12/18/12 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.scotthorton.org is my website.
Find all my archives there and find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at scotthortonshow.
And our first guest on the show today is the great Will Grigg.
He's the author of Liberty in Eclipse, and he keeps the wonderful blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And I think it's fair to say it is mostly a chronicle of local police abuse in America.
It'll flip you out.
It's just maddening.
But anyway, there's a lot of great stuff there.
And so welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you?
Scott, I'm doing very well.
It's always a privilege to be with you.
All right, well, thanks for saying so.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And the reason that I called you is because, you know, everybody's got something to say about the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, of course.
And I was thinking, instead of just hearing something, I wanted to hear something wise.
And I figured, you know, for sure, I know you know about kids and the value of a human life, and I know you know about the state and what they think the value of a human life is.
And I also know that you've got a lot of things to say about a lot of things, and I just wanted to hear what you have to say about this.
In dealing with the subject of children and the state, I think one thing we have to discuss is the presumption of parental authority on the part of the state and the way that it has systematically usurped the role of the parents within the home.
This is something that's been going on for over a century here in the West.
I think that it's reasonable to say it started with our good friends over in the Fabian socialist movement in England.
That's something that I think the late Alexander Coburn wrote about, because he knew the webs who were instrumental in getting that movement going and how he'd seen the same tendencies and trends and priorities being put in place here by our own social elite, the people who presume to rule us.
And that of necessity alienates the natural affinity between parent and child.
And the reason why this is so damaging, apart from the fact that I believe that there are obvious moral and social problems that ensue, is the fact that the state is the praxis of violence.
All that the state does, of course, is compel and forbid people at gunpoint.
And so for the last several generations, beginning, I think, with Arthur Calhoun and the social history of the American family, almost exactly a century ago when our good friends who surrounded Woodrow Wilson were putting in place the progressive revolution that got started really under Teddy Roosevelt, way back a hundred years ago, the dogma that was being taught to educators and what would become known as social workers was that the larger societal interests demand that the state alienate the affections of the child from the parent.
This is not new.
I mean, John Locke was writing about this in the late 17th or, forgive me, early 18th century when he was talking about the fact that the state would try to destroy the bond between the parent and the child and that there's no government that has that authority.
Now, but Will, you say it's not new, but is that old, though?
I mean, is that – you're saying this is the agenda of the American government school system as it exists today?
Yeah.
I think that it's safe to say, when you take a look at the full panoply of interventionist programs that are enacted for the supposed benefit of the children and the fact that we're always told to use the collective possessive pronoun when referring to children, our children, as if somehow your child and my children are communal property, that that reflects the agenda of the people who rule us, and it has been for over a century or so.
And this is something that you can actually trace back to some people.
For instance, I believe with the Rockford Institute 10, 12 years ago, we're looking at the legal environment having to do with education and parental roles.
There's been this effort to enact parens patrie or the doctrine of the parenthood, the fatherhood of the state in American legal decisions going back to the early 1800s.
So it's not a new phenomenon.
I just think it's become much more acute beginning about a century ago, and then with the Great Society, what had been sort of a steady trot became a gallop.
And at the same time, of course, the warfare state was expanding, and they're conjoined.
These are conjoined evil twins.
These are murderous siblings.
What the warfare state requires is a large population of rootless, morally desensitized males primarily, and the welfare state provides that population.
It fills the recruitment pool with youngsters with no particular social prospects and no rootedness in the stability of a family, both a mother and a father, both of whom are necessary for the full development of the child, I contend.
Some people don't hold to that opinion.
We can respectfully disagree, I suppose, but I suspect that we're living with the consequences of destroying that model.
Well, you know, I mean, it sounds like there's a lot to that, but so what does that have to do with this case, though?
I'm not sure what it has to do with this case, because this case, I think, has been exaggerated in terms of its ultimate import.
Granted, there is nothing worse that can happen than the death of a child through violence.
There's nothing worse that can happen.
The worst thing that can happen to a parent, of course, is the loss of a child.
I'm not trying to minimize in any way or denigrate the significance of this event.
What I'm trying to say is that every time something like this happens, and it happens far less frequently than people would assume when we're talking about these active shooter random attacks, mass shooting incidents here in the United States, the trend line has been in decline over the last 10 or 12 years or longer, for instance, this time.
But they're seized upon by the ruling elites for a number of reasons, not the least of which, of course, to change the subject from the violence that they pursue and instill in our society.
And that's why I was so repulsed, as so many other people were, I suspect, by the flitigious hypocrisy of the murder of a 16-year-old American teenager, a 16-year-old American citizen, I should say, striding to the dais there at the White House and then pronouncing these facile words of benediction and comfort for the loss of 20 American children at a schoolhouse in Connecticut.
This is a guy who ordered the murder of a 16-year-old American citizen and who has been killing children in Pakistan and Afghanistan with gleeful abandon.
As a matter of fact, within hours of presiding at the interfaith service in Newtown on Sunday night, Mr. Obama authorized, or people or instruments of his will carried out, a drone strike in Pakistan that killed heavenly knows how many people.
This is a daily occurrence in Pakistan and in Afghanistan.
They commit Sandy Hook-style massacres probably at least several times a week or more frequently than that.
That's not part of the discussion because every time there's an incident of this sort, what happens to us eclipses in moral significance what the government is doing to other people and doing to other children whose lives are just as valuable as those who are taken by violence at Sandy Hook.
They want to focus upon the pathology of the individual private citizen, and they want to alienate that, I think, from the social context in which we have what some sociologists call an enabling condition where the government teaches us incessantly that aggressive violence is perfectly all right as long as it's done to us rather than to them.
I think that whatever combustible cocktail of pathologies and personal crises and economic troubles fueled the atoms of Adam Lanza, whatever was going on with respect to this specific episode, it does us no good, I think, to treat this in the way that it's being treated by the people who presume to define reality for us, as if this is the worst possible thing that's happened anywhere in the known universe over the last several days, that it is unique, that it is something completely foreign to our experience of world-shaking import because it is so much more grievous than the things that the government routinely does.
All these things are equally grievous, but what is being done in our name has lasting consequences that transcend even what happened in Newtown.
Think of how the Pakistanis are looking upon Americans right now.
Think of how the Afghans are looking upon Americans right now.
They look upon each of us to the extent that we endorse what the government is doing, supposedly in our name, as an Adam Lanza.
Now, this is a person who has thrust a global celebrity in the worst possible way as the killer of children, and it was another killer of children who does this with social sanction, who now is being presented to the world, presenting himself to the world as the high priest of peace and reconciliation.
And it's perverse, and it's propulsive.
And I think that it's a type of hypocrisy that is very well understood by those who are on the receiving end of the bloody imperial violence of our government.
And this is the sort of thing that's going to have lasting consequences.
We know what happened after 10 years of intermittently bombing Iraq and then starving hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children or confining them to early death through disease as a result of a killer embargo.
We know what we harvested from that.
But what's going on right now is a continual cultivation of the same type of horror and bloodshed and hatred.
And at the same time, the same system in which people like Adam Lanza gestated is creating up another generation of alienated, rootless young men who are going to be easy prey for the war machine when it's looking for people who are trigger pullers and potential coffin stuffers.
That's the imperial moral ambit in which we live, and it has to change or it's going to destroy what's left of our society.
Yeah, well, you know, I don't know what to say.
I had something to say, but I don't remember anymore.
I guess I'll say this.
I want to pick up on the part about the government as the teacher and all of that crap, because that's what Timothy McVeigh claimed, too.
It was like, hey, I just learned it from you.
And the only problem with that is, of course, it was a factual thing.
He killed people working for George H.W. Bush to liberate Kuwait for the king.
That's exactly right, and he was convicted for it.
That was a skill that was refined, and it was put to use, and he was rewarded for the fact that he could use a high-caliber weapon to take off the head of somebody who had never harmed or threatened him at a great distance.
And they made him a big hero about it, and he felt really great about it for a while, too.
That's the story, right?
And then later he thought, well, wait a minute.
Why did I kill that guy again?
Yeah.
How many proto-McVeighs right now are employed as joystick bombardiers by the drone program?
There was a remarkable piece in one of the British papers describing a man from Montana who had a fit of conscience after he had seen the terminus of one of his drone strikes, seen that he had killed an Afghan child on the orders of his superiors.
And, of course, this sent him into a spiral of depression.
And thank God he got out of this.
He removed himself from that occupation and decided to do something healthier with his life.
But we've got a whole core of these people who, as their daily routine, go to a climate-controlled office somewhere in New Mexico or Nevada or Virginia or New York and spend their entire day directing robot aircraft to fire Hellfire missiles at targets halfway around the world, killing people who in no conceivable way pose a threat to any of us.
And this is given the moral sanction of the government that supposedly is the collective expression of our morality.
How many of those people are proto-McVeighs?
How many of the people who are right now being given electronic babysitters in the form of first-person shooter games in homes that are broken or economically in chaos, how many of those people are going to be recruited to be the next generation of Ender Wiggin-style military tools rather than becoming, as Ender Wiggin did, somebody who was a redemptive character going to go the direction of Timothy McVeigh or people of that ilk?
These are questions, once again, that are not being asked because we're focusing on the tools rather than the way the tools are used and the purposes to which the tools are put.
I mean, the whole discussion right now about so-called assault weapons, none of the weapons used in the Newtown massacres, I understand it was an assault weapon under Connecticut law.
And furthermore, under Connecticut law, as of October of 1999, the police had the power – I don't think they have the authority – but the power preemptively to disarm anybody who's seen as a threat.
That's something that's not being discussed here.
They have preemptive civilian disarmament in Connecticut.
That's how comprehensive the system is in Connecticut regarding supposed gun control protocols.
But all this discussion, of course, focuses on the idea that it's just a screaming outrage that people who are not the consecrated emissaries of the divine government would have access to weaponry.
We're not talking about the fact that within the last couple of weeks there was an episode in Ohio where police threw 137 rounds at an unarmed couple at the end of a police vehicle chase.
In a matter of seconds, they reduced this couple to a quivering mass of dead flesh.
We don't talk about an episode recently in California in which a police officer is serving a warrant on a so-called known gang member.
I mean, that's the equivalent of being a suspected militant domestically.
You're called a known gang associate here.
This police officer, within four seconds, pumped 11 rounds into this guy as he was getting out of the car in the front yard of his home.
This is done in plain view of his family.
These kinds of things happen routinely.
It's difficult to find a week in this country where police are not involved in mass killing under circumstances that have to be regarded as, at best, morally dubious that is competitive in terms of body count to what happened last Friday in Newtown.
But because this is done by the state, supposedly that absolves the individual moral guilt of the actors.
And indeed, many of these people are, like Timothy McVeigh, commended for their acumen in killing other human beings.
For, once again, for reasons that often, usually, quite frankly, don't withstand moral scrutiny.
All right, now here's the thing.
When I was a kid, people didn't really go into schools and kill a bunch of people.
And there were people who had a real hard time getting along in school.
There were people, you know, the picked on, the isolated ones and whatever.
And from what I'm reading of this kid that did this shooting, that was his thing.
And who knows, you know, exactly how accurate all this was.
But, I mean, that was a line that I don't think anybody that I ever knew, who knows, that's a pretty broad statement.
But certainly no one ever was doing this.
No, especially, I mean, Bill Clinton was doing it.
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush were doing it.
But civilians were not going into schools and mass shooting children to death.
Not kids and not anybody older than that either.
So what do you think is really, you know, I mean, it's not like we're in that much of a different era from the Reagan and Bush senior years, right?
I'm not entirely confident in saying that we've seen an increase in this specific type of active shooter episodes.
Although they're better publicized now.
There's a criminologist from Minnesota who's been in the news recently, cited by a number of people whose views I respect on this issue, who said that really the worst school shooting on record, the worst mass shooting of this kind, I don't recall whether it occurred in a school, but the worst, what we now call active shooter massacre actually occurred in 1929.
And that there had been a rise in this type of occurrence between the late 60s and early 1990s that have actually been tapering off until the last few years.
And so the trend line does appear to be going down here.
What I do think is happening though is that once again we're seeing what – I'm trying to remember the name of the scholar who wrote for Parameters, the military journal back in the early 1990s called The Rise of the Warrior Class.
And by warrior class he was referring once again to this population of alienated, ruthless young men who for lack of appropriate forms of discipline and a sense of limits on how they could express their violent impulses end up adhering to paramilitary gangs, paramilitary culture.
And they of course are represented overseas in some of the adolescent soldier populations we see in countries in Africa.
But he said we see a similar subculture gestating here in the inner cities of the United States.
And I wouldn't limit it geographically or ethnically in that respect.
I think that there has become in our culture – or rather our culture has seen the advent of that type of social cohort that expresses itself in terms of picking up a gun, drawing up a kill list, picking up a gun, or otherwise plotting to exact cinematic vengeance on people he considers to be the source of his social problems.
But when you talk about the idea of the government being the teacher, once again I think that we're looking at a system in which school children are indoctrinated in the idea that the government is the fount of all morality.
And that those who act on behalf of the government are in some sense a consecrated elite.
So here in Payette, Idaho, for instance, when my children experience Red Ribbon Week, which is the anti-violence campaign, they're often simultaneously told that violence is not a good thing when private people engage in it for any reason.
But at the same time they're told to venerate the uniformed representatives of government violence, whether you're talking about police and the military.
They're required to write letters to our troops overseas.
They're harangued by representatives in the local police department about the need to avoid membership in gangs that don't carry the insignia of the government in any case.
And so I think that in ways too numerous to count, perhaps more subtle than we're often able to recognize, the government does teach the idea that aggressive violence, when given social sanction, is correct and defensible, as opposed to helping people understand and practice the non-aggression axiom.
And that's a moral question, and it has to be instilled, I contend, in environments where moral instruction is proper, beginning in the home.
And in those other private manifestations of productive association where you have to succeed in mutually beneficial ways that respect the principle of individual self-ownership on the basis of mutual protection of that right.
I mean, you can't have society – you can have a state that creates something it calls a society that is based upon selective aggression, meaning those who are part of whatever social caste the government supports have a supposedly unlimited right to commit aggression against those who are not part of that group.
But you can't really have a society that's based on anything other than the non-aggression axiom and some kind of morality that relies on cooperation and commerce rather than coercion.
And since America, at whatever point you want to select, whether 1861, 1865, 1913, 1967, 2001, since we became what we are now – and it's not clear to me where exactly the breaking point was chronologically.
1789!
That's a good day, too, both here and in France, unfortunately.
You had similar parallel developments here where you had centralization taking place in the name of the people.
Anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Go ahead.
Exactly.
But in the United States right now, really, you have this unfortunate combination of an incredibly pathologically high time preference and the idea that it's somehow defensible to enrich yourself at the expense of other people with no respect for their individual rights.
And going back to the French revolutionary idea, if anybody's ever read – and I wouldn't recommend this – read the writings of Marquis de Sade, apart from of course the titillating salacious bits, there was a certain philosophy or anti-philosophy he was espousing, which was summarized in his phrase that the highest of all moral laws requires that I enjoy myself no matter at whose expense.
In other words, he completely invalidated the idea that anybody but he would be blessed with the right to self-ownership and that he supposedly had the right to impose himself on others in order to derive whatever satisfaction he could.
And then about a century later, he had this terrible creature by the name of Vladimir Lenin who said that the key axiom in politics is who does what to whom.
You want to be the who rather than the whom.
As some translations render that as who consumes whom, and it's really the same idea.
But that Sadean or Leninist ethic, which of course they didn't invent these things.
They isolated them, and they articulated them, and in Lenin's case, they weaponized these ideas.
But that idea that you have the right to consume others, that you can be the who rather than the whom, is very much a part of our popular culture, and it's very much something propagated by the state.
The same thing is true of the idea of the high time preference, consumption without discipline or responsibility, or without an equitable provision for the person who's on the other side of the transaction.
I mean we're up to – our eyeballs are deeper in this perverted ethos, and every once in a while it takes the form of somebody who, for whatever reasons to which we're not given access because they exist in the mind of somebody who's no longer among the living.
Somebody acts the way that that person does, and the high priest of statism say, well, this is an opportunity.
This is a crisis that is an opportunity to expand the powers that we have been exercising that brought us to this point.
And so I think that what people have to do when given the opportunity, particularly parents, is to try to instill in the young people for whom they have a moral responsibility the morality based on the non-aggression axiom, or as I like to call it, the golden rule.
I mean ultimately our choices are the golden rule of the iron fist.
It seems so much easier for some reason for people to choose the iron fist as long as they can imagine it's somebody else I guess.
They're the who rather than the who.
They're the ones wielding the fist rather than those against whom it's wielded.
Yeah, like most of the people I follow on Twitter lean left because that's who's doing human rights stuff most of the time, that kind of thing, and journalism.
That's worth reading.
And yet all of their knee jerks are just, oh my God, Obama, do something.
In fact, we don't have time for them damn Republicans in Congress passing executive order.
You have to stop it somehow.
And their imagination about the somehow stops at that point.
They're not even concerned about how Obama's going to make every AR-15 in America vanish.
What is he, I Dream a Genie or something?
Yeah, he'll get rid of that as soon as he's done getting rid of cocaine between Canada and Mexico, right?
No more cocaine, no more guns.
There's your high time preference at work there, your adolescent magical thinking here.
But these are people who are like serious thinkers and professionals and go to war zones to interview American torture victims and things.
I mean, these are thoughtful people and they're just, they're crazy.
I don't know what explains it.
It's just, I don't know.
They're people I respect for a thousand other reasons.
You know what I mean?
How can they be so wrong about this?
I know minds that are more subtle and better stock than mine have blunted their edge on questions of that sort.
Scott, I don't know what to say apart from joining in your lamentation here that people of the kind you're describing don't think through what they're asking for, what they're demanding here.
That they don't equate themselves at least somewhat with what is measurable in terms of the reality that we confront.
This is not something that happens with the frequency in this country that most people would assume.
It does happen incessantly overseas and it's being done by the same president to whom they want to grant these extraordinary powers to disarm everybody except those who are part of a chain of command that he controls.
He is somebody who is doing Adam Lanza's work in Leviathan and through Leviathan incessantly, and yet he's seen somehow as a healing presence precisely because he's at the top of the pyramid of the state's killing apparatus.
It strikes me as amazing that the very day – actually no, the day before the killings in Newtown, there was a congressional hearing in the House on a measure proposed by Congressman Ron Paul and Congressman Kucinich to demand that the Obama administration provide a legal justification for the targeted killing program, the drug killing program.
This was killed in committee primarily by the Republicans, and so what they did was the moral equivalent although on a much larger scale of knowingly allowing Adam Lanza to kill again if he had survived after Newtown.
If Adam Lanza had survived and we knew who he was and we knew what his intentions were and we allowed him to kill again, we would be morally culpable to some extent in that killing.
Well, that's what the Republicans did primarily.
The Democrats, for whatever reason, were a little bit more reasonable in this House committee.
In the Senate, I guess the role is reversed, at least that's what Mother Jones' coverage suggests.
But they knew that Obama was going to kill again, that there were going to be missiles fired against targets in Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan and heavenly knows where else that would result in the death of children, and they allowed this to proceed without challenging it in any way.
Yeah, I mean, hey, remember the week where they pretended to care at all about the war in Libya and how unconstitutional it all was until somebody said debt ceiling?
Oh, yeah, well, you never know what happens when there's a debt ceiling crisis, guys.
And that was it.
Nobody ever talked about unauthorized Obama wars again.
He can have as many of them as he wants forever and ever.
Gives a plethora of indulgence, yeah.
In fact, somebody posted on my Facebook page the clip from Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore is interviewing Marilyn Manson, and Marilyn Manson's saying, yeah, they're all blaming it on me and whatever, but why not blame it on the president?
He's bombing Kosovo that day.
And Michael Moore points out, actually, that was the day of the most bombs dropped on Kosovo.
Yeah, exactly.
Of the whole war.
In fact, I'm sorry, we're over time.
I've got to go.
I've got Patrick Coburn.
But thank you, Will.
You're the best, man.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
Have a wonderful Christmas.
Everybody, that is the heroic Will Grigg.
I'm so sorry to cut him off.
I should have scheduled this better.
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