All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got the great Jim Bovard, and he has been doing the best work in the country covering the story of the killing of Duncan Lemp.
And of course, he wrote a whole giant pile of books on my shelf over here, including his favorite and my second favorite, Public Policy Hooligan, on sale now at your local book website.
Really great stuff.
And of course, Attention Deficit Democracy, the masterpiece.
Jim, welcome back to the show.
How are you, sir?
Hey, doing good, Scott.
Hey, congratulations on your new book.
I'm glad to see so many people loving it so much on Twitter.
It sounds like you've got another big hit on your hands.
Well, thanks very much.
And thanks for the big blurb.
I got your name right on the back of the book.
So people will take it seriously.
That really helps.
You spelled it right.
And, you know, it wasn't like last book.
Yeah.
Oh, did I spell it Bovard last time?
Yeah, I know that would have been a bad one.
Oh, did I write Bovard again?
Yeah.
Anyway.
Hey, listen.
You write such important stuff.
And importantly for the USA Today, where people can get their eyeballs on it for real.
And of course, also at the American Conservative Magazine.
This one at TAC is from the turn of the new year here.
The official whitewash of the killing of Duncan Lemp.
Trust us.
It was a good killing.
And then this one is in the USA Today from February the 2nd.
The death of Maryland man shows continued out of control nature of SWAT no knock raids.
So tell us, who was Duncan Lemp?
And what's the controversy here, Jim?
Yeah.
Duncan Lemp was a 21 year old guy.
He was a John McAfee fan.
He had a lot of likes of John McAfee's tweets on.
He was a very he was a zealot for the Second Amendment outspoken on that.
He was hanging with some folks that were pretty radical, or at least claimed to be.
But he was set up for a no knock raid, which turned out to be fatal.
And it was, you know, Lemp was living in a quiet suburban neighborhood, basically not too many miles from where I live in Potomac, Maryland, which is a lot more affluent area than around here.
But it's an area where they don't really where they have very little violent crime, except by the police in this case.
Now what was the warrant?
It was a search warrant to check out his, you know, to check out guns that he might have had.
There was a big dispute.
The police said that he had a that he had purchased guns and he had a juvenile conviction that prohibited that.
However, Lemp bought at least one or more rifles at gun stores in Rockville, Maryland, here in Montgomery County.
Maryland has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
So he was he was cleared with a background check.
He was he was approved.
Part of what was, you know, the real killer here was that the the police insisted on getting a no knock raid.
They were saying he was so dangerous and one of the reasons he was so dangerous was he had an illegal assault weapon by the standards of Maryland.
Well, Lemp posted a number of photos of himself on Instagram with various firearms and the cops looked at one of those pictures and decided that Lemp had a prohibited IWI TAVR X-95 rifle, which is not allowed in Maryland.
So that was part of the reason that they went in with a no knock raid at 4.42 a.m.
But this in actuality, this is a reason not to do no knock raids at 4.42 a.m., because what the cops did was misinterpret the photo.
Lemp had had a rifle.
It was not illegal.
It was not the weapon that the Montgomery County police said it was.
So that by itself wasn't a good reason to kill him.
All right.
So at least the cops thought or claimed to have thought at the time that he was a prohibited person from owning firearms at all, plus extra special, this fully automatic rifle that they or submachine gun, whatever it was that they convinced him was a semi-automatic, semi-automatic.
It's important not to.
It was not.
No, no.
They thought it was.
Wait.
So they didn't even think it was a fully automatic gun.
That is correct.
OK.
So I'm Maryland.
Maryland bans a lot of semi-automatic rifles.
I see.
So you're saying I think I read in your piece, though, you say that this was a knockoff of the same rifle, but just but the legal version.
So what's the difference between the version he had and the kind that's illegal?
If it's not a matter of fully automatic or not, you know, the you know, the simple difference was that the model he had was legal.
There was like it was grandfathered in, essentially.
No, it wasn't a grandfather clause.
If you think back to the 1994 1994 crime bill that Joe Biden pushed into law is, you know, the the favorite part of that law for many liberals was the assault weapons ban.
But that did not have that much impact because a lot of gun manufacturers reacted to that law, which had specific things that defined a firearm as an assault weapon by making minor modifications.
And once the minor modifications were made, then the guns were no longer considered to be an assault weapon under federal law.
The same thing apparently happened with this firearm in Maryland.
It was it was modified, so it did not violate the Maryland restriction.
This is part of the reason why some liberal politicians want to prohibit all semi-automatic firearms, because that's the only way you could cover that.
But if you want to ban, you know what, 30, 40, 50 million firearms, yeah, that's going to be kind of tricky.
OK, so I'm glad you straightened us out on that, because I guess, you know, I had looked, you know, Google the the gun when I read it in your article and they're saying, you know, this is an Israeli military weapon or something.
So I thought it was like a it's a it's one of them funky shaped guns where I don't know the magazines in the stock in the back or something, kind of one of them things.
So I didn't know if it was a submachine gun or if it was a rifle or but you're saying it's neither.
It's semi-automatic.
Even the even the illegal version is a semi-automatic rifle here.
Yes.
Yes, that is correct.
OK.
And so the difference between the illegal one they thought they were rating for and the one that he had was something essentially cosmetic to a gun owner, the kind of sight or the kind of grip or something like that.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's that's my understanding.
So.
So, in other words, this is not just, you know, he they were searching on the basis of a technical violation or an offense, but apparently not even a meaningful one.
Right.
Not like, oh, my God, he has machine guns, but oh, my God, he has the wrong kind of sight or grip or some kind of technicality in the cosmetic accoutrements of his of his guns here.
And as you say that and they admitted that.
Right.
I remember this from your previous coverage, too, that they said, oh, yeah, it turns out now that the gun he had wasn't illegal, but it looked illegal to us on the Internet.
So.
Well, yeah.
And it was, you know, the Montgomery County waited until December 31st, New Year's Eve afternoon to to make public this report.
But it was treated as a minor technical issue.
Well, technically, it wasn't the gun, but, you know, it was still a gun.
So Lemp was also, you know, there were there were a number of reasons that the police gave for the no knock raid.
And one is that Lemp had been had criticized the police.
Wait, hold that thought for a second, because I want to go back to what you were saying earlier about how he was able to buy these guns in Maryland.
And even though he had, I guess the the story is that he had juvenile convictions that meant that he was a prohibited person, but he was able to pass the background check.
So that's meaningful.
But do you know if the law in Maryland is whether juvenile convictions should have been held against him or whether the cops were totally off based on that, too?
You know, it might vary according to the specific juvenile conviction.
And part of the exasperation with this case is the the police have not specified what it was.
And the family lawyer and the family say there was no such juvenile conviction that would have prohibited him from being a firearms owner.
And the cops don't even have a story.
Just trust us in the vaguest kind of terms.
Well, I mean, this is and a part of the frustration is this is basically the cop's story, the story basically up and down and back and forth.
And there's been, you know, the folks, the Washington Post, OK, well, we'll just print from the official report.
Well, that's settled.
So, you know, but going, you know, the the the county report said a no knock raid was justified due to Lemp being, quote, anti-government, anti-police, as well as possessing body armor.
And then being the police said he was an active member of the three percenters.
But the family lawyer and the family said that wasn't true.
So tell us about the three percenters.
Is there a history of three percenters pulling out their rifles and opening fire on cops who approach their houses or something like that?
Not that I know of.
I mean, this is the three percenters term comes from the this is a group that believes only three percent of Americans fought the British in the revolution.
So that's kind of their standard for being able to fight back against government, government, government tyranny now.
But I mean, it's an important question, right, of whether they mean someday when the revolution comes or whether they mean the next time I see a deputy sheriff.
Right.
I mean, if you got folks that are waiting to waiting to ambush deputy sheriffs, then, yeah, they're they're a much greater peril.
But I've had no part in any kind of plans to attack law enforcement.
And there was no there was nothing to say he was an imminent threat.
Not only that, but police had been surveilling Lemp and they were aware that he was he would leave the house, he'd take his pregnant girlfriend to a doctor appointment to go into the store.
It would have been possible for the police to detain Lemp and then do a peaceful search of his house.
Yeah, but that's not as fun as pretending to be a Navy SEAL and doing a special operations kind of paramilitary death squad type raid, Columbia style or, you know, Navy SEALs or Delta in Afghanistan style, right?
I don't know.
I don't know what what the motivation was, but I mean, it was certainly unusual for Montgomery County police that don't have the they don't have the history of the violence that the Baltimore police do.
So maybe that's changing.
But it's it's interesting.
So there was a focus on Lemp's views on gun ownership and the fear of tyranny.
That was part of the reason the government wanted to do a no knock raid.
And it's interesting that Lemp's last tweet said the Constitution is dead.
Barely two months later, so was Lemp.
Yeah.
And that's something.
And on a warrant for a technical violation on gun possession that apparently doesn't hold up at all on him being prohibited or on the gun being prohibited in any way.
And now he's a corpse and I guess I don't know if his baby's been born yet, has no father.
The baby has been born.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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I mean, to get a little bit off the facts and onto speculation, as you talk about, they could have pulled them over on the side of the road, something like that.
They also could have showed up, I don't know, maybe six in the morning and said over a megaphone, hey, Duncan Lemp, we have your house surrounded.
We have a warrant for your arrest.
And so come out with your hands up.
We're going to take you to see the judge.
And then, well, what might have happened then?
He was going to grab his X-95 and start blasting them all.
Is there any reason in the world to think, to even believe that the cops believed that?
Well, see, this is part of their frustration because, you know, there's still an almost complete cover up on this case.
We have not seen the the information from the SWAT commanders.
We have you know, there was a grand jury last summer, but almost all the evidence from that was still secret.
But if you look at how they actually did the raid and how they intended to do the raid, it's very chilling because so what the police, the plan was to attack the Lemp home from two sides.
Duncan Lemp and his pregnant girlfriend were sleeping in a bedroom.
It was a ranch style house and the bedroom had a window facing right on the outside.
So what the cops did is the which they did, which was the plan, was to do a break and rake on the first bedroom window.
Have you heard that phrase before?
No, I learned that from you, sir.
All right.
Well, and it's something which I learned from this case.
So what happened?
You had the two officers were standing outside the bed for that Lemp's bedroom outside the house for 42 a.m.
One officer used a fireman's pike tool to break the window and closest to the bed where Lemp and his girlfriend were sleeping.
And that tool has a hook that allowed them to pull back the blinds.
So the other officer would have a good view inside the bedroom.
So what happened, the second officer came up armed with a rifle, looked inside to find Lemp and, you know, told him to, you know, there was some back and forth.
Briefly, Lemp was waking up.
Few seconds later, Lemp was killed by five shots from that policeman shooting from outside the house through his bedroom window.
And now the same.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
And at the same time, that bedroom window was being smashed.
Other members of the SWAT team were setting off flashbangs outside the residence.
So it was like they're under a major damn attack.
And now do they say specifically he grabbed a rifle and pointed it at our guys or they don't even bother that?
You know, that's a good question, Scott, because this is something which which goes to the credibility of the government story here.
You know, there were two completely different versions of the of the killing of Duncan Lemp.
There was a statement that the police issued back in March, a few days after the killing.
And let me pull that up here.
Yeah, this is from a police press release.
Now back in March, this is how the Montgomery County Police Department said Duncan Lemp died during the SWAT raid.
The county said that police officers entering their residence announced themselves as police and that they were serving a search warrant.
Officers gave commands for individuals inside the residence to show their hands to get on the ground.
Upon making contact with Lemp, officers identified themselves as a police and gave him multiple orders to show his hands and comply with the officer's commands to get on the ground.
Lemp refused to comply with the officer's commands and proceeded towards the interior bedroom door where other officers were located.
Upon entrance by officers into Lemp's bedroom, Lemp was found to be in possession of a rifle and was located directly in front of the interior bedroom entrance door.
Now, this makes it sound like the cops came in through the front door, battering ram, of course.
That's a usual invite in these cases.
And they had a confrontation with Lemp and then Lemp moved to his bedroom.
Isn't that what it sounds like?
Yeah.
So you're saying.
And then when he moved into his bedroom, the cop was behind him providing cover for the cops in front and said, well, there's him and there's a rifle adjacent to him.
And so I'm going to count that as armed.
Yeah, actually, it's and this is a completely different version than what they said on December 31st when Lemp was simply shot five times by a cop standing outside his smashing bedroom window.
So these are completely different stories.
And it's interesting.
There were other details in the December 31st report is going back to the one in March.
It ends saying that upon entrance by officers into Lemp's bedroom, Lemp was found to be in possession of a rifle and was located directly in front of the interior bedroom entrance door.
What it says in the December 31st report was that Lemp had been shot five times and he had fallen and he was blocking that door.
So he was already fatally wounded.
I don't know if he was dead at that moment, but dead soon after.
And so it's funny that for the the one in March, upon entrance by officers in the Lemp's bedroom, Lemp was found to be in possession of a rifle.
The dude was dead or almost dead after he'd been shot to pieces.
Yeah, pretty clear there by possession.
They mean there was one leaning up against the corner of the room that he had never even had a chance to put his hands on, assuming he was even going for it.
Right.
Right.
Right.
I think he might have had his hands on.
I don't know.
But I mean, now this is this is the other the other wrinkle.
I mean, you know, let's go to the videotape.
I mean, a lot of police departments use videotape on these kind of raids.
Not Montgomery County, not super liberal Montgomery County.
So progressive cops don't need to wear a camcorder when they're doing a no knock raid because that'd be kind of a violation of their rights, you know, or whatever.
So it's I was told by the family lawyer, Rennie Sandler, that there had been an agreement with the police union which allowed the SWAT team to opt out of wearing body cams.
Yeah.
So and seven minutes after the raid was over, after Lemp had been shot, a SWAT team member did put on a body cam and walked through the house and started videotaping guns and stuff on the floor.
And the and to see Lemp's mother sitting on the bed kind of weeping.
I mean, this is a great highlight film.
Yeah.
But but but there was no there was no reason not to videotape the police assault on the Lemp home.
And this is something which raises profound doubts about the credibility of anything the government says, because it's like, well, trust us, it was a good killing.
Yeah.
I mean, look, the whole idea that, hey, here's a guy who writes right wing things on Facebook and has a gun.
So we have to do and this is essentially like step one before the Capitol riot.
This is what they'd like to do to essentially every white guy with a gun now.
It's just like after Oklahoma City, where they just pretended that, you know, first of all, McVeigh had no friends or co-conspirators at all.
OK.
And by swallowing that, the entire American right helped him do it.
They all did it.
And it seems like, you know, this is essentially what they have in mind.
If this is the cops point of view is like anybody who writes right wing things on Facebook and has a gun, that they're going to be treated with a night raid SWAT team style.
I mean, I guess people are going to find out how the other half lives under the drug wars over there on the east side of town here pretty soon.
And we're going to see a lot more of these, you know.
And you see how easy it is for them to justify, well, look, we were attacking him and the guy tried to defend himself.
So we shot him.
Well, and it's very strange to see the different narratives of the police accounts of the killing of Duncan Lepp because the March 17th account is like five days after the raid and the killing.
It's just it's completely different than the December 31st.
But this is something that basically nobody's called them out on.
The Washington Post was like, OK, so geez.
So, you know, but there are there are a lot of cops who don't share the values that if someone's got a gun and criticize the government, we have to take them down.
But some of the police commanders, I don't know.
I mean, you know, as a resident of this county, I'd love to see the to see the plans for this raid and to see what they were doing.
And it was obvious there were a lot of signs that Lepp was kind of paranoid.
So what did they think was going to happen when they smashed in the window at 4.42 a.m.?
Right.
And even if he wasn't paranoid, I mean, people usually grab their firearms when stuff like that happens, because that's what firearms are for, in case someone tries to barge in your house at four in the morning.
So, well, yeah, you know, it's a reflex even.
It's not even a plan.
It's just, oh, my God, where's my gun?
Yep.
And that's something which is so obvious that even The New York Times noted that after being awakened, SWAT raids lead to killings after being awakened by the shattering of doors and the detonation of a stun grenades, blurry suspects reach for nearby weapons.
Right.
And boy, I'll tell you what, when even The New York Times runs something like that, you know, first of all, you know it's right because it's a severe concession on their part.
And also, maybe it's a mark of a little bit of progress.
I mean, I don't know if you saw this one, Jim, where this would have been three or four years ago.
It was a big special about how did you guys know that sometimes black guys own guns?
And I mean, not when they're on their way to rob a store, but like, you know, for self-defense, just like regular people, you know, that kind of thing.
That was the thing.
And they profile like, check it out, here's a black guy who goes to the gun range and practices shooting his gun.
Have you ever heard of such a thing?
And it's, you know, these completely anti-gun liberals who don't know anybody who owns guns, much less black guys who own guns, but it goes to show kind of how they think of it.
And that's why they support anti-gun control most of the time, is they figure it's a bunch of guys who look like you who are going to be the victims of it, and screw you.
Because they don't get it that, yeah, of course black people own guns too.
And for the same reason as everybody else, for self-defense purposes.
Yep.
And there's been a huge increase in black gun ownership, and you know, I think that should lower the crime rate eventually.
So people better, because in bad neighborhoods...
Except among the cops, right?
Well, you know, people living in bad neighborhoods know that they can't count on the police to protect them.
So...
Yep.
The crime rate among the police will keep going up, though, against those people for defending themselves.
Against everybody.
Yeah.
So, can we change the subject?
Because she comes up in the story here, of course, is Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.
In your USA Today piece, it's, you know, you talk about Lemp, but you also...
And by the way, if you want to get back to any details of that case, we need to know.
I don't mean to take you too far off track.
But...
No, there's one more thing which I can pop in.
Sure.
There was a comment from Duncan Lemp's mother, Mercedes Lemp.
She told me, I will always wonder whether the police intended to kill Duncan from the start.
There was never a search, never any regard for our family.
Just the way that they conducted themselves seemed as if they intended to kill him even before the raid began.
Yeah.
This is the gist of what she said to me at a police headquarters protest on Duncan Lemp's killing last April, and speaking to her last month, she authorized me to use the quote in public.
I don't doubt it.
I don't doubt it.
And you know what, too, is I don't doubt that even if not, it's just business to them.
They don't give a damn.
It doesn't occur to them like, oh, man, we just killed a guy or, you know, there's nothing like that.
They're walking around as she's sitting there crying on the bed, as you say.
They're just walking around handling things as though, yeah, we came and got the deer we were trying to hunt back.
Yeah.
Well, and yeah, I mean...
It might as well have been premeditated, in other words.
Well, it was foreseeable.
I mean, what they knew about Duncan Lemp, you know, it was as obvious as the sun rising in the east, how he's going to react when they smash in his bedroom window pre-dawn.
So, yeah.
All right.
So this is where I was getting to Breonna Taylor's thing, too.
So when the police announced that or the attorney general announced that, you know, the grand jury, which he never gave a chance really to review the cop's actions, were not indicting the cop other than the one cop who fired wild into the neighboring house.
The cops have fired wild and killed the innocent woman who was next to the man with a gun.
Well, that just goes without saying, like, well, screw her.
You can't expect the cops to actually shoot the person that they're aiming at, you know, which was funny.
Like, that just went built in, that the fact that she was by definition the innocent person who was standing next to the guy with a gun, that it was unquestionable whether, you know, the bullets that hit her were within the margin of error, whereas the one that went wild into the neighbor's apartment, well, that's in question, right?
But then secondary to that, though, was the whole thing of, well, her boyfriend, he fired first, right?
But then the thing is, yeah, but they were an armed mob breaking down the door.
And so he had the right to fire first.
He was defending himself from, obviously, a credible lethal threat.
And if you listen to the phone call, which was finally published after they got away with weeks of lying about it, it is absolutely clear, I don't know if you've heard it or if you agree, but it's absolutely clear that he did not know it was the cops.
He called the cops, help, help, someone tried to break into the house and they shot my girlfriend and killed her and oh my God, and all this stuff.
He had no idea it was the police that had done it.
But then their attitude is that, well, of course, if they got the judge to sign off on it, then somehow, technically speaking, that's not aggression.
They have every right to do a paramilitary night raid at this house.
And the people inside the house, regardless of whether they know it's the cops or not, do not have the right to use force to defend themselves, to repel the threat.
They have only the right to submit and be taken into custody, except that, obviously, as you're saying, the New York Times even concedes, well, right when they're coming in the window, you might not know who it is yet, you know?
So they take this line of who's the aggressor and who's the defender, and they essentially just swap it because they're the ones in charge of writing their own story.
And the local news will always parrot the police's point of view on all these kinds of things.
But it's pretty clear, and as I know you know and should be famous, the jury in San Antonio acquitted the Branch Davidians who shot at the ATF because the law in Texas says that no one has the right to initiate lethal force against anyone else, only to use lethal force in self-defense, and that if the cops shot first, and I don't think you have to actually pull the trigger.
I think presenting an immediate lethal threat is obviously, you know, an MP5 machine gun in your face and a battering ram at your door, or as far as you know, just a bunch of criminals kicking in your door.
That's an immediate and present threat.
And the Davidians were all acquitted.
Whether the cops had a warrant, which was a bogus warrant anyway, but whether they had a warrant or not, the people had a right to defend themselves because not even the cops had the right to do what they did there.
And yet since Waco, we've had a Waco-style raid, you know, 15 times a night all over this country every single night since.
And it's a miracle, isn't it, that they only kill, you know, what, four or five hundred people a year instead of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands?
Oh, there's a lot of problems.
A lot of problems.
I mean, I don't know how many Waco-type raids there are a night, but there are certainly far too many violent no-knock raids.
And for a simple search warrant, I mean, you know, this is a case that if the police had come and presented the warrant, I think the family would have gone along with it.
I mean, the family, nobody in the family had a history of violence.
But you know, but that didn't matter when the police decide to attack.
And it was, if you're doing flash bangs, then that's a military-style attack.
And it's like, at least in one state, those are classified, maybe the feds classify them as a weapon of mass destruction.
So it's like, OK, well, it's OK to use them for the police.
But if a private, yeah, there was there was a great case in this.
There was a defense lawyer who was, cops were, you know, he was a criminal defense lawyer.
Cops had done a raid on his client and the cops were saying, well, the flash bangs aren't that big of a deal.
So he says, well, judge, how about if I set one off here in the courtroom?
Yeah.
Oops.
There's the famous clip from the Waco movie, too, where Bob Barr has the page hand the head of the ATF, a ball of Play-Doh.
Jim Kavanaugh.
So, Mr. Kavanaugh, if that was a flash bang grenade whose pin had just been pulled, would you feel comfortable holding that in your hand?
Or, jeez, am I under oath still?
I guess I'd have to say not.
Blow your hand right off, wouldn't it?
Yeah, I guess it would.
Yeah.
So, I mean, and this is the thing, too, right, is in the case of, in this one, they use the flash bangs in so many of the others they do, too.
I'm not sure if that was part of the Breonna Taylor one or not, but, you know, isn't it the case that we could just go back to come out with your hands up?
That we don't have to do SWAT raids at all?
That we could use SWAT raids only for when there's a hostage situation at the bank or those extreme outlier circumstances and the rest of the time they sit on their ass and do nothing?
Well, that's true.
I mean, my impression is at least 80, maybe 90 percent of the cases where SWAT teams are used is they aren't necessary because they become routine for searches.
And it's like, that's a travesty of American values and American procedures before the last 30 or 40 years.
Folks should be, folks should, peaceful citizens deserve a chance to peacefully comply.
Instead, you're treating everybody like they're, you know, like they've got hostages and they're, you know, getting ready to blow up the county courthouse.
Makes no sense.
You get a lot of people killed.
Plus, there is an element of intimidation in these SWAT raids that is very chilling when you see how they, if you read the details and read the arrogance of government officials who feel entitled to treat peaceful Americans like this, as this is, this is ugly business.
Yeah.
And it really does change the entire nature of the relationship between the civilians and the state.
And this is, you know, it's in Waco.
The Rules of Engagement is the famous clip of the guy saying, hey, listen, the days of a cop in a three piece suit walking up to a door and knocking on the door to serve a search warrant of any kind is over.
And not of any kind, but pretty much.
And then, and what's funny is he says, because that's where we stand.
We stand between the David Koresh's of the world and everybody here, you congressmen.
That's why we have to do paramilitary raids from now on.
When it was the paramilitary raid that precipitated the whole crisis and David Koresh was harmless and mostly, except to his own friends and family anyway.
Yeah.
He was not out there attacking people.
Yeah, exactly.
Did you use him as, oh yeah, no, because every criminal that they go after is David Koresh, the horrible Charles Manson, you know, cult leader, blah, whatever their narrative was about him.
And everyone who has a warrant out for their arrest are now equivalent to this guy who's equivalent to the worst criminals in all of history.
And so now the days of knock, knock, knock, hey, we need to come in and look around.
Forget it.
That's those days are over.
And as you say, it just changes what America is from one thing into another thing.
Yeah.
I mean, because if it's so easy for the government to use unlimited power over somebody simply because they want to do a search, then, you know, that is not a way that a democratic government should treat a free citizen.
I mean, there, you know, there needs to be some mutual respect there.
But if the government is treating you like you're, you know, some kind of escaped convict who was, you know, who deserves whatever he gets, there's going to be more and more violence.
And I don't want to see the violence of citizens getting shot.
I don't want to see the violence of cops getting shot.
But you do these kind of raids.
And part of the frustration is this has been obvious for decades.
Twenty six years ago, I wrote a story for Playboy on this, on no knock raids going out of control.
It was a excerpt from Lost Rites.
It was obvious this stuff was resulting in tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.
Yeah.
And it's got a lot more since then.
Yeah.
You know, when I first got the Internet in 1996 or 1997 or something like that, one of the first things that just radicalized the hell out of me was I found it was just the page of government atrocities and it was mostly like the drug war.
They targeted this guy because he was you probably remember his name, Scott something Scott out in California was the first one on the list.
The cops wanted his land, Santa Barbara acid forfeiture case.
Yeah.
The guy.
Yep.
They just wanted his land.
So they murdered him over some pot seeds or whatever.
And then there was a million of them like that.
And I was like, wow, it really is.
It's a Waco raid every day.
The only special about Waco and Ruby Ridge that's unique about them is that, well, the political characterization of the people, you know, the victims on the receiving end, of course.
But the fact that they won on the first day and then there was this long term siege that played out and all that, that's what was unique.
The paramilitary style police deployment against them was actually not unique.
It's just usually they win by the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force immediately.
And so there's no there's no siege.
There's no dispute.
And the people on the receiving end are either dead or hauled off.
And then it's over.
Well, there's a second wrinkle here.
One of the things that's novel about Ruby Ridge and Waco is that we actually got a lot of information about the a lot of documents about what the agencies and the agents were thinking and doing.
And that's some of the most damning information of them all.
So and but, you know, with a SWAT raid like like the Duncan Lemp raid, we still have nothing from the SWAT team or the SWAT team commanders.
We have none of the testimony, almost none of the testimony from the grand jury except what propped up the prosecutor's story.
Now, I want to throw in one more detail here on that raid.
Maryland is very proud of Montgomery County, very proud that they have an independent arrangement with Howard County, which is the next county over.
And so so if there was a shooting by Montgomery County police, it's investigated by Howard County and vice versa.
That's how it should be all over the nation.
At minimum.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Great.
But yeah.
But this supposedly guarantees independence.
However, it's a complete charade because there was, you know, the the family survivors, the other eyewitness, the girlfriend of the shooting was never interviewed by Howard County cops or prosecutors or or detectives.
What the Howard County did was have a Montgomery County detective go around and talk to his colleagues.
Oh, so Bob, tell me what happened with the Duncan Limp Ray.
Oh, yeah.
Fred, this is how it went down.
And that was that was the core of the Howard County analysis.
It was completely by Montgomery County cops and for Montgomery County.
Yes.
And yet they had this charade about, well, it was an independent investigation, you know, and it was it was independent enough for The Washington Post.
Let's put it like that.
Right.
Well, you know, my idea, as far as that goes, as long as we're stuck with these states, is that it should be on a random basis, prosecutors and investigators from different counties investigating whenever there's a police shooting.
So it's not too symbiotic like that.
And there's a little bit more chance of a check and balance.
A little bit.
But, you know, I mean, but the basic laws here in Maryland, we got very strong police unions.
They've created a sweeping procedural of favors.
So, you know, good luck with that.
Yeah.
That's how it is all over the country, too.
They have their own officer's bill of rights.
Yeah.
There's some of us got most states.
Yeah.
Most states don't have that codified.
Maryland does.
Maryland was one of the first.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
I mean, talk about the Orwellian, you know, four legs, good and two legs, even better kind of scenario there with that.
It's just amazing.
OK, you guys, check it out.
The new book is finally done enough already.
Time to end the war on terrorism.
It's available in paperback and Kindle.
Also, the audio book is coming, although that might take a little while for all those who participated in the big fundraiser of twenty nineteen.
I have the list and you will be getting all your stuff as soon as my boxes of wholesale copies arrive.
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So let me ask you this to wrap up here because we're already over.
But I like talking to you.
I'm really interested in what you think of what is apparently unstoppable.
The new era of the domestic war on the radical right as broadly defined as is imaginable coming up here.
Well, Scott, that's part of the reason I'm working extra hard to come across as moderate these days.
You're doing a really bad job, Jim.
Yeah, I haven't done so well since about, you know, the 1980s.
But no, it's great to see people like Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, a lot of others, Massey, Congressman Massey, others speaking out against that.
There's a lot of stuff coming down the road.
And it's, you know, I see the Washington Post.
That's the morning paper I get.
And it's like, oh, my God.
And there's this it's funny with Biden in power.
There is a almost a fervent enthusiasm for more government arbitrary power over vast numbers of Americans.
And simply to see how the how recent events have been portrayed to justify this huge threat exaggeration.
It's like, my goodness, some days it almost makes me cynical.
Yeah, I know, man.
It's something, you know, Trump has been correct me if I'm wrong about this, because I admit I've been kind of busy doing other things, but he hadn't said a peep since he left for Mar-a-Lago.
Right.
And I know they kicked him off Twitter, but he could go set up an account on MeWe or whatever they haven't.
He hasn't tried to do that.
He hasn't done any interviews.
And yet the former CIA officer, Robert Grenier, is on NPR News comparing him to Saddam Hussein and saying that he's leading the insurgency and that he's got to be separated from this massive insurgency.
And I'm going, where is this happening?
He's talking about it as though that bogus FBI report came true and the radical right seized every statehouse on Inauguration Day to try to thwart Joe Biden's inauguration.
But that didn't happen.
And he makes an analogy between al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the few mostly just random goofballs who you couldn't even say seized the Capitol building, just walked around it for a while.
And the broader kind of patriot right or populist right.
And it's funny because he even says, look, there was hardly any al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
And so, yeah, yeah.
I mean, we focused on them.
Of course, he had to let bin Laden go.
We focused on them.
But primarily, he said, quote unquote, primarily, we had to focus on the environment in which they were thriving.
And that meant the Taliban.
And so then on one hand, he's admitting that they focused on the Taliban, not al-Qaeda after September 11th, waka, waka, waka.
But then on the other hand, he's saying that if the goofballs at the Capitol are al-Qaeda, then every right winger who listens to talk radio is the Taliban.
And they're the real enemy who's got to be.
We got to use the counterinsurgency doctrine against them to separate all these people from their insurgent leaders.
I mean, you can't make this stuff up, man.
Well, it certainly worked out well in Fallujah.
Yeah.
Oh, and in Kandahar, too.
They're doing great right now.
Oh, yeah.
It's just I mean, it's it's it's fascinating in a morbid sense to see some of the ideas that are being popularized by NPR, Washington Post and other places, because it's like, you know, I don't want to see a civil war.
I mean, you know, it'd be it's some of the same stupidity that, you know, that prevailed in the early 1860s.
Both the north and the south thought they could easily win.
And it turned out to be a hell of a lot worse for both sides.
So I just I mean, it's it's striking.
It's so easy for so many people to demonize people that have guns and bad ideas.
Yeah.
So it's like, OK, you don't like my ideas.
I can live with that.
But, you know, hey, Second Amendment, get the hell away from here.
So.
Right.
And look, you know, I don't know, man, I'm not a master of these statistics or anything like that.
It's just my imprecise observation that the really racist and dangerous right wing is infinitesimally small in America and that most right wingers are not racists at all and haven't been in two generations or three and that, you know, it's kind of the advent of the Trump era that and liberal media in the Trump era that all right wingers somehow are these horrible racists and all of this stuff where, you know, really, I mean, certainly in the 1990s and I think this is the case today that like the Boogaloo guys and a lot of these different groups are not avowedly racist, you know, like they're probably against Black Lives Matter and the way that they protest and riot and that kind of thing.
But it's not like they're that that's their beef, right?
Their beef is the government, the same one that we all hate.
Yeah.
You know, I wouldn't vouch for the Boogaloo boys.
I mean, there are some folks in that in that group.
I think there's a lot of government informants and some of them have been instigators.
So I'd just be nervous.
You know, there were some of those folks at the at a protest for Duncan Lemp at the Montgomery County Police Headquarters.
And, you know, I got a bad vibe from some of those folks.
It's kind of like, OK, let's where's the microphone?
Right.
And you know what?
There are actual dumbasses naturally occurring in the world.
But for anybody who's involved in radical politics, you should certainly presume and suspect that your dumbest and wildest friend is not your friend and that he's you know, he's not a cop.
He's been compromised by the cops and his job is to get you in trouble and you should stay the hell away from him.
I mean, isn't that obvious enough by now?
Well, sure.
I mean, there there was there was a case of a guy out in, I think, Wyoming.
It was, you know, kind of outspoken anti-government stuff.
And so, you know, he made a new friend and his friend persuaded him to take this pipe bomb he gave over to a federal office.
And it turned out it was a dud pipe bomb.
But it was it was sufficient to get the guy several years in prison.
And it's kind of like, OK, if somebody wants you to do something with a pipe bomb, you know, it's probably a really bad idea.
He's probably not your friend.
Seriously.
And of course, you know, who was surprised when they announced that the leader of the Proud Boys was an FBI informant for years?
And I was shocked.
Oh, I was shocked.
And then, yeah, he they just happened to have arrested him the day before everything happened at the Capitol so that he didn't have to be there for that, huh?
Yeah.
This is something there is.
My editor, an American conservative, Jordan Bloom, has done some great work on informants and some of the infiltrations going on.
And I'm hoping he can do a lot more in this because he's he's cutting edge on that.
Yeah.
Well, as as I'm always saying, I know that this is not your speciality or anything, but I'm going to pollute your interview with it anyway.
Oklahoma City was at least partially the result of the FBI's Pat Con operation, Patriot conspiracy to infiltrate the radical right and make them worse and bust them.
And then my position is that the sting got out of control and happened anyway.
But you could make an argument that they really wanted it to get that bad so that they could play the victim and scapegoat the entire right and especially the rising militia movement, the post Waco militia movement, and deal a very hard blow against them.
But Occam's razor minimalist explanation, they are no good at infiltrating Nazi groups because they got 170 people killed that time.
It's easy to imagine, right?
I kind of want the FBI to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and bust them for something and prevent them from hurting people.
But that's not what you get.
The Klan gets three times worse once their new informant leadership takes over.
And it's a way to bust the local group, but it's also bad for everybody else in the community, you know?
Yeah.
Well, something that everybody forgets, it was an FBI informant who organized a Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville in 2017, shortly before the big right wing rally there that had all the violence.
But it was a Klan informant and it's like it's in the newspapers.
It was in the newspapers once or twice, and then it kind of vanished.
I'm thinking like, dudes, I mentioned that in the USA Today 2018, but, you know, it didn't let's just say it didn't have a lot of sticking power.
Yeah.
Well, you got a sharp eye for this stuff.
And, you know, I got to give you credit for inspiring me, really.
I've read your books for many, many years before I ever wrote one.
And I was so pleased when Anthony told me on the phone, I was just talking with Anthony Gregory and he said to me, the book, the old one, the Afghanistan book, the book is very Bovardian.
And then I stole that and put an exclamation point behind it and use that as his blurb for the book, because that's about the nicest thing that he could have said to me was that I wrote this book in a fashion that you would write a book, which is here's all the proof that I'm right about everything as I bludgeon you over the head with all of this stuff.
And so I far from take credit, take any credit for doing it nearly as well as you.
But you're the example I'm trying to live up to here, Jim.
You do great work.
Well, Scott, that's very kind.
Congratulations again on your new book.
I'm really glad to see you going gangbusters and I hope the Biden people don't get you.
Yeah.
Well, we'll see how it goes.
All right.
Appreciate it, Jim.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
See you, man.
Everybody check out Jim.
He's at the American Conservative Magazine, the official whitewash of the killing of Duncan Lemp.
And then, hey, this is just the other day.
Please help make it, you know, continue to help it go viral.
It really seemed to have gotten out there pretty good on Twitter.
So all you Facebookers and everybody else, check it out at the USA Today.
Death of Maryland man shows continued out of control nature of SWAT no knock raids.
James Bovard.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com antiwar dot com Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
