07/08/16 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org is the website.
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Introducing the great Will Grigg.
He is the author of the great blog, Pro Libertate.
That's freedominourtime.blogspot.com, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And whenever there's police shootings and shootings of police, I turn to Will for wisdom.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
Scott, I'm very happy to be with you and sick of my soul over what's been going on the last couple of days.
It's a really dark time.
This week, this year, it's just been as ugly as can be.
What do you think, Will?
Tell me.
It is certainly ugly, but I think we're telescoping events in a way that's likely to make things uglier unless we take a moment or two to reflect.
The first thing that I want to underscore here is the use of the term massacre to describe what happened in Dallas last night, where you had, by last reports, five police officers who were murdered and seven others who were injured by a sniper.
And then a couple of people who were bystanders were also wounded but not killed.
You'll never see the word massacre described by the, or used rather, by the state-aligned media to describe what happened at Mount Carmel in 1993.
That word is being used now, I think, for the purpose of inflicting a certain emotional resonance here that may be disproportionate to what actually happened.
I'm not minimizing the loss of five human beings, each of whom had loved ones.
They're going to be radiating consequences for that.
But as is the case whenever police officers are killed, there's this state-dictated public liturgy of official grief that ensues.
And the purpose, I think, of that ritual in this instance will be to reinforce a very dangerous narrative here, which is the idea that there is a literal war on police that has been taking place for a number of years now as public dissatisfaction with police corruption and abuse has reached the proverbial boiling point.
We're told that this was the deadliest day for American police since 9-11, and that's a very significant statistic, because we had five deaths of police officers and seven others who were wounded.
And if we indeed were witnessing a war on police, it stands to reason that that would be a rather commonplace occurrence rather than something that shocks the sensibilities of the public.
2015, I should point out, was actually a less deadly year for police in terms of line-of-duty violent deaths or felonious killings of police than 2014 had been.
2014 was somewhat more violent than 2013, which was the safest year for police measured by on-duty fatalities of any year going back four decades or longer.
That is something else we have to take into account while we're trying to put what happened last night in perspective.
It's also interesting that that was the first incident in a year since the law in Texas mandated the collection of violent on-duty killings of police through the use of firearms.
There had not been a fatal police shooting in the entire state of Texas for nearly a year.
That law wouldn't do effect, I believe, in August of 2015.
The Attorney General of the state of Texas is required to compile statistics with respect to the on-duty violent deaths of police officers by gunfire.
There had been 14 non-fatal shootings of police officers in 2016.
There had not, until last night, been a fatal shooting, and there hadn't been a fatal shooting of Dallas police officers since 2009.
I'm not, once again, trying to minimize the gravity of what happened last night, but rather trying to give it appropriate weight.
This is the first incident of its sort in which the identified killer, Mr. Micah X.
Johnson, a military veteran who served in Afghanistan, which I find to be significant, this is the first incident of this sort in which police have used a drone, an armed drone, to kill an embedded suspect or an entrenched barricaded suspect.
This was, of course, a land vehicle rather than an airborne vehicle, but it was a remote operated robot killing machine.
That of course, I think, could be the overture to a great deal of ugliness domestically as the disposition matrix, which has been used by the executive branch to bring about the systematic removal of troublesome people overseas, including the occasional U.S. citizen.
Within that group, you would include the occasional 16-year-old U.S. citizen, who was by any definition not a terrorist suspect.
You might see the importation of that protocol here for use against what people are already characterizing as a domestic terrorist insurgency.
So the times are indeed pregnant with awfulness.
And if you take a look at it, once again, in the sweep of relatively recent history, the amount of violence we're seeing, if you compare what's happening now with 1968, which seems to be sort of the benchmark year for domestic turmoil, we've not seen that type of ugliness in 2016, but there is a great deal of potential energy that is stored up in the factions that have been created.
And when you combine that with a much greater persistence on the part of the tribal identification of people, where we're looking at each other, if you will, horizontally with a certain amount of suspicion on the basis of labels and tribes and designations, and not looking critically at what the people who are presuming to rule us and what they're doing to all of us, there's a great deal of potential ugliness in that alignment of factors.
And that's what has me very concerned.
There is, and this is something I've said to a number of people, both in person and through social media contacts, there is a certain dynamic toward what I've called the Rwandification of American society, where you have people who are segregated, self-segregated for the most part, into these factions in which intense rancor and animosity are used to define yourself with respect to the other faction.
You define yourself by the people you despise or the people that you hate, rather than defining yourself in ways that are not necessarily so volatile and so easily exploitable by people who like to propagate and then exploit collectivist hatreds.
And I think that that's the most troublesome thing that we're seeing here, is not just the fact that five police officers were murdered last night and there was an attempt to murder many more, or that apparently there had been copycat incidents in the aftermath, but the fact that there are people who are referring to this as the overture to a literal civil war in the United States, and that there are people who actually look upon that prospect with a certain amount of eager anticipation as opposed to something akin to existential horror.
And my reaction is much closer to the latter than to the former.
Yeah, well, and it seems like, well, who are you thinking of when you think of people who welcome this kind of conflict?
Obviously, there was the cover of the New York Post today, so there's Roger Ailes.
Who else is on your list?
Well, I'm thinking a lot of what I've seen and the skimmings I've made of the alt-right media, the alt-right blogosphere, in the wake of what happened in Dallas.
There have been people who have been pining for a race war on the alt-right.
There are people who have been equally eager for a similar conflict on the regressive left.
And for about a year and a half or two years, actually, for four or five years, I've talked about the Weimar America scenario in which you would have the Free Corps and the Spartacists literally doing physical battle in the streets of some American cities.
And I think that that's the sort of dynamic we're talking about here.
We saw that in Sacramento a couple of weeks ago.
That's exactly what we saw in Sacramento.
And there have been more than a few commentaries that were engendered by what happened at the Capitol there in California, talking about the idea that next time when you have a self-identified white nationalist group, a hold and a peaceful demonstration of the sort that is disrupted by violent, so-called anti-fascist leftists, that the alt-rightists are going to be prepared and they're going to give much better than they receive.
And I think that this is the sort of thing that plays into that narrative and that there are people who have been saying, once again, with anticipation rather than dread, that at some point these barely suppressed tribal resentments and hatreds are going to give rise to a literal civil war, domestic conflict of that sort.
That's something that I think is not implausible.
And that's one of the reasons for the mood I'm in right now, which I would characterize as a type of depression that is somewhat seasoned with dread.
I've been talking about these things, this type of scenario unfolding now for many years, since the beginning of the second Bush administration.
I've been talking about the fact that our politics, to an extent perhaps greater than at any previous time in my lifetime, although I wasn't really conscious of what was happening in 1968, but our politics are more defined by a hatred for the other faction than by a love for individual liberty.
And particularly in the era of Donald Trump, that's a movement that is, as far as I can tell, motivated entirely by that mindset, the idea that you have to make America great by suppressing, restraining, perhaps even physically removing people that you despise because of what they are doing.
I think that there's certainly that brand, the corollary brand among the regressive left as well.
But I think that we're seeing that type of bifurcation or polarization in American society, perhaps to a greater extent than any time in the last four or five decades, if ever.
And social media tends to reinforce this because people tend to seek the company, both physical and virtual, of those who are going to reinforce their perception of the world.
I don't, for that reason, think that something ought to be done to restrain social media.
I don't think that there are any state focused prescriptions that we can apply here that will treat what I'm talking about.
I think that the state is the primary progenitor of what we're discussing and that the people who operate through the state are doing everything they possibly can to reinforce these collectivist identities on the part of the public and then to try to align them in such a way that will advance the interests of the semi-permanent ruling elite.
And they, of course, profit tremendously, both monetarily and politically, from keeping people at daggers drawn with each other.
Yeah.
Well, and at least right now we have an economic bubble.
What happens after the next crash?
Yes.
And every one of these bubbles is taking place in a society that economically is much different from the America of 1928 or 1929, a time when people were not leveraged to the point that they are right now.
People are leveraged to the point where their daily lives depend on their ability to borrow money.
That's something that would have struck our great grandfathers as entirely incredible.
I think they would have found that to be not only foolish, but incomprehensible.
I mean, these are people who knew how to extract their living from the soil that they stood upon.
And that's a set of skills that really are not in wide circulation today.
And that's one of the reasons why my family and I are living in Owyhee County, Idaho, which is well off the beaten path from just about everything.
But it requires that you adapt a lifestyle which is downsized and much more, I guess, self-sufficient would be a little bit grandiose, but much more inclined towards self-sufficiency.
But if you and this is something that has often been discussed by people on various points along the spectrum.
If you have a hiccup in the electronic cash flow through which EBT cards are recharged and people who are living on a cash just in time basis who depend upon the distribution of benefits and who, for lack of budgeting discipline, will have no way of providing for themselves if there is a week long delay in receiving their electronic benefits, then you have a prescription for incredible ugliness in many of the larger cities.
Well, and that goes for the cops, too, that I was just going to say.
Sure.
Those guys are riot, man.
You've got to look out.
Well, go ahead.
I was going to say that one of the things that we need to take into account here, as well as the emergence of law enforcement as another interest group seeking specially protected victim status, you've had over the last couple of months in places like Louisiana and also larger municipalities efforts to enact hate crimes laws that would actually have a sentence enhancement for somebody who, in the course of resisting arrest, let's say, commits what is called an act of violence or an act of battery, then you would be punished not only for the underlying predicate charge of resisting or obstructing arrest, but you would be charged with a hate crime enhancement because the violence was directed at a police officer because of the police officer's identity.
You have a measure of that sort that was either was either considered or might have been enacted in the state of Colorado.
It's another state where you have the police unions promoting the idea that just as race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, all these other factors are now used for the purpose of creating specially protected classes, that law enforcement as a profession should receive the same type of protection when they actually already occupy a very privileged position in our society to the extent that they are granted qualified immunity.
That's a phrase you read all the time in the literature for doing things that are wrong, violations not only of the law, but also of policy in their judgment.
This is necessary to protect officer safety.
And that's one of the reasons why there is such intense, ambient frustration on the part of people.
When you see the killings by police that have occurred over the last week or so, when it seems clear that you have instances where subdued suspects are simply being executed by police officers who are clothed in this qualified immunity and who are protected institutionally and who were deferred to even in the same judicial system that they supposedly serve, that's the sort of thing that helps to engender the type of hostilities that make situations of this sort so combustible.
Well, you know, I mean, you can see it, too, in just the way they talk on even the pro cop shows and what have you.
It's like little kids, well, young boys anyway, talk about it.
When you can, when you may shoot and get away with it now.
Yes.
You know, yeah.
Anybody ever comes in my house, I'll kill them.
Right.
No, I just shoot him in the leg.
No, I'd shoot him in the head.
This is what 13 year olds talk about when they're, you know, hanging around in the summertime with nothing to do.
This is how the cops see it at this point.
OK, if this happens, you can shoot.
If this happens, be careful that might not be over the line.
But if this happens, you can and can or may is the line for should, even though that's not necessarily imply or not.
They don't necessarily say that.
But that's basically what you're looking at with these cops.
You can hear him talk about it at the point where they can shoot.
They do.
Remember the kid I probably interviewed you about it at the time.
The kid was going to kill himself.
He was having kind of a mental breakdown.
He had a gun.
He was in the house alone.
And the SWAT sniper killed him from outside far away, a hundred yards or whatever, shot him through the scope, because at some point when the kid was waving the gun around by himself alone in the room, this through the scope, he could actually see the open barrel of the gun.
At that point, that counts.
Now you can shoot.
Blam.
Trigger pulled dead kid.
Was he actually threatening, threatening anyone?
No.
But was the the I dotted and the T crossed on the shoot to kill order?
Yes, it was.
And so he followed through on it.
And it seems like, Will, that no one is telling these cops, hey, man, I mean, not even once.
Hey, just because you can doesn't always mean do it if you really think you don't have to.
Like the pregnant lady with the knife who's having a freakout and he shoots her with an AR-15 like, geez, OK, she had a knife.
You're obviously not going to prison.
But did you have to shoot her with your AR-15?
No.
But could he have?
Yes.
And so he did.
And that's where we're at right now.
And that's what people are reacting against.
And yet any criticism against cops is apparently, according to Twitter today, tantamount to inciting murder against them.
Yeah, that plays into the idea of ideational co-conspirators you've seen on the front page of Drudge this morning, linked to a number of stories that claim that anti-police rhetoric is to blame for what happened in Dallas last night.
And all day on Fox News today, all day long.
That's the photographic negative of the rhetoric we heard from the Clinton administration in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing.
If you've been criticizing the federal government, if you've been criticizing federal law enforcement agencies, you're an ideational co-conspirator with the people who bombed this building and killed one hundred and fifty nine people.
And for months thereafter, that was a leitmotif in Bill Clinton's presentations about Oklahoma City.
And he went so far as to say after he was reelected in 1996 that the Oklahoma City bombing saved his presidency because it caused the fever to break.
The fever in this instance being people who were sick and tired of the rogue, lawless conduct of the ATF and other three letter federal enforcement agencies.
And now you have the same or at least in some instances the same, but at least the immediate offspring, institutionally and otherwise, of the talk radio right wing in the 1990s, 1994, 1995 period, who are criticized by Bill Clinton as somehow guilty collectively of what was done in Oklahoma City.
They're playing exactly the same themes right now with respect to what happened in Dallas last night.
And that's something that's happened since 2014.
As a matter of fact, in the aftermath of what happened in Ferguson with the violence, the tumult that occurred there and what's happened in Baltimore subsequently, every time you hear people talk about how somehow the people who engage in principled criticism of lawless conduct by the police, somehow this anti-police rhetoric just precipitates into violence against police, which if true would mean that 2015 would have been much bloodier than it was in 2016 would have been much bloodier than it has been until just last night.
And once again, we don't know whether or not that represents the trend line changing or whether this is simply going to be one of those episodes where people take a look at what happened and are so horrified over what happened that actual changes occur.
But when you talk about can versus should.
In terms of the use of lethal force by police officers, I have written on several occasions about police officers who have been sanctioned because they have refused to use lethal force and have solved a problem through de-escalation.
There was one instance that I wrote about a couple of years ago in which a police publication talked about a police officer who was up for officer of the year because in the face of an armed, agitated man in a domestic violence situation, which any police officer will tell you is the most dangerous of all scenarios, you don't want to get involved in a domestic violence situation.
The police officer, rather than drawing his own gun, talked the man down.
He simply reasoned with the agitated man and persuaded him to drop the gun rather than pulling his own gun and shooting him when he had every legal and perhaps every moral right to do so.
The police chief actually wanted to censure him because he felt that that example would prove to be contagious in a way that would undermine officer safety, which apparently is a higher priority than the safety of the public.
And that is part of the mindset that we're describing here, Scott, where police officers are trained to look upon the public at large as a 360 degree battlefront and everybody who is not identified by the same colors he's wearing is to be considered a potential threat.
Somebody who is to be considered.
A target to subdue, right, not a customer who's not a customer, it's their job to protect.
Yeah, yeah, this is this is a a supposed service where see, they didn't announce this when they changed it, right?
No, they didn't.
The way we all learn it in school is, yeah, no, you're born free and these guys are your security force.
That's how it works.
Yeah, yeah.
This is this is a really interesting enterprise because this so the supposed service they provide is defined not by what they have to do for us, but what they get to do to us.
And that mindset was given tremendously appropriate expression just a couple of weeks ago, forgive me, not a couple of weeks ago, a couple of days ago in an essay on law officer dot com by Travis Yates.
He's a commander with the Tulsa Police Department.
He teaches seminars in risk management and officer safety.
Of course, he has a master of science degree in criminal justice.
He's a graduate of the FBI National Academy, director of training for safe training.
His piece, which was published on Wednesday, is entitled Follow Commands or Die.
I'm going to say what no one else is saying from the president of the United States to every local news reporter in the country.
No one is saying it.
Follow the commands of a police officer or risk dying.
Now, I have written exactly that same thing, Scott, by way of criticizing the institution.
I was going to say, I think he plagiarized you only without the intent.
He didn't bring your intent with him.
Yeah, he says, there you go.
You can commence calling me all kind of horrible names and even call me a racist.
I don't care because that advice will save lives.
You can debate all day long about what proper police force is, when it should be used and if the entire criminal justice system is racist.
But there is one thing in common with every so-called excessive force video you've seen in recent years.
Note the disparaging reference to so-called excessive force video.
The suspect is not following commands.
Take someone not doing what a police officer tells them to do.
And I need to stop here and point out that not everything that exits the skull cave of a police officer is a lawful order.
But in their universe, they are lawful orders by virtue of being issued by a tax feeder, tax feeder and a government costume to continue.
Take someone not doing what a police officer tells them to do, resisting or worse yet, fighting and combine that with additional information like the suspect may have a gun, may have a gun, etc.
And it is not a stretch to see that person shot or worse dead.
It's all too common.
Can anyone produce me a video of a police officer telling someone to do something?
They comply and the officer just shoots them.
Can you imagine that video?
No, that video does not exist.
He wrote the very day that that video was streaming on Facebook as a man reaching for his wallet to comply with an order by a police officer shot dead in front of his girlfriend and in front of the five year old in the back seat.
See, that's the mindset in which these people have been marinated.
Whatever they say.
Is.
A threat, an implied death threat when issued to somebody forever for whatever reason might momentarily exercise his or her right to self-ownership, think of Eric Garner, Eric Garner said it stops today.
So they threw him to the ground and killed him because he had dared to assert his right to self-ownership.
Hey, what's the alternative backing down and saying, you know what, just for standing up to us today?
You're right.
It does end.
Go ahead about your business.
Yeah, we'll see you next week.
Exactly.
Exactly.
No, they had to kill mindset here.
Yeah.
The mindset here is that.
Our liberties exist by the grace of those who have the right to take them for whatever reason they deem suitable, and if we in any way object to that assumption and when we find ourselves on the receiving end of it, then we risk being killed.
And this somehow is a tenable, supportable and even commendable state of affairs.
All right.
Now, stop for a second.
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Are you a left wing radical?
I've never been accused of that, at least not recently.
I'm not accusing you either.
I'm just asking you a silly question.
But I think it's, you know, the point I'm making here is that I'm trying to evoke from you here is about how you're attacking the right from the right here.
You're the kind of guy who normally, if your knee had to jerk, it would be toward the cross and the flag and maybe even your local sheriff, right?
Yeah, as it happens, I like my local sheriff, but I'm not for that reason, not critical of him.
But no, I am a socially conservative churchgoing Christian guy.
And a former longtime employee of the John Birch Society of all the unlikely things.
And my problem here is not necessarily with the idea that there is a social order and that the society works better if certain permanent values are conserved.
To that extent, I am a conservative.
I am, however, an unabashed critic of this evil fiction called the state.
So I guess you'd have to call me a conservative right wing Christian anarchist, perhaps.
Well, back to what we said at the beginning, what you were explaining about everybody's identifying themselves about who they're against the most.
But there's a little bit about who you're for.
And a lot of people, particularly middle class white people and richer than that, think of cops as their best friend.
Like Richard Pryor said, Officer Timpson from the neighborhood who's here to help you out.
So what's your beat?
How come you're not rallying to your side?
Will, that's what I'm asking you.
Well, my side consists of my neighbor, quite frankly, that goes back to the to my identity.
And I hate to use the word, but I think it applies in this case as a Christian believer to the extent that they have a religion.
It's the golden rule.
And I take the proposition of loving your neighbor seriously, which means that if my neighbor doesn't see the world or matters of time and eternity the way that I do, that doesn't matter.
What matters is that I am required morally to be a zealous in protecting his rights as I am when it comes to protecting my rights, the rights of my wife and my children.
And we don't really have a society anymore in which it's understood that the.
Irreducible, non-negotiable principle upon which society has to function is the golden rule by whatever.
Theological or sectarian verbiage you use to express that moral imperative, it's something that is shared by most of the world's philosophic traditions, by many of the world's religious traditions, and it's something that I think is.
Largely ignored in the process of this exercise, we call politics, as far as I can tell, politics is nothing more or less than an effort to find self-serving exceptions to the golden rule and then institutionalizing them for the benefit of you and your clique or your tribe, your faction, your party or your corporate entity.
And I think that in American society today, we define ourselves primarily by our shared antagonisms rather than by.
By principles or values or interests that are more elevating, you know, Tocqueville predicted this a couple of hundred years ago, he said that one of the potential fault lines he discerned in American society back in our youthful Republican vigor was this potential for factions to become so insular and so devoted to the process of conflict resolution through litigation rather than commerce or through some kind of mutually beneficial negotiation that people would become identified more by by interests, shared interests rather than by principle, and that eventually society would become a sort of dust that is scattered on every side and it's unable to cohere to each other unless it's pounded into bricks through the direct force of government, which is what happened, of course, in Tocqueville's France or in France just a generation before Tocqueville.
Yeah, I miss Ron Paul so much.
Oh, I know because that's exactly his message of 08 and a 12 is what America needs so bad right now that we don't need socialism and we don't need nationalism and we don't need everybody picking sides and hating each other.
Man, we just need freedom.
Let's repeal all the terrible laws we passed and stop the wars and let some people out of prison and see if we can get the economy back going again on some, you know, market based interest rates and have a society.
We'll be fine.
Everybody will be fine.
You don't have to hate each other.
It'll be fine.
That was his message.
And we don't have that.
For some reason, there was no one in his family available to run for president this year or anything, I guess.
But, you know, we just really don't have anyone on the national stage that's saying, no, no, no, everybody chill, you know, things will be fine.
Nothing to fear, but fear itself, you know, and the state.
But we can repeal that, you know, I don't know.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so you mentioned briefly that Johnson, the perpetrator here, is an Afghan war veteran.
I don't know if they said if he was a combat vet or not, but you said that you think he Well, I thought it was important because when you go into the military, whether you have a combat oriented M.O.S., you're taught to become a warrior.
You're taught a certain mindset with respect to the way that you perceive others.
And it's not at all difficult, from what I understand, to take somebody who's got that mindset and then weaponize him.
And there's been a lot of focus, predictably, on the, you know, the military and the And there's been a lot of focus, predictably, on the fact that guns are readily accessible to people of all descriptions.
And just within the last couple of days, an immensely foolish columnist from the New York Daily News, the there are so many law abiding people with guns in our society that this creates a fear on the part of police officers that when they're going to any situation, the good guys are going to have guns.
So naturally, they're going to be overreacted by the police.
The corollary here being, of course, that we have to do something about taking guns out of the hands of law abiding and give the police a monopoly on the ownership of weapons, which they would share, of course, with the criminal underworld and leave the rest of us in the middle.
But I think it's interesting that this guy was weaponized.
He's a veteran of a war.
And one of the one of the manifold blessings of war is that it creates a steady supply of people with that inclination toward violence and toward the capacity to dehumanize people on the other end of the gun sites.
And one of his victims was Dallas police officer Patrick, I believe it's pronounced Zomaripa, who was also a military veteran.
He served in Iraq.
So you have in a way to use the readily recitable cliche, the roosters, the chickens rather coming back to roost from the permanent war that we've been in now for most of the lifetime of these two people.
You know, they're both dead now.
They're both dead in the streets of Dallas, having survived foreign battlefields.
And they've ended up in a situation where the domestic element of this permanent war state claimed the lives of both of them.
And we cannot.
And this is something that you and I have talked about for many years, over a decade, as a matter of fact, we cannot have any hope of restoring.
Even a semblance of the small are Republican system of government while we're pursuing an imperial foreign policy that requires steady creation, weaponized human beings, that is to say people who are suited for warfare, irrespective of the context they find themselves in.
And you add that to the fact that we have the longest war in American history, the war on drugs, creating a huge and apparently endless supply of violent confrontations between police and citizens and filling our jails and ruining entire neighborhoods, an entire city that has a lot to do with the tragedy of Baltimore over policing in the early years of the 21st century led to the backlash in Baltimore.
They destroyed the civil society in Baltimore at one point by having a large plurality of the population either in jail, headed to jail or dealing with warrants that could lead to them being taken to jail.
The same thing was going on in Ferguson.
But this is all the mindset of the warfare state, the domestic application of warfare state.
And you and I have spoken on many occasions about how the only political figure of any consequence in the last century or so who's talked about the fact that you cannot have a free society that's permanently at war is the much maligned Dr.
Ron Paul.
He was saying as a matter of that, the tentpole theme of his two recent runs for the Republican presidential nomination, that until we end this situation of permanent war, we cannot restore economic freedom or any other of the freedoms that are associated with what had traditionally been called Americanism.
And there just seems to be no appetite now, unfortunately, within a large section of the movement that he once commanded for a return to his fundamental message, which is that freedom solves everything.
Recognizing property rights and the need for reciprocal respect for property rights is the only basis upon which we're actually going to make this country free again.
People are satisfied now that we can somehow impose national greatness through an authoritarian president and they're willing to settle for that.
And if that's what they're willing to settle for, then that's the best they can hope for.
And that's well below what any American worthy of the name should be willing to settle for.
Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit more about race here, because, well, you know, I've been good on cops killing innocent people and particularly blacks because I'm from Austin, Texas, where that's who they primarily murder and have my whole lifetime.
I've been trying to cover this as a shoddy little media guy as best I can ever since, say, 1998 or whatever, when I got my first show.
And I keep thinking that, man, the Black Lives Matter people are missing the point.
They're blowing their giant, very horrible, unfortunately dropped in their lap of PR opportunity that they have here post Mike Brown to make some changes by focusing on race instead of saying, hey, we got model legislation in 50 states that say when a cop kills somebody, a DA he's never met from across the state comes in to oversee the thing.
Now, I'm just making that up.
It could be something different, but I'm looking for actual accountability here.
This is how to make cops think twice.
It's not by demonizing them and calling them names.
It's by letting them know that there's a DA you've never met who is going to be looking at it if you shoot somebody.
OK, OK, good.
Have a nice day out there, guys, that that would be a thing.
And it seems like to me that saying Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, of course.
Yeah.
And all cops should should believe that.
And everybody of all races in the world should understand that, you know, Jefferson was on something there about everybody's an individual tabula rasa and we all got rights and don't kill people and all of that.
Great.
But if we're waiting for racism to go away before we make police killings go away, then that seems like the long way around.
Why not just focus on accountability?
But then I also think I'm a white kid with an English surname.
And so what the hell do I know?
Well, maybe it really is about race.
I saw a quote where Newt Gingrich today said white people just don't understand.
And I didn't understand until years of people telling me, Newt, you just don't understand.
And then he realized, oh, I don't understand that actually being blacks around here sucks and that, you know, if you think you're afraid of cops, you have no idea, you know.
And so I don't know.
Tell me some things.
What do you think?
Well, most of the discussion of the racial aspect of what's going on is an outgrowth of this pernicious exercise called the war on drugs.
And once again, I have to advert to Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who's done some good work in this realm when they have spoken about the embedded disparities in prosecution and sentencing that you find that are part and parcel of the drug war that have helped to institutionalize, perpetuate a disproportionately large population of convicts who are black males.
And in their train, of course, you have a whole host of social consequences having to do with increased instability in black households and black neighborhoods.
And that leads to Stygian puddles of despair, like certain of the neighborhoods in Baltimore and Ferguson and elsewhere.
And people assume that this is a race thing in the sense that perhaps there's something uniquely incorrigible about black males that conduces toward this outcome.
If you take a look at the way that prohibition created certain ethnic, non-black ethnic dynamics of this sort, you'd see that this is not in itself an indictment of black people as having some kind of innate inclination toward violent crime that distinguishes them from other ethnic subgroups in the American population.
The problem here is, once again, having to do with the fact that you've got a public policy issue that is helping to make this into a race issue.
And Black Lives Matter is a collectivist outfit that is focusing on identity politics when they should be criticizing the state.
They should be criticizing the way that the state is being used to institutionalize violence and aggression that have the impact of violent encounters that leave black people dead or mangled and that leave black families without husbands and fathers.
And so rather than criticizing the state, they're trying to find some way of advancing an identity politics agenda.
And that, of course, does not be any good.
And that's one of the reasons why for, oh, I don't know, a year and a half or so when this became a large subject of discussion, I've always said that they have diagnosed one part of the problem and they've diagnosed it incorrectly.
And they prescribed a remedy that is a form of biatrogenic medicine, that is to say, it's making things worse.
I do appreciate the fact that there are some people in the law and order right who are trying to examine critically the issue of criminal justice reform, the grotesquely disproportionate sentences for nonviolent offenses that came out of the 1980s and 1990s, the Reagan administration, and then the first Clinton administration got some real pushback on this during the Democratic primary as the the omnibus crime bill of the mid 1990s has done more than most recent policies to help exacerbate this problem.
The idea that there were super predators that were being cultivated in these households that were left without fathers and husbands in large measure because of the drug war.
Supposedly, these people were going to become a new breed of of hyperviolent criminals.
And that led to another draconian crackdown, which had the predictable feedback loop of some of the consequences we're describing here.
So there are some people at least who are becoming a little bit aware of the need to do away with some of these grotesque, draconian, mandatory minimum sentences.
But at the same time, they're not looking at the problem of a lack of institutional accountability for police.
Many of the same people that just two days ago were bewailing the fact that Hillary Clinton is somebody upon whom the law has no purchase, have pivoted on a dime and are now execrating people who say that police ought to be held to the same standards as the rest of the citizenry when they use lethal force in a criminally violent way.
That supposedly is a specimen of anti-police rhetoric that supposedly precipitates into into violence against the police.
So they're certainly fine with the idea that Hillary Clinton perhaps for violating the Espionage Act and exposing classified information potential theft by hostile foreign powers.
It's fine to hold her accountable when she does something of that sort.
But if you say that the police officer simply hauls off and beat somebody without consequence or purpose should be held accountable, then then, of course, you're part of the problem here in terms of the so-called war on police.
And they must be held to a to a uniquely tailored standard that immunize them from accountability because of our tribal attachment to this element of what the state does.
Right.
One of the things that Black Lives Movement could have done in addition to promoting.
The idea of an actual adversarial proceeding here when you're investigating a police use of force that may or may not be legal, they need to talk about the idea of individual accountability for specific police officers of if you're a private security officer, a private investigator, let's say, in order to get a license in most states, this isn't the case in Idaho, but most states this is the case.
You have to have some kind of liability insurance that's usually a half million dollars or more, because if you end up in the course of your professional responsibilities, injuring an innocent person, you're going to be held personally liable.
And the company that employs you, the agency that employs you is going to be held institutionally liable and the expenses will come out of your pocket, your earnings, your savings.
That's not the case with police officers.
A police officer beats somebody up is going to be reviewed, first of all, by the Internal Affairs Department of that police department.
They have an institutional interest in minimizing the seriousness of what is done.
They'll be if there is a criminal justice function here, they'll be their actions will be scrutinized by a district attorney who is a colleague rather than a potential adversary.
And if a settlement is made or if a lawsuit goes through and a judgment is issued because a tort has been committed and police officer himself has no risk, runs no risk that he's actually going to be bankrupt unless he has to pay legal fees, which usually the police union is going to going to absorb on his on his behalf.
Usually the the city's risk management fund is going to take care of that.
In Chicago, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that they're going to have to pay because they actually had to take out a bond in order to pay the settlements that have resulted from hideous and and chronic corruption on the part of their police department.
And the taxpayers ultimately, of course, absorb those costs.
Now, if you had police officers as a professional requirement of receiving a peace officer certification, if they were required to get individual liability insurance and if settlements were paid out of police union pension funds, that there'd be a great deal more internal discipline here with respect to use of force issues.
And training would be changed in such a way that you would probably have greater trigger discipline on the part of police officers who have that opportunity you describe where they could get away with it, but it's not morally appropriate that they shoot.
You know, that's something that a non-police officer in a legal force situation has to consider.
I don't see why they should be exempted from that requirement.
The other thing that I find that's interesting is that when you have an incident where a police officer shoots a suspect, the shootings are investigated as suspected assaults on police rather than suspected criminal homicides.
That's a fact that came to the fore during the investigation of what happened in Ferguson, Missouri.
And that's another way that the dynamics of state imposed non-police policies distort human relations in ways that just don't listen to moral scrutiny.
I'm going to interrupt you here because your Internet's kind of screwing up just a bit.
We'll give it a pause and I get to drop this footnote.
You may very well have one that's just as good or better than this, Will.
But when you talk about double standards, I have to mention this piece by Scott Greenfield.
He's a lawyer.
I follow on Twitter.
That's his handle, just Scott Greenfield.
Yeah.
And his blog is called Simple Justice Blog dot Simple Justice dot U.S. dot.
Yeah.
And he has this article called I'm sorry.
Yeah, I like him a lot.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
He's really good.
And he has this one is called Tamir Rice's Basically Reasonable Murder.
And what it does is it really explains chronologically the most important court decisions over, say, the last hundred years, I'm guessing, or maybe last 50 or 70 years that and the evolution of this double standard and how the term reasonable when it comes to you defending your house and your family is not at all the same reasonable when it comes to what a cop does and how.
And it's just the layers upon layers of court decisions that interpret it a little bit different and a little bit different and a little bit different to where now the judges are mandated to look out of the cop's eyes and decide if maybe they might and if they think they might.
And that's what you know, it's just a completely twisted, distorted second set of laws for dealing with cops.
And and it's the kind of thing that, you know, they never teach you.
And maybe in Louisiana, but hardly anywhere else would they ever pass a law that outright says this is a special class of citizens and these are all of their special rights.
I guess they do have some things like that.
But this is mostly layers upon layers of common law and court decisions and appeals and rulings by who knows who that have created a system that I don't know how you could ever really correct.
I mean, you mentioned some great reforms there, but it seems like Congress would have to pass an omnibus.
We're canceling all these court decisions act or something.
I mean, they can do that on the federal level.
The carpet.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know what to do.
You'd have to set the Federal Register on fire.
Let's have a gala Federal Register burning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, I was saying that.
Yeah, I was saying that to be something like impossible that we can't achieve, but it just sounds too good for a goal.
You know, I don't know.
OK, one last thing.
You mentioned the drones and what a huge precedent this is that they rolled in the kind of anti bomb robot with a bomb to kill this guy.
Yes.
It seems like they could have thrown in tear gas or done some other kind of thing.
I mean, I know you can't read their minds or anything, but it seemed like they were really trying to set a precedent with that.
And why that?
Why not tie a shotgun to it or any other thing?
I don't know.
Well, if they have, they will use it and they can get anything.
They want simply for the asking for the Pentagon and the incentive structure of law enforcement such that they will always choose the exotic option rather than one that is more effective, but perhaps not nearly as theatrical.
Yeah.
And there's no reason at all why they simply couldn't have set up a perimeter and waited this guy out, you know, gotten a pack of cards, just waited until he was ready to come out.
He was quartered.
He was he was neutralized.
He was not a threat to them.
He was not a threat to the public.
And there was no reason at all for going with this this option of the the tread bearing drone, if you will, apart from the fact that they had it.
And because they had it, they figured that it was appropriate to use it.
Yeah, we can.
We should.
Same thing.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's a different facet of the same mindset.
That's really something.
And a huge precedent set, as you said, because now, well, geez, officer safety is paramount.
We all got these robots.
Why should we send our human flesh and blood heroes out to risk their lives ever again when we can send robots in?
So this is the first time that this is not the first time this was considered, you'll probably recall that during the standoff on Ruby Ridge here in Idaho back in 1992, the FBI sent a robot drone up to the front porch of the so-called Weaver compound, which was just a tar paper shack with a telephone.
But below the telephone was a shotgun.
And if the door had been opened and somebody reached for the telephone, it's entirely possible, likely given what had happened just the day before, that the person who picked up the telephone would have had his or her taken off, had taken off by the shotgun.
Man, I have that 1992.
Is that an Allen box book?
Do you remember?
Yes.
Allen talked about that in his book on Ruby Ridge, which is probably the definitive treatment of the subject.
And there was a incident in, I believe, South Dakota involving the Brossard family just a couple of years ago where surveillance drones were used to locate members of that family in their fields outside their farm.
And they were used for surveillance logistics.
They were not weaponized drones.
The reason this was done was because Brossard's sons had been carrying firearms and so they wanted to use the drones in order to provide the police with detailed intelligence as a way of setting up an arrest that actually was conducted with no extraordinary violence.
But they would be extended, actually tasking these drones with cameras rather rather than missile platforms to aid in the arrest of a handful of people who were involved in a in a conflict that began with lock stock.
And so that was, I think, a critical precedent.
But what happened last night with the use of this robot is the first instance where they've actually gone the full disposition matrix and simply taken the guy out rather than trying to arrest him and put him on trial for murder, which is what they should have done.
If they were dealing with a protocol appropriate to law enforcement rather than the battlefield, they would have chosen that option, which was most likely to achieve the mission of domestic police agencies, which is to arrest suspects so that they can be tried to the criminal justice system.
Instead, they use the battlefield approach.
They took out somebody as an enemy target.
And that's a very important manifestation of the same mindset that we're talking about.
Well, Greg, you are what is good about my show.
Thank you, sir, so much for doing it.
Scott, I'm honored.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it.
You know, that is the great Will Greig, the heroic Will Greig at Pro Libertate.
That's freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
His book is Liberty in Eclipse.
And you find the link to his radio show podcast there as well.
Thanks, y'all.
All right, y'all.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
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