Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Pete Quinones, aka Pete Raymond, aka Mance Rayder.
But now, yeah, Pete R. Quinones, now managing editor of the Libertarian Institute.
Man, how are you doing?
Doing good, man.
What's going on, Scott?
Interviewing you about stuff.
First of all, I made you the managing editor.
It was that easy.
I just said, you are the managing editor, and it became true.
And so now you're the managing editor of the Libertarian Institute.
Congratulations.
Thank you very much.
You got me at the right time.
I mean, I was hungover and vulnerable, and sure, I was open to anything.
Great.
And listen, you're done changing your name now, right?
Yeah, I'm not going to change my name anymore.
That's the end of the name changes for now, is that right?
Yeah, but I think I'm still on the podcast.
I'm still going to just be Pete Raymond.
And if anybody wants to call me Quinones, that's fine.
Nah, you should change that.
Am I saying it right at all?
Say it again?
Quinones.
Oh, you got to really get the, like, quiche.
Quinones.
It's a K. It's like an Arabic Q.
Yeah, but if you ask my brother, he'll pronounce it the way you did.
Huh.
Well, what the hell does he know about it?
Listen, no, change your name on your podcast, too, man.
Otherwise, everybody's just going to be confused all the time.
All right, I'll think about it.
Just tell them what your name is.
I'll do it.
And just tell them, forget the Q, it's just a K sound, and they'll get it.
It'll be fine.
Quinones.
It's fine.
All right.
Mance Rayder.
I hate that show.
You know, my wife made me watch, I refuse to watch any of them, but she made me watch the last few episodes of it, and they were really stupid.
And I know everybody thought that, but I presume that the entire series was just as stupid as those last shows, just so that you know.
That's fine.
I don't expect everybody to like the show.
I hate TV shows.
I hate TV shows that everybody's all watching together, separately, in their little boxes.
I just don't want to be a part of that.
That's for everyone except me.
Thank you.
I don't want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm just not interested in the things that might be interesting.
Tell me about some of these articles that you've written here.
You've got quite a bit of stuff that you've written just in the last couple of weeks here.
A couple of blog entries, but mostly articles.
You want to talk about guns first here?
Guns?
Sure.
I mean, I could talk about guns all day.
People are killing each other with them, and so that's a problem.
Other people are saying that what should happen then is the government should help us out.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, this is what happens all the time, right?
I mean, I'm old enough to remember 1994 when they did the assault weapons ban, and that meant that nobody was going to kill anyone with a quote-unquote assault weapon anymore.
Then Columbine happened, and a whole bunch of other things happened.
Then in 2004, Bush let the bill run out and everything, and he was literally Hitler.
I mean, people say, oh, well, what would happen if you were in Walmart when that happened?
Well, I'd be shooting back.
I mean, that is simple.
I mean, who stopped them?
People showed up with guns to stop them.
I mean, that's the way – if somebody knows that there's a chance that they're going to go in there – it's like the Pulse nightclub shooter.
The guy went to some Disney nightclub first, saw that there was armed security, and he was like, OK, I've got to look for a soft target.
Then he went and he found a nightclub, and there was no armed guards or anything.
So that's just the way these people work.
If they think they're going to run into guns, they tend to back down or commit suicide or something like that once they start shooting.
So there's this old Bill Hicks joke about how in England guns are outlawed, and you know how many shootings by guns they have in a year?
Like 12.
And he says, hey, I know the populations are different, but still, there's no connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it, and not having a gun and not shooting someone with it.
So he's kind of got a point, but at the same time it's sort of – what it means is you'd have to have a real nationwide program of confiscation and the obliteration of the open market in guns and a full crackdown on gun possession to try to achieve some kind of gun-free America that would look anything like England.
And then that probably would bring down the rates of inter-private citizen shootings with guns.
But boy, would the rates of shootings by cops go up.
Can you imagine what that would look like if they even tried something like that?
Well, the whole thing about Britain is Britain never really had a culture of guns.
It was never something where the populace itself was proud and they had their own version of the NRA, which is a terrible organization.
Let me say GOA, Gun Owners of America.
They didn't have that kind of thing.
So when it came time to turn over the gun, sure, here, have this.
I mean I don't even know why I had it.
It was my granddad's, whatever.
I don't care.
But here that's not going to – it would be impossible.
I really wish they would do it because something else I've been trying to inject into my articles lately is the idea that this whole 350 million people have to be one people thing is – we have to put that – we have to throw that away.
I mean the only way that this thing is going to survive in any way whatsoever is to break it up into smaller pieces.
And if they really started to do like a national kind of gun confiscation kind of thing or the quote-unquote buyback, which is mandatory, I really think you'll start seeing situations where you're going to see states be like, yep, nope, that's the final straw.
Because, I mean, right now cops are killing people in the streets and nobody is shooting back because the conservatives love the cops for some reason.
I don't know why.
But I think the conservatives, if they started saying, well, you're going to have to give up your guns, then maybe they'd finally be like, you know, we really got to split this thing up and we're not going to put up with this.
I mean we put up with people getting – crying drunk men crawling down a hotel hallway, getting assassinated and blown away by cowardly cops on camera.
But now, no, now this will be too far.
I mean that's the way I look at it is I almost welcome it because it was like the whole thing about Trump and Hillary and I wrote about this in an article that I released today is if Hillary would have got elected, I think we would have seen succession movements.
We'd have seen a Ron Paul kind of revolution kicking off again.
We would have seen a lot more people come over to our way of thinking.
But Trump spoke a good game and seemed to be about liberty even though he worships the police and he worships the military.
So I mean people thought that, hey, maybe this can be Ron Paul 2.0.
But no, we got John McCain, Ronald Reagan 2.0.
I don't even know what we got.
Yeah.
Well, considering he never used the word liberty ever in his life and particularly not in the campaign of 2015-16, pretty hard for anybody to really complain they got fooled into believing that.
You know, pro-business.
This is not pro-capitalism itself necessarily or even understanding of it at all.
I mean, if anything, he understands all the worst parts of it and that's what he likes the best.
You know, what we need is an inflationary bubble so that the economy seems good until I'm out of office.
You know, what we need is big contracts to sell weapons to the Saudis to use against the Yemenis.
That's cold, hard green dollars right there, don't you see?
That's his economic doctrine.
I mean, I don't know why people looked at him and thought that he was going to be able to improve anything.
Well, because he wasn't Hillary Clinton.
That makes enough sense.
They also got it in their head that more important than fighting against the state is we need to own the libs.
And he's going to own the libs.
Well, that really hasn't helped push forward Ron Paul's vision of what we should be doing.
Absolutely not.
And, you know, the truth is, too, is we could go back to the Articles of Confederation and it would still be the USA.
It's just all of this central planning that has got everybody at each other's throats and this kind of thing.
I mean, there really shouldn't be this much to fight about.
Yeah, it's funny.
I talked to Judge Napolitano recently and I asked him that question.
I said, what do you think would happen?
Would we have more freedom or more liberty or less liberty if we just went back to the Articles of Confederation?
And he said, well, I think a lot of areas would have a lot more freedom.
He said, but I think a lot of, you know, there'd be many areas that would, you know, become more totalitarian.
He said, especially like, you know, the the Chicago's and the New York's and, you know, they would really crack down.
You know, but then again, they would potentially have the ability to vote with their feet and go somewhere else if they wanted to.
You know, I used to think, too, that, you know, there's no chance in this day and age that Jim Crow could come back without the federal government to stop it kind of thing.
But I'm not so sure about that anymore.
Yeah, I mean, it's.
I mean, I don't want the federal government to win really ever, but it's hard to really argue that you have less liberty by and large with federal government intervention on that issue.
Yeah, well, I mean.
Although sure has opened the door to a lot of other things, I admit that.
But I mean, there's there's when you have a government, if they fix one thing, they've probably broken another while they were doing it.
Yeah, that's for sure.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
Here's how you can do that.
Go to Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
And there's all kinds of options to do so and all kinds of different kickbacks at different levels.
Of course, take PayPal, Patreon and all different kinds of digital currencies and all of those sorts of things.
And anybody signs up by way of Patreon or PayPal to donate five dollars a month to the show will automatically get keys to the Reddit room, my own private Reddit group that I have quite a few members now and lots of fun in there every day.
So check out all about that at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
And thanks.
All right, well, so talk a little bit about this Bernie Sanders article that you wrote about the health care crisis, because, you know, I hear people all the time and making real sense, say, hey, you know what?
The opposite of socialized health care is not libertarianism.
Really, the opposite of it is what we have now, which is this horrible cronyism where maybe it's socialism for the drug companies and the hospital companies and the insurance companies.
It's fascism for the rest of us.
It's pure gangsterism and all of this cartelism over the supply of doctors and all of the different, you know, every bit of what I'm talking about here.
So a lot of people are talking about, hey, sort of the same thing with the Jim Crow thing is like, well, we could wait around for the people of Alabama to gain enlightenment or we're just going to have to force this issue.
And it's sort of the same thing here.
They're not going to repeal all the regulations that made it this way.
But meanwhile, people are dying of being broke.
And so and because they can't afford the artificially high prices that government has helped to create.
And so middle of the road leads to socialism, Pete, right?
Maybe we do just need to get the national government to pick up the tab.
What do you say?
Now, free market would work.
I mean, the Affordable Care Act was with the exception of the mandate, which I would relate more to socialism.
The Affordable Care Act was written by the insurance company lobbyists.
I mean, it was fascism.
People were just consolidating.
It was almost like the government was just signing off on a couple of different exchanges around the country and giving them monopoly, you know, monopoly rule over the industry.
And now Bernie Sanders, not understanding that, you know, or maybe understanding that.
I mean, I don't I don't know his motivations.
I assume they're evil.
He's a politician career.
He wants to put all of this under the government.
And the way I see it is the only way that would be carried out in the United States is.
The insurance company, the doctors would still still be employed.
But now office visits, certain procedures, operations, they would all you know, there would be an actuary table.
And this is how much you're getting paid for this.
And, you know, and you're all and it's all coming from the government, which is coming from the taxpayers or inflating the money supply or however they plan on doing it.
There's going to be a lot of incentive for doctors to perform extra procedures so that they can get paid more.
So fraud will immediately jump into it.
And then.
Depending on how much doctors and nurses will make now, you may not have the best people going into the field.
You may have people going into the field who are just like, oh, I never thought I could be a doctor, but I guess I can be a doctor now.
And, you know, the fifty thousand dollars a year sounds great to me because I was making 20, you know, changing oil or something like that when I was a teenager or something, you know, when I was 19.
I mean, it's just the implications for it, for what Bernie is talking about doing or is is horrifying.
And it will lead to VA style care.
And really, the only answer is the free market.
I mean, it's to release.
I mean, if there's only in Georgia, if there's only two or three insurance companies that you can choose from and they're only allowed to operate in certain states, you know, you don't have a free market in health care.
And that's what a lot of people believe.
A lot of people believe there's a free market in health care because they're uneducated.
They don't they don't understand simple economics.
But really, to let them sell over state lines and to let, you know, let insurance companies open up and compete and do all that.
I mean, in five years, if you were to just do that in five years, health care would be cheaper than it way cheaper than it is now and probably of a higher quality.
And I think I would assume that that even, you know, poor people would be able to afford health care and they'd probably be getting the same kind of quality care that a lawyer could afford right now.
And that's just what the market does.
Well, and, you know, it just goes without saying to a Democrat that, no, all those regulations are there to protect the people of Texas from some scumbag insurance company out of Delaware that would not, you know, that is is subject to much more lax regulations and don't have to deliver a quality product to the people here.
So got to have that sort of oversight.
So how do you answer for that?
I mean, but but that insurance companies and that has been given money to that Democrat.
They've also been given money to that Republican.
I've interviewed I've interviewed lobby a lobbyist on my on my podcast.
And I asked him, I said, so, you know, who who do you give money to when they call?
He goes, we give money to everybody.
He goes, when they call and they say, hey, you know, you know, we need a donation now.
You know, we need a contribution now.
You know, I asked him, I said, do you guys lean left or do you lean right?
He goes, we lean everyone because we keep everyone paid because that's the only way that we can stay in business.
It's the same thing with the insurance companies and the insurance companies are in bed with the government.
I mean, Bernie is only he's.
I mean, I would say he's just acting and playing a role in saying, oh, that insurance company there is horrible and everything, because I guarantee you that insurance company has cut him a check at some point, if not every year.
You know, you know what?
There was only one guy that they ever said this about that.
The lobbyists don't even darken his door because they know this won't do him any good.
And that's Dr. Ron Paul.
And that was the Washington Post.
They said, seriously, the lobbyists don't even bother him because he says to everybody the same thing.
Sorry, that's not in the Constitution.
And so that's it.
Conversation over.
And I've never heard that said about anybody else up there.
I'll tell you that.
Yeah, it's funny.
I know all these articles I've started writing and everything.
I think I probably in each one of them, I refer to Dr. Paul at least once.
Yeah, man.
Well, it's because he's good on everything.
By the way, I got a book of all of my interviews with Ron Paul coming out real soon.
Everybody's going to like it.
It's called The Great Ron Paul, which is a pretty obvious title for it.
Hey, listen, so you do have this podcast, Free Man Beyond the Wall, and you've had some really interesting stuff on there.
So now tell me everything about what Ryan McMacken said.
And also this guy, was it Justin Long, who was Special Operations Forces in Somalia?
Maybe do that one first.
OK.
Yeah.
Justin was, he's, I forget what, what phrase he used, but he's basically PSYOPs.
What they would do is he said they would, they were stationed in Somalia, but they would go back and forth between Somalia and Djibouti.
But their goal in Somalia was to try to convince members of Al-Shabaab or people who are loyal to Al-Shabaab to turn their back on them or if they were a member to quit.
And they would do that with all the same kind of PSYOPs you heard of in Afghanistan, where they try to get the Taliban, you know, members of the Taliban to leave or people loyal to the Taliban.
And, yeah, I mean, he did a really good explanation of what they did.
But more, I thought the more important part was just talking about all the different countries that go into Somalia, do business with Somalia or try to take advantage of Somalia and just, you know, what they do.
You know, he talked about how he thought that their greatest ally and the people that actually have would seem to have the Somali government, the you know, the the president of Somalia who used to live in Buffalo and I think ran the DMV there or something like that.
He said Turkey is probably their best ally there.
So he talked a little bit about their relationship with Turkey, talked a little bit about the surrounding nations and what they have to deal with Ethiopia and talked a lot about how the United States is just they're sowing discord and and chaos.
And I mean, he's he's not one of the he's not proud of his service, you know, and talks about that pretty clearly in that episode.
It's a good episode to listen to.
It's not about 45 minutes to it's not too long.
All right.
And so Mises dot org, home of the anarcho capitalists, their editor over there.
I'm not exactly sure his title.
Ryan McMac and what's he got to say about immigration and the current crisis here?
Mick Macon is the head.
Of course, I've said it wrong all this time.
Sorry.
That's right.
I think Ryan forgives you.
But he he's the editor of Mises Wire, but he writes a lot of articles.
I mean, he writes some days I see him release three of his own articles specifically about immigration.
He just really wanted to talk about how with the expanding the border out, the with the border being expanded out 100 miles.
He talked a lot about how they can pick up anybody they want.
The Constitution just doesn't exist there.
I think shortly after we did the interview, Trump announced that there's it's not even 100 miles anymore.
It's anywhere.
They can basically set up checkpoints anywhere in the United States looking for illegals.
And he said that from 2011 till 2000, no, February this year, 2011 to February this year, 18 percent of the people who were arrested for being illegal were actually citizens of the United States.
We talked a lot about how this is just expanding the police state where down on the border.
And recently I had a former border patrol agent.
He he left because he couldn't.
It just wore on his conscience.
Joshua Childress on.
And he's talking about he talks about how he was down.
He was stationed, I think, in Huma Station, Arizona.
And he's talking about how they're going to he's pretty sure they're just going to set up checkpoints between states.
So like you're on the interstate, you're crossing over into another state, you're going to be stopped.
So if you're in, you know, if you're headed somewhere out of Colorado and you just bought that fun stuff that's legal in Colorado and you're transferring it to another state, potentially you could be stopped.
Your car can be searched.
And now because it's against the law federally, now the feds can arrest you because, you know, you had a half an ounce of marijuana that you're bringing home from Denver.
You know, we just talked about all the implications of that ran over.
We went through all the arguments about, you know, oh, they're going to change the culture.
Oh, they're going to come here and vote.
Oh, they're going to come here and get on welfare.
And they just did a really good job of smacking most of those down.
People who are on the other side of that argument who are just hardcore border hawks aren't going to nothing's going to change your mind.
So, you know, he just put it out there for the people who are willing to listen.
And I think he did a great job.
Well, you know what?
I think the polls are pretty consistent when they do ask about this, that immigrants support America's expansive foreign policy the least.
So that makes them the best Americans of all, sounds like.
Well, if they came from Central America, they've seen it firsthand, haven't they?
Yeah.
Or Mexico, too.
Tens of thousands killed, maybe more.
And just since the George W. Bush drug wars there.
Yeah, it's just...
Well, since he started them, I'm not trying to let Obama off the hook, either.
You know, it's very interesting, too.
I've heard from people who know what's going on with the cartels down there, and the cartels do not really pay attention to weed anymore.
So, like, I knew an American who was selling weed down there, and there was no problems with it and everything.
The cartels wouldn't mess with him.
Now they're into Coke.
So it just really goes to show you.
Yeah, and Reason really has done great coverage of that, how the legalization of pot, especially cultivation in the U.S., has just completely bankrupted the black market in pot from Mexico, and they've had to switch to other stuff.
Yeah, they've had to switch to Coke.
Well...
And meanwhile, you have, you know, I mentioned the Obama years there.
You had an outright CIA alliance with the Sinaloa cartel, and that was what that gun-running, gun-walking, supposedly, scandal was about.
Where you had, you know, these cartel gangsters killing American cops with guns that American cops sold them in order to fight against the Zetas, who I guess maybe had... were they the CIA's former patrons that got out of control or whatever?
That's the way it always works, isn't it?
I think the Zetas were former military, and they took over a part of the gang.
I think they did have a relationship with the Americans that then had fallen apart, but I'm the furthest thing from expert on that.
But I know the CIA was back in the Sinaloa cartel that whole time.
So, you talk about the drug wars over there.
It's not a matter of eliminating supply, it's a matter of picking sides.
That's all.
I mean, they really... they had a good running with weed for as long as they did, but now as much legalization as there is, now they concentrate on coke.
Well, how about legalizing that?
Yeah, of course.
And then if they start running heroin, well, legalize that.
Just legalize everything.
I mean, how long has Dr. Paul been talking about this?
Just legalize it all.
Let adults be adults.
People who aren't going to do heroin today aren't going to do heroin tomorrow.
You can make the argument about what about the kids, but I mean, that's just your typical argument.
And any right-winger pro-gun person who makes a what about the kids argument about drugs, they don't dare let an anti-gunner make that argument about guns.
So, why don't you just be a little consistent?
If kids are mature enough and you've trained them enough that they can handle guns properly, well, I mean, you can train them to not do heroin and not do coke and tell them that that would be bad for them.
Seriously, you know what?
You could smog out your car as bad as it could be, but you're not going to suffocate and die.
But guess what?
If you smoke a bunch of opium, you might, because that lowers your breathing rate, sometimes all the way to nothing.
And so, that's just real.
You don't have to propagandize anybody.
You just have to teach them.
Yeah, the thing about heroin and other opiates is sometimes they make your heart stop.
Yeah, and then, you know, that's pretty permanent.
Yeah, and just teach them the history of opium dens.
So, that's not the same as taking a bong rip.
That's something altogether different, you know?
Yeah, you know, coke, too.
I mean, I'm sure anybody who's done coke has gotten to that point where you're like, all right, I either need a Xanax or go to the hospital.
But, you know, once again, anybody who's not doing coke today, the average person's not going to do coke tomorrow, especially if they're adamantly against it today.
That was a great Ron Paul episode, too, at the Republican debate, where he says, oh, how many people here tonight are going to start doing heroin tomorrow if they legalize it?
I mean, what are we talking about here?
And, by the way, anybody who really wants to become a junkie will be able to find some.
No question about that.
One might come with a dirty AIDS needle this time, you know?
I mean, I live in Georgia.
Marijuana is not legal here.
It's not hard.
Everyone knows somebody, you know?
And finally, Atlanta in the last five years has taken it from, oh, if we find you at less than an ounce, you're going to get arrested, to, oh, if we find you at less than an ounce, you get a $50 ticket.
But, you know, I'd rather shell out $50.
I don't want to shell out $50 at all, but I'd rather do it than go into jail, you know?
It's too easy to point to the immediate consequences of drug abuse and ignore all the effects of trying to outlaw it.
It just goes without saying that if government would just try to make it go away harder than it would, why won't they try hard enough?
That's all, you know?
There's an example in recent history of what prohibition does, but nobody wants to apply that to weed, coke, and heroin because in the last 70 or 80 years, you know, it's, oh, everybody, you know, people drink.
It's what you do.
It's social.
Everybody drinks.
The president, well, our president, this president doesn't drink, but, you know, the former president drinks, you know?
So everybody on TV, there's ads for it, you know?
So it's not that bad.
Tell these people to go study when it was illegal, you know, just how safe it was to own a bar, you know, to own a restaurant in Chicago or New York, you know, when you were trying to get illegal booze in there and there was all this crime going on.
Or if you decided to get into business yourself, I mean, that's why there's violence.
I mean, we have a historical precedent for it.
But, you know, I guess got to keep those prisons full.
Well, and it's true that alcohol causes all kinds of problems.
In fact, most American gun murders are caused by drunk people on the weekends, you know, probably mostly blacked out, drunk, and realize the next day that I killed who again?
What?
Oh, no.
You know, this happens constantly, but still, so what are you going to do?
Allow the drunken, arm-to-the-teeth government to stop them from doing it?
You know, all these people with their own problems and then some, and a badge of impunity to go with it to solve these problems for us?
As he said, we have a controlled double-blind experiment in how this works.
And as everyone recognizes, everyone on the political spectrum who's ever heard of American history knows that Prohibition created Al Capone.
That the, you know, modern mafia was born in the controlling of the black market that was created by the law.
The alcohol didn't go away, and alcoholism was not reduced.
In fact, it backfired, right?
Because people started drinking harder liquor so they could, you know, spend less and, you know, economize essentially on the potency of the drug, which we see in black markets of all different kinds of drugs, too.
So you're right.
And for anyone, I mean, I know, I don't know about everybody else, but I learned about that in junior high.
I may have already known about it from TV before junior high even.
But we studied Prohibition in junior high, and they explained to us why it didn't work.
And after all, how can you get around Scarface Capone?
There's, hey, he's Al Capone.
He's like as famous as Benjamin Franklin or any other American that ever existed.
It's part of our heritage of who we are.
Joe Kennedy and their entire dynasty comes from running black markets in alcohol during that era.
Come on, you can't deny it.
It's part of what everyone knows about American history.
It's like whether Indians ever used to live here or not yet.
I mean, I've done an episode of my podcast with Jason Purves, who's done all this research into a lot of those families you're talking about.
In the 19th century, they were moving opium through China.
So they were bringing opium from China through the United States, and they'd peel it off in a couple places here, and then they'd send it over to England.
That was even the cliche, was bootleggers and Baptists were in this alliance to keep it that way, too.
The last thing a real cartel owner wants is for the drug to be legalized.
That would ruin everything.
So yeah, it makes sense why a bunch of black market opium dealers would then look at the illegality of alcohol as the economic opportunity that it was, plain as day.
Even though other people might not see it.
Their Baptist collaborators are completely blind to the fact.
They just thought they were doing the Lord's work, saving women from getting beaten at night and stuff like that.
Make sure men go to work on time in the morning.
Yeah, well, that was always the argument against weed, was we can't make this legal because it relaxes people too much.
It makes people think too much.
Alcohol just pretty much numbs people and makes some people feel good and makes some people violent.
I really need to start drinking.
I keep putting it off, but I know the time's coming.
I should let you go, man.
Thanks for coming back on the show, dude.
Great to talk to you.
Wait, is this the first time I interviewed you?
No, I was on once before we were talking about the Ross Ulbricht case.
I think you really should have Lynn Ulbricht on your show to talk about it.
From the public records, they were able to do a six-part documentary that's on YouTube that's called Railroaded.
Oh, man, really?
I think each episode's about 20 minutes.
Hey, post that on the blog at the Institute, would you?
Yeah, man, no problem.
When you see just exactly how targeted he was and how they can't even prove that at the time they were monitoring stuff, that he still had anything to do with the website.
Then you see all the graft, the agents getting arrested who had a part in the investigation, who were undercover on the site as admins and could change chats and anything.
It's just mind-boggling.
But yeah, I'll throw that in the blog.
And this is a guy who's doing life for running a dark web site where people could buy and sell drugs.
And he was sentenced on the idea that he had arranged the murder of some guy, which was not one of the charges and was not something he was convicted of, and was later revealed.
Maybe it was known all along, but it was definitely later reinforced that that was a total hoax.
And yet the judge, I believe, if I got the story right, explicitly took this hitman charge, not really charge, into account in the sentencing.
Yeah, yeah.
And it was something he was originally charged with.
As soon as they got bail denied, they dropped those charges and they went through and he was found kingpin.
He got the kingpin put on him and distributing narcotics, even though the drugs never touched his hands once at all.
And another thing about it is in the sentencing and when she's making when the judge, when Judge Harris is making comments, she says she mentions not liking the kind of libertarian thought that Ross subscribed to.
Great.
Well, unlike a good Democrat, she knows we're to the right of Dick Cheney, so.
Yeah, I mean, she was appointed by Chuck Schumer.
Do you need to know anything else?
Chuck Schumer was the one who pushed, even though nothing was ever done in New York City, Chuck Schumer was the one who pushed so that the Southern District of New York could get the case.
Yeah, man.
Well, all right.
And then say the name of it again, this documentary.
It's called Railroaded.
Railroaded.
I could have remembered that from a minute ago.
Railroaded, the targeting and caging of Ross Albrecht.
Great.
It's about about 20 minutes an episode.
So you're looking at about.
That was terrible with math.
Two hours.
And it is the information you get there by the end of the second episode.
You're already furious.
Yeah.
You just realize exactly what they did to him.
And they wouldn't let any of this come out.
All of this public, all the stuff that's in the public that allowed them to make this documentary until after, you know, basically the Supreme, they took it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court denied it.
So now the only way he can ever be released is through clemency.
Man, that's really something.
You know what, though?
That's the.
I don't know, you know what it takes to get the right pop star to support you or something, but that's the latest fad is, you know, belated fairness for previous convicts in certain celebrity cases.
And we just saw one of these the other day where this poor girl who was a victim, who had every right to kill the guy that she killed in self-defense and was essentially, you know, had kidnapped her and was holding her was served 15 years of a life sentence.
But some pop stars took her side and led a kind of public campaign to get the governor of, I think, Kentucky.
It was to commute her sentence there.
So, you know, I don't know if Ross Albrecht is, you know, all the right demographics, but, you know, this should be for everybody of all different political sects and whatever.
There are a lot of innocent people in prison, a lot of extremely overcharged people in prison who never really did anything to anybody.
They were on three way on a phone call when somebody else sold drugs to somebody else or just the most insane, unfair things that you would expect from a lawless, totalitarian police state.
Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people, unlimited cases like that.
So anytime that anybody's getting out like that, that should be supported and we should try to emulate that when it comes to, you know, Ross Albrecht or anybody else we know of like that.
You know, I don't know of any more heroic work than the Innocence Project and things along those lines.
So, you know, you never know.
And by the way, he never really did anything to anybody.
So if he really was that railroaded, then it ought to be a pretty simple case.
It really is.
Once you once you watch the documentary or listen to it, it is a it's it's simple.
It's it's open and shut.
And he should be.
But, you know, not only him.
I mean, sometimes I'll advocate for for Ross online on social media.
So you're like, oh, well, you know what?
You're advocating for the white guy.
No, I want to burn pretty much all the prisons to the ground.
I mean, I want I want them all to be gone.
I mean, they're the overwhelming majority of people in prison are there for nonviolent offenses.
You know, so and the people who are in there for violent offenses, it's like, really, how long should they be in there?
I mean, they have this arbitrary number now.
And, you know, is it rehabilitating them or is it just making them worse?
And, you know, it just there is it's it's not rehabilitation.
It's just punishment.
And if you've seen anything about the prison systems in Alabama or Mississippi recently, they just let a lot of these prisons run down to the point where they they could they'd be condemned if they weren't government buildings.
Yeah.
Well, if you know anybody who's ever been in prison, they'll tell you that most people in there, as an old friend of mine said, are just excess humanity being warehoused out of the way.
Essentially, people who aren't there for any good reason at all, really, other than the government needs a body for that cell more than any other thing.
That's for sure.
I read something about how it costs upwards of fifty thousand dollars to house a prisoner in California, you know, on a yearly basis.
And I'm like, come on, come on.
There's no way they're spending fifty thousand.
Where's the rest of that going?
Yeah.
And by the way, it's captive labor to work for five cents a day or five cents an hour or whatever it is for other corporations to come in and exploit them and use them, which is just slavery.
The fact that that's allowed at all.
You know, when I was a kid, the cliche was making license plates or something, which is, well, like the only product that the government produces is license plates.
So they have them do that.
But now they're answering your phone calls, a customer service and they're sewing and they're doing God knows what, like it's some third world country like China, a fascist dictatorship.
I mean, sort of comic, but you know what I mean?
I mean, just walk into a courtroom and I was talking to Monica Perez on my show today on the episode I released, and she she she said just nobody plead.
Everyone demand a jury trial, destroy the system overnight.
So everybody, if what is it, 98 percent are plea bargains now.
Everybody, everybody.
And if you don't plead, they'll add on charges.
They they have a name for it.
You know, they what's the name for it?
Get it right.
The trial fee or whatever it is, the trial, whatever.
If you if you try to demand a jury, then they will just absolutely stick it to you no matter what.
Even if you get acquitted on the thing we originally charged you with, we're charging you with 10 more things now.
And that'll teach you to act like the Fifth and Sixth Amendment mean a thing.
Yeah, well, I mean, I still think, man, if everybody demanded a jury trial, just like if everybody woke up in the morning and decided they weren't going to pay taxes anymore, what the hell are they going to do?
I mean, in the second case, they can't do anything in the case of the jury trial.
I mean, they're they what they won't know what to do.
Well, word to the jurors, too.
You guys can refuse to convict.
You can just say, I'm not convinced.
I don't I'm not sure that he really did it.
And just nullify.
You don't have to go along.
There's no crime in that.
I'm not saying accept a bribe to change your vote or anything like that.
But just say, no, I don't see the crime in this.
I'm not going along with this.
I'm not convinced by the evidence as presented.
And nullify.
And that's another thing that, you know, of course, the government, the district attorney's offices always do everything they can to make sure that the jury is stocked with government employees and spouses of government employees.
So, you know, good luck getting a jury of your peers up there unless you are one of them.
But still, you know, they're sometimes regular humans squeak through and can be involved on juries.
And, you know, I know someone who, you know, told me a story about really regretting that she had to convict somebody of cocaine possession.
And what it was, was the cops had come in the house and the law said that if you're in the same room with the stuff, essentially, you're in the same house with the stuff that you're in possession of it, too.
So even though it was really two people that had it, it was five people that were charged with it.
And that, well, the law said, the judge said to us that the law says that that counts.
And so if we find that the evidence is clear that they really were in the room, that that's really the only question then.
And so went ahead and convicted and couldn't stretch your brain around the idea that you just didn't have to.
You could have just said no.
You could have just said, I don't know.
I'm just not convinced those people really were in the room.
You weren't there.
Maybe there is reasonable doubt there.
You know, maybe there's reasonable doubt as to whether the law really means that innocent people are guilty, too, because that just doesn't seem right.
What about that?
But essentially, hey, the judge said, did the judge say, or else you're going to go to prison if you don't convict this person?
No.
Judge said, or he's going to be very disappointed in you.
So.
And people need to be brave enough to take a stand on things like that, man, and recognize that they are individual human actors.
That's the purpose of a jury in the first place.
Otherwise, the government would have just carted these people off a long time ago.
And, you know, for all we know, I don't know how much the other people in the room had in their pocket.
These people might have been facing decades behind bars, man.
Decades for something that somebody else did that wasn't a crime anyway.
That just passes as normal.
That's just the natural state of affairs in America on a Tuesday.
And not so innocent, you know, had drugs on him, but was not selling, had no intent to distribute or anything like that.
And he was able to get, I think it was three or four people to walk.
And he told me, he said the jury room, you know, was ready to convict.
And it said it was him and one other guy who just was like, if you're, you know, said, if you're paying attention to this, you should realize that these guys are, you know, these guys are innocent of it.
And he turned to, they turned a jury room around and saved some guys lives.
Heroic, man.
Absolutely.
And just goes to show the power of, you know, if people are willing to do the right thing and take a stand on stuff like that.
I don't know how many cases I've heard.
Some really famous ones like the Waco trial and a lot of just plain old cases where the jurors later say, well, we compromised.
Some of us didn't want to convict at all, but these two guys were like cops brothers and they insisted.
So we went ahead and found him guilty of second degree, whatever it is.
And it's just like, no man, you should have said, you know what, if I got to sit here for six weeks, I'm not convicting this guy.
Screw you.
Why do people have to feel like they just have to bend for someone else when there's no real consequence that they face?
That's their privilege as a juror to just refuse, you know?
Anyway, God dang it.
Nobody ever asked me to be on a jury, but I'd be hard pressed to go along with anything but a real crime.
No offenses.
No offenses.
If somebody was accused of an offense, they'd skate.
You know, real crime against somebody else.
I don't know.
I probably wouldn't show up in the first place, but you know.
Yeah.
Well, you know, violation of somebody's person or property.
I consider that to be a real crime.
The only problem I have with it is, is the punishment that this state wants to hand out.
Is it the right punishment?
I don't know.
You know, I have a tendency to want to say not guilty to everything.
All right.
Yeah.
That's the other thing, Reyes.
You don't know what the sentencing is going to look like.
You convict, you think they're going to get a slap on a wrist, and then you find out they get 20 years and it's too late to say, oops, well, I didn't know they were going to sentence him to 20 years.
That kind of thing happens all the time, too.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
Hey, the flag is still red, white, and blue, and that is more meaningful than any of the other things that we've discussed today.
So don't ever forget that.
Considering the military and the police, the flag is a whole lot more red than it is the other two colors.
Yeah, you got that right.
Okay, guys, that's Mance Rader, a.k.a.
Pete Raymond.
His real name is Peter R. Wait, what?
Quinones.
That's what I was going to say, but then I second guessed myself.
Quinones.
Quinones.
Peter R. Quinones.
And he is now managing editor of the Libertarian Institute, where you can find his great podcast, Free Man Beyond the Wall, and plus a lot of great articles he's been writing for us, too.
So, very good, and thank you for coming back on the show.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
See you, man.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
