07/22/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts & Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts & Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Don't you love that clip from Free Talk Live where they use the argument ad absurdum on the lady, the argument ad Nazism.
Come on, lady.
If the law said, commit the Holocaust, would you do that too?
This is the political equivalent of, well, if your friends all jumped off the bridge, would you go and do that too?
Well, if the government told you to commit the Holocaust and she says, yes, if that was the law, well, you know, she's an American, a good American.
Welcome to the show, Will Gregg.
Good to have you back on.
Scott, it's always a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you so much.
Very happy to have you here.
And I'm sorry if you were able to hear that commercial loud and clear.
I was.
It's kind of devastating in a way to hear that.
Let me tell everybody about you for a second and then I'll shut up.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
That's where Will Gregg writes.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
The blog is called Pro Libertate and primarily covers police issues there.
You can also read or listen to his book, Liberty in Eclipse, and you can listen to his Freedom Zealot radio show as well.
You can find him on the blog and on the front page virtually every day at Lew Rockwell dot com as well.
So very happy to have you back on the show here, Will.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
And I don't know.
Did you want to start from there?
Just the the the mindset of the the average cop's wife about how things work around here?
Sure.
That's typical what you could call the hyper positivist perspective of people who are employed as retail liver, excuse me, retail level distributors of violence on behalf of the government.
And that's a much more accurate job description for police than peace officer is.
A peace officer is somebody, of course, who's protecting persons and property.
And the case that we've witnessed over the last week in Staten Island involving Eric Garner is really instructive because Eric Garner was acting as a peace officer.
He's breaking up a fight.
He was trying to restore order and peace and protect individuals and protect property.
And this neighborhood, of course, was afflicted with a large number of plainclothes NYPD officers who were there for the purpose of trying to catch people violating petty and useless ordinances and then either cite or arrest these people for these petty infractions.
And most of what they were paying attention to were potential transactions involving untaxed cigarettes.
It's really interesting that the free talk live excerpt started off with the idea of black market cigarettes.
The police that were there at this neighborhood, Staten Island, were there primarily to enforce the zero tolerance policy against the sale of untaxed cigarettes.
Mr. Garner had a couple of dozen previous arrests for that supposed offense as well as for marijuana possession, misdemeanor level marijuana possession, most likely because he'd been stopped and frisked, which is something else that happens in the tax jurisdiction in New York quite frequently.
So he had done nothing to anybody.
There was no evidence that he had been involved in this supposedly illicit commerce involving untaxed cigarettes, but he had come to the attention of these police officers because he'd done something that the police officers are not required to do, and that is to intervene on behalf of restoring peace and peaceful order.
And so he was accosted by one or several of these police officers, and he'd had a surfeit of being harassed over the last couple of years.
This is a 43-year-old man who, as far as I can tell, has never done any harm to anybody.
He was the father of six children, grandfather to two.
A very large man.
He looked rather like the individual played by the late Michael Clarke Duncan from The Green Mile.
And finally, in a moment of exasperated assertion of self-ownership, he said, listen, I'm tired of it.
Every time you see me, you harass me.
It stops today.
They killed him because he asserted self-ownership.
That was an unconscionable assertion of defiance on the part of a mere mundane in the presence of somebody who was part of the state's coercive clerisy.
As a matter of fact, in the essay that I've written about the Eric Garner case, I quote a police officer from the police1.com web community, which is a law enforcement exclusive community.
You have to be a verified law enforcement officer in order to participate in discussions.
And what this officer said is that anytime somebody says it stops today, then there's going to be a use of force, because you cannot allow these people to assert themselves in the face of their bettors, their tenders, their minders, the people who are the modern equivalent of the slave patrol, the people who have the supposed right to decide at what point they will take what freedoms we enjoy away from us.
And if they're going to arrest you, they reserve the supposed right to use whatever force is necessary up to and including killing you summarily for contempt of cop.
And that's what happened to Eric Garner.
There's no evidence at all whatsoever that this was in any sense justified.
It was simple harassment that escalated to what has to be considered aggravated murder, probably second-degree murder, because the chief assailant in this episode, the fellow who was the initiator of the thug scrum, Daniel Pantaleo, who's somebody who'd had three previous lawsuits filed against him over the course of the last two years for abusing people, he walked up behind Mr. Garner and put a chokehold on him.
The chokehold has been banned by the NYPD for all but non-defensive purposes since 1983, and since 1993, it's been banned outright.
A police officer is not permitted under the policies of the NYPD to in any way constrict the breathing passages or the blood vessels leading to the brain of a suspect.
And yet this is done quite commonly.
As a matter of fact, it was violated in 1994 in a very similar case involving the death of a young man who was killed by a police officer in front of his own home, essentially because he'd objected to the needless arrest of his brother.
But the act of using a chokehold is, as far as I can tell, I've got a little bit of experience in the grappling arts.
I've competed in judo and jiu-jitsu, but not extensively.
And I've both administered them, and I've been the recipient of them.
A chokehold is a lethal technique, and if you apply pressure to somebody's throat in an act of aggression, as far as I can tell, that justifies a lethal response, which means that if somebody had the means to do so, he would have been justified in shooting Pantaleo in the head in order to prevent him from seeking a chokehold.
That of course assumes that we live in a world where the rule of law would be uniform and would be observable by the citizens and by the police who supposedly serve us.
We don't live in that world.
I'm arguing, obviously, counterfactual here.
But what's happening in the aftermath now, of course, is that people of the mindset of that young woman interviewed, or rather involved in that exchange on Free Talk Live, are trying to say that it's all on the victim here, because he was large, he was overweight, and most importantly, he resisted.
He didn't defer.
He didn't get down on his knees subserviently in front of the slave tenders and accept their shackles and whatever indignity they chose to inflict upon him.
And so what I'm hoping here, and it's a bit of a desperate hope, admittedly, because this is going to get channeled off into the familiar categories of racial collectivism here, and I'm not disputing for a second that race played a role in this, race played a role in this as far as I'm concerned.
But it's not the most important consideration here.
What I'm hoping is that people will look at this, where from a standing start, within a couple of minutes, they went from a malum prohibitum to murder in the encounter with Eric Garner.
He'd been doing nothing.
If he'd been selling untaxed cigarettes, write him a ticket for heaven's sake.
But they wanted to assert what they presumed to be their authority against this guy, and he had asserted his self-ownership, and they killed him for it.
I'm hoping that this is going to resonate with people nationwide, and that it will trigger some long latent impulse within us that, of course, was made very manifest during the American War for Independence, where people had just had their fill of being treated as if they were the natural subjects, they were naturally subservient to the crimson-clad enforcers of the distant monarch in England.
I hope there's a thick residue of that latent resistance within the American public, and I hope that this incident's going to make that overt.
Well, it's a hell of a slogan to rally behind.
It stops now.
And of course, he was right.
Yeah, it stops today, because they're going to kill you, dude.
They're never going to collect one more tax from you, because you're dead, but too bad.
But you're right, that the rest of us, you know, I don't know.
I thought maybe when they threw the flashbang at that little boy in Atlanta that, couldn't we make this the thing where, come on, I don't know, everybody's just so divided upon every tiny little line.
The internet is a blessing, but it's a curse in that way.
How do you create any mass movement when everybody's just looking at their own little Facebook world and whatever?
I don't know.
Yeah, it tends to inform us, but it also tends to atomize us.
And it could be a very fertile resource for the type of leaderless resistance that we need in dealing with a government that's becoming overtly totalitarian.
I mean, when you have police kicking in doors at three in the morning and throwing grenades into children's cribs, you're living in a totalitarian state, albeit one that doesn't always manifest every trait that one would associate with that status.
Or when somebody can literally be killed on the streets of Staten Island, simply because he had dared to claim possession of himself, you're living in a totalitarian society.
All right, now hold it there.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Will Grigg, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
I'm talking about the NYPD's murder of Eric Garner.
All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Got the great Will Grigg on the line.
He's Blarney Karn Karn on Twitter.
What the hell does that mean, anyway?
Until last September, I was under the mistaken impression that I was of Mexican-Irish ancestry.
And I met my birth mother, and she disabused me of that fact.
She said that I'm actually of Hawaiian, Cherokee, Irish, and Basque ancestry.
But the sober connection, it was given to me way back in college, and it just stuck.
Oh, there you go.
Oh, that makes good sense.
There you go.
So that's how you find him on Twitter.
Just search Will Grigg.
It's a lot easier to spell there on Twitter.
You can follow him there.
And again, it's freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
So a few issues to go over here.
We're talking about, again, the case of Eric Garner, this black man who was strangled to death by the LAPD on the sidewalk for, you know, they pretended, not that he actually did it, but he was suspected of possibly selling individual cigarettes without paying his taxes.
And so they killed him to death.
And I believe I let you get through the thrust of the story here.
So I think now it's follow-up time, but if there's any part of the narrative you feel like elaborating on, feel free.
But I'll get you started with, has the law changed about this kind of thing?
The way you talk about it, look, the guy was just standing there not doing anything.
But OK, what if a white cop had a reasonable suspicion that he really was doing something?
I don't know.
And maybe he had started that fight that he pretended to break up, Will, or something.
At that point, I'm wondering about the legality of his attempted resistance, right?
Was there a time?
And did it change where it would have been legal for him to say, no, no, no, I haven't done anything.
You have no right to touch me, et cetera, et cetera.
Because the way I was brought up by government school was to believe that even if they're wrong, you better let them cuff you and go with them and work it out later with your lawyer when you get your fair trial, rather than challenging the cops who might just blow your head off.
And, you know, that was I was raised in the lily white suburbs, too.
But I was just taught, don't mess with these guys because they will kill you.
That actually counts a lot of prudence rather than legal or moral necessity.
Yeah.
I'm mixing apples and oranges there.
I'm sorry.
Well, no.
And the point you're making is sound as far as it goes, and it's regrettable.
If you're talking about a Terry stop, which is the type of thing that happens through stop and frisk, this is something that's already been ruled unconstitutional as applied New York City.
I mean, it's something that's still practiced in defiance of court order, but it's been ruled by federal courts that the stop and frisk program is summarily unconstitutional.
So if you're talking about some kind of articulable suspicion that had been doing something wrong, that would be what they call a Terry stop, an investigative stop.
But that's not what was happening here.
There was no indication that the police were actually investigating him for being an instigator of the fight or having any connection to the fight, and they didn't interview any of the people that had been involved in the fight.
They simply keyed on him because he was in the system on account of the 20 or so previous arrests or citations he'd received for selling Lucy's.
And this is all happening in the context of Governor Cuomo's zero tolerance policy with respect to the sale of untaxed cigarettes because it's cheating the state government of revenue.
That's the overt and explicit purpose of the zero tolerance policy.
We actually created something called the Cigarette Strike Force back in January of this year, and this is a public works project for anybody who's involved in any kind of coercive agency, whether federal, state, or local.
You have the ATF, of course, involved in it, the Border and Customs Service involved in it, several subdivisions, the Homeland Security Department, the state police, the various municipal police departments, the various county sheriffs in New York State and so forth.
They're all trying to track down people who are smuggling cigarettes out of states with less onerous taxes than New York, and New York has about the worst of the country.
So that means pretty much any cigarettes imported anywhere out of the rest of the country would be considered suspect.
And they've been confiscating huge stores of cigarettes and confiscating cash through civil asset forfeiture.
And they've been breaking up what they refer to as cigarette smuggling organizations, which are just businesses that are trying to avoid paying the VIG that's imposed upon the by Albany.
Now, in the case of Mr. Garner, he's not somebody who is attached to some kind of a cigarette smuggling syndicate.
This is a guy who was on disability for emphysema and sleep apnea and type 2 diabetes and all the other familiar elements of people of a certain body composition.
And he was selling of care, apparently on many occasions, loosies, that is to say, as you pointed out, Scott, a handful of loose cigarettes to people on the streets.
There are people doing this all throughout the boroughs of New York City.
There was a story recently, I believe in the Gothamite or the Gothamist rather, that talked about how people who are door attendants and people who are restroom attendants have been handcuffed and taken away because they've been caught in undercover sting selling loosies to people who were ratting them out to the police.
And apparently Garner had been involved in several episodes of that kind before.
But he had just, in my opinion, reading every account that I've read and watching every available video, I've come away with the impression that what happened is that Garner had actually, in intervening to break up this fight, underscored the consummate uselessness of the police in terms of actually providing service to the public.
And that he was being swatted down because he had done something that made the police look bad.
It really isn't difficult to make the police look bad, quite frankly.
And of course, if they did break up the fight, it would have been by jumping in it and making it worse and worse and worse rather than saying, hey, boys, break it up, break it up like this guy did.
Exactly.
Of a vintage where I remember talking with police officers when I was in grade school and in junior high when I aspired to become a police detective and the motto then was, okay, you go home safe at the end of the day, but actually the best way to approach a situation where there's trouble is to defuse the trouble without slapping the cuffs on somebody or making an arrest or otherwise intervening with a heavy hand.
It was more the Andy Griffith approach than the MRAP era approach to law enforcement.
And even Bo Dietl, I don't know if you remember him, they made a movie out of him starring one of the lesser Baldwin brothers, I can't remember which one exactly, called One Tough Cop.
And it was based on Bo Dietl's immensely self-dramatizing memoir.
There's a whole genre, by the way, of police memoirs from NYPD officers.
They all read very much as if they were written, struck from the same template.
But Bo Dietl is somebody who had been a street officer doing this kind of patrol, and he boasted that he never drew his gun once in the entire time that he was a street officer for the NYPD.
And even his book, which was written, I believe, about 20 years ago, 20 or so years ago, he talked about the fact that even as late as the mid-1990s, he was practicing active de-escalation.
This is the exact opposite of de-escalation.
This is a case where the police show up and manufacture a problem, and the problem that they manufacture ends up claiming the life of a perfectly innocent guy.
The way that Bratton, the police commissioner, William Bratton, in New York City is defending this is that this is part of the old broken windows notion, which is that you work on suppressing and doing away with the petty offenses so as to prevent major offenses from blossoming in various boroughs and various neighborhoods.
Well, the problem here is that you're authorizing the police to commit acts of violence that are criminal in the interest, supposedly, of suppressing these petty infractions.
So you have somebody here who had literally done nothing more than say, listen, I'm tired of being harassed.
I'm leaving now, which in essence is what he was saying.
And actually under the standard that we read about in Terry and some of the other federal court decisions, if they don't have articulable cause to say that you've actually been involved in a crime, you can basically say, are we finished?
I'm out of here.
I'm gone.
Unless you can define the probable cause for continuing this conversation, I have no more use for it.
And that's the sort of thing that you should be able to do anywhere at any time.
Yeah.
And you should be able to say that in plain language and not have to say, am I being detained or whatever loophole that people learn?
You know, if you're some guy from the neighborhood, you ought to be able to say, hey, enough, leave me alone, leave me alone and go.
And that's the same thing.
Exactly.
Now, let me ask you this, I'm sorry we're so short on time, but I got to ask you about this because I know you've written about this before.
They're going to say, you already know, you mentioned it already.
This guy's a big fat guy, had sleep apnea and emphysema and this and that.
And so and in fact, you say in your article, they're saying, oh, no, his throat wasn't even crushed.
So therefore, they didn't kill him.
He died of being himself and they just happened to be there kind of thing.
And I know that there was a case in Southern California like this, too, where and I've heard of this a few times, actually.
Of course, we hear this in the taser cases.
Well, the kid had a heart attack and yeah, we tased him, but he died of the heart attack.
And so therefore, the cop isn't guilty of murder.
You know, that's what they're going to try to say with this nonsense, too.
But you wrote about a thing that said that if you punch a 90 year old man in the head and kill him, you can't say that, well, it was just a punch.
I can't expect for him to be able to die from a punch.
It was just a punch.
You take you you take them as you get them or something like that.
I know you've written about this, that if you kill somebody, even with a little old jab, you still kill them.
It doesn't matter what's wrong with their brain case or anything else.
That's exactly right.
And particularly in the state of New York, more especially when you're dealing with strangulation or attempted strangulation, if you touch the throat of somebody as an aggressor under a law that was passed in 2010 and went into effect in 2011, and that person suffers some kind of serious physical complication, in this case, of course, the most serious, he died, then that's a felony.
That's at very best a type of felonious aggravated assault.
And given that the guy died, it's got to be considered criminal homicide.
And so once again, the question is whether we're going to continue to endure and countenance the conceit of sovereign immunity or qualified immunity for people who are carrying badges and wearing costumes, or whether we're going to apply the law with equity.
And given the fact that he used, Mr. Padaleo used a technique that has been banned for two decades.
This is a matter of black letter policy for the NYPD.
And given that he used that illegal technique, then he simply cannot claim qualified immunity because he's violating the policies of the NYPD.
And the other thing, Scott, that we didn't have time to talk about was the deliberate negligence on the part of the police, letting this guy lie there motionless for minutes, not administering CPR, keeping away people who wanted to help him, who might've administered medical aid.
The EMS showed up and didn't apply any of the techniques necessary to resuscitate this guy.
They wanted the cardiac arrest.
He was literally dying there on the sidewalk, and they created a crime scene, and they used this as a way of keeping help from being administered to the victim.
So you've got- It's premeditated murder right there.
It's murder.
Exactly.
It's capital murder.
It's murder one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When they took positive steps to prevent medical help from saving the victim's life, it has to be considered, at the very least, murder through deliberate negligence.
But this has to be considered an act of premeditation and coordination.
That's why they were withholding the aid.
They wanted him to be dead, and good and dead, too, and not revivable later when they get him to the hospital.
Yeah.
I don't see how a rational person could derive any other conclusion.
Yeah.
Well, oh well.
There's no law that applies to them.
But listen, I really appreciate the sentiment, and it's the words out of the victim's mouth here.
It stops today.
It would be nice.
It's time.
I think more and more are just regular people realize, it isn't the criminals who fear and hate the police.
It's regular people.
These guys are the criminals.
They are the danger.
They are the biggest disruption to peace and to liberty in our society, and we've got to roll this back.
We absolutely have to roll it back this way and that, and your way writing these excellent essays the way you do, Will, is a hell of a thing, and I sure appreciate it and appreciate all your time on the show, as always.
Thank you so much, Scott.
That means a great deal to me.
All right, so that's the heroic Will Grigg.
It's freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And the book, and you can get it in audio, too, is Liberty in Eclipse.
Check them also at luerockwell.com regularly.
That's it.
We're over time for the show.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
See you.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government-generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at wallstreetwindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.wallstreetwindow.com.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here for liberty.me, the brand-new social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place and features nightly classes, guides, events, publishing, and so much more.
Sign up now and you get the first 30 days free.
And if you click through the link in the right margin at scotthorton.org or use the promo code Scott when you sign up, you'll save $5 per month for life.
That's more than a third off the regular price.
And hey, once you sign up, add me as a friend on there at scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.liberty.me.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, I'm 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.