Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center.
Their website is tenthamendmentcenter.com.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How's it going?
Good, Scott.
Alright, so first of all, tell me what's going on this Saturday.
This Saturday is a radical event like none other, at least in L.A.
We have many liberty-based events, but we're having an event called Nullify Now Los Angeles in downtown L.A. to talk about ways to reject the empire, whether it's overseas or here at home, where we feel that local and decentralized action to go after the TSA, the Patriot Act, and foreign wars is far better and going to be far more successful than all the failed actions on a federal level to deal with those same things.
And people can learn about that at nullifynow.com/Los Angeles.
Alright, well, so go ahead and give us some details.
The lineup, who's doing what, and there's some music and something.
What?
Music and something is always the best part of an event.
Well, you're going to be speaking there, as you already know.
Tom Woods, Anthony Gregory, John Dennis, Stuart Rhodes from Oath Keepers.
A bunch of people are going to be talking about various issues.
Like I said, the TSA, the Patriot Act.
Stuart will be talking, for example, about how nullification should have been used in response to the internment of Japanese Americans back during World War II.
Could the world have been different if people resisted that type of action from the federal government?
And then we'll have another room that's going to be just a bunch of local bands, plus Jordan Page is going to be coming in from the East Coast to play a bunch of music.
We'll have food and a full bar.
I mean, when you go to a Liberty event with a full bar, that might be dangerous, but it should be a lot of fun.
Cool.
Well, yeah, I mean, it sounds like not just some meeting, but a really big deal.
What's the expected turnout so far, do you think?
Well, I mean, it's hard to say.
It's probably going to be in the few hundreds.
We've got a capacity limit, technically, of about 350.
Okay, cool.
And then, as you say, people can find out about it by looking at what website, maybe calling a phone number or something?
NullifyNow.com/Los Angeles.
Tickets are free for students and $10 and up for everybody else.
Or they can call 888-71-TICKETS to get some tickets for that event.
Okay, cool.
And, again, that's John Dennis and me and Anthony Gregory and Tom Woods and a bunch of other people and music for people who like music, which is pretty much everybody, right?
I think so.
So here, you know, you had a NullifyNow thing in Austin about a month before I moved here.
And now you have a thing in L.A., and I've got to go back.
I don't know if you're trying to get away from us or we're running from you, but we've got to connect.
It's sort of like when you're walking down the sidewalk and you try to dodge a guy, but then you both zig and zag the same direction a couple of times.
You'll find me here.
Anyway, so, hey, speaking of zigging and zagging and getting around things, so here's the thing.
On one level, I guess half my brain, I'm not sure if the left or the right, is saying, yeah, right, that'll be the day when Texas Rangers come out to tell federal police, no, leave this citizen alone, we won't let you.
Come on.
But then again, I think probably if I ask you, you've got quite a list of successes as far as state nullification, if not necessarily interposition.
Maybe you've got some interposition stories for us too, but it seems like this whole reserved powers of the states being invoked, their exclusive authority at the expense of the feds being invoked by the states, is happening more and more across the country, and it seems like I guess the more and more people hear about this thing actually, you know, really working itself out in practice, the more the idea seems more mainstream when I guess otherwise people just knee-jerk and say, uh-uh, even if the feds are wrong, they still win.
It says so in the Supremacy Clause and that kind of thing.
Well, I tend to kind of gauge how things are going based on how the media and the elite respond to it.
If they weren't saying anything, they are, right?
So we're talking a good philosophical game.
This is interesting stuff, but we're really not getting anywhere.
But the fact that places like the Southern Poverty Law Center is issuing warnings about this nullification tour, these radicals talking about ending just about everything from the federal government, or Rachel Maddow on MSNBC spending a 15-minute segment talking about the evils of nullification, I think we're making some headway.
I mean, we recognize already that 15 states are defying not only Congress, but the Supreme Court and saying, well, you know, if someone wants to use this crazy plant marijuana, they can in our state.
Well, maybe not fully, but to at least some degree, but this is defiance of Washington, D.C., and on many levels getting away with it.
And there's over two dozen states that have refused to comply with the Bush-era Real ID Act.
And the response from Washington, D.C. was not to roll their tanks, not to take away funding, but to issue some feeble threats and then three times have to back off.
They still have not implemented the law, even though it's on the books in Congress.
Right.
Well, and then tell me about the gun laws in Montana.
Did they ever change that, invoking the limitations of the Interstate Commerce Clause?
Well, no, it hasn't gone far enough yet.
So those two issues, I believe, are two examples of how we're seeing actual practical success in people rejecting a particular federal law.
There are efforts on various other issues.
For example, Montana and eight, seven other states have passed what's known as a Firearms Freedom Act to say that if a gun is made in the state and sold in the state, this is not interstate commerce, so the federal government needs to get the hell out.
They're still kind of working on putting that into practice.
But what that has led to, and I think it's far more interesting, is a half dozen states used our model legislation called the Intrastate Commerce Act.
And we took this to the logical end.
Basically, any item made in state and sold in state or produced or grown in your state would be outside the purview of the federal government of the Interstate Commerce Clause.
So we feel that rather than just addressing one particular item, we should do a broad reach and cover everything from hemp to guns and everything in between.
And that's starting to get some traction as well.
Well, you know, it's interesting you bring up the knee-jerk nationalism of liberals like Maddow and Morris Dees when the two issues that you identify as the ones where the most success has come are issues that you would identify as being the favorites of the civil libertarian left, if not just the libertarians.
Sure, and even more so, the top issue right now, at least on our end, is bills to nullify the TSA's unconstitutional and immoral actions in airports around the country, Texas most prominently.
But there's five states considering various types of bills to either ban groping without probable cause or fully ban the TSA body scanners.
And people left, right, and center are all for that.
For example, in Texas, a bill to ban the groping without probable cause, kind of like that Fourth Amendment thing, that passed their House 138-0.
Then it got to the Senate, and it got out of committee unanimously.
So the Fed freaked out, and they issued a warning just yesterday.
They lobbied in the state of Texas like they shouldn't be doing, but they issued a warning and said, you know, be careful, don't pass this bill, because if you do, we may have to shut down all air travel that we don't feel fits our safety requirements.
So it's not just Libya and Syria that are under threat of no-fly zones.
It's right here at home from the imperial Obama administration.
Well, it's amazing, isn't it, that they would go that far?
I mean, are they – I guess the Feds are that worried if they're going to make a threat like that, huh?
Well, I mean, I guess if you look back to the Roman era, and if you study some Roman times, there was kind of a process as the emperors were kind of freaking out about, you know, wanting to stop local government in all levels.
And they started issuing these decrees, and they got more and more aggressive over time, and it really was kind of a signal of the downfall of any local self-governance.
And maybe we can see a little bit of that today.
It's not just the TSA, but the Feds recently sent an unwanted letter to the state of Rhode Island saying, you better watch out for your marijuana dispensary program.
A couple of years ago they sent letters to Montana and Tennessee warning them about these Firearms Freedom Acts.
And I think the threat with the TSA is actually an increase.
They're upping the ante if they're threatening to shut down air travel.
All right, well, we've got to hold it right there and take this break.
We'll be right back with Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center.
We're talking about nullification soon, I mean now.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center.
The Tenth Amendment, which one is that again?
It's number 10.
You know, the Bill of Rights, that old thing, it's the last one.
Right, which means the least important, right?
Oh, yeah, of course, of course.
But it's the one that's just kind of a reinforcement of what the Constitution was supposed to mean.
That we, the people of the several states, from the time, of course, well, they created the federal government to be their agent for certain enumerated purposes and nothing more and everything else.
All the most difficult, divisive issues are supposed to be decentralized, handled locally or in states.
Well, you know, it's funny.
If you actually take the time to read the Constitution, it seems pretty clear that the people who take the general welfare clause and the interstate commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause and they try to twist these around to try to say that what the authors of Article I meant was Congress can do anything to anyone at any time that they can possibly imagine and even the stuff that they blunder into, too, with no limits whatsoever.
That's basically, well, general welfare.
So that means anything that in their opinion is for our own good, they can do?
Is that what anybody really thinks the authors of the Constitution wrote?
And the general welfare clause isn't one of the enumerated powers.
It's the, in order to promote the general welfare, here are the enumerated powers.
You have to be a liar to say that Article I, Section 8 reads any other way.
Well, people like Bush and McCain and Obama and Reid and Pelosi and the rest of these people, they're counting on the fact that we've all gone to government schools and believe that every solution to every problem needs to be fixed by government and have not been taught that the rules given to the government, that paper called the Constitution, actually were severely limiting.
And there's a reason for this, and we can get into all kinds of boring discussions on all those clauses, but in practical reality, whatever you want done, it's probably going to be better off not having it in some far-off hands of some politicians.
Otherwise, what you end up having is a one-size-fits-all solution, and when you do that, everybody's kind of irritated.
The best way to do things in a big land mass, I think, is to allow people to have their own way in their own area, and that's the only way you can have a wide range of political, economic, and religious viewpoints all living together in peace.
Right, well, and you know, especially in the era of the terror war and all that, it's pretty obvious, I think, to everyone that the character and the nature of the whole society is changing terribly.
I mean, the fact that we even have something called the Department of Homeland Security sounds like some kind of nightmare out of Russia or Germany.
That's not what America's supposed to be about, the homeland.
That ought to pierce every eardrum it touches.
You know, how can we put up with this, and how can we ever do anything about it other than getting our states to just say, no, you know what, we'll take care of our own security.
Of course, that's a pretty steep hill to climb as well.
It seems a lot more possible for regular people to influence their state legislatures than their federal ones.
Well, think about it this way.
Since the Patriot Act passed in, what was that, 2001, there's been four or five elections.
And as far as getting rid of the Patriot Act, how well is that doing?
It's highly possible that we'll see this, and I think it's very unlikely that we won't see it extended.
But Obama, who originally said, you know, this is a dangerous law, and all these people on the left who said it was bad, and then all these so-called Tea Party constitutionalists that were elected this last time from the right, well, they're just passing this thing overwhelmingly.
So what does that tell you?
Federal elections, federal protests, calling the federal government, faxing them, and demanding changes is a failure.
It doesn't work.
So we believe that there's a different way to deal with this type of thing.
We're actually going to be releasing a new project about the Patriot Act once Obama signs the thing called nullifythepatriotact.com.
It's not live yet, but we believe that through local and decentralized action, we can possibly reject this thing, and it will never happen on a federal level.
Well, and you know, I mean, the perfect illustration of that is in the news today, where at politico.com, Rand Paul threatens to hold up Patriot Act, and when you read the text of the thing, the very best he can do, and to his credit, he's doing the very best he can do, but under the procedures of the Senate, the very best he can do is delay the vote until Friday.
And Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell and the rest of them have all conspired to ram this thing through without any of the promised debate.
They're extending it for four more years, which I think is longer than the last sunset was, right?
They changed it from two to four or something like that.
And here's this one senator who's trying to do something about it, and he can't do anything.
Right.
Well, Anthony Gregory, who's speaking at Nullify Now Los Angeles, has a great article up at the Independent Institute and CampaignforLiberty.com today about this.
And his statement was basically, look, Obama has been horrible on civil liberties, and the fact is that he actually wanted this extension to be even longer than what Congress is giving us, 2015.
So obviously the left doesn't care about civil liberties.
They don't care about ending the wars, maybe at least on the… Well, the liberals don't.
The leftists still do, I think.
Sure.
Well, I think the average people on both sides of the political spectrum, whatever they may be, I think they kind of understand these things and that there's a lot of problems.
But as far as the politicians and the elites in power, both sides are a mess, and we just keep repeating the mantra that going to the people who created the problem, that's Washington, D.C., to fix the problem is not just absurd.
It must be some level of insanity.
All right.
Well, maybe I'm against really participating in politics in any way at all just because I'd be horrible at it and I would hate it or something.
And so I think it's a matter of principle.
I don't know.
You don't want to run for office as a Republican or something?
Oh, well, never even mind that.
I'm thinking about even helping a politician and doing anything.
Why don't I personally never vote?
Running a campaign or helping a campaign for somebody, anything like that.
That's just not my thing.
But what I'm thinking is though that for a lot of people it is.
And maybe you'd have some words for them about how realistic you think it could be that they could make themselves or their friends the local representative in the state house, where they could actually be the one to gum up the works with this stuff.
Well, I think someone like Glenn Bradley in North Carolina is a good example, or Aaron Livy up in Maine.
These are guys who are just average everyday people.
They're not politicians.
But they decide, yeah, I'm sick of this.
They really believe in the political process and all that.
So they got involved locally, and they introduced all kinds of legislation in their states to deal with violations of the Commerce Clause or using the National Guard unconstitutionally overseas in aggressive wars and the like.
And this is something for people that are into the political process that can do.
People who are not in the political process can also do things.
They can just stop complying with the state as much as possible.
We see here in California there's a lot of people who refuse to comply with Washington, D.C. on weed.
And you know what?
When enough people say no to Washington, D.C., and enough states end up following up, following their lead and passing laws that back them up, there's not a real lot that Washington, D.C. can do to force their mandates down our throats.
Now as far as National Guard troops being used for the empire overseas when a third of the country is drowning right now, for example, and not that I'm necessarily in favor of having a state at all or a National Guard at all or whatever, but that's what these guys think they're signing up for is helping out in emergencies in their own states, if not their own neighborhoods.
Right.
But I wonder how much outrage about this current abuse of the National Guard is there in the state houses now?
I guess in Maine they have an effort to – I interviewed that guy, didn't I?
Yeah.
In Maine there's an effort to do something about bringing the Guard home.
Is there anything else going on and maybe you can tell us about that?
It's very light.
What we're trying to do is restart the movement that was pushed by Ben Manski, that Cindy Sheehan got on board with while Bush was still in office.
I mean, as you know, the anti-war left has pretty much gone home and there's not a lot of activism out there, but we believe that this can be restarted and there can be a coalition between left and right, people who oppose the empire for moral reasons and people who oppose the abuse and misuse of National Guard for constitutional reasons.
Get them all together in supporting legislation like our Defend the Guard bill that was just introduced for the first time in Maine to say, well, you know what, maybe we can't stop Washington, D.C. with our protests and phone calls and elections, but we're going to do everything we can to stop involvement as much as possible on a local and state level.
We'll start with, hey, we're not going to allow our troops to be used overseas, our state National Guard troops to be used overseas for any of these foreign wars and occupations.
And if that doesn't do the trick, maybe they'll have to take it to the next level and stop sending tax funds to Washington.
Don't worry, they can print it up all day.
I saw a whole thing about how it works or whatever.
You know, they tour the factories and stuff.
They're like, here's how they print all the money all day.
That's great.
All right.
Anyway, thanks very much.
Have a great day, Michael.
Thanks, Scott.
See you soon.
Everybody, that's Michael Bolden from the 10th Amendment Center, 10thamendmentcenter.com, nullifynow.com.
See you Saturday in L.A.
