All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Matt Agarest.
That's how you pronounce that, right?
From the Free Thought Project, where they keep tabs on the cops for us every single day.
And you got to sign up for the afternoon email list if you want to understand why I'm so cranky all the time.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on, man.
Yeah, dude.
So first things first here, business.
You got a new account over at Substack, where you're publishing these articles there, too.
Is that correct?
Yeah, man.
You're the first person I've talked to, like personally, that's getting it.
It's not too much, is it?
We're sending them out a few days, you know, like not every day or anything.
I can take it, man.
Come on with it.
Okay.
Awesome.
Awesome.
So, yeah, that's important and a great way for people to support and a bit of like kind of a social media for articles, sort of a gig going on over there at Substack and people can help support.
And this is really especially important for you guys, because when it comes to all of this de-platforming and censorship and algorithm persecution and all the rest of this stuff, you have been leading the way as a victim.
Why don't you tell us a little bit of the history of that?
We are, man.
When it comes to censorship and social media, we're at the forefront of it.
We were, you know, we watched years of hard work get wiped away in 2018, you know, six million plus followers just unceremoniously purged from Twitter, Facebook and even a little bit on YouTube.
And, you know, we've been fighting that ever since.
If you look at our pages on some of these places, like some of the social media networks on Twitter and Facebook, we have addendums like a 2.0, 3.0.
I think we're at a free thought project 4.0 and police to police 3.0.
So that tells you how many times we have been wiped off the face of the Internet by these people.
But we're not letting up, man.
We keep fighting a good fight.
Yeah.
Well, you sure are.
And no question about that.
So, yeah, it's really important for people to, you know, because part of this, too, is Google deranking.
Yeah, this has happened to antiwar.com and a lot of left wing sites as well.
In fact, the World Socialist website, a small Trotskyite group who I respect and they do really good journalism a lot of the time.
They do.
And they were persecuted along with us.
And they did really good journalism on this and had really followed up and got denials from, you know, the companies and this kind of thing.
But then when they were, I forgot if it was Google or Facebook, I think it was Google testifying before the Senate and the right wingers are saying, you're unfairly persecuting the conservatives.
They say, no, no, see, we went after the World Socialist website and we went after a couple of those others.
I think it was referring to, get this, Truthout and Truthdig, who are each one hundredth of a, what's a hundredth of a millimeter called?
That's how far they are to the left of The Nation magazine over there at Truthout and well, Truthdig is gone now.
And then, of course, antiwar.com, I mean, we're just plumb line libertarians, but we're very Catholic in our presentation and run, you know, liberals and conservatives and right wingers and left wingers of all descriptions as long as they've got good antiwar stuff.
But none of it's like what hateful, warmongering, violence inciting level of dissent or anything like along those lines that you could say is illegitimate.
But they use us to prove that they're balanced when they're going after somebody else.
And then they even phrase it that way.
Because what excuse they have for going after these Trotskyites, for example, at the World Socialist website.
They never did anything to anybody.
And in fact, if you read their stuff, I mean, other than their commitment to communism when they write about communism.
But if you just read their journalism about issues in the world, it's all extremely professional and reasonable stuff, regardless of whether you agree with their points of view on things or whatever.
There's nothing, they're not Antifa out there saying burn your city down or whatever.
Not that that would even be illegal under the First Amendment anyway, but still.
Yeah, exactly.
Man, still these people haven't learned their lesson.
You still have them cheering this on.
Even though since the whole Alex Jones scene where the left largely celebrated the fact that he was removed from social media.
Even after that, when we were purged, there was a bunch of leftist sites purged from Facebook as well.
And Mother Jones was part of that group that praised all this mass censorship and purging back in 2018.
And it ended up coming back in 2020, Mother Jones falls victim to it.
And that's, I mean, this is what happens.
It's a pendulum.
If you'd support censorship in any way and push it in one direction, I swear it's going to come back every single time and knock you in your ass.
That's what all these people are learning, you know?
You know, it really sucks too, because we have this kind of spiral of government persecution in power where one side does something unfair to the other, and then the party in power switches, right?
Like using FBI files against each other, whatever it is, instead of saying, they were bad guys for doing that, so we're not going to do it.
Instead, they just do it back to them, and that kind of thing.
But persecuting people, preventing them from speaking, even, and it's not necessarily just a First Amendment issue, as the cliche goes, these are private companies.
No one forced us all onto one big tweet reservation together, or whatever.
It's not exactly censorship, but it sort of, kind of is.
It's absolutely against what had always been, you know, if there's such a thing as a social contract, we all agree with that Voltaire thing, that I disagree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it.
That's what it means to be an American, if it's anything beyond just living between Canada and Mexico, right?
It's that we respect each other's right to choose what church we want to go to or not, or to say what we want, to write what we want, to, you know, have a fair trial if we're accused of something.
These basic things, and we're willing now to give up that over the thrill of exercising a little bit of censorship over the other guy?
And of course, it means that the powerful censor the weaker, right?
Whether they're left or right.
Any regular people cheering on power and doing this to the other side are just absolutely shooting themselves in the stomach, you know?
Yeah, man, and it's so hypocritical.
You have the same people that were trying to force, you know, companies in different states to bake cakes against their religious beliefs, right?
And these are private companies who can freely associate with whomever they'd like.
And so you have a lot of these people that were trying to force these companies to bake the cakes that are now cheering on a censorship, claiming that, like you just did, that Facebook's a private company.
And then they turn around and go, well, you're the one who said that you don't have to bake the cake and the thing, right?
So they're right, the left and the right are correct about what hypocrites each other are and what lack of principle each other hold.
But so, I mean, okay, great, point made.
But now the next point is, can we say freedom of speech, please?
Can we neutralize the internet and not have all this Silicon Valley telling us who we're allowed to get as Google results and who we're allowed to share on Facebook?
It's funny you should mention that, man.
I put out a piece today, actually, about Facebook, is it truly private?
And I go into depth in there about how they're actually, you know, the censorship arm of Facebook, which is the Atlantic Council, you know, the NATO whitewashing agency that tries to, you know, it paints Russia in a negative light and justifies NATO and all this.
The Atlantic Council is actually funded by the U.S. government in part by the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, several different little factions of the U.S. government.
So the fact that Facebook is partnered with a quasi-government think tank that's actually making decisions for them, kind of, it actually, it de facto makes them a non-private entity.
But, you know, it makes them an arm of the government by, because they are associated with a government-funded agency, who's making these decisions on who to censor.
And so it's not entirely private, you know, especially since they're handing over all of our information like these, you know, that we just saw yesterday, Facebook started handing over Trump supporters private messages to the FBI.
A private company doesn't do that.
You know, we had the San Bernardino shooter that he was, he had an Apple iPhone back in 2016, I guess, when, you know, when he shot up the place and Apple was, respected privacy so much that they refused to give the FBI a backdoor into that iPhone.
Now we've come full circle to where the Facebook has essentially merged with the federal government to where it's just a, it's an apparatus that collects data and hands it freely over to them, regardless of warrants or anything that, you know, anything related to any kind of due process.
Right.
I'll never forget that so much of these inroads were made in the name of stupid, fake lie about Russia and all of their intervention in the 2016 election that never happened.
And oh no, the Russian fake news, the Russian misinformation and disinformation.
Now we need these fact checkers.
Now we've got to change the algorithms.
Now we've got to protect the people because it's the attack from our violent foe.
I mean, every bit of it was a lie.
None of it ever happy.
Entire thing was just a frame up job by the FBI and the CIA against a major party candidate for president of the United States.
And here we are.
And as Glenn Greenwald points out, every moment of every day, cheered on all along by center left liberal Democrat journalists saying, yeah, outlaw everybody who tries to write stuff in competition with me.
The blue check mark Nazis, man, they are.
It's a crazy gang that wants to silence everybody but them so they can completely control the narrative.
Yeah.
Seriously.
And yeah.
And they'll be the only ones left talking.
Right.
Because now the entire right are white supremacists, Nazi, racist insurrectionists, right?
Rush Limbaugh and the the hundred and forty five million, you know, million Americans on the right hundred and whatever million Americans on the right side.
Every single one of them is illegitimate.
And anyone to the left of the Democratic Party are all absolutely up for repression and, you know, lumping in with the worst thing Antifa ever did and whatever and persecuting them to.
And so we're going to have Nancy Pelosi's point of view allowed only.
Yeah.
You know, the center left saying gender and in the house.
Right.
Oh, my God.
It's a bizarro world, man.
I mean, that's the stuff that's happening is just that it just keeps getting crazier and crazier.
I don't know where this is going to end and stop, but it doesn't look good.
You know, here's a Segway Antifa ain't going away.
People were asking me before the election about how are the different sides going to react if their guy loses and this and that kind of thing.
And one of my things was the Antifa leftist types.
They don't give a damn for Joe Biden.
If Donald Trump wins or if Joe Biden wins, isn't going to make a bit of difference to them.
I think that Biden is even worse.
But that's not an argument from their point of view.
That doesn't help Biden at all.
And of course, they attack Democratic Party headquarters in Oregon.
I got to smash some windows or whatever with that big deal.
But in Portland, I think it was last night or the night before.
So there's going to be a bit of that.
But here's the thing is the cops are going to keep killing Americans every single day.
And as you document every single day at the Free Thought Project, black people and white people too.
But the white people don't have the kind of activism about their white victims being killed by cops compared to what black people have going now.
So good for them.
We should be so organized and with them.
But in any case, the cops, they murdered Patrick Warren Sr.
The other day.
We're going to talk about that.
But they're going to murder another black guy today and tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that.
And some of these are going to go viral and all the Internet persecution in the world.
If people have to just text them to each other over, you know, phone tree networks or whatever, you can't stop the signal.
These stories are going to get out.
And these absolute outrages like what happened to Mr. Warren here are going to continue.
And the reactions against that are going to continue.
And so that is going to be the pretext for worse and worse clampdowns on the left and then on libertarians, especially like yourself, who are covering things like this to that.
You know what, Matt, you're inciting violence by helping make people so mad at cops that they might violently resist or something, you know, and and that's already the line that they're going.
They're already trying to stretch the word incite to mean, geez, I don't know, somebody reacted to a thing that he said and did something.
And so now it's the guy who spokes for when, you know, by by law, by a Supreme Court decision that had been always defined much more narrowly as imminent violent action, as in as Greenwald pointed this out the other day, that in other words, if you're leading a mob and you're outside of the guy's house and you go, come on, boys, burn it down and they do it, OK, that's not protected speech.
That's or that's, you know, hiring a hit man or at some point that's not protected when it's an imminent threat of of violence.
But they're already stretching that in the case of Donald Trump's stupid speech and actions on January 6th, and they're going to apply that to right wing, the left wing and libertarian activists of all kinds, too.
And they're already, you know, wearing it on their sleeve that this is what we have in mind for you.
Yeah.
Reason did a good breakdown on Trump's speech that, you know, how none of it was actually illegal.
None of it incited violence.
I mean, you know, they cited Supreme Court precedent that actually negated everything that the government and Twitter and Facebook all used to try to silence them.
But yeah, man, this is going to ultimately come back and it's going to be used against people like us who who never, you know, never incite any type of hatred or anything.
You know, we just report and try to hold police accountable for their actions that, you know, the mainstream media won't do that.
We were talking about that yesterday.
We had a we had a First Amendment auditor on our podcast yesterday, and we were talking about how selective the media is when it reports on these stories.
We were talking about how George Floyd was, you know, was tragic.
You know, George Floyd died.
But I mean, five people were killed the same day that George Floyd were killed, that George Floyd was killed.
You know, five people that same day were killed by police.
Right.
And none of them made a blip in the media.
You know, and then we had we had Elijah McClain killed, you know, who had never broken a law, who was not.
And, you know, the police weren't what he wasn't wanted or anything.
He was completely innocent and just walking home from buying some sodas at a gas station when he was tackled by police, held down on the ground, choked out and then forcibly injected with ketamine until he died.
And that happened in August of twenty nineteen.
And, you know, the people didn't even know about it until after, you know, after George Floyd happened.
Yeah.
So it's kind of crazy that how like the selective on that was just an atrocity.
And that was the worst.
You know, I don't know.
At least you could pretend that, jeez, George Floyd like flexed his arm muscle and tried to was trying to resist getting in the back of the police car.
But Elijah McCain McClain, he might as well have been an 11 year old boy for all the resistance he put up to them.
Seriously.
Seriously.
That's how it is.
And so like that's it's already selective reporting.
And when they silence voices like ours with this criminalizing political speech that they think that could incite violence, I mean, someone could come read our articles and and they could get mad, they could go out and act on it, you know, but that's not us inciting them.
That's their that's their choice.
You know, we try to promote peace regardless between police and the police.
We we have on cops on our podcast.
We interview cops all the time.
We talk solutions to this great divide that's happening.
We want to you know, we want to bridge the gap between police and police.
And that has to happen, you know, like we always talk about that.
It always goes into the drug war and everything, but that's the solutions we push.
But if someone interprets an article that we report on a cop killing somebody and then goes out and acts on it, we're not responsible for that person.
You know, I mean, anybody could trigger can be triggered by any amount of information.
And then the precedent set now, though, is that if it's political speech that the establishment blue check marks disagree with and someone acts on that, then we're criminally liable for it.
So that's a dangerous road to go down.
Yeah.
And the thing is, they can do so much of that just through there, as you put it.
You know, as you're talking about, there are these quasi governmental organizations like Facebook and that kind of thing that it doesn't ever have to necessarily get up to the Supreme Court.
Right.
They just, you know, banish you from the Internet in a way where it's not exactly a federal law that's unconstitutional that has to be overturned.
It's just a bunch of policies and and decisions that that get made that turn it into full censorship in effect in a way that may be very difficult to undo.
Then again, I mean, what the hell?
People are fleeing Twitter and Facebook and doing different things and you can't stop them all.
And you don't need Amazon servers to have a server.
You know, I mean, I don't know.
I kind of know the market is around this, man.
I'm a proponent of the free market, as you know, and there's there's already people there's there's these these crypto companies who are putting the block chain into space that's going to have like this uncensorable free Internet.
You know, I mean, there's there's all kinds of things that are fighting this censorship in the background.
And because I mean, this has been this has been coming for years.
So it's not like it's just been blindsided on us.
You know, I mean, we're not just been blindsided by it.
This is people been prepping and planning for this stuff for a long time.
So I think that we're we're getting there and getting prepared.
There's a massive social media uprising with all these different social media companies coming out.
I mean, there's going to be competition in the social media realm, which is going to be awesome.
This is what needed to happen 10 years ago, you know, when Facebook had its monopoly on this this entire thing.
So and there are negative consequences from that, too, where just every faction has their own version of Twitter and they never talk to each other or understand each other or any kind of thing, you know.
So yeah, yeah.
But anyway, a little circle jerks and yeah, but then again, I mean, something will come out.
Everybody switched to Facebook overnight when that thing hit it big in 2008 or whatever it was.
And so something like that could happen again with something that's that's this much better, you know.
So we'll see.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Listen, we need to talk about some of these examples because, you know, I don't know, man, people I don't know what they know.
But it's important that they that they understand the phenomenon of police abuse, brutality and deadly violence, as you put it, on a daily basis.
And I remember when George Floyd died, you know, oftentimes I crib your articles.
But when I post them on the blog at the Libertarian Institute, I just give it the simple, overly simple headline cop kills man or cop kills woman.
And so George Floyd, that was his headline, cop kills man.
And it was like and if you look at the URL, it's like thirty nine or where, you know, because it just happens over and over and over again.
And no offense to him or anything like that.
I'm not saying that.
But just he's just another one, as you said, five people were murdered by cops that day or at least killed by cops, probably most of them murdered.
And then but this happens constantly.
So if you could, please tell us about the gentleman and Colleen and what happened there and whichever other, you know, very recent examples you'd like to bring up, maybe.
But also help us understand what the hell is going on here, that these cops just blow people away for no reason.
Was it always that way?
And now we have social media or is it the all the judge made immunities that have come just in the last couple of decades?
Is it the war on terror, militarization?
I know it's all of these things, but like, it seems pretty strange that cops just blow people away when they're clearly not criminals.
It's just some guy who, for whatever reason, was acting funny or something.
They shoot him.
You know, the old man calls the sheriff because he thinks someone's breaking into his house and then he meets the sheriff in the driveway and he's holding his gun in his hand point at the ground and the cop goes, drop it, drop it, pop out and kills the old man that called the cops.
I mean, they're it's like they're nuts, man.
Why?
What is going on, man?
Oh, man.
Well, I mean, obviously, police in the United States are trigger happy.
The United States police from coast to coast kills more than the entire world's police departments combined.
You know, then all these other countries, I mean, I'm not talking about like these tyrannical regimes in Africa or, you know, in different third world countries where they're under military dictatorships, where people go around hacking people with machetes and stuff.
I'm not talking about that kind of place.
I'm talking about like in the Western world and even in China, you know, American police kill far more people than everybody else.
And we do so with mentally ill people at a rate fifteen fifteen hundred times higher than like than like if you're mentally ill, you have a fifteen hundred percent chance higher or higher chance of getting killed by police responding to it.
You have you may not even committed a crime, as was the case with Patrick Warren, Sr., who was killed over the weekend by Kyleen police.
He was, you know, his family called.
They called the police department and asked for a mental health expert.
And that guy wasn't available.
So they sent out a different officer, Contreras, I believe his name was.
And this guy had no training whatsoever with and handling people with mental illness.
And, you know, just a few minutes after arriving to this house, right, arriving to the house, he shot Warren dead in his own front yard.
And just to show you like the difference, a little bit of training makes the day before the day before this Contreras guy showed up and killed Warren, the actual the Kyleen police officer who has been trained to handle with like mentally ill, it resolved the incident with zero violence, brought him to the brought Warren to the hospital.
You know, he checked out.
And when he got back home the next day, which is when Contreras showed up and killed him, he had another mental breakdown.
But this time, you know, the guy didn't have the training and he killed him in his front yard.
And they waited about a week to release the body cam video from it.
And I have to admit what Lee Merritt put on the Internet wasn't exactly what happened.
You know, like he put out a little edited video and and kind of stretched the truth as to how Warren was killed.
Who did?
And here comes here comes a guy in police.
Wait, wait, wait.
Who put out the wrong thing?
Where?
Oh, Lee Merritt, the like the high profile police brutality attorney.
He's the one who is representing the family.
And he put the video out last week after it happened from the ring doorbell camera that they had and from the cell phone video.
And he he said that that the cop pointed the gun at the woman and at the family.
And that just didn't happen.
But what is true is that that the cop did not need to kill Warren.
You know, the after Lee Merritt put out his edited video with his kind of untrue narrative.
Here comes the Kylian police department and they put out their heavily edited and propagandized video that attempted to justify like every step of the way, like what this officer was doing.
And they had the audacity that after after Contreras shot Warren three times, the narrative in the video, it says, yes, and here we have Contreras try to help Warren as he's on the ground by yelling at him to turn over, you know, and it goes back to the cop yelling at a man who's got three bullets or two bullets in him.
Turn over, turn over.
And they called that help, you know, air quotes.
Are you kidding me?
Like this guy, Warren was clearly in a deranged mental state.
He was growling and he had his hands up in the air.
But all this this.
But he hadn't committed a crime.
Right.
So all this cop had to do was just back up, get in his car and drive away.
You know, like he wasn't threatening the family.
The family was asking him to get brought to the hospital, but they were clearly in no danger as they were.
He was in the house with them.
You know, they weren't like outside saying that he's in the house breaking stuff.
You know, that's that's just not was that that wasn't the case.
And you can see in the video, too, that like, OK, let's say that this cop has a disability where he just can't walk backwards.
OK, so slug him then.
Why you got to put a bunch of bullets through his chest?
You can't even just try to punch him first.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, he resorted like he pulled the tape.
Warren pulled the taser prongs out and the next step was to kill him.
The guy didn't have a hatchet or anything.
Right.
He just cut his hands.
Yeah.
And his whole family's right there.
They would have gotten you know, they would have probably intervened and pulled them off of him.
I mean, yeah, it was it was completely unnecessary killing, man.
It's the I mean, there's there's a thousand of those cases on the Free Thought Project of just that same incident unfolding time and time again, even with children.
And I mean, it's just it's depressing, dude.
The same week.
I don't know if it was this this week, but maybe it may have been last week and across the country in San Bernardino, there was a 91 year old woman who called police.
She thought somebody was breaking into her house.
And when cops showed up at her house, they they they dumped like 13 rounds into her.
She's blind and deaf and 91 years old.
And the cops who showed up, it was on January 9th.
So that was last week.
But yeah, they showed up to her house.
She had a gun because she thought that she was you know, she thought that she was being robbed.
And and so when police showed up, I guess being that she's blind and deaf, she didn't immediately respond to their commands to drop the gun or she might have thought that they were the criminals.
You know, they didn't handle the situation properly enough to identify themselves clearly to a disabled 91 year old woman.
So their next option, instead of just hiding behind their car and trying to talk to the woman who's clearly no threat.
She's a frail, elderly white woman.
You know, that's like the the antithesis of what police usually kill.
But nevertheless, they who couldn't hit them, right?
Even at 13.
Yeah, she would have missed at point blank range anyway.
Right.
I mean, exactly.
And then and they killed her.
They shot her to death.
Yeah.
And it's just like the one I was thinking of that, that I was saying it was from Northwest Austin.
Pardon me, Northeast Austin, like in Hutto area a few years ago, where's the old man met the deputy in his driveway.
He's got a pistol in his hand point at the ground.
And he's like, Oh, thank God you're here, deputy.
I think he went that way or something, you know, and the deputy sees a gun in his hand and has an absolute panic attack and just blows him away.
And again, like you're saying, not the typical victim, an old white retired man in his driveway in the suburbs.
But to this cop, oh, my God, he's trying to kill me.
Like where do they find these guys?
How could anybody be such a coward?
Do they train them?
Listen, what you have to do is always be terrified, more terrified than anyone you've ever met.
Anyone you've ever seen being afraid of anything before.
If someone runs a red light, they're trying to kill you.
If somebody has a gun in their hand in the state of Texas, they're trying to kill you and you have to blow them away now.
And by the way, the judge will always let you get away with it no matter what.
So go ahead.
That's exactly it, man.
Man, this this this cop, he's a friend of ours, Alex Salazar.
He was in.
He's an ex cop now.
But he was in the LAPD's like drug and gang unit for over a decade.
And I mean, that's what that's essentially how they were trained.
Everybody was trained that everyone is a threat.
You know, you always always get ready to use deadly force, even even like we haven't looked at like analyze videos together where like they're training videos where targets pop up constantly from all different sides, you know, so like they're they're trained to be fearful of everything, you know.
And it's and so that's why there's I guess there's that's one of the reasons why they're so apt to to jump to deadly force immediately, especially, you know, 91 year old women.
Right.
It's funny, you know, when they first started dressing up the SWAT team guys and really militarizing all the SWAT teams and stuff in the 90s, I remember thinking, well, they must be kind of smirking to each other.
Like, look at us wearing all this gear and ski masks and helmets and MP5, you know, submachine guns and all of these things.
But like we're in Austin, Texas, where the meanest criminal, a big, tough cop could take out with a good right hook.
Right.
Like there's nothing here to fight.
There are no enemies here to fight in Austin, Texas.
This is the Shire, for God's sake.
And look, you know what?
There's some really rough parts of Houston.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about Austin.
There are no really rough parts of Austin, OK?
And I used to think that, like, they kind of know that this is a joke, but they're getting their money and whatever.
But really, that ain't right.
It is.
It's just like in social psychology class.
Attitude follows behavior.
If the people of Austin aren't my enemy, how come I'm dressed up like a special operations soldier?
How come I'm a paramilitary?
If we don't need paramilitaries, clearly we need them.
And if someone has a warrant, the way you handle that is you send the paramilitaries.
And then just the idea of Hunter and what was his partner's name knocking on the door and saying, there's a warrant for you, come with us, or even to escalate, come out with your hands up.
We have you surrounded.
They never even heard of that.
Those days are long gone with the 20th century.
Now this is what we have paramilitaries for.
And the guys on the team, they have no idea how crazy this is.
That's how they're dressed and that's how they behave.
Because it's not crazy.
That's the way we do things.
And the transition from the way it was to the way it is, it seemed kind of ridiculous at the time, but nobody stopped them.
And now here we are.
Yep.
Now it's the norm.
80,000 raids a year.
Most of it for victimless crimes, for bench warrants, for drug arrests that they didn't show up or for just because some whacked informant high on meth tells the cops to just get them off of his back that they're selling drugs in his house.
Like Dennis Tuttle and Regina Nicholas in Houston, as we were just talking about.
Those people were innocent couple, innocent family, had never been in trouble with the law before.
And some methed out informant told cops, or maybe didn't.
Maybe the cops just lied.
We don't know everything about that case yet, but yeah.
They just went in there and executed this couple with like dozens and dozens around.
And then they shot so much that they shot each other.
And that's just, I mean, dude, that's like the naked gun movies.
You know, back in the day where the cops would just surround the house and dump a million rounds into it.
Like that's the literal representation of it.
That's what they did in Houston.
They just surrounded this house and started shooting and they didn't know who the bullets were coming from.
They were shot their own officers.
And it was all to kill an innocent couple who hadn't done anything wrong.
Just to justify their big gear that you just mentioned, you know, their military gear that they like to wear.
And I mean, dude, that's how I was.
I was in special forces, you know, when I was in the Marine Corps and we got all this cool gear and I just couldn't wait to use it.
You know, I was a loaded gun that they wanted, you know, they could have pointed me at anything and I would have shot it.
And that's the mentality that we're dealing with.
And it's dangerous when that's, that mentality is dangerous, period, in war, wherever.
But when it's being aimed domestically at the, you know, the citizens that they're supposed to be allegedly protecting, that's when you get a situation where police kill 1,100 people a year.
Yeah.
And many of them are unarmed and mentally ill and innocent.
Right.
And, you know, people blame all the left wing professors and all of this stuff.
And it's true.
Like a lot of this woke stuff is completely crazy.
But why overall, why do black people or the black people who believe that white people in America don't care about them and what happens to them?
What's the number one leading reason for that sentiment on their side is that they imagine probably to a great degree that white people in the majority have power, certainly have more power than them.
And yet, for whatever reason, we, quote unquote, haven't made it our business to call off these dogs who primarily pick on the poor, who are disproportionately black and Mexican and other minorities.
Everybody knows that.
That's how it works.
And but the west side of town really can't be bothered, even when it comes to their side of town.
Occasionally, they won't call off these dogs.
And I think this is probably got to be absolutely at the at the core, the number one leading cause by far of racial tension in this country is people being treated very unfairly and feeling somewhat correctly, like other people don't care, you know.
It should have been.
What's funny is it should have been the Black Lives Matter movement.
They're the ones who should have named their movement All Lives Matter in the first place.
Right.
Now we've got this stupid dichotomy and all of this stuff.
But if that had been the name of their thing, All Lives Matter, including ours, then that would have been fine.
You know, might have really gotten somewhere.
Well, I mean, you can't blame them for the tone deaf reception of that message.
No, you're right.
You're right.
You know, you know, it's just yeah, it was just poorly received because a lot of people didn't get it.
And so I was like, wait, why are they saying that when it first, you know, first happened?
Then I understood I had it explained to me.
And, you know, you don't you don't when someone goes in the room and says, you know, like let's help cancer victims.
You don't go in the same room and be like, well, he has Alzheimer's, too.
So why do you hate Alzheimer's people?
You know, like that's not it's not what this is about, man.
It's yeah.
I mean, the flaw in it was it's you know, that the real message was Black Lives Matter, too.
That was the point.
You know, it's like you can just haunt us for sport when you can not either, man.
Right.
But then if you say Black Lives Matter, too, well, that kind of sounds pathetic.
Like you're kind of conceding your weakness or something in a way where you don't want to do that.
So you've got to drop, too.
But now you're right.
It's not their fault.
But it is kind of true that the slogan just didn't test that well.
Right.
Because what other people heard was, oh, you're so special.
Not everybody else.
When that was never the point.
The point was for them to be treated equally like everyone else in, you know, in the first place.
It's not like it ever was fair for blacks in America.
You know what I mean?
This is all still progress we're trying to make here.
But then, as as one very bad person put it, it sounded like what they were saying was this is our problem, not your problem.
It's not your concern.
Or if it is your concern, it's because it's your fault, even if it's not.
Right.
But it's not.
It doesn't have as kind of an underlying subtext.
Join us.
Let's all oppose injustice together because the cops are treating people unfairly no matter who they are.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
And man, a perfect example of that was in 2015 when police killed Jeremy Martis, the six year old little boy about an hour from here, from my house, actually.
He was in the back seat and they were chasing his dad, the constables in the front seat with him.
Yeah.
OK.
They shot him and his dad in the front seat.
And the like the protests for that.
There was like the.
I can't remember his dad's name.
Good Lord.
Anyway, there was a couple of his friends.
But then like the majority of the protesters out there were black people.
Right.
You know, that was like something.
It was a white kid.
But they were out there because that was such a horrific act of police violence that, you know, that they had this big, huge outpouring of support from the black community.
And it just show you like, look, they're not they're they're worried that police are killing people.
They're out here in the streets.
You know, this is clearly not some racist thing, you know, and it was a Black Lives Matter.
People were out there doing this.
Right.
And you've covered on your site recently.
Right.
Haven't you about the Boogaloo Boys and Black Lives Matter putting their fists up together and and standing in solidarity with each other.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Recently this week, as a matter of fact, they had a they had a protest.
And it just shows the the inherent racism about within the policing.
And it might not even be racism, might even be like some difference in political ideologies is why they so like there was a gun, a pro-gun protest in Virginia at the Capitol on Monday.
And where last year there was the same protest, there was like 20,000 people this year.
There was only a few dozen people.
And it was made up from the Boogaloo Boys and the Proud Boys and then some Black Lives Matter folks and some Black Panthers.
And every one of them had guns out there.
And the like the the Proud Boys and the or the maybe it was the Boogaloo Boys and the Black Panthers.
They got together and cheered each other on and stuff.
And when cops showed up, right, they all these people were in a gun free zone.
That was the big protest.
But there was not a single one of the white people at the protest was detained or otherwise even talked to by police.
That the only people police stopped were black people doing the exact same thing as the white people there.
And like so I pointed out that, you know, that's actually that's a literal or it's an observable act of racial profiling.
But then someone else pointed out that it might even be just a political ideology difference.
You know, like they agree more with the Proud Boys, so they're not going to they're going to leave them alone.
Maybe.
And I could also see that, you know, the Black Panthers don't support their cause.
Yeah, you know, I could see that being like some COINTELPRO stuff to go ahead and treat the Black Panthers unfairly right in front of the Boogaloo Boys and just to kind of drive a wedge between them and to let the Black Panthers resent.
Oh, I see.
It's us, but not them, huh?
And then what are the what are the Boogaloo Boys going to do?
Pull their guns on the cops and say, let them go?
No, they're just going to stand there.
It's just a protest.
Really.
The guns are just props.
They're not there to fight.
Right.
So so all this happens.
Oh, jeez.
I guess we're not all on the same side after all.
You know what I mean?
I could see that being right out of a COINTELPRO type playbook.
Yeah, that'd be a brilliant sign off right there.
Yeah.
No, that's exactly what happened.
What you said, like that was the response, you know, like, why are you pulling us over?
There was you know, there's people on video saying that.
Why are you pulling us over?
There's why are you stopping us?
There's everybody's doing this.
So yeah, that's that's whether or not it was intentional.
That's exactly what happened.
Yeah.
But it's just so obvious for for any thinking member of Black Lives Matter or the Boogaloo boys or anybody else that come on, the us and them here is not left versus right and black versus white.
That's stupid.
Doesn't that sound like something some evil genius came up with to use against you?
Right.
Like, how could that be the real division here?
These obvious stupid things when we're all oppressed by the same super state.
Come on.
It's true.
And it still it works.
And it's gotten worse.
Since Trump took power in 2016, man, the level of divide in this country has escalated to levels that I've never seen in my life, man.
And everybody's in their own clique, even it's even, you know, torn apart the libertarian movement.
And it's just it was like the the perfect storm.
Trump, whether or not he was, you know, was he was complicit or this was a plan or not, whatever the end result was, was the same.
And it's because it's everybody at each other's throats.
You know, this this these these algorithms on social media that that thrive on on people arguing and and encourage that because it keeps people engaged on their sites and then lets them drive ad revenue.
All of that, like, just is just came to a head.
You know, luckily it didn't come to where the people on January 6th, luckily they weren't armed, you know, like like, yeah, I don't really consider what they did as a coup.
It was a bunch of goofballs that were with bad intentions and dumb, making poor decisions and thinking that, oh, we're going to go get our leader back in power.
Let's go to Capitol.
I mean, I watched the videos from there.
They were silly anyway.
It could have manifested into something far worse than that on that day.
You know, like those hundred thousand people could have had guns and then then we would see we would be in like a civil war right now, like right now.
We wouldn't be probably on a podcast right now, Scott.
You and I would be like, well, it's a Trump responsibility to figure out.
Yeah.
I mean, he didn't directly incite them as we talked about, you know, go through and parse his words.
He said peaceful.
And I don't think he thought they were going to break into the building, go and fight in American terms means stand out there and chant.
Everybody knows that we don't fight, you know.
So but on the other hand, the fact that he even showed up there that day to continue to insist that it had been stolen from him and the right amount of pressure on Mike Pence could change things and that Mike Pence could overthrow and refuse to accept the state's results in the Electoral College and this kind of thing.
That is criminal, high crimes, misdemeanor sense, not in a direct penal code violation, but in terms of of just his refusal to respect his constitutional role and theirs in the separation of powers.
And in the worst way, a sitting president attempting to refuse to accept his defeat.
And it ain't like he's right that they stole it from him.
That might be a different story, but not really.
Right.
Like at some point, once the Electoral College has voted, the states have sent their electors and this has happened.
It doesn't really matter if they screwed you in November.
The deal is done in December.
You had your chance in court.
You didn't win, et cetera.
At some point he should have given up no matter how bad it hurt him long before even the day before January 6th.
That should have never happened at all.
You know, what a piece of crap Donald Trump is.
They just thought it was a game, man.
They really did.
They thought it was a game.
And then I guarantee you those people that were trying to break through that window in the Capitol, they thought that, you know, they had been let in by all their cop friends.
They knew that they weren't going to face resistance because there's cops among their ranks and everything.
They all thought it was a game until Ashley Babbitt got a bullet in her chest, you know.
And that's the wake up moment for them.
And shortly after, they were all pushed out of the Capitol.
And then, you know, it was like it took him less than an hour to just quash that whole rebellion.
Right.
And which is why I say it wasn't really a coup.
It was just a bunch of idiots who thought that they had the government on their side trying to go keep their ruler in power.
And it manifested into something that allowed the government to create an even larger police state.
And now the war on terror has now turned inward onto us.
So it's just they played the perfect role in this whole creation and fostering of the police state.
Yep.
Absolutely right.
And I know that we're going to be continuing to talk about the negative results of that for years into the future now.
So to leave this conversation on a light note, a lighter note, Rashida Tlaib and I guess I don't know about AOC, but her and Tlaib and Omar both have said that they oppose any new legislation.
They're leftist enough.
They go, that would be reactionary and wrong, like what Bush did back after 9-11.
And we learned the lesson of that.
So you know, there's there really is something to be said for if you stand for something, you'll notice a lot of other things wrong, even if you're wrong about something.
You know what I mean?
The opposite of that, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
If you stand for something, you'll see right through some stuff.
And so I hope that with kind of leftist pressure in the Congress saying agreeing with, of course, the Republicans in this case are going to be against it.
Most of them.
I guess there will be certain FBI Republicans who support it, but most of the Republicans will be against it for partisan reasons.
And if there's good leftist pressure against it from the more socialist members of the Democratic Party, then it's possible that it could be stopped.
It's really not too late.
They have this proposed law, I know you've seen, where they want to create new domestic terrorism divisions inside Homeland Security and the FBI, as though we don't already have a counterintelligence division and all this stuff, as though the FBI is lacking for power to investigate American citizens, for God's sake.
But anyway, so there's a chance there.
There's a possibility there that some wiser and cooler heads could prevail.
Because after all, for a Reichstag fire, there was no fire.
And yeah, a couple people died.
It is sad that a few people died.
I'm not saying that.
But I mean, beating the cop to death with an American flag, holy crap, man.
But yeah, it doesn't seem like a good excuse to pass an enabling act on second thought if we can get anybody to have a second thought, you know?
Right.
And I mean, they don't need to pass it anyway, though.
Trump already did that during the summer.
He put these crazy felonious measures into place that allows protesters who destroy property or injury of government property or whatever, they can go up to 10 years in prison.
So there's already these laws on the books.
They don't need to beef them up anymore.
They're already pretty damn scary.
So hopefully they don't go any further, even though that's what Biden appears to be wanting to do.
So yeah, I hope that AOC and Omar, I hope that they actually stand to their values, even though I completely disagree with them on about 90 percent of everything.
I'll gladly support them in that venture if they do oppose any kind of new domestic terror laws.
Yeah.
Right and left against the police, state libertarians leading the way.
It's the only way to do it.
You know, we got to have this realignments, the American people, the Republican, the Democratic Republicans versus the war party.
You know, the elite Wall Street, the arms manufacturers, all the bankers and agribusiness and big pharma and and the cops and their unions and, you know, the combine.
And it is it's the ninety nine point nine percent versus the point oh one.
So we ought to be able to do this if we can get our priorities straight here.
Here.
That's what I'm saying.
All right.
Matt, you are one of the most important journalists in America.
And I mean that very sincerely.
The Freethoughtproject.com.
And everybody, please sign up for the afternoon email so you can understand why I am so angry all the time and read about these atrocities that our government commits against the American population day in and day out.
The Freethoughtproject.com.
Really appreciate it, buddy.
Thank you, brother.
It means a lot.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
