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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Which, by my powers of deduction, I think, leaves me with no other conclusion than I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show my friend Will Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Boy, doesn't that sound nice?
Freedom in our time.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
Scott, thanks so much for having me on again.
It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here, as always.
So, have the cops killed anybody in America lately?
What time is it this morning?
It's 1034 a.m. where I'm sitting in the Mountain Time Zone, so I'd assume that by now at least somebody has succumbed to the lethal ministrations of our paladins of public order.
That's just the way things go.
I remember way back in, I think it was 1991, in the aftermath of the Rodney King arrest and beating, that Patrick Buchanan, somebody for whom I intermittently have respect, wrote a column defending the actions of the police in that episode because he said there's a war going on in the streets of America, and we have a case where some of the good guys committed an atrocity, but they're still our guys.
They're still our protectors.
We still have to take the side of the police in spite of the fact that things like this simply happen.
I didn't realize at the time, once again, this is 20 years ago, that that was a harbinger of an attitude that has become institutionalized here, which is that the police are literally street-level warriors.
They're soldiers in exactly the same sense that people deployed under arms abroad by the government could be considered soldiers, and that the rules of engagement have to reflect that they're in a 360-degree combat environment, which means that those of us who are not wearing government-issued costumes and find ourselves on the receiving end of their attentions have to be considered potential enemies, that they're involved in something akin to counterinsurgency warfare here domestically.
I didn't realize that that was no longer a metaphor.
I didn't realize that even 20 years ago, this was something that was becoming entrenched by way of an apology for the actions of the police, but we've reached a point now where there is no remaining ambiguity.
We have, if you take a look at the powers that are exercised by the government and the way that their enforcement agents behave, we have a universal battlefield, and those of us who are in an encounter with somebody who's nominally a local law enforcement officer have to consider ourselves to be potential KIAs, because that is the mindset these people have been indoctrinated with.
All right, well, and for people who don't know Will Grigg, this guy's no hippie.
And, Will, back when you were with the Birch Society, you used to, I think, you were certainly part of the campaign, if you weren't the one running it, that was called Support Our Local Police, which was mostly about, you know, if we can have democratic control, little-D Jeffersonian democratic control over our local sheriff's department, maybe we won't quote-unquote need a bunch of federal intervention in our local communities, militarizing our cops and turning them into these soldiers that you're talking about.
We want to support our local security force, at least we get to vote for them and stuff, right?
And yet, now look at you, Will, what's happened?
What's happened is I came to understand, somewhat tardily, I guess I was rather slow on the uptake, maybe about ten years ago or so, that we no longer have local police, that we have a situation in which the federal government has essentially centralized, nationalized law enforcement, primarily through the war on drugs, which is the main conduit through which the Pentagon is arming and equipping and training tactical units and SWAT units, but also people who are simply involved in quotidian, routine law enforcement.
We have a situation where local communities cannot outbid the federal government when it comes to providing police departments and sheriff's departments, too many sheriff's departments anyway, with their lifeblood, which of course is revenue.
And one of the things that's happening right now as the depression takes hold and revenue streams constrict and dry up is that we're seeing sort of an ambivalence here develop.
On the one hand, there are instances where police departments are simply being shut down and they're going out of business because you no longer have the ability of the local village or town or county to support a police department or sheriff's office, on the one hand.
On the other hand, you have some police agencies drawing ever nearer to the federal government in search of a bailout, in search of revenue, and one of the big things that happened in the stimulus package, so-called, was that there were several billion dollars that were set aside to keep law enforcement up and running and in the toys that they've become inured to.
And I think that what's happening is that in some areas of this country, you're going to have police departments go out of business and sheriff's departments take over the affairs of law enforcement, which actually is closer to the common law standard where the sheriff is supposed to be in charge of protecting life, liberty, and property, as opposed to enforcing laws that are handed down by decree.
That's a hopeful trend, albeit somewhat geographically limited.
And on the other hand, you've got a number of other police departments that are becoming more aggressive, more militarized, more overtly a band of robbers and thieves, using asset forfeiture and other means simply to steal what they can't get by way of taxation.
That's what's been going on in Detroit, which, of course, is an economic moonscape.
You have a modest uptick in violent crime over the last five or six years, but asset forfeiture rates have gone through the roof.
Well, you just have police departments acting as bummers, as robber bands, like the Candidary at the end of the Thirty Years' War in Europe back in the 1700s, or 17th century, rather.
You know, it seems like you really got it right with the change that took hold or something.
I mean, it would have been – I mean, I don't know.
I guess I idealized the 80s just because I was a happy little kid in the 80s or whatever, and I didn't really know.
I wasn't paying attention when the Philadelphia police bombed the MOVE house.
Oh, I know.
I never heard of it because in 1986 I was 10, you know, or 85.
I was nine, you know.
But it seems like – I don't know – in 1982 or something, way back in the olden days, it seems like if the cops just outright went around stealing people's land for the purpose of stealing their land and then calling it a pot seed on the carpet or whatever to the judge later, wouldn't that have been scandalous at some point back in American history that people would have just said, no, man, what is this?
Cops just going around with guns, stealing property so that they can buy new machine guns with it and destroying the lives of innocent people?
And this happens around us all day, every day.
Nobody even cares.
I mean, civil forfeiture, I don't even talk about that on this show because it was one of the things that made me hate the government so much 16, 18 years ago.
I'm so over it.
It seems like everybody would have been, you know?
I know.
I think that what happened is that starting in the mid-'70s, and I blame Nixon for this, quite frankly, because Nixon, for cynical political reasons, created the so-called war on drugs.
Granted, the federal government has been involved in prohibitionist efforts of one sort or another for over a century, but it was really Nixon and Pat Buchanan, unfortunately, probably played no small role in these calculations who decided that by way of finding a wedge issue that would sort of drive the two elements of the Democratic Coalition apart, you had sort of what we now call the neocon element, who were the supposedly respectable professional liberals in the Democratic Party, and then you had the countercultural anti-war element with which, quite frankly, I'm much more sympathetic.
I was more sympathetic at the time, ironically enough.
And in order to drive a wedge between those two elements of the Democratic Party, Richard Nixon declared war on drugs.
And to that end, he ended up diverting a lot of funding from the federal government to nominally local law enforcement agencies in some of the major cities and creating this rhetorical trope about the police being the street soldiers protecting our rights against the forces of disorder.
And that was about the time that you had real change in some of the propaganda being put out by Hollywood as well.
You suddenly have things like the Blue Night, both Wambaugh's novel and the television series starring the unfortunate George Kennedy, talking about the idea of punishing contempt of cop.
I mean, that's something that entered the vocabulary of the mid-'70s, and now it's pretty much their chief preoccupation.
You know, Will, I saw a thing on TV about the cops themselves talking about how Dirty Harry and the French Connection completely changed the American people's view of cops.
There you go.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Will Grigg after this, y'all.
Scrooge and Hackman.
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I'm not a cool guy anymore.
If you thought I ever was before.
I took a look at all the signs.
And rolled it over in my mind.
The feelings I could not beneath.
All right, Joe.
Oh, that fills that volume fast.
All right, yeah, it's chaos.
No, yeah, it is.
It's chaos radio.
And it's the Liberty Radio Network, lrn.fm, antiwar.com, slash radio.
Talking with my pal, Will Grigg.
And, well, I was condemning Gene Hackman because we were going out to break there.
Because I saw this thing on the Discovery Channel or something where, and of course, none of these people have any shame whatsoever.
So it's just amazing to sit and hear them talk.
And it was about how really all in the history of American media, I guess you had Joe Friday and whatever.
But for the most part, the police were always portrayed at best as a bunch of Three Stooges type clowns, Keystone cops.
And at worst, they were just thugs the same as Al Capone.
And it was always the antihero that was the hero in American film, really up until the 70s.
And then came out the French Connection and Dirty Harry.
And both of these made it, set the standard, that Kiefer Sutherland standard.
That cops have to commit felonies all day in order to keep you safe.
The law is for them to apply to you.
And thank God it doesn't apply to them.
And it worked, Will.
It worked.
And the people, the entire country's attitude about cops changed.
And the cops learned from this.
And the unions, you know, they went and organized.
They made friends in Hollywood.
They worked so hard to put out law and order.
It will be in syndication forever.
Here's both sides of the criminal justice system.
The cops and the prosecutors' point of view.
Exactly.
And, yeah, we're doomed.
It's been like this.
It's run from A to B, the spectrum of acceptable depictions of the government's law enforcement apparatus.
You have the perspective of the cops and the perspective of the prosecutors.
And you almost never in any police procedural have an example of somebody who is completely in this being railroaded by the system into a huge, a metastasizing domestic gulag of millions of people in prison, in jails, on probation, or on parole.
You never have the idea that there's something innately wrong with the system.
You have incidental episodes of corruption where somebody who's a police officer has fallen from grace because he has shaved the law in a way that benefits him personally.
So you can have acceptable depictions of individual specific corruption, but you don't have a sense that there's systemic corruption.
You don't have a sense that there's something severely wrong with the system that's not devoted solely and exclusively to the protection of person and property, but rather is a self-generating, self-perpetuating engine of misery, which is what the system has become.
Indeed, that's probably what the system was intended to become, at least to some extent.
But when you talk about these radical changes, the way the police were depicted in the 70s particularly, that's another really good example of how it's a lie to assume that Hollywood is anti-government, anti-law and order, anti-law enforcement systemically.
Granted, there are some people in Hollywood that meet that depiction, but law enforcement is a government function.
Statists are going to be extolling the supposed virtues of government coercion.
And so at some level or another, in some way or another, there's going to be a resonance between the punitive populace of the right for whom the Kiefer Sutherland standard, as you correctly describe it, is the operational moral template.
And the status of the left to understand that they're not going to be able to redistribute property or to change forcibly the defects in the way that we choose to live unless they have this apparatus of enforcement in the hands of the state.
And so that doesn't – I'm not surprised to find out that there's been that really important influence on public opinions being exercised by Hollywood, which supposedly is the bane enemy of law and order.
Yeah, well, the left-right spectrum wins again.
Anthony Gregory was telling me he gave a speech one time, and a kid came up to him after the speech and said, I just – I'm almost there with you, I guess, but I just don't understand.
You're against taxes and prisons?
And Anthony's like, yeah, of course.
Look, man, no prisons, no taxes.
No taxes, no prisons.
Yeah, somehow this is supposed to be a left-wing issue and a right-wing issue that just can't come together.
I know.
And I think that there's a definite interest on the part – and this is the old – what's it, the Baptist and bootlegger syndrome, if you will.
Strangely enough, I think a really good popular depiction of that was in the 1987 version of the movie Dragnet.
I don't know if you remember the Dan Aykroyd vehicle with Tom Hanks.
Yeah, yeah, I do.
The Pat Robertson figure and the Hugh Hefner figure were covertly collaborating with each other.
The guys who were running Pagan, People Against Goodness and Normalcy, were getting payoffs from the creepy, skeevy religious right organizer.
And they were collaborating with each other in order to build their little dystopia.
And actually I saw that at the time, and I thought, I wonder if there's any truth to this.
I'm convinced there's a lot of truth to that, because time after time you see these people who are supposedly polar opposites in the political struggle, the partisan political struggle, are promoting the same interest in terms of creating a corporatist monstrosity of the state.
And I think the way that law enforcement has been promoted here by both left and right as a means of forcing the rest of us to behave is a really good illustration of that syndrome.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I kind of wanted to spend part of this interview letting you chronicle some innocent people who have been murdered by the cops lately, Will.
But, I mean, really, there's so many of them.
There's no one going on.
I can hear the siren outside right now in central Los Angeles.
They're on their way to kill somebody or just from killing somebody, I guess.
Yeah, it's not like we're having to pan for gold anymore.
It's like going out with a basket and gathering manna.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just so plentiful, you can't avoid those stories anymore.
And chronicling them does become a little bit weary, worrisome.
All right.
Well, so let's talk about, you know, the sickness of the American mind in general, because that's really the important point.
That's how we got here is, you know, I put this one on a bumper sticker last night, sent it into Liberty Stickers.
But the idea is the American people have already given up free speech, search warrants, fair trials and protection from torture.
Why not abolish freedom of religion?
Why not, to go further, turn the Department of Homeland Security into the National Police Force, integrate it with the guard units?
All the lines are over.
I think you're right.
Why not simply make a clean sweep of the whole matter?
I think you're onto something when you say, if you will, that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in ours, but in ourselves, that we're underlings.
I think this whole manufactured outrage over the Cordoba House is a really good example of that.
You've got conservatives who are, whether they're admitting it or not, promoting the fundamental tenet of the Communist Manifesto, which, of course, is the abolition of private property, on a case-specific or religion-specific basis here, saying that, well, we believe in private property, but this is an exception.
And, oh, by the way, there's a similar exception for any other Muslim community that wants to build a mosque or build a school, because we're involved in this civilizational clash with the Islamic world, which, of course, is something that we have been told wasn't the case for how many years?
Because of this one historic situation, this historic circumstance, we have to, for the interval, suspend the private property rights of these people who are marginalized, peripheral, and somewhat disreputable in our eyes, on the assumption that you can only deal with one group of people and not compromise the private property and religious freedom rights of all Americans.
But I hear that refrain constantly, and you suddenly have people like this thuggish pseudo-populist Carl Palladino up in New York who's running for the governor's mansion talking about the use of eminent domain to confiscate the property from the Cordoba Initiative and build a war memorial on the property there within a certain two- or three-block radius of Ground Zero, which, of course, is part of the same neighborhood where you have strip clubs and McDonald's.
And bars and all kinds of other initiatives.
Of course, this is a former Burlington Coat Factory site, and we're always told that this is somehow hallowed property.
And as much as I respect the people behind Burlington Coat Factory, I just don't think that their property was particularly sacred.
But you hear this constantly on the part of people who are otherwise bane enemies, once again, of eminent domain who are consistent, persistent critics of land grabs of all kinds.
Michelle Malkin literally went from calling for the confiscation of this property from the Cordoba Institute in the same day to bewailing Obama's land grabbing in the western United States without making the connection between these two instances of the denial of private property rights.
No, no, no.
See, you already said the most important part, I think, which is that the last eight years, the Republicans said, we're not at war with Islam.
That's what George Bush said.
The neocons have tried this whole time to say, yes, all of Israel's enemies are America's enemies because they're Muslim and they want their 72 virgins or whatever lie.
But George Bush said, no, no, no, Islam is cool.
It's these guys.
And now and the Republican Party, at least, mostly went along with that.
And now what?
We're going to have every congressman in the country now is running against this freaking community center.
Well, yeah, I mean, we're so far gone.
Well, I have to that lady singing, so to speak here.
Yeah.
Performing an aria, I'm afraid.
All right.
All right.
Well, man, you know what?
History is going to record that there was pro libertate and that, you know, some of us were trying, at least.
And you're certainly one of them will.
And I thank you for it.
Thanks so much, everybody.
That's Will Griggs.
The blog is freedom in our time dot blog spot dot com.
And we'll be right back after this.
