05/10/07 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
This is Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And my next guest is the great William Norman Grigg.
He writes the ProLibertate blog, which you can find at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And he's the editor also of the brand new writesourceonline.com.
Welcome to the show, Will.
Thanks, Scott.
Great to be with you again.
Of course, it's always wonderful to talk to you.
And I'll tell you, I just don't even know where to start with you today.
I got so many things that you've written lately that I want to discuss.
But I guess I really want to start with you where I just ended with the listeners before that song, which was about the Republicans who went to the White House to tell Bush it's time to turn around on Iraq, and that congressmen do not see light, but they can be made to feel heat.
They're up for reelection and they don't want to lose.
They want to hang on to their power.
And he's dragging them over a cliff.
And so I was telling the people that if they just put, I was just telling them if they contact their congressman and put pressure on their congressman, their congress can end the war.
But then I'm reading this article by you about neoconservative fascism.
And I think that, you know, at the point we're at today, could Bush not just abolish Congress and keep the war going on as long as he felt like?
He and his acolytes and his handlers all claim that the president has the authority to do that.
And actually that authority emerges from some inchoate sense of necessity because the imperial executive is elevated above the law.
And that was the point of the Harvey Mansfield piece from the Wall Street Journal a week ago that I analyzed in my blog and a piece that was published on New Rockwell's website, newrockwell.com.
Mansfield says that historically the presidency and the rule of law are antagonists and that when there is a conflict between the two of them, it is the former that should prevail.
And on that construction, one should assume that the president would have the power, if not the explicit authority, to abolish Congress and rule by decree or otherwise to ignore any contending power center in order to do what he considers to be necessary.
The doctrine here is that the president has power derived from necessity and not from the law.
I don't think we're quite to that point yet because as bad as things have gotten in terms of what Aristotle used to call the revolution within the form, as bad as things have gotten in that respect, there are still contending power centers and cross-cutting currents, if you will, in our polity that do limit, at least in a larger cultural sense, what the president feels comfortable doing.
Although when he's using signing statements to modify laws after they're passed, you're seeing sort of a rolling incremental abolition of Congress.
So right now, it's difficult to say exactly how far Bush is willing to push this, whether he'll be dragged down by whatever residual loyalty to the Republican Party and its interests he might possess.
And so I think that it's a helpful and very encouraging thing that at least some members of Congress are willing to get in Bush's face and tell him to back down.
But right now, we're perhaps a uniquely precarious position in the history of our country in terms of doing away with what remains of the republic altogether.
Okay, now, a couple of things here.
First of all, when I was a little kid, my father explained to me that the president is just the president.
He's not a king.
And, in fact, I think it was, you know, I was, I think, 10 or 11 years old.
I was 11 years old, I guess, during the Iran-Contra hearings.
And there's Ronald Reagan is being forced to testify in front of the Congress.
And I didn't understand how that could be.
And my dad said, well, that's because he's not a king.
He's just the president.
And he is subject to the rule of law, the same as you or I are.
And now, that's one thing.
But then, I gotta wonder, Will, whether, you know, myself and you and my dad are just biased and whether this guy Mansfield actually does have a point.
You know, Butler Shafer came on the show and said, quoted Lord Macaulay as saying our Constitution is all sale and no anchor.
From an objective point of view, does Harvey Mansfield not have a point that the president basically can do whatever he wants?
It's always a question of what he can do versus what he should do.
I don't entirely hold to the belief that our Constitution is completely untethered from something substantial.
It did arise out of a specific people with specific traditions and customs.
And it was understood by the founders of the Constitution that the Constitution was not a self-enforcing document, that you have a parchment that contains wonderful principles that established terrific checks and balances, diffused power among them, and was supposed to be a mechanism to go of itself.
But it was understood that the people would have to remain vigilant in terms of those who would hijack that mechanism.
And you can make a good case for the proposition that after the war between the states, the triumph of the unitary government over the seceded South under Lincoln and the Radical Republicans, that the republic was severely transmuted, if not dispensed with altogether, and that we're basically dealing with the institutional momentum of something that was long dead.
Some people hold to that belief.
I'm a little less ideological, a little more idealistic than that, I think, in terms of my belief that there remains some remnant in our culture that understands, as your very wise father did, that there is this concept called the rule of law, and that in America the law is king, to cite Thomas Paine's wonderful formulation in common sense.
I do think that most people, unfortunately, have become so transfixed with presidential politics that they believe that the president embodies our nation, and so they have sort of this dumbed down grade school level understanding of this concept of nationalism, which is completely foreign to what we're supposed to be.
We're supposed to be a confederated republic under a constitution.
But too many people look on the president as if he were some kind of a divine emperor king who protects us and causes the sun to rise and our fields to be fertile and suchlike.
Bush has played on that very well.
There's this really deep idolatrous strain of nationalism, particularly among evangelical republican conservatives.
They're the people who have been doing most of the damage to what remains of our constitutional system over the last four or five years.
One reason I'm somewhat heartened by the fact that there is some organized opposition in Congress to Bush and his intransigence on the war is that illustrates that at least some element of that constituency, the evangelical conservative Christian right, the people whose sons and daughters are dying of this idiots war in Iraq, they finally reach saturation point in terms of what they're willing to put up with.
And I think that might be the ultimate check here that would keep our country from careening into an abyss of outright fascism, at least I'm hoping so.
Well, yeah, and it sort of does seem like this guy Mansfield waited too long.
He should have written this thing in 2002 when the American people would have said, yeah, you know, he's really right about that.
He did.
As a matter of fact, he wrote a piece for the weekly standard, which is, of course, a real neotropsy eyed organ produced by Murdoch and completely devoted to being, I guess, an act of stenography for the crystal family and the rest of the people who created what's called, I think, quite mischievous, the neoconservative movement.
But Mansfield wrote a piece, I think, two years ago for the for the weekly standard in which he more or less field tested the same themes from his Wall Street Journal article.
So you're dealing with something that I think represents concepts which are past their best if used by date, if you will.
And in that sense, I think that he certainly missed the wave.
But be that as it may, these concepts are very well entrenched in the so-called neoconservative faction of the Republican Party.
And those people have shown that they migrate very readily.
A bunch of them jumped ship in 1992 from George Bush, the elder, to plight their trough, such as it is, to Bill Clinton.
They jumped ship again in 1999 and ended up with George Bush, the younger.
They're perfectly capable of migrating again to join the movement by the Hillary Clinton or Jonathan Edwards or any other Democrat who seems that he'll be sufficiently bellicose and interventionist in his foreign policy, pay proper fealty to the nation state of Israel, and otherwise extol the concepts that the neotrots prefer over and above those of constitutional republicanism.
So really, this is all, they know this is BS, but it's just a means to an end to them.
They want an all-powerful president so that he can enact their policies, basically it.
Exactly right.
They don't really care about the identity or professed ideological commitments of the president in question.
They're just looking at somebody who will be a tool of their interest.
Their interests require the consolidation of power in the presidency.
Now I want to read this a little bit out of your article, Neoconservative Fascism.
It's at LouRockwell.com and also at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
This is from the organization book of the German National Socialist Party.
The Fuhrerreich of the German people is founded on the recognition that the true will of the people cannot be disclosed through parliamentary votes and plebiscites, but that the will of the people in its pure and uncorrupted form can only be expressed through the Fuhrerreich.
He shapes the collective will of the people within himself and enjoys the political unity and entirety of the people in opposition to individual interests.
His power is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited.
He is responsible only to his conscience and the people, and of course I guess the people is his conscience there, right?
So and this is, now the Nazis, they had a way of just coming right out and saying it.
Nothing coy about that, but is this guy Mansfield and his article in the Wall Street Journal, is it that blatant?
It's even more blatant, I think, in some respects, at this point, at the point when that organization book was written circa, what was it, 1934 or so, the Nazis hadn't entirely consolidated their power.
In the late summer of 1934, they essentially criminalized all contending political parties and they had the mechanism of the police state already in place.
The foundations had been laid, the walls were going up and they were looking at the details and fixtures for the garrison state they were creating, but they hadn't yet gone to the point where they were actually going out, rounding up people, putting them in concentration camps or liquidating people they considered troublesome, such as the Jewish population of Germany and the other countries they were able to conquer.
But at that point, they still paid lip service to the idea of the democratic process.
As a matter of fact, there was the memoir of an SS officer, I believe his name was Le Grell, I think he was a Belgian by birth, and his memoir was entitled Adolf Hitler, Democrat, and they understood that they had been brought to power democratically through the provisions contained in the Weimar Constitution, which provided for a very strong executive who could essentially abolish the constitutional rule by decree in the case of emergency, so that mechanism was already there.
But the thing is, Mansfield dispenses with the idea that the people have anything to do with the management of our governments when the great and glorious decider elects to do something that he considers in his infinite wisdom to be appropriate, irrespective of what the law says or what the people would say, the people of course being the resources, if you will, the blood and treasure that would be squandered on the left of the decider guy or the commander guy or whatever mock folksy, sober kid that Bush is giving himself this week.
So Mansfield in a sense was even more blatant than the Nazis were at that point in their development.
Eventually, of course, the Nazis being very candid, displaying only the virtue of candidates, the only virtue I can impute to the Nazis, they would eventually be very forthright about what it was they were doing and the fact that the people of Germany or any of their conquered countries had anything to do with their objectives.
They were eventually very candid about that.
Mansfield right now is being very candid about the idea that essentially the president is the law, that he is the living constitution.
You know, conservatives used to assail the left quite properly when the left would talk about the constitution as being a living document, meaning one that was infinitely malleable.
But they have leapfrogged the liberals now, the faction called the liberals, if you will, the leftists.
And now they're talking about the president being the living constitution, somebody who basically ex-niliates the law according to his sovereign whim.
And that, my friends, is fascism.
It's like Dukes of Hazzard when I was a little kid.
Boss Hogg is the law.
That's it.
The law's not on paper.
It's probably been repeated with somebody as relatively benign as Boss Hogg.
Well, you know, I'm always thinking back to when I was a kid and how I learned these concepts in the first place.
I think that was probably the first thing I learned about the law was Boss Hogg saying, I am the law.
And then it was later that somebody told me, no, this is where, you know, free people send their representatives and they agree on it.
And then the court doesn't overthrow it and et cetera like that.
That's what the law is.
Yeah.
But no, you're talking about George Bush and his lackeys.
They consider him the unlimited Boss Hogg of the United States, basically.
Well, of the entire world, actually.
Of the entire world.
Sure.
Because you're dealing, once again, in the era of George W. Bush, you're dealing with a regime that has given itself the supposed authority to intervene anywhere, anytime, for any reason, and to abduct people and spirit them away to destinations such as Syria or Egypt or even less pleasant places where they'll be beaten and tortured for no reason that the state has to specify.
They claim that their writ is global in its extent and that George W. Bush is essentially the decider for the entire globe.
And that, of course, is going to get us into some trouble because we've gotten crosswise with some other countries that have relatively powerful governments, such as those of Russia and China, and they don't much care to take dictation from Washington, and those guys hold a lot of the paper on our debt, and so they have that check on what Washington can do if nothing else.
And, of course, we're dealing with, in Russia, a nuclear power in China, an emerging nuclear power, and their powers with India, which is also a nuclear power, and so chances are we're going to see some really ugly blowback over the next four or five, maybe ten years as a result of the hubris.
That's a word very frequently used in the Bush administration, but it's appropriate as a result of the hubris of the Bush administration here.
And we're the ones who are going to pay the price for it.
It's not going to be the decider or his epigonese or those who come and is trained in the next administration, the one after that.
It's going to be the people who are being told now that we have really no effective say in the deliberations of our government, which, once again, is why I am so heartened, albeit in the very qualified sense, to see the fact that there were members of the House of Representatives, which was designed to be the most responsive branch of the federal government, the most accountable branch to the people, the branch that deals with all those things where the federal government can put the touch on us in terms of either our property or our wealth or even our lives.
Members of the House of Representatives went to George W. Bush and said, you've got to start reeling it in.
You've got to give us a deadline.
You've got to give us the ability to go back to our outraged constituents and tell them that there is going to be an end to this war in Iraq.
I don't know if it's too late.
If the war has metastasized to the point where we're not going to be able to extricate ourselves or if the metastasizing growth of specifically executive power has gotten to the point where it's taken on a life of itself, of its own, but it's at least heartening to see that there are some people in the House of Representatives who remember the representative function of their jobs.
Yeah, now, the thing is, and I agree with you, it is heartening and I hope it's really not too late.
For many, many years, I guess not so much anymore, but for many, many years, I put a lot of faith in the structure that James Madison created.
At the end of the day, the American people through the House of Representatives can set things right.
I guess at this point, probably the generals wouldn't even go along with Bush if he tried to really override the Congress's authority.
Hopefully that's the case.
But I have to wonder, well, I remember this, I've never been in the military and I really don't know a whole lot about it, Will, but I read in the book, The Commanders, about the first Gulf War by Bob Woodward about Panama, and particularly the part about Panama where they talk about the Marines and the Army beginning all this new training, and all the new training was preparation for the invasion.
But they were doing it right there in Panama, and somewhere in there the quote was, we fight like we train.
If you see us training to do this, believe it or not, we're about to actually use those tactics in practice.
And now I'm looking at Bush and all these powers, as you say, not just, well, either way, not just over the people of the world, the foreigners, which most Americans don't care if their government slaughters foreigners, but all these, the Military Commissions Act and the rewriting of the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the subsidies to all the local police forces, as you explained last time on the show, the national government considers local police agencies' cars their properties since they subsidize it, etc.
And I have to wonder, is this a situation where they fight like they train, that these people are really planning on creating a situation of martial law and clamp down in this country?
You're exactly right.
When you talk about the Mexican, you fight the way you train, and of course, as a basketball football player, I used to be told that you play the way you practice.
And so it's of immense importance to the public at large to understand that when you see the federal government taking control of your local law enforcement, when you talk about sheriff's departments, the sheriff being the only local law enforcement rooted in our Anglo-Saxon tradition, the professional police departments are actually something of a standing army, always have been, but now they are literally a standing army because they're receiving subsidies through the Department of Homeland Security and other federal grants, such as the Byrne Grants, the Justice Department for Counter-Narcotics Enforcement.
They're being militarized, they are taking dictation from Washington, they're no longer locally accountable.
Why are they doing this, that the enemy is outside the borders of the United States?
They're not looking out to protect us from those who would come in to pose a threat to us.
They're looking at us, they're looking within the country at us as a pool of potentially troublesome people.
I mean, take a look at all of the enforcement measures and types of scrutiny and surveillance which have been created in the post-9-11 environment.
Take a look at the people at whom these measures are directed.
They're directed at us anytime you go on an airplane, anytime you find yourself being stopped at a roadblock or a security checkpoint like the one that was just recently introduced in Arizona.
Supposedly, a border checkpoint is 29 miles inside the southern border of the United States, and it's created some stir in Arizona because people don't much like the fact they're being treated like criminal suspects simply because they're trying to travel.
But the way that the mechanisms are being set up right now is very troublesome, irrespective of whether or not we remain in Iraq and whether or not our government invades or bombs Iran and broadens the compass of foreign war overseas.
The government has overtly and obviously declared war on the population of the United States of America, people we used to refer to as citizens that were considered, I guess, what subjects are suspects.
Take a look at the Real ID Act, the fact that just I think yesterday the Department of Homeland Security announced that it's going to ignore the fact that I think two dozen state governments are on record now that they will not cooperate with the Real ID Act, which is basically the government putting its brand on all of us for the purpose of human inventory control.
And the Department of Homeland Security says, well, it doesn't matter because eventually you're not going to be able to travel if you do not have a federally certified biometric ID card, which means you could have a state driver's license that will permit you to drive around in that state.
But if you want to get in an airplane, you have to get a U.S. passport, which will be equipped with an ARFID embedded ID chip.
These things are being put in place not because of a threat to us, they're being put in place because we're considered to be a threat to the stability of the regime.
That's the one thing people have to remember above all.
You go back to the proposition that most Americans don't care what happens to foreigners who find themselves in the fell clutches of our regime, the regime that rules us, I should say.
You can go back to the War for Independence and take a look at the writings of Edmund Burke, who was really the founder of modern conservatism.
In April of 1777, after the war had begun, he wrote a letter to the sheriffs of Bristol, which was a district he represented in Parliament.
At great length, Edmund Burke gave voice to profound opposition to the war against the American colonies, precisely because he understood that by threatening the liberties of subjects of the crown in the colonies, the crown and the ministry were threatening the liberties of all Englishmen everywhere.
What particularly made Burke angry was a proposal, a proposed piece of legislation to abolish habeas corpus.
What Burke was saying in so many words is that if you abolish habeas corpus, we're no longer a free culture, we're no longer free subjects of an empire or a kingdom ruled by law.
Well, that's something now that we have passed in terms of benchmarks on the way to tyranny.
The abolition of habeas corpus, the changes to the Insurrection Act that permit the president to use guard and reserve troops as his own Praetorian Guard.
Those are things that King George III could not have dreamed of getting away with at the time we were fighting, our ancestors were fighting, to assert their independence from him.
And here's Bush at 28%, at best 30% in the polls, and he's getting away with it.
Yeah.
I want to play this clip for you here, Will, and get your comment.
Listen to this.
All right.
We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie began operations.
And in that year, the trustees meeting for the first time raised a specific question which they discussed throughout the balance of the year in a very learned fashion.
And the question is, is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?
And they conclude that no more effective means than war to that end is known to humanity.
So then, in 1909, they raised the second question and discussed it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war?
All right, Will.
You recognize that?
I certainly do, and the point is, just as timely now, a century later, isn't it?
And for the people who aren't familiar, who is that speaking there?
I'm trying to remember the name of the fellow, but he was the one who...
Oh, it's Dodd.
Norman Dodd.
I'm sorry?
Norman Dodd.
He was one of the investigators of the Taxotem Foundations back in the 40s and 50s, if I remember correctly.
And he was speaking about the role played by the Carnegie, what became the Carnegie Foundations in preparing for U.S. entry into World War I.
And of course, Norman Dodd is most famous for talking about the directives that have been issued to prepare for the eventual merger between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The really interesting thing is that this was seen as completely an aberrant notion half a century ago, because the Soviet Union, of course, was so markedly and unambiguously tyrannical.
Right now, we've sort of passed and laughed the former Soviet Union in some ways, in terms of the powers that are being exercised by the head of the federal government, the executive branch of the federal government in our system, but the use of war as a way of bringing about dramatic social changes is something which has been written of by political philosophers at least as far back as Plato.
The idea was that when an executive, and it's always the executive that gets people embroiled in wars of this sort, when the executive wants to move a society in a certain direction, then it is to his advantage, it's in his interest, to get people involved in the war just as quickly as possible, and the assumption that that's something that involves the entire society, and so you can regiment and militarize society so as to make it susceptible to reconstruction from above.
Mansfield talks about that in the Wall Street Journal piece, about how civil rights and civil liberties actually belong to the collective.
They don't belong to the individual, and what's necessary is that people have to recalibrate their notions of what the proper balance is between liberty and security, and be prepared to change front if necessary.
That phrase, change front, is a really interesting expression.
If you've read, as I have, literature of the so-called philosophers, the court philosophers of the fascist regime in Italy, I mentioned Giovanni Gentile in the article in which I discussed Mansfield, and some of the apologists for Adolf Hitler, they're always talking about society as a phalanx, as a military formation which is led by the executive, and so a phalanx will change front to deal with the threat that is defined by the vanguard leading that phalanx.
So that takes you to the world of Orwell's 1984 as well, when we were at war with East Asia one week, we're at war with Eurasia the next week, it doesn't matter whether it makes sense.
The fact is that Big Brother has defined that we all have to change front in a unified way in order to deal with the threat that he perceives.
So the connection between militarism and the perpetual state of war is declared by an all-powerful executive, and the creation of domestic totalitarianism is something that we simply cannot avoid or ignore.
Yeah, and you know, it's interesting, somebody posted in the comments section on my blog yesterday, a link to a news article about a local, I think it was a sheriff's department, it may have been a city police force, who somehow got in trouble for torturing their inmates, including beatings and making one guy lick a toilet clean.
Yes, that was in Florida, yes.
And you know, it's funny, you think of Abu Ghraib, and we all know it was a special access program called Copper Green that was ordered by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and all that kind of thing, but you know, we also know that some of those guys on the night shift at Abu Ghraib were, at least one of them, Grayner, was an American prison guard.
And it's funny because we look at these pictures of Abu Ghraib and people go, oh my god, America's not love and democracy, it's torture.
And I'm thinking, you know, these people have no idea, don't we all know in our society that this is the way people are treated in prison, like animals at Abu Ghraib?
That's exactly right.
In today's LouRockwell.com collection of articles, there's a piece I wrote called Because They Can, or Because They Could, rather, The Logic of the Torture State, and it deals with a horrible incident, you're probably very well aware of this, Scott, involving this Lester Eugene Seiler, a very minor drug dealer from Tennessee who was tortured for two hours.
I heard the audio this morning.
Yeah, exactly.
And this is the sort of thing that was going on contemporaneously with the revelations coming out of Abu Ghraib.
This isn't a case of Abu Ghraib creating monkey-see-monkey-do mimicry on the part of bad apples in the Tennessee Sheriff's Department, the Campbell County Sheriff's Department of Tennessee.
This is something that apparently was a stated operating procedure for that Sheriff's Department acting, once again, as a counter-narcotics team funded by the federal government through a burn grant and trying to shake down some very undistinguished drug dealer for money in order to justify the continuation of grants to the federal government.
That's the way our system operates right now.
That's the skull beneath the skin, to use T.F.
Elliot's phrase.
Yeah, and it's funny, you know, the whole idea that we're going to go around the world, which, not that the people in power believe this, but they convince the American people somehow that the reason we're invading these countries is for these people's own good and we're going to make a great democracy out of them, etc.
We have a lot of perfecting to do here at home before we go around killing people for their own good overseas, I think.
Yeah, our plate's pretty full in that respect, and what amazes me is how often when we're going out to democratize these countries, you're dealing with countries that have cultures that are older than ours, first of all, that's certainly the case with respect to Iraq, it's certainly the case with respect to Iran, but often you're dealing with countries that have been suffering beneath the heel of somebody who was a subcontractor for Washington, which was Saddam Hussein's status exactly.
Yep.
That's right, former employee, again, the, who are we at war with, East Asia, Eurasia, whichever.
Doesn't really matter.
Same thing.
We're at war with someone, that's the important thing.
That's right.
And, you know, I'm looking at James Bovard on the antiwar.com blog from yesterday, this guy Mansfield gave the esteemed Jefferson lecture for the National Endowment for Humanities on the 8th in Washington, D.C.
Yeah, these people are in the business of creating awards to give to each other.
The Jefferson Award, I really like that.
I'm amazed that you can spontaneously combust over the profound act of blasphemy, profanation of the name of Thomas Jefferson.
But that, once again, is perfectly in keeping with the general totalitarian flavor of what's going on here, where they conscript, totalitarian regimes tend to conscript the name and memory of somebody who would oppose them in order to confer some kind of a benediction on the activities of the totalitarian regime.
That's certainly the sort of thing the Soviet Union used to do.
Yeah.
Wasn't it FDR that made the Jefferson Memorial in D.C.?
That's exactly right.
I was going in that general direction.
That's a really good example of what's going on.
They want to empty the content out of these figures who did specific things and said specific things and, once again, deploy them as a way of buttressing the existing regime.
If you take a look at imperial Roman history, the more frequently the Republican heritage was invoked and the more often the Senate's supposed authority was cited by an emperor, the more deeply mired in tyranny Rome became.
It's just a naturally occurring, hypocritical trait in people who exercise power over others.
Yeah.
It goes back to, like you were saying, it's almost a—whoa, what's that terrible noise, Will?
There are people working on my home in the background.
Oh, I see.
That's all right.
I don't care.
I'll talk right over that.
I thought it was something on the line.
It goes back to, like you were saying, this belief that rights belong to everyone as a whole before they belong to individuals, it sounds like Plato versus Aristotle, right?
That's what we're talking about.
Do you start with the person or do you start with the state?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, the idea is that the state confers the rights on the individual and that rights consist of temporary and revocable privileges that are assigned by the state to serve the interest that the state would define.
That, of course, is very much a Platonic concept.
And I'm reminded at this point that Thomas Jefferson, the real one, not the one whose image and likeness are used for the purposes of the state today, but the real Thomas Jefferson once proudly boasted he could never make it through Plato's Republic because he considered it to be a compound of the most perfect nonsense.
And that's why I don't have much esteem for Plato myself, quite frankly, not being a collectivist.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, speaking of the original Jefferson, I learned my libertarianism not from Murray Rothbard, but from Thomas Jefferson.
That's where I learned all this stuff about the rights of the individual.
You can say whatever stupid thing you want as long as reason is left for you to combat it.
You can believe in one god or ten as long as you don't pick my pocket or break my leg.
And the state is basically the process of pocket picking and leg breaking.
Isn't it, though?
And this is, you know, this is the thing that really gets me here is that, you know, besides all this war and empire overseas, besides Bush and his unitary executive theory and, you know, the turning upside down of all American history and all this kind of stuff.
Well, back to your article that's running on Lew Rockwell today, because they can.
This is something that happens in, you know, pretty much every county in America.
You know what I mean?
This is the kind of thing we all know in this society, and I'm kind of a broken record on this on this show, but I think we all know in this society, by the time we're teenagers, it's sort of just understood that if you go to prison, that you're very likely to get raped and beaten and whatever, whatever, unless you join the neo-Nazis to protect you or something that we all know that this is how our society works and on the most local level.
And yet we continue to just go on and on.
Well, most people assume that they're going to live that type of charmed and sheltered life that will protect them from the rough edges of the state, or at least from the worst cutting edges of the state.
People don't understand how easily they can find themselves at the mercy of those who've been given the power, not the authority, but the power by the government to work their will upon them.
I mean, there was a piece just a little while ago, a couple of days ago, describing a raid on a trailer court in California involving a code enforcement team that had been put together as a pretext to open doors so that the police could go in and search for contraband and drugs.
This, of course, once again is something the federal government funds.
But when you have code enforcement officials who feel perfectly qualified to intrude in your home with guns and other arms, such as tasers, which are not a non-lethal technology by any means, and they can use any pretext they can to find you in your home and to find some reason to detain you, to take away your freedom, to put you in jail, we're not living in a free society.
I've written in my blog about the experience I had with the local animal code enforcement police officer here in Payette, Idaho, who received an anonymous phone call saying that our six-month-old German shepherd was being abused.
And what she told me was basically if I didn't fatten up our pup, I was going to be facing a felony charge.
You know, and a felony charge would mean essentially that I couldn't vote, more importantly, that I wouldn't be permitted by what they're pleased to call the law to carry a firearm or to own a firearm.
On the basis of an anonymous phone call from an accuser I would never be able to confront on a charge that's completely spurious because the animal control officer had seen the dog, the same dog, about a week before and hadn't seen that the dog displayed any sign of being abused, dealing with something that was my own property.
I mean, that dog is my property.
It doesn't belong to the city or county of Payette or the state of Idaho or anybody else.
But this is how easily people can find themselves getting crosswise with the state.
And I think, you know, I read that article that you wrote about that and didn't the dog catcher even tell you, oh, look, it's obvious to me you're not abusing your dog.
But you still better do something or I'm charging you with a felony.
Exactly.
That's exactly what happened.
And so far she's not come back much to my great relief.
But the longer this goes on, the more curious I become as to exactly what's going on here, because she was telling me basically if chief didn't fatten up, I was going to be hauled into court on a felony charge.
Now, a felony in Anglo-Saxon law was a crime that involved the potential infliction of a death penalty.
I mean, you go back to ancient Latin law and to Anglo-Saxon law, that's where the term comes from.
Now, in some jurisdictions, including here in Idaho, if any charge that involves a potential prison sentence of longer than a year, a jail term longer than a year, a prison sentence of a year or more.
But it's just an amazing thing.
Literally, I'm sitting here in my home doing nothing to harm anybody and committing no offense against what is called good public order.
Somebody whose identity I'll never know called the police department and said that our dog was being abused.
And on the basis of that, I confronted the possibility of a felony.
That's how easily people can find themselves on the receiving end of government coercion.
Because basically, anytime anybody from the government instructs you to do something, that communication carries an implicit death sentence.
Because if you resist the government sufficiently, with sufficient tenacity, they reserve the right to kill you.
That's something that was made obvious in that audio tape and transcript of the torture of Eugene Seiler, where the Detective Franklin said, okay, why don't we take his handcuffs off that way, if he lifts a hand against this, then we have the right to beat the blank out of him.
Now, you've got to understand that mindset has got to be very common among law enforcement people at all levels of government.
Basically, I have the right to beat the blank out of you, if you do something that I consider to be resistant or combative behavior.
That's not the mindset of people who are protecting and serving the public.
That's not the sort of official mindset that would characterize people who are representative officials in a genuinely free society, and that is where we are right now.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm afraid that's where we've always been.
I remember, and I'm trying to remember specific examples, but I remember learning about how before the Supreme Court incorporated, quote unquote, the Bill of Rights against the states, how basically this is the way it worked in, at least in the South, in basically every sheriff's department, is they're going to beat you until you confess to whatever it is they want.
Sure.
I mean, if anything, we're getting better and better over here.
Will not worse.
Jesus Christ.
Well, it's becoming more and more refined, if you will.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're perfecting their excuse, making it legal.
Well, and it's just like the lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld for torture.
The judge said, you know, I'd really like to let this lawsuit continue.
It seems to me like you have a pretty good case.
Fortunately, however, the former secretary of defense has sovereign immunity for any time he committed while he was the secretary of defense.
Yeah.
Meaning the only condescend to stand trial for those offenses they're willing to stand trial for.
Yeah, exactly.
Great.
Well, land of the free and home of the brave.
Okay.
Well, how's that on a progress report on your liberty, everybody?
You like that?
Check out freedominourtime.blogspot for the ProLibertate blog and rightsourceonline.com.
Thanks a lot, Will.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.