06/04/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Oh, thank goodness.
I got the great Will Grigg on the line.
He writes this great blog.
It's called Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Don't you like that insistence right in the title?
freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
He's also the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse, and you can also find it on audiobook, in fact.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing well.
It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you so much.
Good times.
Very happy to have you here.
And you know what?
I'm sorry to put you through this, but heard any bad news from the drug war lately?
I've heard nothing but bad news from the drug war.
The drug war has consummated bad news, and it has been now for over 40 years in its current iteration.
And it's another manifestation of this intermittent tendency of the American public to lapse into these bouts of punitive psychosis.
We had this happen over a century ago with alcohol prohibition, which required a change to the Constitution.
Not many people recall that in order to have the federal government involved in regulating what people chose to consume, the Constitution had to be changed because it was understood that the federal government had no authority under the Constitution to do this unless you expanded that document.
And then after 13 years and some semblance of normalcy being rediscovered by the public, the Constitution was reamended in order to do away with alcohol prohibition.
But when we're talking about the prohibition of cannabinoids and narcotics and things of that sort, this is something that is just done within the broad and apparently illimitable number of supposedly implicit powers that the federal government can exercise under the Constitution.
And every law enforcement agency in this country, no matter how localized it might be, is part of this federal effort.
This is a unitary system that is locally administered through your police department or through your sheriff's office.
And the sheriff's offices historically have been very jealous of their turf.
But over the last 30 years or so, thanks to a combination of pressure and plunder, that is to say the prospect of shared plunder, just about every sheriff's office in this country is enlisted in what is a literal war against the American people.
Boy, it sure is seeming like that more and more every day.
And, you know, I remember back after Waco, I talked with a guy who had been special forces in the Marines, and he kind of told me the story of the new kind of rebirth of special forces after the failure in the Iranian desert, when they tried to rescue the hostages and the way, you know, they created SEAL Team 6.
And then all the guys on the original SEAL Team 6 went out to, and I don't know if this is exactly right, I'm just saying this is what I was taught, each one of the guys on the original SEAL Team 6 then went out to become the head of force recon in the Marines, or the head of the Navy SEALs in the Navy, the head of Delta Force, and etc.
And this is where all that came from, and how the FBI hostage rescue team was actually just another one of those break-offs of the original SEAL Team 6.
And it was under, for a time, under the authority of a guy who I believe had been one of the original members.
They were certainly all trained that way as the, you know, next generation of these special forces guys.
And that's all they were.
There's nothing para about it.
They're simply a military special forces unit of the FBI.
And I don't know if, I really don't know enough about the history of the first SWAT teams in LA and etc. like that, if they outright were, you know, carbon copies of the hostage rescue team, if they were exactly that militarized.
But it seems like every SWAT team in America now is basically indistinguishable from the hostage rescue team, which is, you know, such a, it was even a lightning rod after the violence at Ruby Ridge in 92, and the Waco Massacre in 1993, that, you know, it really came to symbolize, you know, the soldiers quartered among us in the guise of being civilian police.
But this is now every damn Sheriff's Department in America, it seems like, Will.
And no less armed or, I don't know, they must not be quite as well trained, but they're trained in exactly that same kind of style of violence.
Yeah, they're struck from the same template.
And now the most modern version of that is the hostage rescue team, which seems to excel in destroying hostages rather than saving them.
And it was blooded for the first time here in Idaho at Ruby Ridge.
And then less than a year later, of course, they were involved in the catastrophe at Waco and the Delta operators who had helped train them who were brought in.
This is a very interesting part of that story that bears repeating, who were brought into the Waco situation after the initial raid by the ATF was turned back.
They were brought in because of a drug nexus that had been falsely adduced to the Branch Davidians by then Governor Ann Richards.
That's how the ATF ended up getting advice and material support and training from the military.
And Hueys for the initial assault.
Yeah, Hueys, exactly.
This is a full-scale domestic deployment of the military.
There's nothing paramount as you say, Scott.
The only difference is they operate under less restrictive rules of engagement here domestically than they do overseas.
And that's another aspect of this that doesn't get much attention.
You referred to the SWAT teams in Los Angeles, the one that was created in 1968 under the late and not particularly lamented Daryl Gates, was modeled on paramilitary or quasi-military or blended forces that were put in place in Southeast Asia by military advisors in the late 50s and early 60s.
So this is something that is a direct outgrowth of the Vietnam War.
This was an American transposition of tactics that had been employed against the Vietnamese, the Viet Cong specifically.
And the original SWAT team had its first engagement at a record store that was being run, a hangout that was being run by the Black Panthers.
And this grew out of a noise complaint.
Somebody complained that these people are playing their music too loudly.
A cop went and confronted the Black Panthers.
Harsh words were exchanged, and this escalated into a confrontation where guns were drawn.
And so the SWAT team got its orders, and they were deployed to deal with this menace of a handful of people at a record store.
And over the course of one day, it escalated to the point where, according to Gates' memoir, they made a special call to the White House to get permission to receive a rocket launcher from Camp Pendleton to use in order to put down the resistance there on the part of the Black Panthers at this record store.
So from the very beginning, there's a very steep and very quickly scaled escalation ladder that the SWAT concept's always been involved in.
It was still understood before the war on drugs was proclaimed by Nixon in 1971 that SWAT was supposedly a model which is going to be confined to a handful of potentially troublesome high-crime urban areas.
It would deal with exceptional circumstances that perhaps would involve hostage situations, or barricaded gunmen, or bank robberies, or Patty Hearst SLA-type terrorism.
And from that point in 1971 up through about 1995 or so, there was still this idea that SWAT was an exceptional model, that you wouldn't use that protocol except in dire circumstances.
What happened in 1995 to change this, and I should point out that beginning in the early years of the Reagan administration, there were a series of executive decrees and orders that were issued that encouraged the active involvement of Joint Task Force Six and some of these others, conventional, not conventional, some of these more familiar special operations elements within the military to be involved in drug interdiction along the U.S. border and along our territorial waters and things of that sort.
So there was a beginning of this none-too-subtle blurring of lines and blending of missions.
But what happened in 1995 is that you had the Law Enforcement Support Organization brought into existence under Bill Clinton and Giannarino.
Giannarino, of course, had been implicated in the ugliness of WACO, but we shouldn't say that this was a Clinton administration operation.
This gestated during the late period of the Bush administration.
Ruby Ridge was something that occurred during the Bush administration.
There's a continuity here, it's not a partisan issue.
But BLESSO, the Law Enforcement Support Organization, was a program that serves as a conduit for military hardware to your nominally local police organization, your sheriff's office, on concessionary terms.
And so that's how we have MRAPs and other armored vehicles being given to police departments and really freighted and dire crime-plagued areas like Preston, Idaho, which is a town of about 4,000 people, 3,999 of whom are Mormon, and which has no measurable crime rate, but yet they got an MRAP because they could get it for a little bit more than free, actually, except for the operating costs, maintenance, and fuel, and so forth.
And they got it because they could.
The same thing happened in Nampa, which is a town here in Idaho of about 60,000 or 70,000 people.
They don't need these things, but this is a situation where the availability of the technology defines the need.
It exists.
We can get it without paying for it.
Ergo, we need it, and we'll find a use for it.
And the use they put it to always involves escalating this war against the citizenry.
Right.
All right, now, so, well, I'm going to try to tell the story and paraphrase it while I Google, unfortunately, now.
Hopefully, I only just thought of this, but I really want to bring it up to you.
It was a story of police getting an MRAP.
And the chief says, I think it was the chief or maybe it was the sheriff.
He says, a lot of soldiers are coming back now.
And of course, many of them are joining up the police department, obviously.
Right.
But then he just on a dime in the middle of a sentence, he immediately conflates the returning American hero veterans of the terror war into the terrorists and says, and they're all very sophisticated now in the use of IEDs.
And that's why we need this.
Right.
The weapon of the Sunni based insurgency in Iraq is now presumed to be the weapon of the American soldier returning.
And for some reason, the sheriff with no particularly guilty conscience seems to think that these soldiers won't be able to wait to go to war with him as soon as they get back.
And I just wonder, like, who told him that or where do they get this stuff?
Did he know he was lying or the it almost sounded like something Winston Smith's neighbor would have said about, like, I'm so glad that my children turned me in or something.
Wait, did you just say that the soldiers are the Al-Qaeda guys or what are we talking about here?
But anyway, I got this big truck and I mean to justify it.
Exactly.
And I think perhaps the sheriff or this police chief slipped a joint here, if you will.
I think that there was perhaps a synaptic connection that wasn't fully realized here.
And I think that what he was probably trying to say is that they need to use the counterinsurgency methods and tactics that have been employed overseas for the purpose of crime suppression here in the United States.
And one of the things that has happened over the course of America's descendant empire, beginning with the occupation of the Philippines, the turn of the 20th century, is that every foreign entanglement has been a training ground for domestic crime control methods.
And then you have domestic crime control methods sort of advance the science of counterinsurgency.
So actually, the first place where we started reading about the phrase clear and hold as an urban warfare tactic was not in Iraq or in Afghanistan, or perhaps in Haiti or Somalia or someplace like that.
It was actually in Northern California in the early, actually, forgive me, the late 1990s, where they were field testing methods that were later used during the surge in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan.
And in somewhat similar fashion back in the late 1890s, when you had counterinsurgency underway against the Philippine freedom fighters that involved the torture technique we now call waterboarding at the time was called the water cure.
The field commanders who were actually teaching American soldiers in the Philippines to use water torture were veterans of the NYPD who would use that as a third degree interrogation tactic against criminals.
So there really is this evil symbiosis between the branch of the imperial government overseas and the branch of the imperial government that is our local law enforcement.
And they both want to apply basically the same methods to the same ends, which is to force submission to the political elite, whether you're talking about people who are putting up a fuss here domestically, you think that they still have property rights that the government has to respect, or people overseas who don't take kindly to the yoke being imposed upon them by the United States supposedly for their own good.
And the fact that you have priority recruitment of military veterans into police departments is another illustration, Scott, of what you talked about regarding the fact of the Third Amendment and the protection that it supposedly provides has been largely rendered a fiction.
You have troops quartered among us if they are invested with a military mindset where they conceive themselves as existing on a 360 degree battlefield and see Americans not as citizens whose rights they have to protect, but as a potential enemy that is a threat to force protection, to use the military expression, or officer safety, use the cognate here in domestic terms.
And so they receive the hardware and they also receive the indoctrination, and it is bred into the bone, quite frankly, over the last generation or so.
And that's one of the reasons why there is a bit of a generational cleavage between people in law enforcement who are my age and perhaps a little bit younger.
There are many who are older who are still active in law enforcement.
On the one hand, you have that cohort, and on the other hand, you have people in the, I'd say, post-1993, 1995 class who've never done anything else.
This has been the operational doctrine for the whole time they've been in the military.
There's nothing more important than officer safety, and you have to look upon the public as an enemy to subdue.
That's something I think that was implicit in the adoption, the tragic adoption of Robert Peel's model of paramilitary law enforcement from the beginning, but it has escalated and evolved dramatically just in the last 20 or 25 years.
Yeah, boy, I'll tell you, it's just like Chalmers Johnson says, you either give up your empire or you live under it.
And you know what's funny too, Will, is I was talking with Lew Rockwell last night on my new show on Liberty Chat, and he was talking all about an anarchist society and how we don't need these SOBs and all and all this.
And he's drawing this great picture.
And so I'm doing my little imagination and thought experiment about just how great it would really be to have anarcho-capitalism.
You sold me, Mr. Rockwell.
You got it.
But I was thinking, wow, can you imagine?
Never even mind that.
Never even mind necessarily repealing the 20th century or any of that.
But just what if we just had peacetime?
How far away are we from that now, from the idea of everybody living in this society without fear of some boogeyman, without some brand new excuse of why we need the government so bad every single day?
If we could just have a little bit of like return to normalcy, you know, it's been so long since we had that.
It's almost like, you know what I mean?
It feels a million miles away at this point that we would even that that we would come anywhere near ceasing this exact path that you're described going down this exact path that you're describing, where all of the suppression of foreigners techniques employed during the wars are brought home to the people, perfected and then reemployed in different places around the world and then brought back again.
Remember the LAPD, the Marine Corps went to the LAPD in 2008 and said, we taught you guys coin back in the early 80s, but we forgot.
Can you teach us all the stuff that we taught you?
We can't seem to find that paperwork or whatever.
And so then the LAPD gave the Marines training on for going into, you know, escalating into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Well, one of the things that has to be recognized here is that this is a literal war.
When we talk about the war on drugs is a literal war using military hardware and military tactics that target people who are U.S. citizens for the most part.
And what I'm hoping is that this atrocity that was committed last week in Haversham County, Georgia, in Cornelia, Georgia, in which this 19 month old child was left perhaps permanently disfigured as a result of a flashbang grenade being thrown into his crib during a 3 a.m. no knock SWAT raid over an alleged $50 drug transaction, that that perhaps would be enough to trigger what remains of the moral gag reflex of the public.
I don't know, but I do think that there is a very healthy revulsion over this, particularly over the utterly despicable conduct of Sheriff Terrell, Sheriff Joey Terrell there, whose first instinct upon publicity being given to this atrocity, this has been already investigated by the D.A. and already been investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
He said, there's nothing to look at here.
There's nothing to see here.
This is just a bad thing that happens as a result of this war.
We're fighting against domestic terrorists.
He actually used that expression to describe somebody who was allegedly involved in a nonviolent drug transaction, according to a petty criminal had been retained as an informant by the task force there for the purpose of luring people into conducting drug transactions.
What has to happen, Scott, in order for us to restore any semblance of normalcy here is that every joint narcotics enforcement task force in this country has to be shut down immediately.
That wouldn't solve the problem, but it would make a substantial dent in the problem, because these drug narcotic investigation task forces, the one in the Cornelia raid last week is called the Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team, NCIS, which, of course, is an acronym familiar to television consumers here in this country.
It's something that has a military resonance to it.
Every single one of these task forces is an engine that goes of itself.
In the case of Georgia, they're allowed to keep 100 percent of what they confiscate in terms of money and property that is seized through asset forfeiture.
That means that the property is seized and found guilty, the property of involvement in narcotics trafficking.
Then people who own that property have to prove that it was not implicated in narcotics trafficking in any way.
They can keep 100 percent of what they seize through a federal burn grant.
The commanders of this task force have their salaries paid as long as they can assure that this is a program that's going to go out and collect enough through seizures and confiscations in order to justify its existence.
The ground-level plunderers have an incentive to set up as many of these controlled stings and controlled buys as they can.
They're helping to keep the drug market alive, in other words.
Those, of course, create a pretext for raids of the sort that happened last week.
Every raid of that sort will create a huger risk premium that will drive up the cost, the street cost of narcotics.
That increases the profit margin, both of the private sector criminals who are running what should be a perfectly legal private economy and the public sector criminals who are profiting off of this.
It really is the sort of thing that should not exist in any country that would call itself civilized, where you would have a group of people who are undisguised road pirates and undisguised plunders who could kick indoors after midnight.
For some reason, this is something we're seeing more often, are these raids that take place after sundown or before sunrise in order to see if somebody has been engaging in prescribed but essentially nonviolent behavior.
This is the sort of thing that shouldn't be happening here.
I don't think there's another country on the face of the earth, quite frankly, where you see so frequently the spectacle of police kicking indoors under the cover of darkness and dragging people out of their beds.
I don't think that happens in Cuba as frequently as it happens here.
We know that it doesn't happen as frequently in Cuba because there are 45,000 SWAT operations, SWAT enforcement operations in this country every year.
That's the lowest estimate I've found.
That's from Peter Kraska, who's probably the best academic researcher on this subject.
We have over 100 of these taking place a day.
These are not hostage situations.
These are not bank robberies.
They're not counterterrorism operations of a sort that most reasonable people would conceive when they use that expression.
These are more typically the sort of thing that happened in Cornelia, Georgia last week.
And once again, the reaction of the sheriff here is the sort of thing that I think should provoke a rebellion in that county.
I'm irresistibly reminded of the fact that the revolt in Scotland under English occupation back in the late 13th century, both in the historical record and in the movie that Mel Gibson made, Braveheart, that began against a sheriff by the name of William Heselrig, who murdered William Wallace's wife.
That's a matter of history.
It was dramatized for the purposes of the movie.
But Heselrig was taken out in the most direct and violent way imaginable because people had had enough.
I don't wish physical ill on Joey Terrell and his family.
For heaven's sake, he's a family man.
Leave his family out of it.
If he doesn't have the decency to leave your family out of it, be a better man than he is.
But he simply has to go.
So he has to be recalled, and then his drug task force has to be dismantled.
And the same thing should happen in every county in this country.
And we're not going to see a semblance of normalcy until this happens.
If we're going to countenance the continued existence of government-operated police, that's a disputable assumption, I think, would be better off if we had private security, we had private peace officers, and that's something that we've seen in this country before we embrace the British model.
If we're going to countenance the continued existence of government police agencies, they must be peace officers.
They must be devoted entirely to the protection of property rights.
They should be reactive rather than proactive on the model of the fire department.
The fire department, of course, doesn't send people cruising around in neighborhoods looking for fires to put out.
And they certainly don't send people around a la Fahrenheit 451 setting fires, which is what most police operations amount to these days.
These are police operations that have the effect of engendering crime or contriving excuses to intervene where there are no violations of personal property rights taking place.
Well, I mean, when you say 100 a day, and that's footnoted six ways, I know I've read you for a long time here.
I mean, there's no other way around that number other than something is going way out of control here.
Like you said, people who watch TV, which is everybody, they might believe that a SWAT team is for a hostage situation at a bank, but no, they're kicking in doors all day, every day, 100 a day in America.
That is, I don't know exactly how it is in Cuba or anywhere else.
But for the USA or anywhere else, that is absolutely out of control.
It's something that is a complete repudiation of the heritage that we boast of, where we have liberty protected by law and minimalist government.
And we generally stay out of the affairs of our neighbors.
And all those things, of course, have been completely inverted as a result of our descent into statism.
It's become a very commonplace thing now to have people being SWATed, which is where you have a mischievous phone call being placed to 911, in which people make some kind of a comment about somebody having a gun, or somebody talking about shooting somebody else.
And of course, they know, the people who make these phone calls, they know that the response is going to be a military style raid against the targeted individual.
That happened in Caldwell, which is a town about 40 miles from here in Idaho, very small town.
A guy got SWATed about a year ago, and as a result, an entire apartment block was terrorized, because the SWAT team kept going to the wrong doors.
They terrorized no fewer than four people in the same apartment complex.
When they found the poor schlep had been SWATed, he's somebody who'd done nothing, but he'd infuriated, once again, a petty criminal, a woman who didn't like him, and he'd offended her somehow.
And acting as a confidential informant, she filed a false and malicious report that he was planning to kill her.
And when they found this poor guy, they kicked in his door.
Actually, he was responding to the door kicks on either side of his apartment.
He opened the door and said, what's going on?
And they ordered him to the ground, and they forced him to crawl on his stomach before the raiders so that he could be handcuffed.
And they were threatening everybody in the block with a feral dog.
They said, if you don't come out, the dog will bite you.
They illegally searched several houses.
This took place in Caldwell, Idaho, for heaven's sake.
That's a town of about 30,000 people.
But that's the sort of thing that can happen very readily in this country, because the police are primed to that type of overkill response.
And there are people who, for whatever reason, have taken a dislike to the neighbors, and they know that they can sit the armed emissaries of state violence on them.
And that's a social condition that is not reflective of a healthy body politic, I contend.
Right.
Well, now, so here's the thing, though, is it does seem like, certainly on POT, we're beginning to see a real shift in the consensus here.
And it is a generational thing, of course.
But, you know, with the militarization that obviously is, you know, goes hand in glove with the war on drugs.
I wonder whether you think, I mean, as you put it, it certainly should be.
But can it be that this case, that this can be the last straw?
One of these has got to be the last straw.
You know, you mentioned the Braveheart thing.
I was thinking of V for Vendetta, where the guy shoots the little girl in the street, and the mob comes and says, no, dude, that's enough of you secret police thugs for now.
We're done with you.
And they bring out their tire irons and, you know, avenge her murder, that kind of thing.
It seems like, and again, just like you, I'm not wishing for that to happen, literally.
But I'm saying, isn't there one where that's the last straw?
Where actually, no, you are not our security force.
You are all as fired as hell now.
And if you're smart, you'll resign and leave town.
Because we are pissed.
Why isn't this the one where all of America just throws up their hands and say, you know, apparently, we're not getting any closer to a drug free America.
And this tiny baby had his face burnt off.
So maybe we could just quit, huh?
Why not?
Yeah.
I think this might indeed be that proverbial paradigm shifter, that proverbial deal breaker.
And I do think that there are large sections of this country where the police have lost, if you will, the mandate of heaven.
And they're being seen for what they are, which is the mercenary hirelings of a corrupt political class that illicitly claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
And so they've been desacralized in the minds of a lot of people.
This is happening primarily through social media.
It's happening, if you will, in cyberspace rather than in physical reality.
But that's a precursor, perhaps, to what will happen as a result of conscious action in the realm in which we actually live.
People will start looking at these individuals and saying, look, if we're going to allow you to be carrying out some role in the community in which we live, this is what it's going to be.
You're going to protect life, liberty, and property, period, full stop, new paragraph.
And I do think that this is the year where we're seeing a very healthy change of climate on the part of a lot of people.
But what's happened, Scott, as well, is that on the other side, on the side of the Praetorian class, if you will, they're becoming more and more obsessed with the idea that their role has to be, once again, force protection, the protection of the supposed integrity of their group as a caste.
That explains the lawsuit that was filed last week, a 1983, 1983 federal civil rights lawsuit against the Justice Department, as if that's going to work, and the city of Seattle because of their new use of force policy, because they're requiring that the police in Seattle, which have a horrible, well-earned reputation for overkill, for brutality, for disproportionate use of force, they're contending that the new use of force policy, which is a feint, nothing more than a feint in the direction of accountability, they're demanding that it be repealed because it would hinder them too much in the exercise of lethal force.
It would hold them responsible for episodes like the killing of this hapless, drunken, deaf woodcarver, who was just capped on the street by a police officer, and he's carrying two woodcarving knives that were folded in his possession.
This happened a couple of years ago.
It actually instigated a federal investigation.
He was not prosecuted for this.
It was an act of criminal homicide, clearly, but he was given the residual benefit of the doubt through this magic of qualified immunity.
But you've got a group of police officers there who, acting beyond the mandate of the police union, which is not actively supporting these people, are demanding nothing less than full-armed immunity for whatever they do to people.
And I think that mindset's going to become contagious within the ranks of police.
So we're going to see a really interesting polarization occur here between the public and the police who supposedly protect them.
This reminds me of another thing, Scott.
In Cincinnati, the municipal police department has issued instructions to police that they cannot go into burning buildings to rescue people, because there was a police officer killed a few months ago.
I saw you tweet that out last night.
Yeah.
A genuine peace officer died trying to rescue somebody in a fire.
So a police department in Cincinnati says you can't run into a burning building to save people, because, although they don't say this, you don't have any enforceable responsibility to protect an individual citizen.
Your duty is to protect the state, to protect the political class.
So I think we're seeing an interesting polarization here that will be healthy in a conceptual sense, if you will, but it's going to be perhaps socially turbulent, perhaps even dangerous, until the people at large, who are supposedly the beneficiaries of what we're told are police protection, or rather, are entities intended or intended to protect us, the public at large comes to realize that something is seriously wrong with the system as it exists right now and demand that we have radical changes to it.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I'm so sick and tired of it, man.
I just...
And the thing is, too, is all you got to do is just go look at any of these cop block pages, or there's 100,000 of them or something out there now.
Thank goodness for that, too.
And like you said on Facebook...
Yeah, that's a healthy development.
Yeah.
And it just keeps coming and coming.
Raleigh Balco, thank goodness.
He's not just doing his great work, but he's doing his great work at the Washington Post.
Washington Post, yeah.
Sort of being thrust in the face of people who actually have power and influence that, you know, just how bad it really is.
And so, you know, Robert Higgs, I forget if I told you this, but I talked with Robert Higgs at this thing in D.C. where we were, and he said to me that he thought that the combination of Facebook and people having, everyone having cameras in their pockets right at the same time that the police are getting absolutely completely out of control and off their leash is really bringing things to a head right now, where it's just becoming so apparent to so many people what's going on.
You just can't ignore it.
Even if you're a sweet, innocent old lady who just never heard of such corruption, yeah, you have.
It's in your face.
It's in everybody's face.
Yeah, that was a very healthy and unexpected synchronicity, and I think that explains why there's been this change in the aggregate public mind, if you will, that I was describing a few minutes ago.
And I do think as well that in addition to looking at the cop blog pages, it would be a healthy thing for people interested in what's going on to visit some of the cop talk forums, policeone.com and the line of duty.
Take a look at the way these people perceive what they do and perceive criticism of what they do.
Take a measure of how they regard us, how little they regard us, and how reflexively they result to a type of blinkered cultish tribalism in the face of criticism.
That's something that's a very healthy, albeit infuriating, exercise as well.
Yeah, I know.
It's amazing the self-righteousness that these guys deploy at all times.
All right.
Anyway, I've kept you way over time here.
The show's over.
Everybody's gone.
It's just you and me, and everybody is going to hear this later on at scotthorton.org.
But thank you very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Will.
Thanks so much, Scott.
You take care.
All right, everybody.
That was the great Will Grigg.
His wonderful website.
Man, you got to read him.
He's just as good at writing as he is at talking, and you heard it.
That's freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com for his great blog, Pro Libertate.
Get his book, Liberty in Eclipse.
Come on, man.
Help support.
Get his book.
And also, one last thing.
I found my footnote.
It's fox59.com, and boy, the quote was specific.
It was much more specific than the way I paraphrased it.
Quote from Sergeant Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department talking about why it's okay for him to have a gigantic new MRAP mine-resistant armored vehicle.
He says outright, there's no implication here.
He says, quote, the weaponry is totally different now than it was in the beginning of my career.
Plus, you have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build IEDs and to defeat law enforcement techniques.
So he is outright casting the returning veterans as enemies of the state, and he's immediately then conflating them with the insurgents that they've been fighting in their wars of foreign occupation out there.
So who's counter-insurging who now, huh?
Give up your empire, live under it.
That's what they say.
See you tomorrow.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Edited by libertarian purist Sheldon Richman, the Future of Freedom brings you the best of our movement.
Featuring articles by Richman, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard, and many more, the Future of Freedom stands for peace and liberty and against our criminal world empire and Leviathan State.
Subscribe today.
It's just $25 per year for the back pocket size print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's the Future of Freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.you