10/28/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Next up is – no, first up on the show today is William Norman Grigg.
He writes at Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
His book is Liberty in Eclipse.
You can get it in paperback or in audiobook.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Will?
I'm doing great.
Thank you so much for having me on again as a guest.
Very happy to have you back.
I can never keep track of when your show is on.
When's your show on?
Saturday night at 8 o'clock Mountain Time, which is 7 o'clock Pacific or 9 o'clock Central, at libertyroundtable.com is the easiest way to find it.
There's an online streaming version of the program, libertyroundtable.com, and that would be every Saturday night at 8 o'clock Mountain.
Okay, great.
I'll try to say that again at the end of the thing.
But we can find the archives there too?
They don't have an archive, but I do have an archive, and I have a link to it at the bottom of every essay I publish at Pro Libertate.
Right.
Okay, there we go.
You know what else you guys can find at the bottom of each essay at Pro Libertate?
The tip jar.
You know what?
I think just read one essay by Will Grigg, and you'll think to yourself, boy, I sure would like to help this guy keep writing things, and then it'll be great for everybody.
Okay, good.
Very kind.
I appreciate that.
Well, you know, yeah, you're a great writer, and you got your priorities straight too, so you're a great writer squared.
All right.
Thank you.
First thing I want to talk about, I mean, you got such great articles about such horrible stuff going on.
I want to let you talk about all of it.
But first of all, we've got to talk about the big news in the police state right now, and that is Ferguson and all the spin.
And maybe it's right.
I don't know, Will.
Is it really right, like they say on Fox News, that, oh, it turns out that, well, he had it coming, and that the cops' version of the story must have been right, and so therefore all the witnesses who say that he was surrendering had his hands up.
So they must all be lying, and no wonder he'll be the officer, Darren Wilson, who shot Mike Brown, shot and killed Mike Brown in St. Louis, will be no-billed here any day now.
I'm thoroughly expecting that he's going to be no-billed because it's almost impossible to indict and prosecute a police officer for homicide in the state of Missouri, going to the fact that their state statutes recognize them as privileged aggressors.
There's actually a specific provision in the Missouri State Code which recognizes the supposed right of a police officer to initiate aggressive violence and kill somebody when it's clearly not an act of defense, whether you're talking about self-defense, defense of other innocent people.
Furthermore, Robert McCulloch, who's the – Wait, wait, wait.
Stop on the furthermore there and go back to the really a second.
Yes.
It says in there that they have the right to initiate deadly force?
What it says is that there is an exception here with respect to the homicide statute's treatment of defensive force that applies specifically to police officers.
Wow.
Every other case involving defensive force, you pretty much have a duty to establish that you as the agent of lethal force were acting defensively.
That's not true of a police officer.
There is a specific exception in the Missouri State statutes.
I've not been able to find a similar one.
I'm pretty confident that some of the ones exist, but I've not been able to find one that is so blatant and brazen as the one in the state of Missouri.
And that creates an almost impossibly high threshold if you're a diligent prosecutor, McCulloch obviously is not, who is seeking to prosecute a police officer for manifestly unlawful killing.
You've got a very high hurdle to cross, and Mr. McCulloch is not particularly motivated to cross that hurdle.
He is notoriously deferential to belief.
He always has been.
A detective man runneth not to a time when he's actually prosecuted successfully a police officer who has shot somebody who is unarmed or otherwise harmless, or somebody who didn't deserve to be the malign focus of the attention of a police officer to begin with.
And his office obviously has to be the source of these leaks.
These leaks are not coming from the camp of Michael Brown, obviously.
But the thing that I find really interesting here is that the story was framed in advance of the disclosure of the document, if you will, because the document, the autopsy report, could be read as validating Winston's current story.
And of course, we don't have his original story.
That's an important part of this case.
He never filed an instant report, which means we cannot review his initial story against whatever emerges as a result of the evidence being presented to the grand jury.
But it can also be read in a way that is very favorable to the account provided by Dorian Johnson and the other witnesses who said that there was a struggle of some sort inside the police vehicle, and that during that struggle, Officer Wilson discharged his weapon causing Michael Brown to flee because the injury on the hand, the reported injury on the hand of Michael Brown, would be consistent with somebody trying to swat away an already drawn gun in order to defend himself against being killed.
And what Dorian Johnson said, just in the immediate aftermath of the killing, was that Wilson pulled his gun and threatened to kill Brown.
And Brown tried to defend himself, but a shot was fired and Brown fled, and that he was shot several times at a significant distance while he was fleeing or while he was surrendering.
There's nothing in the reported autopsy report, the text of the autopsy report, or the way that it's been treated in the press that is inconsistent with that account.
What I do find interesting is that the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis County and then the Washington Post both quoted something like Dr. Judy Melanick, who apparently spoke with somebody from the Post-Dispatch, but nobody from the Post, and they substantially misrepresented her comments as she read this report.
She didn't have any direct involvement in the autopsy or in the investigation.
And she went on, I believe it was MSNBC, and did a very lengthy interview in which she described at some length the ambiguities in the report, and she explicitly said that she had not been accurately quoted in the initial news report.
Okay, and now this is the lady who the quote is, well, if there's blood on the gun, that means he was going for it, and this kind of thing, right?
Yeah, and that's not what she said.
Wait, wait, so just to be clear in case people aren't caught up on this, these were the quotes that the pro-cop right and Fox News and everybody took and ran with a million miles an hour.
Oh, see, what a simple statement of fact.
There was a dot of blood on the gun, that means he went for it.
If there's blood on the gun, it could mean that he went for it in the sense of trying to disarm and kill the police officer.
It could also mean that he was trying to defend himself against an unjust summary execution by the police officer.
But the trajectory of the bullet wound suggests that he was trying to move the gun away rather than he was trying to seize the gun to begin with.
And the gun in that case would have been already drawn without just cause.
But wait, wait, wait, hang on a second.
Remind me in a minute, I hope you don't forget, but if I understand this right, and if I understand what you've just explained, I want to kind of sum up and make sure that I'm on the same page with you here.
They came out, this report was leaked, the right wing and pro-cop media said, oh, see, this proves that he went for the gun, that there was a struggle in the car, this, that and the other thing.
But on the other side of that, as I think you're explaining here, the story of the witnesses, of all the other witnesses, you know, the ones that we would think would be called by a prosecutor going after this cop if there was such a thing, they all agreed that, yeah, there was a struggle in the car.
The friend of Mike Brown agreed, yeah, there was a struggle in the car.
He tried to grab him, he bumped him with the door, then he tried to grab him, I guess maybe, what, through the open window in a clumsy kind of way.
He pulled his gun, the gun went off, he shot the guy in the hand, whatever.
Like, this was already not in dispute.
And what they're saying is, oh, my God, look, Mike Brown was within the vicinity of the patrol car, everybody.
But, yeah, so what?
We already all knew that.
What am I leaving out?
What nuance am I skipping here?
I don't think you're skipping any of the relevant nuances here, because these people are seizing upon the well-established with a sense of original discovery.
If this were a critical disclosure, as you pointed out, as I pointed out, Dorian Johnson has never disputed that there was a struggle within the car.
And this is something that other witnesses have confirmed as well.
There was obviously a struggle of some sort in the car.
There was a gunshot fired during the course of that struggle.
What is in dispute here is whether you had, on the one hand, Brown trying to seize the weapon from the police officer, or trying to shove the weapon away rather than simply being killed while he's involved in this altercation through the open door or the open window of this vehicle.
But he did flee, and after he had fled, there was no reason for additional shots to be fired at that point.
Understand the protocol as I understand it, what the officer should do is call for backup and then go in pursuit of the suspect if indeed the suspect should be arrested, detained, and prosecuted.
And so the question here is twofold.
First of all, did Brown act defensively?
And secondly, once he had fled, did Wilson have any just cause to shoot him?
But that's something that the autopsy report doesn't address, but you'd never know that on the basis of the coverage that we're hearing from the punitive populace who instinctively take the side of the police officer.
Back in one second with Will Grigg.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
So I'm talking with Will Grigg.
He's at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
No, really, he insists.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com for his great blog Pro Libertate.
The book, again, is called Liberty in Eclipse.
Get a paperback or audio book.
All right, so now we're talking Ferguson.
And so, in other words, all the whole spin that, oh, he had it coming and the poor cop is being falsely maligned and whatever, like we're hearing from all the right-wing radio guys and Fox News, et cetera, is all a bunch of hogwash.
And all they've discovered is the same thing that everybody already knew, was that there was a confrontation between Mike Brown and Officer Darren Wilson at the point of the vehicle before he fled and was shot from behind and turned around and was shot in the front.
And also based on alleged misquotes.
You're telling me that the expert quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch piece and then copied and pasted all around the planet, like Mark Twain's infamous lie running around the world, even though it's a lie that that's his quote.
It's somebody else, but he always gets the credit.
I forget who it was.
Anyway, she says, I never said that.
She went on MSNBC and said, I never said that.
Will, please elaborate, would you?
Yes, she went on Lawrence O'Donnell's program, Dr. Judy Melinek, and said that what she had said was limited to the findings within the autopsy and that it could be consistent with one story or the other, but she extrapolated from her comments some kind of an overarching ratification of the story that is being told on behalf of Darren Wilson.
And once again, we don't have Darren Wilson's original story.
He didn't fill out an instant report.
And that's one of the things you find in a lot of jurisdictions, that the police are able to revise and extend their stories as the evidence comes in so that they can craft the most self-serving narrative possible.
And this is particularly true in St. Louis County where Robert McCulloch, as I pointed out, the DA there, is expansively tolerant of the unlawful use of force, including lethal force by police officers.
Yes, she went on MSNBC and had a very lengthy and not entirely congenial interview with Mr. O'Donnell.
She did not want to be forced in either direction in terms of the narrative here.
She didn't want to attenuate her commitment to the observable facts as documented in this autopsy that was conducted by another professional.
But one of the things she pointed out is that we don't have a lot of the other evidence that would tell a fuller story, such as the expended rounds that did not hit Mr. Brown.
There were other rounds that were fired in his direction that would tell us a great deal about where the two of them were located and help us construct or reconstruct the actual incidents far more accurately than the mere autopsy report would do.
But what has happened here, as you point out, Scott, is that a couple of sound bites were extracted from her interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, according to Dr. Melanick, irresponsibly embellished upon her remarks.
And that embellishment was seized upon by the Washington Post, which, contrary to popular opinion, is not a liberal journal.
It's a statist one.
It's an establishmentarian newspaper.
And they took the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and that was the seed germ of a larger story that had another set of irresponsible assumptions written into it, and from the post, of course, used as a template, were struck all these other pieces that have been circulated throughout not only establishment media, but social media and the blogosphere.
And it's all being used to ratify the idea that any time a police officer shoots somebody, particularly of Michael Brown's age and ethnicity, then we should assume that the police officer acted correctly.
And that is, as I pointed out before, an intensely and innately anti-American assumption.
The whole premise of Americanism rests on the assumption that people who are public officials or government agents have to justify what they do to the citizens.
You don't assume that they are right whenever they take any kind of action, particularly when they take a life.
Explain yourself, damn it, should be the American's reflexive response whenever he sees a police officer using violence against a citizen.
But there are certain precincts of the right, I call them the punitive populace, who simply assume that the one great exception to their otherwise overarching rejection of government power should be the local police.
And the local police are, of course, to use an expression I've employed before, they are as to the state as the edge is to the blade.
They are the people who actually inflict violence.
It becomes tangible rather than abstract when you're talking about the local law enforcement as the manifestation of this thing we call the state.
But I think this is tied up unfortunately in a lot of racial presuppositions.
Ferguson is a majority black community.
There's a terrific essay, and actually it's a very detailed research piece I wanted to plug here, that was published by the Economic Policy Institute by Attorney Richard Rothstein entitled The Making of Ferguson, Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles.
And it talks about segregation, and it really talks about white flight of course, a phenomenon that left behind a number of communities there in St. Louis County, including Ferguson.
But what he points, and I'm quoting now from this essay, government policies turned black neighborhoods into overcrowded slums, and white families came to associate African-Americans with slum characteristics.
White homeowners then fled when African-Americans moved nearby, fearing their new neighbors would bring slum conditions with them.
That government, not mere private prejudice, was responsible for segregating greater St. Louis was once conventional informed opinion.
And then in the course of 64 pages he documents the fact that you have market interruption by the government beginning 100 years ago under Woodrow Wilson, who was a horrible bigot among other things.
You have market interruption that prevented the integration of St. Louis and a number of other cities across the United States of course.
And this was amplified by our good friend Harold Ickes under the New Deal, and nothing happened during the Civil Rights Revolution in the 1960s to alter this in any significant way.
But these communities that are being plundered through confiscatory police action, Ferguson's typical, and we've talked about this before, where people are being stopped on trivial or inventive violations and put into a system where they end up with these onerous enactments, these onerous fines and fees that are imposed upon them and leave them in a position where they're not able to go out and get productive work.
These communities were created by government action to the point where they were actually rezoning a lot of greater St. Louis in order to spruce vice into these black inhabited areas, things like gambling and prostitution.
They didn't just spring up sua sponte in these black communities.
They were channeled there as a matter of deliberate municipal policy, and the same thing is happening now with respect to tax collection at the point of the gun, and the guns in the hand of the police officer, which is one of the reasons I suspect why you had this encounter between Wilson and Brown.
Brown was not being sought as a suspect in a robbery at the time.
He was being harassed because he was walking in an unoccupied street, and that's the sort of trivial violation upon which the police and prosecutors in that part of St. Louis County feed.
As a result, you have this completely avoidable conflict that escalated into a death, and now the machinery is in motion to exonerate Wilson in spite of the fact that we have no reason to think that what he did was in any way justifiable, and really the burden should be on him to demonstrate that it was justifiable, not the other way around.
Hey, can I keep you one more segment, because the music's about to start playing, and I'm not done talking to you at all yet.
Oh, let's do that.
Okay, cool, because, well, one of the things I wanted to ask about is just how simple this is as a left and right issue, or is it a white and black issue?
I think it's more of just a left and right thing, where if you're a conservative, you're just supposed to love this, but I don't really see the logic in that other than just kind of simple redneck racism, really.
Identifying with the cop more than the victim in that kind of more simple way, but I'm sure that you'll have something smarter to say about that.
I hope so.
And then I've got a lot of other stuff I want to ask you, too, so everybody hang out.
It's Will Grigg from freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Hit that PayPal button while you're there, would you?
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I'm looking at Twitter trying to figure out how do you get someone who writes for salon.com to care about the Waco masker?
How about some of those women in there never had a chance to have an abortion?
They might have wanted one.
No, I guess probably not.
They're not going to believe that.
Well, maybe if we pointed out that about a third of the people in there were black.
They're a protected species of the left in America, right?
Or not if they're hanging around with a mullet-headed, Trans Am-driving right-winger like David Koresh, huh?
At that point, they cede their blackness and their right to have their rights protected.
At that point, they're just rednecks.
That's the real problem, isn't it, Will Grigg?
That this is all just partisanship.
Right-wingers love to see liberals and left types killed, and vice versa.
Waco is the perfect example of that.
Yeah, tragically, that does appear to be the case.
People are more fixated on trying to discomfort and to suppress those whom they hate rather than trying to preserve that which they love.
I've talked about this before as well.
The most successful political theorist in the modern world, beginning around 1900, would be Vladimir Lenin.
He digested all the politics down to one simple formula.
The key question is who does what to whom?
In other words, you want to be the who rather than the whom, and the what becomes inconsequential.
And unfortunately, if you're somebody who's been assigned to one of these political ghettos by our self-anointed rulers, you think of yourself in terms of your tribal affiliations.
It may be ethnicity.
It may be social status.
It may be a shared enthusiasm for certain types of popular culture.
You might like Toby Keith, for instance.
I don't know why you would.
But you think of yourself in terms of this cohort of people, and you want to make sure that those who are our rulers, the people who are in positions of elected power, in other words, represent your faction.
And your power doesn't end up in the hands of the wrong people who would be the left-wingers, the sort of people who like, I don't know, indie rock or hip hop or something.
They like different kinds of popular entertainment.
And of course, they vote for a different group of statists.
And they're all, of course, the status in question drawn from the same stable of fungible corporatist hacks and shills.
But the difference is we get to define ourselves by the hostility we feel toward the other faction.
And we have this cultivated instinct to look upon each other with absolutely irrepressible hostility and ignore what's being done to all of us by the cohort that presumes to rule us.
And so you define your perception of what the ruling class does in terms of whether it injures your people or their people.
And when you're talking about the reflexive, up until recently anyway, support that you saw on behalf of your stereotypical conservatives for the local police, this is always something that's done on an as-applied basis.
Many of the same people who would assume that Darren Wilson acted properly because of the identity of the person he shot are the sort of people who would have fuzz busters or other paraphernalia in their cars so that they can avoid detection and the attention of the police.
Why is that, do you think?
It's because they understand that they might very well end up on the business end of some implement of mayhem being wielded by part of this consecrated elite of dispensers of violence, and they don't much relish that prospect.
So when it comes to them and theirs, they don't want to be the recipient of the same type of attention that Michael Brown received.
But they don't have the moral imagination to understand that the same should be true of Michael Brown and his friends and family.
And that just as they wouldn't really like to find themselves being harassed and then unjustly injured or killed by police, that perhaps the same is true of Michael Brown.
But they look upon Michael Brown and they look upon the people who surround him as supporters as being inescapably and incurably other.
And that reflects, I think, a triumph of mass indoctrination by our self-appointed ruling class.
And it's a tragedy, and it's one I have some fleeting and some embattled optimism that we're going to overcome because, Scott, I do think we've reached what I've called the point of peak jackboot, which is to say peak public tolerance for this type of arrogant, unaccountable violence on the part of the police.
And it's not something that's uniform, but I think that a large enough cohort within the population has finally had a surfeit of this.
The people are starting, however tentatively, to condemn and resist and fight back.
I don't know if you saw the video that was publicized yesterday by the good folks at the Free Thought Project of this Alejandro Natividad who was in La Quinta, California.
Please.
I was going to ask you about that.
Please talk about that.
This is the most inspiring thing I've seen in many years.
He was with a friend and they pulled up at a stoplight and his friend was driving the car and started to behave strangely.
And that came to the attention of a deputy who was stationed at the street corner.
And he had the two pull over and the two got out of the car.
By the description, it sounded like maybe the guy had a mild seizure or something.
Something like that, a grand mal seizure, some kind of mental episode or neurological episode.
So this is a case where a police officer, if he were a peace officer, would be inclined to help.
But no, the first order of business is prone yourself out before me.
Assume this self-abnegating posture of complete submission before me.
And God bless Alejandro Natividad, he said, no, I'm not.
I'm standing at a distance.
I'm either advancing, I'm not retreating, but I'm not getting on the ground.
I've not committed a crime.
You have no right to order me to get on the ground.
I'm not going to do it.
And by this time, of course, the deputy had his gun drawn.
In about five or six minutes of one of the most amazing dramas I've ever witnessed unfurled, as Natividad, talking about the fact that he was a veteran who had served in the Army, appealed to the man behind the badge.
There's just a man on the other side of this badge and this gun.
Deal with me as a man.
Stop pretending as if you've got the right to order me to prone myself out in front of you.
And by the end of this, at least two other deputies had shown up.
And as I understand it, Natividad was eventually shackled and put in the back of a police car, but released without charges.
But this reminded me, in the broadest sense of the heroism of Wang Wei Lin.
He's Tank Man from Tiananmen Square back in June of 1989.
Granted, you didn't have this man standing off an entire armored column.
But given what we know about police militarization, that's a very vivid possibility.
Because all it takes is one gesture of unreconstructed defiance.
And as the Waco example illustrates, there is literally no limit to what they're willing to do in order to make sure that that defiance is put down hard.
Well, and he was looking straight down the barrel of two guns, three guns.
So it didn't need to be a tank at all.
He was as brave as that, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, he was facing the imminent prospect of physical extinction.
And what he had said is, if I'm going to get it, I might as well get it standing on my feet.
Rather than prostrating myself at the feet of the people who kill me.
That's a tremendously inspiring thing.
And I hope that this is something that will become contagious.
Yeah, and people can find that, as you said, at the Free Thought Project.
It's also at libertycrier.com.
And, yeah, I was going to ask you about that.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I mean, the bravery there is really something else.
And, you know, for the cop, too, the cop doesn't just say, all right, what the hell, and holster his gun.
Or even, like, put it at his side.
He still is just, yeah, what is going through the head of these people, man?
What are they telling them at training about the average goofball at the stoplight?
I don't get it.
And how could it be, whatever crazy thing it must be that they're telling them, that they believe it to be true?
Well, they're indoctrinated to look upon the public at large as a mass of undifferentiated menace.
And that the most important imperative that they confront is officer safety.
And that success is defined by making people submit and making sure that they go home safely at night.
And when I've talked about this with our local sheriff here at Payette County, Chad Huff, one of the things he shared with me, and I think I've shared with you before, is that he's at wit's end dealing with people who come out of the post academy here in Meridian, Idaho.
He says, I get these people who come out of post.
They've been indoctrinated to look upon the public as the enemy, and Chad Huff is in his late 40s.
He's of a different generational cohort.
He says, I understand that I'm supposed to be serving these people, so I have to de-thugify my deputies.
He literally has to deprogram them as if he's retrieving them from the thug clutches of a cult, which I think is actually a pretty good description, and trying to reintroduce them to the idea that the people they're supposed to serve are actual human beings, that their rights are just as important as those of the individual police officers, and that if they're going to be serving in his department and wearing the uniform of his department, that they're going to have to assume certain risks because officer safety is not the most important consideration.
And to the credit of Sheriff Huff here, I know of at least one instance where there was a SWAT standoff involving a domestic violence call, and he took off his gun and went up and knocked on the door and talked to the guy.
And in doing so, he managed to incur the wrath of the field commander there, saying, what are you doing?
Don't you know you're violating about half a dozen different officer safety protocols?
He said, yeah, I'm aware of that, but this is more important.
So there are a few of them out there who have the residual humanity and presence of mind to deal with a situation of this sort in a way that involves de-escalation, but this was not de-escalation, as you point out, Scott.
I had the gun trained on this unarmed man who's armed only with a cell phone recording what happened.
And the other two who showed up knew nothing about the situation apart from the fact that they'd received a call for help from a member of their fellow tribe of privileged dispensers of violence.
They came out with their guns drawn as well.
And very few times in the last 25 years, once again, I go back to Tank Man as the precedent here, have you seen such a stark confrontation between a man armed only with unyielding courage and strength of will on the one hand, and then other people who had the means to kill him immediately in the name of this abstraction called the state?
And I think that in any other country on the face of the earth, you wouldn't have had this kind of a standoff.
And in most circumstances of this kind here in the United States, you'd end up with a guy being beaten or killed by the police.
I don't think that's true of any other country on the face of the earth right now.
I don't think that there is any other country afflicted with police who enjoys such expansive impunity.
I don't know if you saw the video that was recently released of this execution, no other word is suitable, in Michigan last year, where a mentally disturbed man who'd suffered a breakdown, he was apparently armed with a knife, was surrounded by eight cops who shot him 30 times in full public view.
There was no threat to the officers at the time that this happened.
They formed a picket line and they executed him.
I didn't see that.
Where can people see that?
Oh, for heaven's sake, go to my Facebook page, Scott, and then get a link to it to put with this interview.
I think that would probably be the best way to handle it.
Huffington Post, I think, has a link to it this morning.
But you can contrast that with the recent case that I'm going to be writing about in China.
Remember Communist China, where you had a man who was armed with something akin to a cleaver who had been involved in a domestic dispute with a woman.
You had two police officers show up.
One of them distracted him while the other snuck up behind him and disarmed him without pulling a weapon.
That's in China, for heaven's sake.
They don't execute people on the streets in China, but they do in Michigan.
That should tell us something about the extent of our apostasy from the values of Americanism that are expressed in our founding documents are just common sense as human beings.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, too, it's not like you're just some guy.
You're Will Grigg.
When you say that you don't know of another country in the world where the cops have this much impunity and as a matter of custom react this severely like that, that's not because of your vacuum and giant ignorance of the world.
You're a guy who can probably name all 190-something countries in the world if I gave you a few minutes to think about it, who knows a lot about a lot of things.
I think you're probably right.
I don't think in Saudi Arabia or in Zimbabwe or one of the corrupt, meanest other dictatorships in Burma.
I guess it depends, again, on who's killing who, but I think really for the most part you must be right.
I can't think of where you're wrong about that.
Iraq?
If you read the State Department country reports on human rights, what's really interesting is how frequently they condemn these other countries for doing things that are admittedly horrible but that are very much part of the established public policy here in the US, including museum piece communist regimes like Cuba and North Korea.
Just a few months ago I posted a piece showing a woman in North Korea who actually slapped a police officer who was harassing her for conducting some kind of unauthorized commerce on a public street, and she walked away unscathed.
And about six or eight months later you have Eric Garner being choked to death for doing the same thing on the streets of New York City.
And in Eric Garner's case he didn't do anything but refuse to comply.
In the case of what happened in North Korea, the woman assaulting a police officer, and as I said, here in the United States, she'd be dead.
I don't have any doubt at all that she would have been tasered and bludgeoned or perhaps shot.
And that's a matter of American exceptionalism as cultural myopia.
We assume that we are some happy exception to the general run of mankind when it comes to the abuse of power by people who are given complete impunity.
And impunity is something that police enjoy in this country in no small measure due to the influence of police unions, and in large measure because for 40 years or so, people like some of my former colleagues have been indoctrinating the public that if they're local, then the police must be trustworthy, missing the point that nobody who claims power to initiate force can be considered trustworthy.
If we're going to have something called a political government, and government of course is the praxis of force, it's compulsion, then you have to assume that there are going to be some kind of countervailing mechanisms of accountability, but local police don't have any public accountability.
They're accountable to their supervisors and to the municipal corporation that employs them, but they're not subject to electoral accountability.
Unfortunately, too many county sheriffs who are electorally accountable now are essentially handmaidens of the federal government through federal subsidies.
And it's not just what we see through the 1033 program at the Pentagon that's making them addicted to military toys and other favors and blandishments of that sort.
They've been given a license to go out and plunder through asset forfeiture in the name of the war on drugs.
And that brings us to another set of cultural presuppositions about how we have to assume that the only kind of people who would be objecting to what the police do are the druggies, the residual leftover vestigial Woodstock generation, or people like Michael Brown who reportedly had marijuana in his system.
That's another thing that got put into the mix, as you might appreciate, Scott, was the idea that he had so much THC in his system that he may have been hallucinating at the time he was killed when it turns out that the toxicology shows that he might have had a couple of cannabis blunts the day before he was killed.
You know, this stuff remains in the system for a very long time.
And that played into the Bill O'Reilly demographic's perception of reality so perfectly.
Oh, look, it's a large black teenage super predator who's blitzed on drugs, including the marijuana, which everybody knows turns people into psychotic fiends.
And he beat this poor police officer so severely that it caused an orbital blowout fracture.
That's something that is still out there.
People still believe that, although it was discredited months ago.
So obviously, Wilson was justified in doing what he did.
Next problem.
Next question.
This has been done with.
You know, if it weren't for the malign influence of the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharpens in the world, nobody would have a problem with it.
Besides that, these people would rather be out protesting than working.
Ah, there is another cultural presupposition, which is why I brought up that report by Mr. Rothstein.
There's a reason why that economy is so depressed.
I mean, this is an engineered Bantustan.
If you take a look at the way that St. Louis County is designed, you have this ring around the internal core.
It's like a donut.
And the whole of the donut is black, according to one of the common descriptions you can read in the literature.
You know, these people were not allowed the opportunity of living in an actual market economy for decades.
They've been living in an engineered slum as a matter of government policy.
So there is something that principal people on the right and left can agree on.
Yes, the left is right.
There is segregation.
There is institutional racism.
But you know what?
They're incorrect in blaming this on private attitudes.
This is where the right has their piece of this proposition.
This is something that was engineered through federal policy.
This is the result of distortions put into the market as a matter of deliberate policy going back to Harold Ickes and Woodrow Wilson.
So why don't you find some common ground here in opposing government-imposed segregation and then the means of coercion that enforce government-imposed segregation and plunder the victims of it, which is what's going on in St. Louis County?
But having that conversation would mean that people would have to be motivated by a love of freedom rather than a hatred of the other faction.
Right.
Well, and just wait until Jeb comes, and the right has no reason whatsoever to hate or fear the government.
Trailing clouds of glory.
I mean remember the first five years – first four years of – four and a half, five years until Katrina drowned New Orleans.
That right wing – it really was a brown shirt mentality.
How dare you question the decisions of our leader?
They would cry.
I mean it was damn near lynch mob mentality back then, and it's coming again soon.
It's been sublimated somewhat given the fact that somebody representing the other faction now is the dear leader.
And so you don't have the active, vibrant, and very aggressive Führer Prinsip that we saw say in 2002, 2003, and then again 2006, 2007.
One of the things that happens of course is that depending upon who's in power, at one point you'll have Sean Hannity saying you hate America if you breathe out so much as tepid endorsement of whatever the dear leader is doing.
And then when the wheel turns, you have people like Mr. Schultz, Ed Schultz from late of MSNBC saying exactly the same thing.
I mean back in 2011 when Obama waged his unconstitutional war on Libya, Ed Schultz literally said, well, the president said that Qaddafi is responsible for killing Americans.
As an American, that's all I need to hear.
It was a direct transliteration of Hannity's rhetoric.
And I find myself wondering if the chief purpose served by Ed Schultz is to make sure that there is somebody in the media who is at least as stupid as Sean Hannity on the other side.
Some kind of equity agreement between the factions here.
You get a Hannity and we get saddled with a Schultz.
That's our handicap.
I don't know.
But as you say, one of the things that's likely to happen here is if we end up with another Bush, God help us, in the White House, then we're going to see a revival of that mentality.
If we end up with Hillary in the White House, we'll see a continuation and exacerbation of what we have right now.
And we're once again going to be finding ourselves being played off against each other as if we are the primary problem we confront, not the people who claim to have power over us.
You say we're at peak jackboot.
But the thing is we've gone so far with people tolerating it that there's a real question of whether any of this can be turned around now.
When I was interviewing Shane Bauer about all the militarization of the police, I just started thinking how big you could build a Rocky Mountain chain out of all the armored personnel carriers that have been given to these cops.
All the machine guns that have been given to these cops.
Whoever is going to repeal it.
What state legislature is ever going to say, no, you all have to go back to blue blouses, all of you, now?
This is not going to happen.
Well, it can happen in the present configuration.
I'm one of those people who believe that the only way that we can avoid the United States becoming a political singularity is if we break up the mass right now.
And that doesn't necessarily mean that we'd have a geographic reconfiguration of the Union or the emergence of several contending polities within the land mass that is the United States right now.
But it means that you do have to have countervailing forces in terms of interposition and nullification.
And both the left and the right believe in this.
The left has created sanctuary cities.
That's a form of interposition.
There are other elements of the left that have supported selective decriminalization of marijuana.
That's a form of nullification and interposition.
And you have the right promoting the same thing with respect to property rights in states like Nevada and other places like that here in the Mountain West.
You have to do something about breaking up the mass, or this project is doomed to become the proverbial political singularity.
In the case of the Soviet Union, which is, I think, becoming more and more instructive of our predicament, they had a military industrial complex that was comparable to ours, although nowhere near as well funded.
And they ended up with, of course, a huge overhang of all the surplus from the Red Army and from the internal security units that existed before 1991 or so.
And it's taking them the better part of a generation to dig their way out from beneath the rubble.
And quite frankly, if we have an American spring here in a genuine sense and we emerge from beneath what we're facing right now, it's going to take us a generation or so.
But what I think is that just as it was said back in the mid-1970s that you probably couldn't find five believing Marxists in Moscow, I find it difficult to believe that within the next few years you're going to be able to find a very large percentage of reflexive cop worshippers here in the United States.
I think that's one good thing that social media has done for us is that it has somewhat demystified and desacralized law enforcement.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was what Robert Higgs said was you have this massive confluence here leading to this peak jackboot situation where everyone has a video camera.
Everybody, everybody's mom has a video camera in their pocket at all times.
And the cops are as unleashed or more than ever before.
And everybody's got a Facebook feed.
And so every local police abuse story is turned into a YouTube and sent out to the nation.
And there's not a damn thing that whoever replaced Dan Rather can do about it or whatever.
All those old channels have lost their monopoly.
This thing is just getting around.
You can't deny it.
You can't deny it.
I talk to my friends who are not political people at all, and they go, man, on my Facebook, it's just endless police brutality all day.
It's out of control.
What is going on?
And these people are not political people, but they just can't escape it.
It's crazy.
It's something that transcends politics because this has to do with something that has no connection necessarily to any of the partisan bickering that passes for politics in this country.
It's just a question of people dealing with the unadorned, unfiltered essence of what the state is, which is the power to turn people into things.
And I think at that level, there's an understanding growing right now that's very encouraging.
That's not to say that we're at any point near the end of this.
It just means that there is, I think, grounds for reasonable optimism.
All right.
Will Grigg is at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Check out his radio show.
Check out his PayPal.
Check out his book, Liberty and Eclipse.
Thanks, Will.
Thank you so much.
Take care, Scott.
Appreciate it.
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