All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott.
And I hate the government.
One of the parts of the government that I hate is the Transportation Security Administration.
Those guys are the worst.
And so now to agree with me is Becky Akers from the Campaign for Liberty, and LewRockwell.com, and the New American Magazine.
Welcome to the show, Becky.
How's it going?
Well, thanks, Scott.
It's going very well.
And yes, I absolutely, positively agree with you.
Well, you know, I think more than any other writer in America, you have been on the case of these TSA goons over these last years and years since the Democrats pushed it and George Bush signed it.
What is the matter with these guys?
I mean, you can do airport security, presumably even having a state, without this madness.
Why is it just madness from beginning to end with these guys?
Yeah, it's really amazing.
It's almost like they're out to parody the worst totalitarian regimes in the world.
It's like they're trying to impersonate Kim Il-Jung, or Hitler, or Stalin, or something.
Each day when I get up and read the new releases that are out on it, they're groping cancer survivors and forcing them to show their prosthesis to them.
And they're victimizing men who have bags to hold their urine because of medical problems.
And dumping the bag all over the man.
And you just read this stuff and you think, somebody made this up.
This is The Onion reporting.
This is not actually happening.
In the land of the free, in the home of the brave, I mean, we have now reached a level of brutality and utter callousness that really characterizes the very worst of police states in history.
Where the state's goons are rewarded and promoted for being the cruelest and most merciless of their fellows.
Where ordinary people are standing around watching this and not doing a whole lot about it.
I mean, yes, Americans are finally beginning to stand up against what the TSA is propagating at airports.
But still, we haven't read about any mass surges on checkpoints with the TSA agents trampled when they strip search a little kid.
I'm sure everybody's seen that video now where people are standing around and they're muttering.
Yeah, this is ridiculous, this is absurd.
As TSA agents terrorize a little boy, his dad's standing there holding him instead of taking him out of there.
And the TSA agents are stripping his clothes off him.
We need to do more than mutter, people.
I mean, this is unprecedented.
Well, now, here's the thing.
Well, I wanna get back to the willingness to go along with this that we're talking about at large here.
But here's my thing, I'm a libertarian like you and I understand the economics of government is to just make a mess out of everything because good, then everything's ruined and then they can ruin things more.
And they fail upwards at all times, crisis and Leviathan and all that.
If there's one check on that that I can believe in, if it's not in the built-in economic structure of their monopoly power, it's that somewhere in there is a Colonel Potter type who's a no-nonsense serious guy and who demands that the people below him in rank in his agency act right for crying out loud, use their discretion on behalf of the little kid, not against the little kid.
And it's just, are there no Colonel Potters anywhere running anything up there?
Well, Scott, first of all, possibly because you're a libertarian and I'm an anarchist, I don't really have too much faith in the Colonel Potters of the world.
Secondly, I'm not sure- It just seems like occasionally you'd get one.
You know, in the military or in some of these agencies, somebody who's an actual professional who takes their job seriously, who really believes that they're there to protect people and protect their rights, et cetera.
Nobody even believes that up there anymore at all?
I, you know what?
I think it's kind of a self-selection process, okay?
If you do truly believe that there are terrorists lurking in the old homeland, are you really going to waste your time at airports frisking grandmothers?
Wouldn't you be out there cruising the highways or something instead of looking for these people?
You know, seriously, if you are seriously interested in, quote, security, you'd be reading things like government security news and the rest of the enormous number of periodicals that have grown up around this cottage industry.
And you would understand that it's highly unlikely a terrorist is going to appear at an airport.
TSA is there for one reason, actually two reasons, and two reasons only, and neither of them have anything to do with terrorism.
The first is to reassure the American public that they can get on a plane and travel safely.
And the type of person that's reassured by seeing grown men frisking a woman, ganging up against little kids, is the type of person that says, yeah, this is fine, that's great, I'm safe now, okay?
So fools like that are the ones that TSA is there for.
The second and far more important use of the TSA is to condition Americans to accept the police state, to unthinkingly go along when an authority says to them, come here, I wanna feel you up.
Your job is to simply say, thank you, sir, I appreciate how you're taking care of me.
Here, did you get enough of a feel?
Here, let me spread my legs wider so you can get further into me, okay?
That's our job, and that is what the TSA is there for.
And that is why, despite the nationwide furor over this, despite the American people finally standing up, finally, after nine years of groping, because understand, all of this was already happening at airports.
TSA was selectively choosing a person here and there to do this for the entire nine years it's been in existence, okay?
The difference now is it's in our faces and many people are being groped, okay?
But the whole point of all this is to condition us, and that's why TSA is not backing down.
It's why every time there's a new incident, every time a new survivor of cancer is victimized and it makes the news, you hear people like Jill and Joe Biden going on television telling us we're just gonna have to put up with this.
I mean, there are terrorists out there and this is a threat, and we just have to be understanding and patient and tolerant.
And while you have John Pistol out there saying, no, I ain't backing down, you can just jolly well put up with it.
And why Big Sis Napolitano is saying, you don't like it, don't fly, okay?
That's what's going on at the TSA.
Hmm, well now, okay.
So when you talk about the father helping the TSA mug his son at best, that's the nicest way to describe it.
And all the passengers just standing there.
I mean, that's the metaphor, obviously the analogy holds all the way through for the whole society.
I mean, that's what's happened is all these lines have been crossed, torturing people to death, outright lying right to our faces on TV all day, every day for just, and about the most insane things, lying us into war, all these things, tapping all of our phones, treating us like dogs at the airport like this, worse than people would treat their dog.
And nobody did anything because we don't know what to do.
What are you supposed to do?
You either vote Democrat or you vote Republican.
Otherwise, what, we're gonna all just march on DC and tear it down brick for brick or what?
And so all the lines get crossed and everybody's looking for everybody else to start the revolution or something and nothing's happening.
Instead, they're just rolling right over us.
Now, it won't be long, Becky, before there's a Homeland Security agent inside every sheriff's department and city police agency in the country there to basically de facto federalize the entire police system in this country.
I mean, how many years away are we from that?
Well, that's actually already going on with the Fusion Center.
That's the whole point of the Fusion Center is to coalesce and consolidate the national and the local cops.
But go back to another point you made, Scott, because it's a brilliant one.
And that is the absolute desensitization that's going on now.
One of the worst things you can do to a human being is force him to helplessly watch as you savage another person.
And that's what's going on at the airport.
Yeah, the whole thing is, it's like the Milgram and the Stanford experiment it's playing out live in front of us.
Like 1984 was an instruction manual, how to get it done, how to make people accept it.
All right, hang on, y'all.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We got Becky Akers on the line.
She writes for lewrockwell.com and the New American Campaign for Liberty.
And we're talking about the TSA.
And it really does kind of seem, doesn't it, Becky, like they, somewhere up there in the halls of the Justice Department or just in the White House itself through the years for the last decades now, I guess.
It's like they looked at the Stanford prison experiment and they said, hey, cool.
So we can just get 5% of people at random to jail the rest.
It'll be fine.
We can turn America into a totalitarian nightmare without a shot being fired.
Yes, and that is precisely the reason or one of the reasons that I would strongly urge everyone listening not to fly, okay?
You are taking your life and your liberty in your hands and you are then putting those irreplaceable gifts into the hands of TSA goons who are there to intimidate and control you, who have killed people, who are going to kill again.
All it's gonna take is a survivor of incest or sexual abuse as a child or somebody who has experienced rape to go ape in the airports when the goons are filling them up and then the TSA will take that as their excuse to open fire.
Actually, TSA agents are unarmed so they'll call the local cops and there's going to be a riot or a murder or something.
So I strongly urge everyone stay away from the airports unless you are there to protest, but otherwise stay out.
If you've got tickets, try to get them refunded.
If you can't get them refunded, I just ask you, is a $500 ticket worth your life?
I really can't say it seriously enough, TSA is murderous and it is going to strike again.
And something that has me very worried is the Fed's recalcitrance on all this.
It is as though they are saying, go ahead, make our day.
Yeah, well, and Lou pointed out on his blog today, lourockwell.com/blog, that one of them said, well, maybe we'll take a look at our protocols or something because they may, I guess Sean Hannity or somebody made this some big political issue all of a sudden where all the right wingers have permission slip to be against the cops in this one instance or whatever.
And so you have kind of this, well, and I guess because upper middle class people fly on planes a lot, they're the ones who have to go through this too.
Right, yep.
But yeah, I forgot what my point was anyway, sorry.
Anyway, go ahead.
I'm sure you have something smart to say about this, all this madness, because you always have.
I would just caution everybody to stay on the ground for your life and liberty.
But then another big reason to boycott the airlines until the TSA is abolished and we can't settle for anything less than abolition of this vile Nazi agency.
Another reason to stay on the ground is the callousness it introduces, the soul destroying experience of watching goons molest a child and knowing you can't do anything about it unless you're willing to go to jail, okay?
This is something, you know, and we have been so desensitized by movies and television that glorify violence.
Now I don't watch TV.
The only time I see it is if I'm staying in a hotel or something and my husband turns on the set, which even he rarely does anymore and he grew up as a huge TV buff.
But so we don't see things like, shows like cops very often.
When I do, I am shocked.
It's like the state is so cocksure of itself.
It actually films and broadcasts video of its thugs beating up taxpayers and Americans sit and watch this crap.
And there is an armed revolution in the streets.
What is going on?
Now you can go to the airports and watch this in person?
Really and honestly, do you want to savage your own soul this way?
And here's the thing too.
Every single American is bright enough.
If they can use language, they're smart enough to figure out that any idiot could go to the airport with a rifle and start killing people on this side of the security gate.
You know, like what?
I mean, come on.
Anybody could put a gun to the head of a truck driver and steal his tanker full of gasoline and suicide crash it into a ball game or whatever.
How hard is it to imagine how someone could hit soft targets?
What, we've never seen movies before?
People could commit acts of terrorism in America.
No amount of prison guards, security droids walking around persecuting us could ever prevent that.
And no one who thinks about it for a minute could believe that it could.
Really, could they?
We've had metal detectors my whole life, since I was a little kid.
Walk through the metal detector.
Okay, you don't have a gun.
Fine.
You know?
That goes back to your point about the Colonel Potters, Scott.
And it's why I just don't have much faith in that theory that sooner or later, some of the Colonel Potters are going to emerge and say, now, wait a minute, this is just nonsense.
Because they've got to see what an exercise in absolute nonsense is.
Yeah, it's more like Catch-22 than M.A.S.H.
Yes, it is.
Colonel Potter, that's the metaphor for a competent government official who gets paid whether he fails or not but does the right thing because it's his job and he means well and that kind of thing.
Like on TV.
I think that's kind of self-contradictory and that is actually where it belongs, is on TV.
Because I just don't know that it exists in real life.
But if it did, still, the patent contradiction in all of this, the idea that terrorists are going to try and attack American aviation again, I mean, they all know they're not going to get too far.
The passengers will rise up as they have twice already against the underwear bomber and the shoe bomber.
You know what I think would be good politics, Becky?
What?
If one politician or another just said to the American people, be a man.
You know what?
Life's risky.
What are we, a bunch of cowards?
East Germany or something?
Forget it.
Let's abolish all airline security.
You provide your own.
And what is this?
Why does it have to be like this at all?
Give me a break.
I sound like a crotchety old man because I remember the 1980s when I don't think people would have let it be like this.
There was a Soviet Union then and they didn't let it be like this.
Yes.
Well, one reason the government is not going to encourage people to stand up is because the first people we'd stand up against would be the government.
They know that.
The government loves effeminate citizens.
And that's one of the reasons feminism has been so very popular and why governments at all levels have pushed the feminist agenda.
Why they have rolled over and instituted- But wait a minute, shouldn't that mean that women are supposed to be a man too?
You know?
Why does everybody gotta be a security mom?
What about being a man?
Listen, at this point, I don't care whether it's men or women who stand up, just somebody stand up, but- I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound sexologist.
All I mean is, what about stiff upper lip and Berlin during the Blitz?
We can get through this, guys.
Not, oh, well, boo-hoo, the sky's falling around me all day when 9-11 was nine years ago.
Yeah, but again, remember the vested interest all politicians and bureaucrats have in fear-mongering.
This is another reason why your idea about private security in airlines will never fly because, so to speak, because the government wants to be in charge of security and it wants all of us thinking it must be because if an airline handles its own security, it will be interested only in threats against itself, its inventory, its pilots, its passengers, okay?
It doesn't care if you have a couple of joints in your carry-on bag.
You wanna choke up when you get ready to go on the airline, couldn't care less.
That doesn't- Yeah, just don't do it in the bathroom on a plane.
Why would it care?
Okay, but the government does because every time it nabs another pothead at the airport, it gets another victim for the prison industrial complex.
This is all connected.
Ah, see, which brings right to the point of privatization and privatization.
One of them means fascism where the government hires a private company to run a prison and then they make products for way less than minimum wage in their prison and that kind of thing, which is one kind of privatization.
Then there's the other kind of privatization, which is the kind that you're saying will never happen, which is where the government just gets out of it.
Handle your own security, let the private businesses hire their own security, which is a completely different thing.
We gotta come up with a different word for that.
Yes, I agree entirely, Scott.
I've been on that rampage for a long time and I find very few people even among libertarians who agree with me, but I agree with you entirely.
We need a new word for this and none of us should be fooled by Representative John Micah coming out, oh yeah, we need to privatize security at the airport.
All he means is we need to get the private screeners that were there before 9-11 back.
And the real irony in all of this, of course, is that Micah wrote the legislation that got rid of the quote private screeners and put in the federalized ones.
Now, all he's saying is we need to get the private ones back and they will do exactly what the screeners before 9-11 did.
Those screeners pre-9-11 worked for the FAA, the new screeners will work for the TSA.
There is no difference and it doesn't matter a whit whether they're privately employed or government employed, they are going to be groping us and irradiating us regardless.
Well, we'll get rid of them one day when the paper dollars the government pays them in isn't worth anything and they have to get real jobs.
All right, thanks, Becky, appreciate it.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Becky Akers from lewrockwell.com.
We'll be right back.
