consider this an eccentric or quixotic point to make, but he's serious about it, and you can make a really good case based on the history of the state of Nevada and the States Enabling Act and constitutional provisions, but he's got his arms around this issue quite firmly.
So I don't know whether or not he's made a rational calculation of his own self-interest from a purely financial point of view, but chances are he does know enough about this to understand that he's not going to be getting a better deal necessarily with Clark County or with the state of Nevada.
He's just attached to a position that some people might call abstract, but other people would call patriotic.
All right, now, so when it comes to the turtles, I think I read that the turtles like having the cows around, because I don't know if they like tripping on the mushrooms or what it is exactly, but that the cattle themselves are good for the turtles.
And I did see a video by, I think, an unnamed libertarian, but he seemed to have his act together, because he was separating some wheat from some chaff, and he was saying that the rumors that this is all about fracking make no sense, because that's all based on some stuff going on on the entire other end of the state, but he said that it really does look like this is Harry Reid and his son and some cronies with some solar power company.
They don't want the risk of cows running around where they have a field full of mirrors.
Is there any credibility to that, do you think?
There was a BLM study that was dealing with the issue of trespass cattle and how it would be to their advantage to be moving cattle off that specific track within Clark County.
And now this is going to be their land, or this is going to be on public land too, this solar farm?
Well, this would be on land that would be leased to a corporation that would be building the solar farm, in the same way that the land seized from the Danes was leased to a gold company, a gold mining company.
I've got no problem at all with the idea of developing solar energy, and I certainly have no idea what gold mining is.
I'm a hard metal enthusiast, as you know.
But these people should be making their own deals based on equity, and they shouldn't have the government confiscate property and then sell it to them on concessionary terms that do amount to a subsidy, a type of corporate welfare.
And I do think that there are probably in the works some of these grand corporate welfare designs in Clark County of the sort that are very commonplace.
Crony capitalism or corporatism is the system we live under, and you could say that perhaps people who are involved in the ranching industry represent people very low on that totem pole, that there is a certain corporatist arrangement they have with the state.
That's not something that they necessarily did.
That's what they inherited.
And perhaps they're getting shunted aside now for bigger and wealthier and more politically connected proponents of the same system.
And I don't know enough about what's happening with the rumors concerning the development of that area for solar farms.
We do know that green energy, green industry, is one of the big things being promoted right now within the Obama administration.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that working with the Senate Majority Leader and his gnomish son there on the Clark County Commission, that they are pursuing steadily some kind of a big deal that would require the Bundy Ranch, the last ranch of the 53 that's in Clark County, be removed so that a bigger interest could move in.
It wouldn't surprise me to find out that that's what's happening right now.
I've not been able to develop enough material on that, enough soundly sourced material on that to say something intelligent about that in print yet.
But it would make sense, given what we've seen elsewhere in Nevada and throughout the Intermountain West.
All right, now, I'm sorry that we're out of time.
I hope, and I know I've been interviewing you all the time lately, but I need to get you on the show again here real soon because I've got this entire mess of stories about the high-tech surveillance state as it's implemented on the local level that I just got to talk with you about.
So, early next week, perhaps, sir?
I think that would be great, Scott.
Thank you so much for your time again, Will.
I appreciate it.
You bet.
That is the great Will Grigg.
His blog is ProLibertateFreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com.
I'm Scott Horton.
Mine is ScottHorton.org.
Thanks for listening.
See you tomorrow.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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The military industrial complex.
The disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
I'd like for you to read this book, The War State by Michael Swanson.
America's always gone to war a lot.
Though in older times, it would disarm for a bit between each one.
But in World War II, the U.S. built a military and intelligence apparatus so large it ended up reducing the former constitutional government to an almost ceremonial role and converting our economy into an engine of destruction.
In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important first-hand source material, but writing for you and me.
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Or just click the logo in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
We should take nothing for granted.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
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Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
