3/16/20 Jim Bovard on the Police Killing of Duncan Lemp

by | Mar 16, 2020 | Interviews

Jim Bovard shares the story of the death of Duncan Lemp, a 21-year-old Maryland man recently killed by police in his home in the middle of the night. The police aren’t releasing their side of the story yet, but it looks as though Lemp hadn’t even been charged with any crimes—police were simply executing a search warrant on what they deemed a “high-risk” target. The SWAT team threw stun grenades into his room, where he and his pregnant girlfriend were sleeping, then shot Lemp to death. Scott suspects that the officers responsible will face few to no repercussions for this crime, as is almost always the case.

Discussed on the show:

  • “Did Maryland Police Shoot And Kill A Sleeping Man?” (The American Conservative)
  • “Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997)” (IMDb)
  • “Potomac man killed in police-involved shooting in Maryland” (The Washington Post)
  • “James Bovard Playboy 2000 Flash Bang You’re Dead SWAT Team Abuse” (jimbovard.com)

Jim Bovard is a columnist for USA Today and the author of Public Policy Hooligan: Rollicking and Wrangling from Helltown to Washington. Find all of his books and read his work on his website and follow him on Twitter @JimBovard.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty ClassroomExpandDesigns.com/ScottListen and Think AudioTheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3S2zV2k4Y0
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All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got James Bovard, author of Public Policy Hooligan and a bunch of other great books.
And here he is writing at the American Conservative Magazine.
Did Maryland police shoot and kill a sleeping man?
Welcome back to the show.
Jim, how are you, sir?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Really happy to have you here, man.
Not so sure.
I like the circumstances in this case, but I guess that's always the case when we talk, isn't it?
Well, tell me.
Yeah, it's it's hard for libertarian to get a break.
I'll tell you what.
Yeah.
And and in this case, it's a libertarian is the sleeping man, 21 year old Duncan Socrates Lemp.
Tell us about him, please.
Yeah, he was someone who was from his Twitter feed.
It looks like he was a supporter of John McAfee, the former libertarian presidential candidate.
The last tweet that Duncan Lemp set out was only four words that said the Constitution is dead.
And now is so, too, is Duncan Lemp, because the Montgomery County, Maryland SWAT team attacked his house at four thirty eight a.m. last Thursday.
Now, this is this is a house that's in a very affluent part of Montgomery County, not the part that I live in.
But so he was there just sleeping with his pregnant girlfriend and talking to the family.
The lawyer, the family hired after he was killed.
What happened was the police fired into the bedroom where Lemp and his girlfriend were sleeping and that gunfire was followed by two flashbang grenades.
Now, you know, the government talks about the flashbangs like they're a cat pistol, but these flashbangs are considered a weapon of mass death and destruction.
They're four times louder than a 12 gauge shotgun blast.
They've a number of people have been killed and wounded by these things.
And simply to throw them in is going to cause horrendous psychological shock.
Now, it's interesting how the county government has modified its story on this.
On the end of the first day after they killed him, the police press police said it was simply a question of firearms offenses.
And then late on Friday night, the police put out another version and said that Lemp had confronted them.
Now, OK, if someone shoots into your window and throws a bomb into your bedroom and you stand up and say, what the hell are you doing?
Oh, he confronted us.
Let's kill him.
So the cops have not alleged that he was holding a gun or a knife or even a flashlight.
No, they just say, well, he had confronted them.
So it makes you wonder, do the police feel they've got a right to kill anybody who confronts them after the police start shooting and bombing?
Yes.
Well, of course they do.
And now.
So there's so much else going on here, too.
I mean, do I have it right that the the lawyer's version, he didn't even stand up to confront anyone.
He was just shot while sleeping in his bed and was dead before he even knew why he was dead.
Yeah, it's it's it's unclear exactly when he died, but it is it is clear that the that the cops, you know, handcuffed the family members and then searched the house.
And the cops probably put photos of five firearms, which they found none of which were in themselves illegal.
You know, the cops were putting the photos of the firearms online.
But what they did not include was a photo of Lemp's bullet ridden body.
I mean, I think that would be more interesting to see the person just after the police killed him, maybe see the damage from the flashbangs in that bedroom, maybe look at the other parts of the scene where the damage occurred.
But no, we just see the pictures of the guns.
I mean, part of the thing is Montgomery County, Maryland is very liberal and owning a gun is not quite as bad as a hate crime.
But, you know, there's there's not a lot of support for firearms ownership in this part of Maryland.
If you go, you know, 30 miles to the west from here, you get a completely different political atmosphere as far as guns go.
Yeah.
Boy, they sure do love militarizing their police over there, though, don't they?
Oh, it's not guns they're against.
Just private ownership of guns, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, there's there's a number of wrinkles on here.
The cops have said that that Lemp was a prohibited person, prohibited from owning firearms, but they haven't said that he, you know, but they've not been willing to say why he was prohibited.
His lawyer told me that he did not have a permit to use medical marijuana.
This is something which, you know, using marijuana, if you're a gun owner, well, that's a federal felony right there, though it's rarely enforced.
I was looking at the court records.
The only offense I found was a speeding ticket from last year.
So but there's I mean, I think when we talk about these red flag laws, the idea is that this is for wife beaters, right?
That this guy would have a restraining order from his ex-girlfriend that he's been stalking or something like that.
But apparently, no.
Yeah.
A lot of people are saying this was a red flag raid.
I don't know that.
My impression is it might as well.
I would not assume that was a red flag raid.
What is interesting is Lemp was a member of a number of online pro-gun rights groups.
He'd expressed interest in joining a militia.
He also made a comment about how he was a software developer, and he had made some comments or at least there were tributes to him online about how he could do a website, set up a secure website.
So that was striking.
His Instagram page shows two photos with the motto, Six Semper Tyrantis.
Virginia state motto, Thus Always the Tyrants, including one photo showing firearms held high.
Now, this will ring home for you, Scott, because I was checking his Lemp's Facebook page on Friday morning.
I was surprised that he and I had seven mutual friends, including one who's a mutual friend of ours.
Yeah.
I noticed that.
And in fact, I, I logged into my Twitter to check when I read that paragraph out of your piece here.
And I noticed I have four friends in common with him, including Rayford Davis, the great former cop turned libertarian activist.
And so, yeah, this guy was that apparently seems like it's probably why he was targeted was just because of his political views.
And you know, I don't know.
I mean, a number of people on Twitter have been assuming that I'm not assuming that because it's possible that that's someone who knew he he was he was outspoken about his support of gun rights.
And, you know, as I mentioned, there was a lot of that's not a popular position here.
But so, yeah, I don't know why he was targeted.
I mean, it may have been well, there's a number of theories I've heard and, you know, I could blather here, but it's hopefully that information will come out.
But there's, you know, there's a couple other wrinkles on this part of what I want to do with this article was set the context here in Maryland.
Maryland has had a long history of daily SWAT raids.
The cops did a raid on a mayor's house and killed his dogs about 12 years ago.
So the state legislator required the cops to report every SWAT raid in the following four years.
The cops did over 8000 SWAT raids, killed nine people, injured almost 100, killed a lot of animals.
So what the state did was stop counting, of course, because it was getting kind of embarrassing.
Right.
Yeah, they could quit with the militarized raids on people's family homes in the middle of the night, like this is the Soviet Union and they're the NKVD or they can stop keeping records of the disasters that break out every time they do this.
But so, yeah, obviously, that's the easy answer.
Yeah, and another problem here is that the Montgomery County has not disclosed the names of the police or policemen who killed Lemp.
But cops in Maryland are protected by what they call the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights.
That means that the that the cops cannot be questioned for 10 days after they kill somebody.
And now so it was just a search warrant that they were executing here or it was an arrest warrant.
That is my understanding.
That is my understanding.
A lot of people have said, OK, I mean, some people have said, well, it's similar to David Koresh.
OK, so you have someone who you suspect of illegal possession of firearms.
So the person steps out, David Koresh went for a jog.
David Koresh actually went target shooting with ATF agents shortly before the raid.
But so the same with this guy, OK, you think he's doing stuff illegally, then he steps out of his house, you arrest him or or you do a peaceful search after daylight.
But when you do a basically a violent attack at 430 a.m. in the morning, this practically, you know, this is a recipe for someone getting killed.
And it makes and I guess he was considered high risk.
And I don't know if that was because of his political beliefs or because maybe there is other information that the police have not disclosed would put this in a different light.
They have said almost nothing and it's more than four days after they killed the guy.
And it's not like it's boosting their credibility to keep silent.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, we see this all the time with the cops getting the wrong house and stuff like that.
It seems like they either do very poor surveillance or there was one I saw where a cop got shot the other day and it was because they did a SWAT raid on a house where there was a guy wanted for murder in there.
But they didn't realize that his partner, who was also wanted for the same murder, was in there with him.
And so they thought they were raiding one guy, but they were raiding two and one of their own guys got shot, which just goes to show how lazy they are in in staking out the place in the first place and making sure that they know what's going on here.
In this case, they raided a house with nobody with a criminal record.
This guy, as you say, supposedly was a prohibited person.
I love that phrase, a prohibited person in possession of firearms.
But they raided a house.
He's got no criminal record other than a speeding ticket you could find.
And he's in there with his mom and his dad and his pregnant girlfriend.
And they raid the place like Steel Team Six.
Yep.
It's and it's 430 a.m. and the cops start shooting, apparently.
That's according to the family lawyer.
The cops haven't explained what they did.
They just said, well, he had confronted us, so we killed him, I guess.
But then they do the flashbangs.
And when you do that, you know, it well, anyhow, I won't get too graphic here.
But no, it's just it's a very strange situation.
And I think anybody can imagine what could have happened to his pregnant girlfriend or his baby or their baby from throwing grenades at her.
Yeah, it's not too hard to imagine that that kind of stress or something could cause a miscarriage or or something terrible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there was yeah, there was a case in Georgia some years ago where the SWAT team does a raid and throws a flashbang into the baby's crib.
You know, it was a really bad day for the baby.
So but I mean, you know, what's the evidence here?
And the and the county government hasn't told squat.
And it's like I think maybe they're hoping it will all blow away.
But I don't think so.
Yeah.
I mean, Bovard's already on the case.
And so what are they going to do?
We know the answer is not that they're going to hold the killer cop accountable.
Whoever fired those shots.
And they say fired them from outside.
I mean, do we even know that if they shot through the wall or through the window or what?
It sounds like it could have been an accident even right.
You know, if you shoot through somebody's window at during at 430 a.m., it's usually not considered an accident.
Well, I mean, the entire circumstances certainly not.
But cops shoot them, shoot each other in the back during SWAT raids and stuff like that all the time.
Right.
They're running around with their finger on the trigger and.
Oops.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, I'm not trying to quit the guys, but I'm just saying it seems kind of strange.
Like, why would they just assassinate him?
Right.
It's more like they probably.
Oh, oops.
Sorry, Sarge.
I waxed the guy before I had a chance to say.
Yeah.
But but something that would raise questions about that, that narrative is that, OK, if you do that, you shoot into the house accidentally.
Then why do you also throw in flashbangs?
So that's true.
Flashbangs are bombs.
Flashbangs are bombs.
I mean, if somebody threw a flashbang at a cop, they'd get, you know, sent up the river for a very long time.
You're right about that.
Yep.
And in fact, you know, it's always good to bring up the documentary Waco, the rules of engagement, because people need to see that.
And there's a great clip in there, of course, of Congressman Bob Barr confronting Jim Cavanaugh, the head of the ATF, and saying, oh, yeah, it's just a flashbang grenade.
And that's I forgot the words that the guy was using to try to play it down.
So Barr has a page hand him a ball of Play-Doh and he says, this Play-Doh in your hand right now, if that was a flashbang grenade whose pin had just been pulled, would you feel very comfortable holding that flashbang grenade right now?
And he's like, oh, geez, no.
Yeah.
Because obviously it could blow his hand off or maybe his arm off up to his elbow or something if he was to hold it in his hand like that.
Certainly he could lose all his fingers in his hand.
And so he had to concede that, oh, geez, I guess, yeah, OK.
But they can throw this through a church's window on a Sunday morning or a libertarian's window at 430 on a Thursday.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, those are bombs.
And I've been reading more about them lately.
And a funny comment by one criminal defense lawyer, the cops were, you know, it was there was a raid.
He was defending his client.
And, you know, the cops were saying, well, the flashbangs are no big deal.
So the defense lawyer says, so how about if I set one off here in the courtroom in front of the jury?
Can I do that?
So it is like, oh, well, no.
So I don't know.
But it's it's part of what was spurred this article was I sent questions on last Friday to the Montgomery County press spokesman, I mean, just a simple set of questions.
And she was unwilling to answer my questions.
And then she notified me that my press inquiries were going to be handled like a Freedom of Information Act request, which meant that the government can delay for weeks or months before the answer.
And it's like, no, this is, you know, this this is a bureaucratic game.
And this is, you know, this is what they do when they don't want to provide any information and they don't want to say, well, you know, take a long walk in a short beer.
But this is basically what what that means when you say, well, it's this is going to be handled under the Maryland Public Information Act, which is, you know, reminds me of the FOIA Act, which should stand for the Freedom from Information Act.
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Well, now, so what about the other media?
How's the Baltimore Sun doing on this?
They care at all?
I haven't.
You know, I haven't checked stories this morning.
I was chasing writing about something else.
Washington Post on the day of the killing had an article headline.
Police involved shooting in Maryland.
And you know, they were involved somehow.
Yeah.
Well, you know, they were, you know, they were in the same zip code.
They were in the same zip code and maybe something happened.
Post had another story, I think, in the last day or so, maybe on Friday night.
Washington Post has some excellent reporters and I'm kind of I'd be curious to see if one of them jumps on this.
There are a number of other writers who I've either seen or heard from who are looking into this.
You know, hopefully there's enough pressure to stop the government from not answering questions about why they killed Duncan Lemp at 430 a.m. on Thursday morning.
Oh, man.
Well, I got a bad feeling about this.
I mean, I guess at some point they'll have to admit the cop's name.
But we already know that the prosecutor is either going to not pursue it or if he does, he's going to take it to the grand jury and hide behind them and let them dismiss it.
Or if the grand jury is somehow full of a bunch of Bovardians and they decide that they want to see this cop hang, the judge is going to decide that only other cops can judge whether a cop did the right thing.
And all other cops agree that he had no choice.
And so qualified immunity applies and he gets to keep all of his vacation pay and the rest of it because this is America.
I mean, there's no accountability for killer cops, except one out of a thousand, maybe.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, it's I mean, this is unusual for Montgomery County.
Montgomery County police tend to not do these kind of things.
It's not like Baltimore police where if something like this happened, people say, yeah, well, it was Thursday.
So.
Well, didn't you say they killed nine people lately or eight people or something before they stopped keeping count?
Yeah, eight or nine, I think, or maybe something like that.
They got away with all those, right?
Well, yeah.
I mean, but there is a whole lot more which have been killed in non-SWAT raids that were not counting that.
But take a step back.
I mean, I would think that there would be some people in law enforcement locally that would not be happy with how this apparently went down.
I don't know that there is going to be a total blue wall of silence here.
Maybe there will be or it might be that the that the county will simply make a large payment to the family to settle their to settle a wrongful deaths lawsuit if the family files one and kind of hope to let the case go away that way.
I don't know.
But there are there are other people looking into this, and it's something which I will be looking into further as well.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I sure hope that you stay on the case and keep the pressure on them, because it's not a matter of law.
It's a matter of politics.
And so the politics say that the people of Maryland are absolutely sick of this and there's going to be hell to pay if they don't do the right thing or the people of Maryland don't care.
The cops can kill as many people as they want to for fun because, hey, that's the law.
And so whatever.
And if that's the narrative, then they'll get away with it.
The only the only alternative is public pressure makes them feel like they absolutely cannot let that happen.
Well, yeah, I mean, that you know, that might be the best pushback against what might become a cover up.
I mean, it looks like a cover up four days in.
But I'm not sanguine about things changing because it was the Maryland politicians who passed that law enforcement Bill of Rights, which lets which which entitles policemen not to answer any questions about who they kill sometimes until after the evidence comes in.
So the police can say, oh, here's the evidence which they have.
So this is what I did.
This happens in New York and some other places.
I'm not sure if police officers in Maryland get to see the evidence before they make their official statement and why they killed somebody.
But it is a profoundly corrupt law.
This, you know, you know, it gives special privileges to the people who already have, you know, vast precedence in their favor when they shoot people.
So.
Well, you know, it's interesting here, too, about we've seen this from time to time where someone is identified as a constitutionalist and that's a check for how dangerous they must be.
We can't go knock on the door or we can't announce over a megaphone, come out with your hands up.
We have to do a dynamic SWAT raid because this guy says he's loyal to the U.S. Constitution and everybody knows that that is sedition.
That is, you know, a dangerous ideological bent among the crazy radical right that they think that the Constitution is the law and that they talk about it.
Well, occasionally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if that was a factor in this case.
I mean, there are you know, I don't know why the local police targeted this guy.
I don't know why the police decided they had to use so much violence because it's a violent attack at 430 a.m. with flashbangs.
So it was like it was the the local police decided they had to do a preemptive attack on the guy.
It wasn't surprising that someone got killed.
So did they factor that in before they attacked?
I mean, I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, you see all the time.
That's totally fair that in this specific case, we don't know.
But, you know, we do know that they consider the cops and we've seen this in their homeland security reports and whatever, that anybody with a Gadsden flag, that that's a sign of some anti-government radicalism when the Gadsden flag is from the American Revolution.
Right.
Then this is always to tyrants.
They want to associate that with Timothy McVeigh's T-shirt or something.
But as you say here, that's the state motto of Virginia.
That was my home state.
And, you know, it was it's a great state motto.
It's a great state seal.
And I'm just surprised it hasn't been prohibited as a hate crime or or perhaps that the new governor will change.
No, I'll shut up.
I'll stop.
Yeah.
I'm sure he'll ban that along when he announces his new curfew.
But yeah, I mean, this is the funny thing.
It reminds me of in seventh grade, my my history teacher, government, whatever the class was called.
I guess it was history.
But when she taught us about the checks and balances and the separation of powers, there's just no hiding how embarrassed she was that the America's founders were such kooks that they were afraid of having too much power in one branch of the government and thought that you needed to separate the government and have, you know, the courts and the legislature and the executive be able to check each other's powers and what.
But it was a crazy, paranoid time.
They had just finished a war against the king where the king had been kicking people's doors in on the writs of assistance and stuff.
And so, boy, those crazy anti-government radicals who created the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. government, they were so anti-government and such kooks when they did so.
And that was the narrative of the whole thing.
This is something we're all supposed to roll our eyes about now, thus always to tyrants.
Come on.
Everybody knows tyrants can do whatever they want.
That's why they're tyrants.
And that's what makes us Americans.
Yeah.
Well, the Sixth Emperor Tyrant, I think that was adopted as a state motto either during or just after the Civil War.
So it's that raises even more questions.
But we'll just draw the curtain of mercy on that.
Yeah, that's a pretty bad because that is what what John Wilkes Booth hollered at Abraham Lincoln right before he shot him, right?
Oh, I don't know.
I wasn't there.
Oh, OK.
I think I just read that somewhere, but it might have been in The New York Times.
So not that old.
You know, someone was ragging on me on Facebook.
No, ragging on me on YouTube because I did an interview a week or so ago with James Corbett and I was in a black and white background.
That guy is so old, he uses black and white.
I was like, dude, that's funny.
Yeah, you're kind of old, but you know what?
Not compared to people who are older than you.
So hey, you just got to look at it like an economist.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, man.
So yeah.
Let me ask you something.
This thing with the SWAT teams coming in people's houses at night and and or killing them and their dogs.
This is kind of a problem in all 50 states, isn't it, Jim?
Yeah, this is something which I first wrote about for Playboy in 1994.
And then I did at least one or two follow up articles for Playboy on this topic.
I haven't come back to it lately, but well, you know, prior to this piece.
But no, it's it's it's you know, people realize 25 years ago, the SWAT teams had too much power.
They were too violent.
You know, it's kind of like asset forfeiture.
Oh, it's a damn outrage.
Innocent people are getting robbed.
Twenty five years later, the same crap is going on.
So it's actually worse.
So, you know, and it makes sense the way that they sell it, that look, if you have a hostage crisis at a bank, you need an option of a really talented sniper or something.
That's how they sell it to the to the people.
But in reality, like what are these guys going to do?
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
They're not just going to sit around waiting for a hostage crisis at a bank.
They're going to find other things to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's how it works.
That again, speaking of Waco, the rules of engagement, there's a clip in there.
I guess it's an ATF officer, but he was speaking for every cop in the land, I guess.
He says the day of a couple of detectives in three piece suits knocking on a door to serve a search warrant of any kind is over.
And why?
As he put it, because we stand between the caresses of the world and the American and everybody here, the politicians, as though Koresh was on his way to D.C. to murder the politicians.
So that's why the politicians need the ATF there to protect them and even pretend they're protecting the American people, the people of Waco, the people of Texas from Koresh.
Oh, no, it's the politicians he was coming for and completely made up.
And that's the excuse for no more knocks on the door.
And you know what is the thing, too, that, you know what, maybe it's naive in this day and age when so many people have AR-14s for a detective in a three piece suit to knock on a door.
But how about stand outside behind their engine block and announce, come out with your hands up.
We have a warrant for your arrest and we don't want to fight.
And so just come out and do this the easy way.
They don't even try that anymore.
That's like a throwback to an old Western or something.
Come out with your hands up.
They've never even heard of that.
There are millennial kids who are listening to this show right now who they've never even heard on a TV show.
A cop say, come out with your hands up.
That's ancient history.
Yeah, well, I would point out that there are some areas and there are some police officers who do serve a warrant with a knock on the door, kind of like what the English, the English ruling from their high court in 1603 was not going to announce that there are some police officers who do that.
There are some police departments that do that.
It might even be something which is done at times here in Montgomery County, Maryland.
But when you bring in the SWAT, then you're, you're basically, that's almost a decision for preemptive violence, if not massive intimidation.
And most people don't need that to comply with the law.
It's like, okay, you got a warrant.
It's like that, that, you know, that great line from the Grateful Dead song, I like to get some sleep before I travel.
But if you got a warrant, I guess you're going to come in.
So and that's how most people would react to a warrant.
It's different if you're doing a warrant on someone who's a convicted murderer or something like that.
But I mean, most citizens don't want to get out with the government.
So it's like, okay, I don't like the warrant, I might challenge it with my lawyer, but you know, but they've they've gotten away from that.
And that's part of, you know, it's most unfortunate.
Well, and it's dangerous for the cops, too, since that's all they care about, is like I was saying, they got one of their own cops got killed last week or two weeks ago, shot through the back through the shoulder blade or something, I think they said by this guy.
And that was a murder case, but still, they didn't even try to say, come out with your hands up, we have you surrounded and, and that kind of thing.
They went in with a dynamic raid and didn't realize that they had two suspects in the same place, and got one of them shot.
And they're just they're incentivizing people to react violently.
As you say, if they announce that there's a warrant, most Americans reaction to that is, okay, if there's a warrant, then I'm not, I'm not being shot, and I'm not being hauled off to Guantanamo in a couple of days at the most, I'll be in front of a black robed judge with a lawyer and have a chance to go through the process that way.
And so 99 out of 100 of us would rather go to court, then try to shoot it out.
Yeah, you know, almost always.
So they're incentivizing violence against themselves.
Well, it's it's it works out badly for everybody.
So yeah, well, listen, I'm so glad that you noticed this right away and got right on the case.
And I'm glad as you already indicated that you're going to stay on the case and let us know what happens with this.
Because yeah, something which I want to add, I want to add a hat tip to my editor, Kelly Vallejos, an American conservative.
She was great on this story.
She moved it out very quickly.
And I'm happy to see it resonate strongly on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere.
Yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, Kelly is definitely a great one.
And, you know, I mean, think about this.
This is one of us.
Right.
This is one of our guys.
And, you know, I like to think that if I was ever falsely convicted or or, you know, God forbid, shot by the cops in the middle of the night or something, that people would stick up for me.
We kind of owe it to this guy that, you know, he was part of our movement for freedom in this country.
And it's just the way that your article begins.
The Constitution is dead, is the kids last tweet before the militarized SWAT team murders him.
It's just it's it's perfect and horrible in all the worst ways, you know.
Irony nowadays, hard, hard to fathom.
So but hey, thanks so much for having me on.
Thanks for helping people learn about this.
And you and I are both trying to keep an eye on this case for their developments.
Absolutely.
And I'd love to have you back as soon as there's something more to report, Jim.
Hey, thanks so much, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Jim Bovard.
He wrote Public Policy, Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, Terrorism and Tyranny, and a million more rights at FFF at USA Today and here at the American Conservative Magazine.
Did Maryland police shoot and kill a sleeping man?
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