10/24/14 – John Whitehead – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government-generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at wallstreetwindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.wallstreetwindow.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Joining me again on the line is John W. Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute.
That's rutherford.org.
He writes great things opposing the police state.
He wrote a book called A Government of Wolves and he's got another new article here, Hollow Justice and Courts of Order in an Age of Government-Sanctioned Tyranny.
We're running it today on antiwar.com and a very important angle on the police state and that is the so-called third branch, the independent branch of government that has the right to tell the rest no, supposedly, and it's apparent complete and total lack of willingness to do so.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how are you doing?
Hey, thank you, sir.
I'm doing fine.
Thank you for having me on.
Very happy to have you on.
Back in the very late 1990s, I was on a local unlicensed community radio station called Free Radio Austin and they got busted by the feds and had to go to the federal court and I sat in.
Luckily, I wasn't there at the time that it happened so I didn't have to go to court but I was there in the audience watching the proceedings and it was fun to me to see the federal judge.
His name is Sam Sparks.
He's the guy here in Austin's district, whatever it is.
It was fun to watch him call the government the government as though he wasn't part of it.
He was really part of this tradition where, oh no, he's a judge.
It really is separate and distinct from the government and, of course, the more he said it, the more obvious it was that that wasn't true at all.
He was going along with whatever they wanted, basically.
That's how it really works but it's kind of puzzling to me.
Federal judges are appointed by politicians.
Well, sure.
Yeah, but at the same time, they're appointed for life and especially when they talk that way, to be a federal judge, you have to have a good enough understanding of the theory of the law and maybe a little bit of respect for it or whatever.
Why not get off telling the government no all day instead of helping the government screw the people all day?
If that's where, in other words, in the Madisonian system of things where ambition is supposed to counteract ambition, why doesn't Sam Sparks really screw the feds all day instead of really rubber stamping them all day?
They couldn't stop him and that is the way that he would be exercising his most power and authority, right?
Hey, when I was a young lawyer coming up, I had law professors, judges who worked in the system tell me one thing basically.
If you ever want to be a federal judge, they said, don't have any opinions.
Don't write anything controversial.
Don't step outside the line or you'll never be a federal judge.
The people you see sitting on most of the federal courts and I've been in and out of the courts for 40 years are, they're basically part of a system that, in my opinion, is not there for justice and I've seen it over and over in the cases that I cite in the numerous articles in my book, A Government of Wolves.
They're there basically to keep order.
They're not there to promote justice.
You're not going to get, very seldom do you get any judges, and especially the federal courts, that I would call would be more liberty oriented.
They're just not that way.
They're there basically to make sure that there's no revolt.
There's no rebellion.
I mean, they uphold, and the Supreme Court in over 90% of the cases upholds the state's position, whether it's police shooting people numerous times in cars and all the kind of cases.
Maybe we can talk about a few of them, but it's that way.
You have a few judges who step outside the line occasionally, but when they do, they seem to come back in line, especially Supreme Court judges, and rule with the majority the next time it comes around some kind of crazy case that doesn't make any sense.
For example, when the Supreme Court ruled two years ago that if a SWAT team arrives at your door, they're at the wrong place, they have no warrant, but they think you might be doing something illegal, they can still crash through your door in an eight to one decision.
This is without a warrant.
The Supreme Court upheld that.
I mean, that's the kind of cases we're seeing coming down.
You would think that would be happening in Nazi Germany or some other totalitarian regime presently operating in the world, but it's happening in America.
I think that's part of the crisis here, is everybody's recognizing, it's like we're living now in a, it's a government of wolves, but it's a nation of John Whiteheads saying, well, wait a minute now, you don't have to be some doctrinaire libertarian to object to this.
This goes to the most very basic definition of what it means to live in America that we learn as kindergartners and stuff.
We're like, hey, they're supposed to at least pretend they're interested in justice.
They're supposed to at least pretend they're interested in fairness.
It's not supposed to be a system like this where, like the way I learned it when I was a kid, in America, you're free unless you commit a crime and do something wrong to somebody else.
The government isn't even interested in you at all, unlike in that evil old Soviet Union and that kind of thing.
Everybody's mom and everybody's sister and everybody's everybody is catching on to this.
Whoa, we're really sliding down a slippery slope here.
Yeah, but here's a couple things about the judges, especially the federal courts.
They're about 20 years behind technology and society.
It takes them a while to catch up.
I'm not saying they're slow readers, but they're not.
In fact, I have a few friends that cover the Supreme Court regularly.
They told me, they said, when it comes to cell phones or electronic devices, watch out.
Most of the Supreme Court judges, I think only one or two of them actually use the internet or use cell phones.
So you're dealing with technologically illiterate people to begin with.
And then you have the mindset that we've got to make sure there's no more strange people uprising out there.
A Martin Luther King, for example, who was looked down upon by the courts, by the way.
So yeah, I think we have to wake up and realize that the stuff that we've read about in former regimes and stuff is happening in America right now.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that we are moving really into what I would call a regime right now.
It's going to be very, very difficult.
I mean, the Supreme Court just ruled last year that if you're arrested and you're just a suspect and you're charged with a so-called serious crime, unquote unquote, they can forcibly take DNA from you.
The FBI wants a huge DNA file, and there are a number of reasons I think they want that file.
In fact, I'm doing some research on that right now, but I mean, they can forcibly take your DNA now.
They can put you down on the floor and take it.
They ruled in the Florence case that if you're arrested for a misdemeanor, the police can now strip search you at the police station.
This is a misdemeanor.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever been, Scott, ever strip searched forcibly, but it's one of the most egregious things.
You're talking about anal searches and those kind of things.
But this has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
And again, I'm going to go back and say, this is not the old Soviet Union or the Nazi Germany.
It's the U.S.S.A.
Yeah.
Well, now, so let me ask you this, because in the last couple of days, I interviewed a professor who talked about the national security state as the permanent government, the real seat of power in America, the executive branch, right?
And then I interviewed Shane Bauer all about the militarization of the police yesterday.
And so we talked a little bit, and he's from Mother Jones, you know, but we talked a little bit about the economics of this, where, of course, you know, it's all free money to a local sheriff.
He has every interest in spending as much as he can.
And you could...
And most of it's, you know, the war on drugs is all aimed at making money.
SWAT team raids get federal grants for doing hot raids.
Yeah.
Well, now, but so my question, though, is in terms of a larger agenda, and I wonder if you think that there really is some kind of consensus at the more establishment levels that, holy crap, we are so terrified of the American people that we better build a totalitarian police state to keep them all down because they're that afraid of us for whatever reason.
I don't know why they would be.
Or is it really just the economics of the same old military-industrial complex?
If you can sell armored trucks to the Pentagon to sell to the sheriff's departments or whatever it is, then you're going to lobby, you're going to sell as many as you can, and you don't really care who gets killed with them later, right?
I mean, it's just every rifle salesman has the same interest in getting the government to give him the contract to create a system of enslavement for us all here.
Oh, man, and now they have music playing.
Well, I talk to local police who get the so-called FBI alerts, friends that I know.
They don't like them.
They're concerned by them, but there are certain segments of the population that are labeled extremists that have to be watched.
I'm sorry.
We've got to stop and take this break.
My fault, as always.
Okay.
Go ahead.
John Whitehead, rutherford.org.
We'll be right back.
Government of Wolves is the book.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. 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.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John W. Whitehead, author of A Government of Wolves.
He's at rutherford.org, the Rutherford Institute.
This article is Hollow Justice and Courts of Order.
And we're going to get back.
I want you to talk about all these decisions as you do in this article that blow people's mind and all that kind of thing.
But where we left off at the break, we're talking, you know, a kind of bigger picture, all the militarization, throw in all the court rulings, rubber stamping it all if you want.
It's the same kind of thing.
And so I was asking about whether there's an agenda here.
I mean, you keep talking about Nazi Germany.
But in Nazi Germany, you knew what happened there.
The Nazis took over.
And there are a bunch of fanatical, psychopathic murders with their Gestapo running around killing whoever they wanted and declaring that freedom is not workable.
You're going to do what the Fuhrer says and all this kind of crap.
Here in America, somehow they seem to be accomplishing the same agenda in not so slow motion here without much of too much of an outcry, but with seeming consensus on elite, you know, power type levels.
So I guess I was, you know, hoping you could explain what you think is really behind.
Well, I think what I see and I say it in my book and other places, I think there's some paranoia, what I call up top in the government.
The Department of Homeland Security, a year and a half ago when they purchased, they contracted to buy from the ATK Corporation, 1.6 billion hollow point bullets.
They didn't buy them up off the market.
When I first raised the issue with some people, I said, oh, they're just buying up bullets.
I said, oh, no, no, no.
They actually had them made specially for their agents.
The Social Security Administration purchased almost 200,000 hollow point bullets to be distributed to 41 locations across America.
Hollow point bullets explode on contact.
They tear your arm off.
That's what Martin Luther King was shot in the head with, Kennedy.
You go down, John Lennon actually was shot with four hollow point bullets in his chest.
They explode on contact.
They're meant to kill and maim.
So why would the government be doing that?
I mean, I think there's some paranoia.
Again, I talked to local police chiefs in different parts of the country that are friends of mine.
They don't like the FBI alerts they get where certain segments of the population are labeled extremists.
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security, DeGeneres and Napolitano, under Obama, issued two memos, right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism, where they listed what they considered to be potential terrorists.
It was PETA groups on the left and animal rights groups on the right.
It was returning veterans or anybody that opposed government.
So it's not a conspiracy theory.
They've already labeled who they think needs to be targeted.
It's anybody that's basically going to get out there on the streets.
The Occupy Movement, 2011, extremists.
And what happened to them?
Well, folks, all you've got to do is read a few articles on the internet.
They got their heads beat in.
So there is a reaction out there.
And when you use the word Nazi, there's a couple of people that I quote in my book, The Government of Wolves.
They call it friendly fascism.
I think the government's just learned how to do it better now, softer.
There are better father figures in government, which is a key element in those kind of deals.
Obama is a nice, smiling father figure.
And the more mad at the government it is, the more people step in line and go, oh, let's get rid of the rebel rousers.
Let's get rid of the troublemakers.
But I go back and look at my heroes of the past, Martin Luther King and people like that.
Wow, were they rebel rousers.
And I remember as a young guy reading the same kind of stuff about them.
Let's get rid of the troublemakers.
Let's get rid of them.
Let's get this guy in jail somewhere.
The FBI actually collected, what, 17,000 pages of information on Martin Luther King on how to stop his protests.
So it's not a conspiracy or any of that kind of stuff.
They've been doing it for years.
So we just know more about it now, or we should know more about it.
And we hear about, you know, from the way that they talk where, and this goes for, you know, local sheriffs, deputies quoted here and there to people at the highest levels of power.
They consider really any marginal politics, and it's a really wide margin because it's a very narrow set of official, you know, acceptable opinion.
Any politics outside of that, especially anybody trying to organize outside of Republican and Democratic circles, they consider that to be near terrorism.
They'll call it soft terrorism or, you know, they'll call it extremist qualifier, you know.
Yeah, extremism.
They call it extremist.
And I read those two memos, and people, you should go read those, right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism.
The words extremist and terrorist were used in the same sentence sometimes.
So after I read the memos, I wrote a commentary and put it out and said, hey, I'm a terrorist after reading that, just because I oppose a lot of governmental policies that deny freedom.
So that's the lay of the land.
You get back to the courts, the courts are upholding that.
When I see Obama at that last State of the Union address, and I saw Supreme Court justices around him like he was a rock star, I went, wait a minute, that's not the way it's supposed to work.
They're supposed to balance out the President at the Supreme Court.
They shouldn't be worshipping him.
I mean, they shouldn't be worshipping Congress.
They're there for the people.
But here, and again, I've advocated this, the Supreme Court judges, they shouldn't be appointed for life.
I disagree with that.
Eight to ten years in the Supreme Court is enough.
Give us new people, give us young people.
I mean, the average age of a Supreme Court justice now is like 70 years old.
And again, I go back, there's a lot of young folks in America that need to be represented.
They want freedom.
And I don't think what we're seeing in the courts, and I've been in and out of the courts, I've been at the Supreme Court with cases arguing, you're dealing with very stodgy people who are part of the system.
You're not dealing with radicals of any sort.
There have been a few radical Supreme Court judges over the years, and I quote Justice Douglas.
He was more radical, but we don't have anybody like that on the Supreme Court right now.
Yeah, it seems like, especially when you have this giant list of all the things that they're rubber stamping, and then, as you point out, and this is all important, I don't know if many people understand this really, but the Supreme Court's refusal to hear a case is the same as just agreeing with the lower court and whatever it said.
But it seems like they've gone so far that now it would take Congress to come and pass new laws, basically outlawing the court from claiming jurisdiction on these issues, and just saying, actually, Supreme Court, you can't legalize these things, and so all these decisions are null and void.
So in other words, Ron Paul would have to be the President and the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader.
You're right.
Don't bet on Congress to do anything.
They're in hip-hop, and we all know that.
I mean, I've written on that, and that's documented.
The lobbyists basically control Congress.
The corporate entities do.
But when the Supreme Court in 2014, not here too long ago, did not refuse to hear the NDAA appeal case, where the military can arrive and take you away, they upheld the Korematsu decision, essentially, which created concentration camps in America in the 1940s.
And by the way, Justice Scalia just in a speech he gave about two or three weeks ago said he thought you could have the concentration camps again.
He just said, sure, I think it will happen probably in times of crisis.
This is a Supreme Court judge.
He said it a couple weeks ago in a speech.
Sure.
Even though, you know, especially for the young, maybe not too familiar with the argument or whatever, all of the rest of American society has condemned that horrible, awful mistake, that time they killed all the Indians kind of a thing that should have never happened, the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II.
But to Scalia, hey, there is no limit on executive power when it comes to the very worst things that government could do to you.
Definitely not.
Yeah.
So we don't...
What's happened, I think, is free-thinking people, by the time they go through the hearing process to become a federal judge, they're weeded out.
Again, I was told very clearly, don't write anything controversial.
You'll never be a judge.
So they're quiet.
They fall in line.
They get a great job.
I mean, imagine being a Supreme Court judge where you are riven around limos, airplanes.
You've got all the things you want in the world.
And to give you an idea of a case that we had, and this is probably one of the most shocking cases, it's a guy named Harold Hodge.
We represented him, and we're still in court over this case.
He stood out in front of the Supreme Court a couple years ago on a January day.
There was no one out there.
It was snowing.
He held a sign around his neck which said, the police brutalized African-Americans and Hispanics in America.
He was quickly arrested for not moving.
He was all by himself right in front of the Supreme Court.
He wasn't blocking the doors or anything.
We filed a case in his behalf.
The federal judge ruled that the law, it's a congressional law, saying you can't be on the Supreme Court plaza demonstrating or portraying a message.
The judge ruled that it was repugnant of the Constitution.
Two days later, the Justice Court, the Roberts Court, issued its own administrative rule prohibiting, it was even more restrictive, anybody being out there on that plaza with a message.
I mean, you're talking about free speech.
I mean, that means you could not walk out, you, Scott, could not walk out in front of the Supreme Court and turn and go, this court sucks.
It doesn't do a good job.
He didn't just do that, but he did that after a lower court had tried to do the right thing for a minute.
Exactly.
Basically, the Roberts Court overruled, and here's the thing, we're still in the courts for that case, we're appealing it.
We got to go up to that court now.
What kind of court issues something like that knowing they may have to hear this case?
Yeah, the Federalist Society, they're all the wrong parts of that and none of the right.
It seems to me when you look at Alito and Roberts and these guys, they might as well all be David Addington and Dick Cheney up there.
Their conservatism is conserve executive power at all costs.
That's all they care about.
Keep order.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, that's John Whitehead at Rutherford.org.
Thanks very much, John.
Thank you, sir.
Hey, I'm Scott here for Whole Food Multicomplete at WholeFoodComplete.com.
Whole Food Multicomplete is an entire supplement program in one bottle containing 100% RDA of vitamins and minerals plus live probiotics, digestive enzymes, antioxidant herbs, energy nutrients and more.
It's made in America using real foods and live probiotics, no chemical synthetics.
It's soy-free, gluten-free, and independently tested and verified.
They're so sure you'll love it, they're taking 20% off your first order with coupon code Scott Horton.
Satisfaction is guaranteed at WholeFoodComplete.com.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Or maybe you just can't stand the President, gun grabbers, or war mongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking, lots of them.
And well, everything that matters, LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.