All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
Back to it, I should say.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is the great Will Grigg.
He keeps a blog at freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
It's called Pro Libertate.
And his latest piece is also running at Lou Rockwell dot com today.
The everyday evil of America's torture state.
Welcome back to the show.
Will, how are you, Scott?
I'm doing very well.
And it's always a pleasure and a privilege to be with you.
Well, right on.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And it's always an honor and a privilege to have you here.
Of course, you are, you know, way, way, way up there at the top of the list of listeners, favorite guests.
I know that for a fact.
Oh, kind.
Yes.
Well, I know that.
And for very good reason, of course.
Now, so this made pretty big headlines.
I'm sure I didn't see it, but Brian Williams must have even covered it on the nightly news or whatever that the DEA had at least, quote unquote, accidentally locked this guy wanted on or whatever charges.
I'll let you tell the story for five days.
He tried to kill himself in there.
Is that right?
This is a big deal, but it was just an accident.
And after all, they're creating a partnership for a drug free America.
And so what's your problem and what's going on here?
Of course, in the kit, in the course of trying to bring about this sin free society, they managed to expose this young man, Daniel Chong, who's, I think, an engineering student there at the university of California, San Diego, to crystalline meth, which was found at the bottom of this five by 10 foot detention cell in which he was left for about five days in circumstances that are the very best suggestive of deliberate malignant neglect, because he could hear what was going on on the other side of the door.
He could hear conversations taking place.
He spent several days in darkness, handcuffed, screaming at the top of his lungs and repeatedly kicking on the door.
And in order for him to have been left for four and a half or five days in darkness without food or water or toilet facilities or adequate bedding or light, for the most part, there had to have been some kind of decision made by somebody in a position of responsibility.
All those people remain conveniently anonymous.
No doubt they're swaddled in sovereign immunity or whatever other official fiction protects them from the consequences of their crimes.
And in the course of his confinement, Mr.
Chong began to hallucinate very quickly.
That's what happens when you're in a situation of sensory deprivation.
That's of course, a Soviet style form of torture that is used by the CIA and its satellite intelligence agencies around the world.
He also suffered from severe dehydration.
He was driven to the desperate measure of drinking his own urine in order to prevent outright dehydration.
But he was in the beginning stages of renal failure.
When he was finally taken out of confinement, he was severely dehydrated.
He lost 15 pounds in the worst possible way.
And at one point he had shattered his eyeglasses and written something of a suicide note to his mother, sorry, mom, in his arm by scratching the letters into his arm and bleeding.
And he had at one point, as he tells the story, not only ingested that crystal and meth because he was dealing with the insistent demands of an empty stomach, but also apparently swallowed shards of glass.
He was a real mess when they took him out and he was hospitalized.
He's yet to receive an apology from anybody who's responsible for this.
And the thing that is most galling perhaps about this horrible story is the fact that he was supposed to be released, had been swept up in a drug raid on the 21st of April.
He was at a friend's house to celebrate 420, which is some people might appreciate is a annual day, sort of a unofficial holiday, uh, extolling the virtues of the recreational use of marijuana.
In any case, Mr.
Chong was not charged with a drug offense and he was supposed to be let go.
And instead he was diverted from the interrogation room to this detention facility and held in conditions that are at least as bad as those we commonly associate with Gitmo or Bagram.
That happened in California, in Southern California.
All right.
Now, I guess this shows just how naive I am and just how brainwashed from TV, even after all these years and talking about the most horrible things that government does to people, uh, I still just, um, I'm so willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
When I heard this story, I thought, well, some jackass must've put them in a cell, you know, down the hall and around the corner and then went off for the weekend shift and didn't tell his replacement.
Or if he did, you know, the replacement was a bumbling idiot and they just forgot about the kid, which is absolutely horrible.
But that's just my imagination.
You're telling me you got plenty of information that they were clearly within earshot of this kid screaming and banging and begging for his life on the other side of that door.
That's exactly right.
Furthermore, they are required to make routine checks of all the cells.
It's not as if you simply put them away and forget them.
And a retired DEA administrator who was interviewed by the local press there in the San Diego area pointed out that in his 35 or 40 years of experience in that agency, which by the way, has no constitutional warrant to exist, he had never heard of a case in which somebody was left longer than overnight in a circumstance of that kind.
This isn't simply a question of forgetting somebody.
This is somebody who tried to make a point.
The evidence admittedly is circumstantial, but there's a very formal weight of circumstantial evidence here that you're dealing with something that goes beyond mere culpable neglect into the realm of positive malice.
On the part of the people that did this to Daniel Chong.
Well, positive malice means torture.
Yeah.
They tortured this kid.
Yeah.
By any rational definition, this is torture.
There's simply no ambiguity about this.
Okay.
But you know what?
So once every five years, we hear a story where there's one real bad cop that does something wrong.
But so what's the big crisis here?
Well, the big crisis here is that we're dealing with the Gitmoization of America's domestic law enforcement apparatus.
It's best described as a law enforcement apparatus, not a justice system.
There's no justice to be had through the mechanism as it exists right now.
There are four cases that I talk about in this article.
I mentioned, of course, the case of Daniel Chong, because that's the most recent, perhaps the most lurid.
But the three others that I deduce in this article are similarly outrageous.
The case of Nick Christie, who was a retired pipe fitter or boilermaker from Cleveland, who was tortured to death by the Lee County, Florida Sheriff's Department a couple of years ago.
This is a guy who wasn't accused of a crime.
This is something that's also a common thread here in many of these stories, not all of them.
But he was somebody with psychological problems who left his wife behind in Cleveland to go down to Florida to visit his family.
She was concerned because he was off his meds.
Meds in this circumstance, of course, are of dubious benefit at best, but she was concerned for his health.
And so she made a very common and frequently fatal mistake.
She called the police for help.
The Lee County Sheriff's Office picked him up at his brother's home and took him to the detention center there, the jail that they maintained in Lee County, Florida, strapped him to a restraint chair, repeatedly doused him with military grade pepper spray in spite of the fact that they're not dealing with a violent criminal.
They're dealing with somebody who was picked up on a welfare check.
They put a spit mask over his face that occluded his breathing passages and left him gasping, gasping for air.
So intense was the barrage of this chemical weapon, which is what pepper spray is.
It's low grade chemical munition.
So intense was the barrage that other inmates in the jail were choking on the fumes.
And when the emergency med techs arrived, when it was finally clear to the adults who were doing this, that Mr.
Christie was dying, he'd been protesting between anguished, anguished, desperate gasps for air.
His lips were turning purple.
He was showing all the symptoms of hypoxia.
When finally they brought in the med techs to administer to him, the med techs couldn't because the chemical spray residue was so thick and their latex gloves weren't given them adequate protection.
They were actually dealing with a caustic substance that was burning through the gloves they were using to try to treat him.
But he was killed in an act of homicide, as the local medical examiner documented.
But the local attorney, the prosecuting attorney for Lee County, ruled that there was no reason to treat this as a criminal act in spite of the fact that you have an obviously lawless and unjustified murder through torture of a 62 year old man who was not accused of a crime.
And this is something that has gotten a little bit of publicity.
I know that in the local press in Florida, there's been a lot of outrage about this.
There's been outrage in Cleveland.
But this is the sort of thing that unfortunately is not that uncommon when you have police conducting so-called welfare checks to people who may be uncooperative, but their lack of cooperation shouldn't be treated as a criminal act because they're not criminal suspects.
When you have these people who are armed with tasers and pepper spray and other supposedly non-lethal implements of pain compliance and they're dealing with obstreperous people who simply don't want to be bothered, there are often bad things that happen.
As the case in White Plains, New York, this is a case I wrote about several weeks ago.
Well, now, hold it right there.
We'll have to get back to White Plains when we come back from this break.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
Right after.
All right, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio, I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Will Gregg and we're talking about the, I don't know, pandemic.
Of local police torture.
Sometimes to death in America, you know, it's always been like this or something.
And I don't really know qualitatively or quantitatively exactly, but my understanding is that really before the Supreme Court kind of nationalized the Bill of Rights and incorporated it against the states, it was simply common practice and probably 90 percent of sheriff's departments around the country that, yeah, we just beat you until you confess.
That's how we do it.
It was the people of this country never were jealous enough of their own liberty to put a stop to things like that.
It took the boss's boss to come from D.C. and have their own interests in making themselves more powerful at the expense of local police and prosecutors to try to professionalize police systems and whatever in this country.
But, you know, the USA is founded on torture.
Cops have been they tortured somebody every day for the last 600 years on this continent.
Am I wrong?
I don't think you're wrong.
And one thing that I'd point out regarding the ideology of this disease, which is institutionalization of torture, the first place where we have definite documented proof that torture was used as a war technique was in the U.S. government's suppression of Philippine independence following the Spanish-American war.
The Filipinos had actually taken to heart all these strident and hypocritical pronouncements about America's determination to liberate the Philippines from the foul hand of Spanish oppression.
So once the Spaniards were thrown out, the Philippines thought they were free.
And, of course, Washington did its usual efficient job in disabusing them of that notion by killing several hundred thousands of them.
But during the course of the war against the Filipinos, there was a tactic called the water cure that was widely used.
And the water cure is what we now call waterboarding.
It's derivative of the tortures that were used by the Holy Office, the Spanish Inquisition.
And there were actual marching cadences that were chanted by American troops in praise of sticking in the nozzle and filling them full of liberty.
And there were trials, war crimes trials, that were held after the end of the war against Filipino independence.
I think there was at least one conviction, a very, very trivial and nominal sanction was inflicted, something like a $10 fine, to show you where these people ranked in terms of the hierarchy of concerns of the regime ruling us at the time.
But the people who administered this, the people who taught it, were veterans of the New York Police Department.
The New York Police Department had been using the water cure before the 1898 Spanish American War and then the decade or so long mopping up operation against the Filipinos.
So you're entirely correct, Scott, when you talk about the fact that torture has been in the institutional arsenal of police forces as long as there had been police forces in this country.
What's happened is that concomitant with the nationalization of the Bill of Rights to the incorporation doctrine back in the 1960s, you had another and I think much less commendable act of nationalization.
That was the creation of these uniform criminal statutes that criminalized the ancient, venerable Anglo-Saxon right to resist police abuse.
We've talked about this before.
If you go back a couple of hundred years into the history of the British court system or even as recently as the 1940s here in the American court system, there are explicit recognitions of the fact that the individual has the right to resist lawless violence by a constable or by somebody else's estate agent, including what we now call police officers.
And destroying the legal protection for the right to resist was one of the priorities of this largely anonymous Soviet of experts who created the model statute that now has been adopted pretty much through judicial activism as opposed to legislative action in just about every state in the union.
Fortunately, there is a recent case in Michigan in which the state Supreme Court, by I think it's seven to one or five to two, I think there's seven justices on that court, five to two majority, upheld the right to resist unlawful arrest.
So there's a bit of a counterrevolution going on there.
It's damn well about time, quite frankly, when you see the fact that the people who are operating as police officers today are clothed in impunity and they're kitted out for war.
You're not talking about people who are like officer friendly or like Sheriff Taylor from Mayberry.
You're talking about people who wear tactical vests, who have multiple levels of supposedly less lethal to outright lethal armament, and they are taught to have a military mindset in which they perceive society to be a 360 degree battlefield and Americans to be insurgents or potential enemies who must be subdued.
Their ethos is to control and dominate, not to protect and serve.
The only protection they're concerned about is force protection, or as they call it, officer safety.
And now we see the the teeny John Yoo, Bybee ethos of torture has really metastasized into the very marrow of our domestic law enforcement.
Well, and you know what it is, it's the partisanship of the war on terror era where, you know, when when the Abu Ghraib photos broke, you could either be a human or you could be a Republican partisan.
And there were enough people who were Republican partisans who decided that they were just going to argue that, no, I love torture.
Torture is great.
Torture is awesome.
Let's, in fact, you know, deliberately get together and buy the products that are advertised during 24 because the people got to know torture is great.
And so here we are after years and years and years of this kind of thing.
It just spreads throughout society.
Now, there's this great article on Truthout today about how just ugly America is becoming, how ugly the American people are becoming.
And of course, in there, he blames it on free market, libertarian capitalism somehow, even though the whole article is about the fascist state is, well, I'm a leftist, so it's the free market's fault, he writes in there.
But anyway, it's just it's about how the American people have just poisoned themselves and made themselves horrible.
They like this, like we talked about a second ago.
They never stop their local sheriff's departments from torturing people.
It really was the incorporation in the feds.
You know, I'm not saying I'm in favor of nationalizing anything.
I'm in favor of abolishing the nation.
But I'm just saying, like, historically speaking, deputies can break whatever bones of yours they want.
Yeah.
If they learn how to inflict trauma without leaving a mark, that, of course, is something that very rarely gets reported.
There's a case I wrote about in, I believe, Tennessee, where some poor schlep was on the porch of his own home when a deputy showed up and started to harass him.
And he eventually was surrounded by what I call it's a formation I call a thug scrum of about 12 or 16 or 19 people and tasered repeatedly to the point where he was defecating and urinating on himself.
And this proceeded for several days thereafter.
And they simply wanted to mess with him because they considered him to be mouthy and unpleasant.
And his chief tormentor, who's the local police chief, was his former football coach.
And so he knew him and apparently entertained a very low opinion of the individual.
This is a case which is unfolding right now in Tennessee.
We mentioned the idea of torture being pretty much anything you can get away with and how there's very little institutional or cultural restraint on what police officers can do.
Another case to talk about in this article that Lew Rockwell has republished deals with a fellow named Raul Rosas in Fresno, California, who was dragged out of his home and then hogtied.
Hog tying is becoming a very common tactic where you shackle the hands behind the back, shackle the feet and then chain the handcuffs and the foot shackles together.
And that, of course, is a position that is fraught with the potential what's called positional asphyxia.
This is usually done when somebody's got the knee in the back of the victim.
And in this case, they tasered this man for about eight or 10 minutes.
And then when he complained because it was a hot day that he needed to drink, they waterboarded him.
They literally waterboarded him.
They reverted to the old Filipino practice, the water cure, by sticking a hose in his face and running water over his mouth and his nostrils to the point where he was literally spitting out spitting out water.
And I think at one point coughing up blood, according to the eyewitness testimony, was obvious that he was suffocating.
His lips were turning blue.
They were urging the assailants to stop.
But one of the assailants claimed that this man was simply faking his death by hypoxia and by drowning.
And pretty soon he went into cardiac arrest and died.
They made it a sultry attempt, really a token attempt to perform CPR.
But by the time the EMTs arrived, he was dead and he had done nothing.
He was not a criminal suspect.
Once again, there was never an investigation of any criminal charges involving this guy.
He simply, for whatever reason, was the subject of a domestic violence call.
There was no domestic violence report in the record, but he fled to the bathroom.
The police came for him.
And the question that's often asked is, if these people are innocent, why do they flee?
The question I would urge people to consider is, why wouldn't you flee?
If you're dealing with armed strangers who are granted institutional impunity and sovereign immunity and whose mindset is one of controlling, dominating or killing those who resist, why wouldn't you flee?
It's a perfectly rational thing.
Unfortunately, what this means is that if they get a hold of you, they consider themselves licensed to inflict whatever sadistic torments upon you that comes to their fertile imaginations.
And they know that very rarely, if ever, are there institutional forms of accountability for these kinds of abuses.
And all this discussion of torture follows that hideous 60-minute interview with, I believe his name was Jose Rodriguez, who was the head of the clandestine service in the CIA and the chief torturer for Cheney during the Bush administration.
He spent most of the 1980s commuting with torturers in South America, at least some of whom have actually been hauled up on criminal charges for the things that they have done in countries like Argentina and Peru and in Central America.
I mean, these are countries who supposedly are at very best are junior partners in the grand march of global democracy, but they're actually holding people accountable.
Yeah, right.
Well, and if there's if we're going to follow their precedent, it'll be another 25 years or something before we indict any of our torturers.
Right.
I mean, that's the I guess, as you were saying, that's the incorporation nowadays is the incorporation of the immunity.
So now the average deputy sheriff has just as much sovereign immunity as the highest ranking federal CIA torturer.
Exactly.
And he has access to Homeland Security drones now as well.
Yeah.
And often this isn't disclosed to the public.
And we have in, I believe it's Gadsden, Alabama, Gadsden County, Alabama.
Sheriff, we said, oh, gee, golly, Ned, our police chief actually said, gee, golly, Ned, somehow we ended up with a surveillance drone.
Gee, I wonder how this happened.
Well, it was reported two years ago in the press.
And I believe it was the oh, good grief, was it Epic, who used a Freedom of Information Act request to get information on which of these jurisdictions had permits the FAA to use surveillance drones.
So they forced this issue to the surface again.
But this county has been receiving hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars in war on drug subsidies.
And it included not merely the surveillance drones, but license plate reading technology in every gadget and gizmo that the Pentagon and the Homeland Security Department makes available at subsidized rates, you know, using taxpayer subsidies to buy them on behalf of police departments in this little little county of Gadsden County, Alabama.
This sort of thing is happening all across the nation as well.
Yeah.
Well, you know, here's one at Ross story from The Guardian.
Georgia opens first jail devoted to U.S. veterans.
And this reminds me of this story that we saw.
Well, I'm sure you saw this not too long ago about how police agencies across the country and I forget whether it was they're getting specific federal training along these lines or what.
But they're getting training on how to deal with veterans, you know, just like in Matt Bargainer's article that he wrote back in 2003.
How many Timothy McVeigh's are going to come home from this Gulf War?
Well, apparently the government's really scared that they've made a bunch of enemies out of their out of their, you know, can of fodder that they send the ones that make it back home.
Just like Barack Obama, as Lew Rockwell pointed out, the Secret Service was paranoid, shark eyes like crazy around the disarmed soldiers when Obama's giving them high fives in Afghanistan where he snuck in the middle of the night.
Yeah, at some point they're going to resent being used as props in the backdrop.
And the concern is not politicians.
They got a guilty conscience about it so bad.
They just keep blabbing like, boy, it's just a matter of time before these soldiers try to kill us for what we did to them.
Exactly.
The concern on the part of the feds is not the things that could be done to the citizenry by the veterans who are brought into the law enforcement apparatus.
The concern is that these people would turn against the state.
That's the real focus of their anxiety, is the notion that at some point these people are going to reject the system rather than being willing to carry out criminal violence on its behalf.
And so in those concerns, I think we have a glimmer of of deeply buried and cleverly disguised optimism that there are people who are coming back from these wars who are actually willing to rethink radically the premises that sent them there, that ended up implicating them in all these horrible crimes against perfectly innocent people and ended up doing horrible things to themselves, both body and soul.
Yeah, well, you know, the thing about, I guess, if I was really to try to distill the most important thing for people to get out of your article today, it was four different stories, right, of people tortured by local cops.
It's to me, it's the when I picture the situations, as you describe them, it's the willfulness, the willingness of the cops, their attitude in engaging in this kind of behavior and the understanding that there is no, quote unquote, adult supervision in the room to stop them from doing these things.
It's like the Lord of the Flies or something like the state of Israel or something over there where they just go crazy with the power and no one can stop them.
Well, all the incentives that exist are keyed in such a way that it enables these people and grants them absolution.
The last case to talk about involves this fellow, pretty loathsome character, I suppose, from Niagara, New York, who was actually tasered into providing a DNA sample.
And the state Supreme Court in New York said, well, you can't do this unless you have specific judicial authorization to do it.
You can get a torture warrant in order to use electroshock trauma or whatever other coercive means would be necessary in order to get somebody to surrender a DNA sample.
It didn't occur to the Epsilon-minus semi-morons who were working for the police department there that if they wanted a DNA sample from the guy, you give him a can of soda.
You give him a can of soda and chat him up, there's your DNA sample.
You don't have to take a taser to his flesh.
But they created a precedent now where, to a limited extent, there is qualified judicial approval of the idea that if you're subject to interrogation in the police department, they can use taser torture in order to get you to offer self-incriminating evidence.
And of course, on the same construction, why not waterboard them?
You know, why not submit them to stress positions or anything else?
Right.
And so there's your adult supervision.
That's the guy in the black robe going, yeah, well, just electrocute him until he does what you say.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, well, actually, make it make an effort, make a perfunctory effort to obey the rules.
And having failed that, come back to me and I'll give you a permission slip and you can torture him.
That's the Alan Dershowitz torture warrant that he talked about 10 years ago.
Only this is for a time bomb scenario.
Well, and you did say it was a very important case where the guy was accused of kidnapping some kids, but it wasn't like they were missing at the moment, right?
There was no ticking time bomb here.
There was, you know, Jack Bauer wasn't trying to find out where the nuke had been secreted, which was, of course, Alan Dershowitz's premise.
And 10 years after that, now we find that it's perfectly permissible to do this for the convenience of prosecutors and investigating detectives who screwed up by misplacing the original DNA sample that actually got the DNA sample from this guy.
And in order to cover their own incompetence, they had to go back for a second bite of the apple.
He wasn't willing to participate.
They got an ex parte order that supposedly authorized them to get this DNA sample.
They tortured the guy into opening his mouth to take a buccal swab.
And then this was appealed to the state Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court did overturn the conviction and mandate a new trial.
But in the context of doing this, they said, well, if you would just follow this procedure, you could probably get away with doing the same thing.
And so there's the glimmering silver lining around the dark cloud for the Cheneyites here.
There are circumstances in which it's permissible for police to torture somebody as a matter of routine interrogation.
Why would we be surprised?
Well, this is the only guy who was actually even credibly accused of being a criminal.
Out of all four of these stories, the rest of them are just plain old regular people who got, you know, wrong place, wrong time in the hands of the wrong cops who all got away with it.
Right.
And what that means, essentially, is that any of us is maybe a phone call or a suspicious look away from being tortured to death at the hands of our own police.
Yeah, that's really a sobering thing, but we really don't have the luxury of ignoring it.
Yeah.
Well, and we got to note the distinct lack of any organized opposition to this kind of thing.
You know, there's some, but it's it's, you know, small groups and there's certainly no like popular front only on the fringes of politics.
There's no like mainstream push that like, whoa, we got to scale back our cops here at all.
It's just missing.
No, but there's a lot of attrition happening in some of the smaller towns who've seen a wave over the last several years because of civic austerity measures, because there's no money to throw around where we've had smaller towns disbanding their police departments.
I've actually played a very small role in helping to disband one in Covington, Texas, and I'm targeting a couple of others here that I think would be very usefully abolished as well.
But that's happening at the margins, like you say, Scott.
And one of the things that we found is that the police are very much a fully integrated part of this military industrial corporate media complex.
They're a major consumer of the things that are put out by the corporations that own the major media.
And in that fact, I think resides the answer to the question, why do we ever see a lot of media attention focused on, as you said, this pandemic of lawless violence by police?
I think that fact is highly suggestive at the very least.
Right.
And, you know, I forgot what it was, where it was.
I saw this.
It was going around on the Facebook.
You might have seen it where it was all the top industries that lobby and contribute in favor of the police state, in favor of the drug war specifically.
Right.
And it's just you know what it is.
It's like some cynical parody of democracy.
Like if somebody said this is what is wrong with democracy, this is what could happen.
We're literally just the prison guard unions and Anheuser Busch, i.e.the competition.
Sure.
And the iron bar manufacturers, they get together and hold the entire rest of the society hostage so that they can make money.
Yeah, that's validated with Adam Smith about said about the way that certain business interests can't get together without conspiring against the against the economic benefit of the rest of society.
In this case, of course, you've got literally an iron triangle when you're talking about the prison industrial complex and corporations like CCA, who in their in their financial investment disclosure statements, candidly admit that they have a vested financial interest in maintaining and expanding the drug war in order to produce future business for themselves.
Of course, now they've gotten into the business of detaining immigrants, which is exactly the opposite of what a sound immigration policy would do, because as we found out, most of the problems that result in immigrants overstaying their visas or simply staying in this country and not going back to Mexico, which is the primary focus of this discussion, have to do with the fact that they try to leave.
They're likelier to get caught and detained in this country.
They're not letting them go.
And one of the reasons why they don't let them go is because there's no profit in doing so.
There's tremendous profit, of course, for expanding the amount of detention space, the number of beds that people are buying and their multilevel gains to be had by the unionized tax feeders at every level of the system.
But as you say, Scott, there's really a sense in which we're living in a transparodic society.
We're immune to satire.
I don't think that as ingenious as the people are who are responsible for the onion, that they can really get ahead of the curve here in terms of the lurid ridiculousness of public policy that we're dealing with here.
And my only hope here at this point is that at some juncture in the future, we're going to find that they can no longer afford to do what they're doing.
And unfortunately, what we know is that the political elite is perfectly willing to bleed the host dry in order to keep the parasites well fed.
And that, of course, doesn't look for a future, but there's no way around it.
We're going to have to go through it.
And hopefully at the other end of this, people will be chastened and a little bit wiser about what we permit people to do in the name of those who presume to rule us.
Yeah, well, yeah, I think there's hope there.
And this may be a little bit Pollyanna, but I saw Peter Schiff saying that.
No, man, you know, it's the austerity is going to hit the state.
They're the ones who are going to get the cuts.
I mean, unless your budget comes from tax money, how's the austerity affect you?
Other than it's less money out of your pocket.
So let them suffer.
In fact, this is I remember a conversation I had with my dad back in 2003 or four was I sure hope the housing bubble crashes and the American economy crashes sooner than, you know, the war spreads to Iran or worse.
You know that this is our best case scenario, kind of as if, you know, like it's funny.
It's another symptom of the ignorance of the elites.
They don't understand the business cycle at all.
And you just give them a recession for a couple of years and they start, you know, crying about the decline of the American empire for good and whatever, which that is happening, but not for the reasons that they think.
I mean, they just think America can never be prosperous again.
They don't know why we or how we could be.
They don't have the first clue.
So as far as they're concerned, like, gee, I guess America's days are just over or whatever.
Well, good, I guess, because that means that there's much less willingness to, you know, get into the bigger wars.
You know, they'll bomb Libya from the sky, at least so far.
They're quite afraid to go ahead and push through to Iran or, you know, a real big project like that.
And so, you know, we got we got to be thankful for our poverty at the silver lining level anyway, that we can afford less cops.
And ultimately, we will have, you know, a bit fewer, although you're right, they won't be the first thing, though.
They'll take away our firefighters way before they take away our SWAT teams.
But still, that's certainly the case.
And in order for America to survive, the empire has to die.
And that means that the empire at every level has to die right down to the local level where you have the militarized constabulary that follows exactly the same modus operandi domestically that the empire's troops do abroad.
As a matter of fact, police in this country have a more emancipated set of rules of engagement than most of the people who are engaged overseas in countries like Afghanistan.
That's a thought that really should be rolled around in the mind a little bit by people who are retaining whatever residual attachment they have to the support your local police mantra.
We've gotten to the point where if you're supporting a local police, you might as well admit that in 1775, you would have been a Tory.
Yeah.
And in fact, if you go ahead and accuse the people that fought the Revolutionary War being traitors, and they had every right, they were bound to respect the authority of their local redcoats, and how dare they fight back?
Exactly.
You know, I'm not sure whether that would be a more conservative or literal liberal position in America today, maybe.
I don't know either.
Yeah, it depends on who's in power at the time, right?
Although you got to hand it to conservatives, by vast majorities, they stay horrible on foreign policy when liberals are in power.
Liberals are at least good on foreign policy when conservatives are in power.
And they, of course, are silent when Obama's there.
But the conservatives, you know, you read at least any of the conservative writings on the internet, outside of the American Conservative Magazine, obviously, but you know, National Review, Weekly Standard, whatever.
The only time they ever praise Obama is for killing people or threatening to kill people.
And, you know, putting sanctions on people and whatever.
And then, of course, they always want to criticize him and say he's not willing to do enough.
But they are, you know, they don't think twice and become Ron Paulians or something just because of the Democrats in power.
They might talk about the Constitution on some things, but certainly not on empire.
Yeah, they're expansively skeptical of government when it's doing anything other than killing people.
And when government is killing people, they consider that, I suppose, to be the distilled essence of all that's virtuous about this enterprise called government.
On the other hand, you've got liberals who tend to believe that there's something sanctifying about using exactly the same means when the instruments of power are in the hands of somebody they consider to be suitable, like a Barack Obama.
They're sort of an Ed Schultz contingent within the liberal movement who embrace that.
Well, and a lot of it is just cognitive dissonance, too.
You know, like that article I was talking about before, where the guy's describing the fascist state and blaming it on free market capitalism.
He even accuses the fascist state in there of wanting to dismantle the welfare state, which sort of goes along with what we were talking about, that they'll keep as much cops and militarism in the worst parts of government longest.
But it still hears this guy complaining about and describing in great detail this professor, I think, this fascist state that we live in and how bad it's getting and how mean and ugly it all is and whatever.
And still, he wants this fascist state to be the one to take care of his Grammy.
Like, what the hell, man?
You want those people to be in charge of taking care of your grandmother.
Yes, seriously.
Disjunction.
We will all have health care until the cops are our doctors.
Then we'll all be healthy.
There you go.
Better living through state coercion.
Yeah, I just it's it's fun because I mean, and here's a guy who's even recognizing this during, you know, the Obama-Hillary administration or whatever, but he still still just can't get over the love of the state here.
Yeah, it is an affliction.
It's a psychosis.
That doesn't mean that I want people forcibly treated for it.
I just want to see them deprived of their power to make our lives miserable.
There you go.
That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Just stop doing things.
We don't have a big agenda.
We're trying to force down your throat.
Just quit.
Yeah, we believe in non-aggression.
Why don't you?
Yeah, exactly.
We're not going to force you to believe in non-aggression, but we might force you to act as if you did.
Right.
That's what I want.
Seems easy enough, you know.
And as Ron Paul keeps saying, liberty works.
So might as well go with that because it's right and functional.
All right.
Well, listen, I've already kept you way over time and through the top of the hour break and all these things.
And I know you've got a busy life and you have a bunch of great articles about cops to write.
And so I will let you go.
And thank you very much for your time on the show again, as always, Will.
Thank you, Scott.
It's always a blessing.
Everybody, that is the great William Norman Grigg.
He writes the blog Pro Libertate at freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
And the piece in question here is also running at Lou Rockwell dot com.
His latest piece, the everyday evil of America's torture state.
Oh, you know, one thing we didn't talk about, which we could have is the rapid reaction teams, you know, when the prisoner gets out of line in his cell and you have basically like riot police rush him.
This is how they torture people.
The torture people loophole down in Guantanamo.
It's also practiced in county jails and state prisons and federal prisons all across this land every day.
But you already knew that, right?
You watch MSNBC on the weekend.
