04/21/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, X-Key Score, Boundless Informant.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for offnow.org.
Now here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again, there's no way to be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy, but the offnow project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it, there's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place, in state after state.
I've lost count, more than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
Hey, I'm Scott.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Welcome back to it.
Our next guest is our good friend, Will Grigg.
His blog is called Pro Libertate.
That's freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing well.
Thanks so much for having me on again.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, you've been down to Nevada and back to check up on this Bundy Ranch situation, am I right?
That's correct.
All right, well, so will you first please tell me everything you know about it, and then everything you think about it.
What I know is that you've got the most recent installment of what's been an ongoing serial there in Nevada over the last 25 or so years, where the federal government has arbitrarily changed the conditions on which people can have access to the 80 or 84 percent of the land that the federal government unconstitutionally claims title to.
This has affected ranchers and miners and loggers, and this is something I find really interesting and shamefully undercovered, the remnant of the Shoshone Indians in the state of Nevada from whom that land was taken back in the middle of the 19th century.
Clive and Bundy is the last of what had been 53 ranchers in that area of Clark County, Nevada.
Fifty-two of them have been driven into exile or extinction or into another line of work or just onto the welfare rolls over the last 21 years.
This all began back in 1993 when, under Bruce Babbitt, the Department of the Interior decided to make it onerous in terms of the regulatory environment and cost prohibitive in some instances with respect to grazing fees and other impositions for people to be ranchers.
They wanted to drive ranchers off the property there in Nevada, off the so-called federal property, as well as in Texas and Arizona and in New Mexico and elsewhere.
And you have the ongoing artificial extinction of the ranching industry, in large measure driven by environmental concerns that I find to be completely spurious.
It's been known for about a quarter of a century that the much-heralded desert tortoise, which is the species supposedly threatened by the presence of grazing animals in that range in Clark County, actually thrive when they are exposed to cattle.
There's a symbiotic relationship between them because, as it turns out, their preferred feed, the tortoise, is the fecal residue of bovine herds.
They're coprophagic.
They cannot eat the vegetation unless it's previously been digested past the digestive tract of a cow.
And so beginning about a century ago, there was a boom in the desert tortoise population after the federal government moved grazing into that area in order to grow beef for the military.
Yes, this is another long story, sort of resonance, if you will, of the warfare state almost exactly a century ago.
You had this boom begin when the federal government created an incentive for ranchers to start grazing cattle in Clark County, Nevada.
And so the tortoise moved in.
There was a population explosion.
And starting in about 1934, there were concerns over the possibility that somehow the tortoise might be driven into extinction if the cattle were allowed to flourish.
In fact, the opposite was the case.
So they started to move cattle grazing out of Clark County in 1934 that had predictable consequences.
The tortoise migrated to someplace where food was more abundant.
That, in turn, led the regulatory bodies to say we have to take greater and more invasive measures to protect this endangered tortoise.
The reptile, of course, was being driven out of Clark County by federal policy.
And by 1990, it had become settled policy, albeit very shoddy science, that in order for the tortoise to thrive, you had to remove the cattle from the range.
And so the tortoise has been suffering because the cattle have been removed.
But it's all a pretext.
This is not about protecting a desert tortoise.
This is about controlling the land and turning it over to politically profitable use on the part of politically favored constituencies and corporate groups.
That's what's happened with the Shoshone, obviously, and that's what's happened with other people in the western United States and extraction industries.
Cliven Bundy has never said that the land in question that he uses to graze his cattle is his.
He's very insistent on that point.
He calls them public lands, but he insists that the federal government is usurping the role of the county government and the state government in the management of those lands.
And in constitutional terms, his position is unassailable, because if you take a look at the Enclave Clause of the United States Constitution, I think it's Article I, Section 8, Clause 17, there are specific functions for which the federal government can use federal lands, very limited functions and very limited allotments of lands that they have to purchase from the states.
If you take a look at the Enabling Act of the Nevada statehood measure, the Enabling Act within the measure that made Nevada a state, I believe it's Section 36, forgive me, Chapter 36, Section 10, it talks about the fact that there was to be a very limited use by the federal government for military installations and other purposes in the lands that were within the former territory that became a state called Nevada.
And once those needs had been fulfilled, then the federal government was supposed to sell off the remaining lands.
It was never envisioned that they would own 80 or 84 percent of Nevada and turn it into a veritable colony.
Now, there's some controversy as to a provision within the Nevada state constitution in which the state supposedly forever foreswore any claim upon those lands.
I don't think that that's a sound analysis in terms of what the state government is supposed to do or how the federal government is supposed to manage those lands.
I believe that where there's a clear statement that the federal government cannot own those lands, that the federal government cannot claim through usurpation on its part or abdication on the part of state officials, it cannot claim that to which it is not legally entitled, and that's the position of Clive and Bundy and a number of other people in the state of Nevada.
There's a movement there called the Movement for Full Statehood, which recognizes that right now Nevada is a colony of Washington, and that's an impermissible state of affairs.
It's supposed to be a small-arm Republican government.
You can't really be a Republican government if you're a colony.
I believe that all the states have been rendered colonies anyway because of what the federal government's been doing since, take your pick, 1865, 1877, 1913, 1914, or so forth.
But there's still this residue of small-arm Republican belief in the state of Nevada, and Clive and Bundy and his family pretty much embody that.
And that's one of the reasons why they've not been paying grazing fees to the federal government, although they're perfectly willing to pay fees to the county or to the state government, which they believe would be the appropriate entity to receive them.
They're not going to pay fees to a usurping landlord.
That's the expression that Ammon Bundy shared with me when I interviewed him a little less than a week ago.
So you've got a Western, if you will.
The plot of every bad Western involves a prohibitively stronger bully that's working with hired thugs and corrupt law enforcement officials to drive the embattled little guy off the land.
And this has been a script which has played out many, many times over the last quarter of a century.
And Clive and Bundy remains the last intransigent holdout there in the state of Nevada.
He's not the first or the only to have had his cattle stolen by the BLM.
In 1991, you saw ranchers Ben Colvin and Jack Vocht have their herds stolen by the BLM and then turned over, this is an interesting part of the story, to the management of ranchers who were willing to play ball with the BLM.
Last year, Wayne Hage, who had had a longstanding confrontation with the U.S. Forest Service and the BLM, actually won a federal ruling handed down by a federal judge saying that those agencies had been involved in a criminal conspiracy to drive him off his land.
That's in the black letter text of that, I think it's a 115-page ruling, that was handed down almost exactly a year ago.
I think it was May of 2013.
And one of the other stories here that I'm working on right now involves a very tiny ranch that had been operated by a family of Western Shoshone, the Dan family, Carrie, Mary, and Clifford.
Unfortunately, Mary, I believe, is no longer among the living.
She would have been in her 90s now.
Carrie is 80 or 82.
Clifford is about that same age.
They had the BLM show up with paramilitary troops in 1998 to steal their horses and cattle in order to collect on what they were calling a $3 million debt, grazing fees that these people refused to pay because they have an ancestral claim on the land that goes back well before the European-American settlement of the area that became known as Nevada.
And their land claims were extinguished by the federal government through an entity called the Indian Claims Court, which went out of business a number of years ago, probably 10, 15, 20 years ago.
And its sole purpose was to justify the land grab.
Their logic was that yes, although the Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863 guaranteed the Shoshone that they would never have to relinquish their land, that there would be limited land set aside for federal uses, and otherwise the Shoshone Indians would retain property and claim uncontested claims of the land, in spite of the fact that this was all made in solemn promises, in ratified treaties, that by virtue of the fact that you had your American settlers come in and take their land, they simply lost control of their land.
They couldn't keep it, and because a stronger entity, backed by the mind of the federal government, laid claim to that territory, their claim is no longer valid, in spite of the fact that it was made in irrevocable terms in this duly ratified treaty that the Shoshone entered into in good faith.
And so to extinguish those claims, our good friend Senator Harry Reid actually proposed a measure that would take the $26 million that the U.S. government paid itself to buy these lands of the Shoshone.
That's an important part of the story.
Nobody in the Shoshone nation wanted to accept payment because they didn't recognize the validity of that transaction.
So it was turned over to the Department of the Interior, headed by that same Bruce Babbitt, and that was back in the 1990s when there was all this controversy about embezzlement and misappropriation of funds in the Indian trust system within the Bureau of the Interior.
The U.S. government paid itself $26 million, and Harry Reid said let's pay each surviving Shoshone $20,000 and call it quits.
That will extinguish their land claims.
That measure I don't think was ever passed, ever ratified by the Senate.
But it really underscores the perfidy and the incorrigible dishonesty of the federal government in all these dealings having to do with the land in Nevada.
They don't believe that anybody other than the federal government and its preferred constituents should have access to these lands.
They'll use any means, whether you're talking about misrepresentation or dishonest representation in treaty negotiations or arbitrary changes to regulatory guidelines or brute force in order to exercise control of these lands.
And anybody who stands to thwart those designs is designated a terrorist.
I mentioned Mr. Man, Clifford, or if we can be Clifford Dan, who was the Shoshone brother to these two sisters who had last holdouts in the West of Shoshone.
He was actually arrested and thrown in prison in 1992 because he had doused himself with gasoline and tried to set himself on fire in an attempt to protect his property against the predations of the BLM.
This was called an act of terrorism for threatening to kill himself.
He was sent to prison as a terrorist.
And so when you hear people like the execrable Harry Reid talking about Clive and Bunny and his family and their supporters as domestic terrorists, that's the context in which we have to view this.
Simply trying to defend land that you and your family, your ancestors, have used peacefully and productively for decades denotes you as a terrorist in the mind such as it is of Harry Reid.
All right, now, there's lots of follow-up on there, but first of all, let's talk about that.
Because I believe, well, isn't it the case that terrorism has an actual definition?
I mean, I know Greenwald says that it's the term with no definition at all.
But I say, nuh-uh, man, there really is a definition for terrorism, right?
No?
Yeah.
It's the threat and use of violence in order to affect political change through the intimidation of a targeted population.
Usually policymakers, but not always.
I guess if you're a senator, then any resistance to the state amounts to, because the state is we, the people, after all.
And resistance is aggression, for sure.
So I can see where he's coming from.
All you've got to do is a couple of definitions of is, is, kind of loops around and you win.
Exactly.
There's some bizarre set of polylogic-type applications of language here that are used by people of that sort in order to find defense of your property as aggression against the designs of those who covet it.
And this is an old story to American Indians.
When I was at Bunkerville, I ran into a fellow by the name of Red Bear.
And I think I mentioned him in the most recent essay I published about this.
And he is an Apache.
He came down from St. George.
And I think he might object to this, but I'm going to share this little piece of news anyway.
He was not the only one.
There were many people associated with Indian rights activism who came down in support of Clive and Bundy because they recognized that this is the same story.
And they're willing to transcend the admittedly awful history of inter-ethnic violence and opportunism.
And of course, in this respect, the Euro-American settlers are by far the guiltier party in history.
They're willing to transcend that in defense of the principle here, which is that we have a common enemy.
And that enemy is the corporatist government in Washington, D.C., that invariably speaks lies and deception and is willing to use any means, up to and including mass slaughter of innocents, in order to steal land from people who have made productive use of it and who have clear title to it, or in this case, the case of Clive and Bundy, who have established grazing rights and other rights that attach to that property as the result of prescriptive use of that property for decades.
And yet, the federal government whimsically changes the rules.
It's a little like Darth Vader from Star Wars.
I've altered the bargain.
Pray I don't alter it further.
And we have just one duty, and that is to submit to disappear, if that's the fate that they've decreed for us.
It's happened to countless Indian bands and communities throughout the western United States.
And now you've got one rancher remaining in Clark County, Nevada, who's basically making the same kind of a stand that the Shoshone Indians, the Dan family in the northern-western part of the state have made.
And they've been treated horribly.
This family, Carrie and Mary Dan, and I believe Carrie is the last survivor, they've never had electricity or running water.
They've lived in a state of grinding poverty.
If you've ever studied the way that American Indians have been consigned to live in this country, this really is, in many instances, a standard of living which is the worst in the western hemisphere.
It's worse in some ways than that of Haiti.
And these are people who are targeted by the same BLM for the same reasons.
You have the same language being used against these Shoshone Indians that's been used against Clive and Bundy.
The left has somewhat rallied to the cause of the Dans on the assumption that it's always a question of who does what to whom.
They want to look at the Shoshone as a who rather than a whom because they're among officially recognized victim groups.
Well, that's all well and good.
They have a legitimate claim here to being persecuted and being expropriated unjustly.
But you should set aside these stupid ethnic categories.
Just take a look at what is being done here.
When you subscribe to the Leninist formula of who does what to whom, the what doesn't matter.
Well, people who are morally sound understand that the what is all that matters.
And the what is aggression here.
The what is aggression against the Dan family and against the Bundy family.
It doesn't matter what their identities are.
The only thing that matters is what is being done here and how you can justify what is being done.
And to advert to your point again here, Scott, about the definition of terrorism, people like Harry Reid and his ilk assumed that only terrorists would be defying the accumulated might of the federal government.
And what happened on April 12th there at Bunkerville was an act of peaceful defiance, albeit peaceful defiance supplemented with the willingness and the means to use defensive force in protection of person and property.
And they thwarted the ambition of the regulators there in Clark County, the federal mercenaries and the BLM and the Metro Police in Las Vegas, which is a death squad.
The Las Vegas Police Department is a death squad by any definition.
And Sheriff Gillespie is somebody who spent many, many years covering up for police murders in Las Vegas.
They were there on the site.
And so these people were sitting there, the accumulated representatives of the federal government willing to kill in order to seize this property.
And this property in this instance referred to the cab of them and confiscated from the Bundys as part of an objective to drive them.
The objective was to drive them off the land.
And you had hundreds of American citizens gather and defy the accumulated might of the federal government.
And now as a result, you've got the federal government's coercive apparatus with a huge and unbearable case of blue balls.
And they're going to wait probably three or four months until publicity has died down and until people are distracted by other issues, most likely some kind of a conflict involving Ukraine the way things look right now.
And then they are going to do what they had planned to do anyway, which is to use some kind of prohibitive overwhelming force against the Bundys in order to take Cliven into custody and to consummate their desire to seize his cattle and to drive him off that property.
He's already said on the record when I was there that if the sheriff shows up with a warrant for his arrest signed by a county judge, that he will submit peacefully to arrest.
And I talked with the people who are providing private security for him at his home, and they said that if you have deputies show up with a legitimate arrest warrant from a county judge, there will be no problem at all.
If, on the other hand, a SWAT team shows up using the showtime protocol to kick in the door and drag these people out in chains or just to leave their lifeless bodies on the ground, then there's going to be bloodshed, and there's going to be people on the ground there, in and around Bunkerville, many of whom have combat experience, who are going to do what they can in order to get their back.
Well, that's kind of a red herring, and then, I mean, it would be a federal warrant, not a local one.
Well, it shouldn't be a federal warrant.
That's the case he's making.
I mean, the thing is he's always been in contact with Gillespie.
He esteems Gillespie much more highly than I do, and he believes that Gillespie wouldn't act on a federal warrant.
He wouldn't allow a federal warrant to be enforced.
I think the latter is a very dangerous supposition, because I do think that you're going to see federalized action through the metro police here.
Well, so now what about this whole thing about calling out the militia and swearing arm resistance and all that?
Because, you know, I do believe in the right to bear arms because I think individuals have a natural right to defend themselves, and that includes their property to some kind of degree when it comes to, you know, that's got to be figured out.
I'm not sure, not mathematically, but somehow there's a way to figure out what kind of violence is justified in proportion to what kind of aggression and that kind of thing.
And there's grand history around the world and certainly in the United States of America of people using nonviolent resistance to get their way as well.
And it does look to me like, hey, a bunch of guys with guns are what got the Bureau of Land Management to draw back this time, and that might be an important lesson in the Second Amendment for a lot of people.
I'm not saying I'm 1,000 percent against it necessarily, but, I mean, what do you think about that?
Would it not have been better to, or do you think it's all right for him to go this way now rather than suing their ass or whatever it takes, you know, through the legal process?
As long as the courts are open for business, then we're not in a state of war here.
And so does he want to start one, or I don't get it kind of.
He's not interested in starting one of the people who are there to provide.
Let me say one more thing about that.
Randy Weaver, they just set him up, they sent him the wrong court date, and then they showed up at his house and killed his kid.
And he was like, what in the world, right?
The Branch Davidians, blam, they just raided him on a Sunday morning.
They didn't say, oh, yeah, we'll never come out, we'll never submit to your authority in the first place.
They just were completely besieged for no good reason at all, and then were put in that position.
And it seemed like this guy was saying, yeah, I'm putting myself in that position, which is a little bit different to me.
Yeah, there are differences between the Waco and Ruby Ridge situations and what's happened in Bunkerville.
I think that what happened in Bunkerville was a little more like the defiance in 1973 by the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee, where recognizing that they were not going to get redressed through the normal system of law because they were under the rule of Dickie Wilson and his goons, and the courts had been thoroughly corrupted, law enforcement had become incorrigible, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which claimed original jurisdiction here, was indifferent of the murders and other depredations being committed.
They finally seized control of property and held it for months while the FBI and the military threatened to wipe them out.
It was the intervention of some white neighbors on behalf of the AIM that actually prevented the bloodbath from occurring.
They weren't going to kill the AIM, in other words, the white people there who were not hostages, they were actually volunteers.
And so I think that there's something more similar in that respect between the Wounded Knee of 1973 and Bunkerville of 2014.
But I need to point out that Mr. Bundy and his family are not looking to turn this into a shooting match, and the people who have rallied to their side in the militia movement, many of whom have combat experience in the Marines and Special Forces, they don't want it to be a shooting match either.
What they are trying to do is they're trying to arrange some way in which the legitimate power of the county court and the county sheriff would be recognized here as dispositive of this issue.
And that's exactly what the federal government doesn't want.
And I don't think that the county government and the county sheriff there are really much interested in doing what they are required to do anyway, which is to try to de-escalate the situation and to address these property claims in the context of something other than the arbitrary administrative rulings by the federal government and courts that the federal government, of course, has an insurmountable advantage in.
Judge Napolitano has made an interesting point here.
This is a civil affair.
In other words, you've got a civil claim being made by the federal government against the Bundys.
This is something that can be resolved by attaching the property so that it cannot be transmitted or sold without the federal government starting to collect the taxes that the claims are owed to it, the grazing fees and other fees.
So this can be accomplished through administrative means, through court means, without a conspicuous show of force, without in any way disturbing the Bundys there in the use of the land.
And the other reason why they're escalating this right now, I contend, is because of an artificial timeline that began on April 8th of this year when a former crony of Harry Reid was put in charge of the BLM.
And I think that's probably what accelerated the timeline, what accelerated the campaign against the Bundys, what led to this escalation.
It's needless otherwise.
There's no reason on earth why they simply can't wait them out.
And then if they're convinced that they have a claim that's unassailable, they could, through leaves and attachments, actually take the ranch and then use it as a way of disposing of the supposed death of the Bundys owed to the federal government.
That's sort of what they did, by the way, with the Dan family in the western part of the state, the Shoshone family I referred to earlier, is that in exchange for having them surrender their property, they essentially forgave the grazing fees.
These are all rounding errors.
Some of what we're talking about are tremendous and unfathomable when you're talking about people in the productive sector, like the Bundys or the Dans.
But this is a rounding error.
This is pocket change.
This is the sort of stuff you'd find in the upholstery on Capitol Hill $1 million here, $2 million there.
But the principle of the thing is why these people have dug in their heels and become refractory.
They honestly think that if they don't make the stand that they're making right now, that you're going to have an unmistakable, unalloyed relationship of colonialism out there in Nevada.
And then the Reeds and people who are in their residue, and there's been some speculation about overseas interests and the United Arab Emirates and the People's Republic of China trying to buy up some of this territory for energy development.
But they'll see this territory lost forever, and it'll become part of this unalloyed, undifferentiated corporatist system that's going to reign in the southwestern United States, and a way of life will disappear, and you'll have some really interesting compromises being made with respect to our ability to produce food domestically.
This is a beef ranch we're talking about.
If you've seen the price of beef lately, if you've seen what's going on in California with the drought and the fact that people aren't finding areas to graze their beef cattle.
So there are all kinds of larger, secondary and tertiary issues involved in this.
But what it boils down to here, for me, if you put this in a saucepan to boil it down, you've got the same kind of predatory land-grabbing conduct on the part of the federal government that it's engaged in since the middle of the 19th century.
And you have at this one little juncture of the road there in southeastern Nevada a group of people gathered and dug their heels and said, This far, no further.
We're not going to allow this to proceed.
And I think that within the next three months or four months we're going to see some genuine ugliness there because I do not think that the federal regulatory apparatus is going to relent.
Something called Jerry Spence.
Yeah.
I'd like to track him down because I think his services are going to be needed.
Oh, man.
God dang.
All right.
Well, listen.
You know what?
I'm keeping you over a little bit here.
So let me go ahead and ask you real quick, Will.
What's the excuse?
I mean, there's got to be an official one.
I don't mean the truth.
I mean what they say, which is the opposite of the truth most of the time.
What's the excuse for the feds owning the entire West instead of selling it off long ago to, I don't know, paper World War II or something?
The rationale here has changed according to the needs of the people who are operating the federal government and their clients and constituencies in the corporate world.
What happened in the 1860s, the mid-1860s, is that Nevada was illegally made a state in order to have a Republican delegation in the House of Representatives in case the 1864 election was thrown to the House of Representatives.
There were three candidates running at the time, McClellan, Fremont, in addition to Lincoln.
And so one way of looking at this is that Nevada was made a state prematurely in order to prevent the possibility of an actual emancipationist, Fremont, becoming president of the United States, as opposed to the guy from the railroad combine who posed as an emancipationist who was actually a tax collector for the corporate state rather than somebody interested in human freedom.
And so you had these promises being made that the statehood of Nevada would mean that the federal government would repudiate its claim on most of the land.
The same kinds of promises were made to the western Shoshone.
The biggest difference is they wanted to have rail lines and other communications avenues go across Shoshone territory in order to get gold from California out to Washington, D.C., to fund the war against the states.
So Nevada as a state really is sort of the bastard offspring of Lincoln's war.
And as I mentioned, in 1914 they moved cattle grazing into that area so that they could produce beef for our stupid and improvident involvement in World War I.
I think this is seen as a national security issue because if you take a look at the uses to which Nevada has been put, they all involve the development of military assets.
Whether you're talking about what's going on at Groom Lake or you're talking about the fact that the Department of Energy has conducted nuclear tests out in Nevada, not recently, but they have over the last several decades.
Many of those taking place within the very near perimeter of the territory that the Dan family owned.
And then the Bundy Ranch is not that far from military installations, and I think they look at the western United States as sort of a proving ground and a resource hoard for the warfare state.
That's why they're not getting rid of it.
They don't want to get rid of the land or sell it off to pay down the national debt because it's too valuable of an asset for this self-licking ice cream cone that is the military industrial complex.
I think that has a lot to do with it.
And I think as well, if you take a look at some of the other states, here in the state of Idaho we've got most of the land claimed by the federal government.
I think that they're looking at this as the type of concessionary resource base that they can carve up at their leisure in order to reward certain constituencies and pals, whether you're talking about here or overseas, transnational corporations and such like.
I think it's simply too profitable to keep us on a colony rather than to allow full statehood.
And as I said before, I really think that the idea that the United States is a confederation of constitutional republics is a fiction.
It's been a fiction for a number of decades now.
But there are certain restive people out here in the Intermountain West, particularly in places like Nevada and New Mexico, who take at face value what they've been told in their civics classes.
The Bundys walk around with pocket constitutions everywhere, and they can recite chapter and verse from not only the U.S. Constitution and enabling after statehood, but all these other relevant documents as well.
And so they have the law on their side for the most part.
There are some questions and controversies about the Nevada State constitutional provisions and how they apply here.
But power doesn't listen to principle.
When they're in a position to force their will on people, they will force their will on people.
And that's what's happening here in Nevada.
And this is the sort of thing that could become sort of an underground coal fire, if you will.
There was a meeting in Salt Lake City of western state legislators talking about, once again, challenging federal ownership or claim to ownership of more than 50% of the acreage of the western United States.
And from time to time, this has become sort of a flashpoint here.
And I think that's another reason why Harry Reid and his allies want to stop, extinguish this little spark that's been lit by Cliven Bundy and his friends in Bunkerville very quickly.
Because in a drought, one spark can start a wildfire.
When you have a drought here in terms of constitutionalism, one little spark in Bunkerville can ignite a bonfire for liberty here, a range fire of liberty.
So I suspect that they're going to get out here and douse this down very quickly as soon as they can.
And I really don't look forward to it.
I've seen these people and taken the measure of them to the extent that I could.
And whether you think their claims are legitimate, whether you think their claims are well-reasoned, these are not cynical people and they're not posers.
They're people who are genuinely convinced that they have a constitutional principle on their side.
And they're not going to yield.
And unyielding people are always dangerous from the perspective of those who manage empires.
All right, Will.
Thank you very much for your time on the show.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Will Grigg.
His blog is ProLibertate.
It's no ordinary blog.
You go and bookmark that one and keep it and look close.
ProLibertate.
It's at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And the book is Liberty in Eclipse.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest, at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
The military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
The military industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
A story to read this book, The War State, by Michael Swanson.
America's always gone to war a lot, though in older times it would disarm for a bit between each one.
But in World War II, the U.S. built a military and intelligence apparatus so large it ended up reducing the former constitutional government to an almost ceremonial role and converting our economy into an engine of destruction.
In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important firsthand source material, but writing for you and me.
Find out how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all alternately empowered and fought to control this imperial beast and how the USA has gotten to where it is today.
Corrupt, bankrupt, soaked in blood, despised by the world.
The War State, by Michael Swanson.
Available at Amazon.com and at Audible.com.
Or just click the logo in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
We should take nothing for granted.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for Braswell Business Communications Services at Fusepowder.com.
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Fusepowder.com.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Edited by libertarian purist Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom brings you the best of our movement.
Featuring articles by Richman, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard, and many more, The Future of Freedom stands for peace and liberty and against our criminal world empire and Leviathan State.
Subscribe today.
It's just $25 per year for the back-pocket-sized print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's The Future of Freedom at fff.org.
Subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
The Future of Freedom