Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Matt Agerist.
And he runs the Free Thought Project, which is such an important website, man.
It's the antiwar.com of cops.
And it's crazy over there.
I mean, it is just stomach churning chaos and violence all day long, every day over there at the Free Thought Project.
And everything is just so well written and so well done.
And yet this particular article really stands out to me.
Not so much about the cops, but more about, you know, culture wars and terrorism and reactions and all these things.
And I thought was really important.
I reran it at the Libertarian Institute and featured it at antiwar.com as well.
NZ, that is New Zealand, of course, NZ terrorist used ISIS tactics to divide and people are buying into it.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Matt?
Good, man.
Thank you for having me on.
Very happy to have you.
So, yeah, boy, you got this exactly right.
Let's talk about the New Zealand attack in a second here.
But first of all, you start off with a quote from John Acton.
Now, is that Lord Acton or that's a different Acton?
Yeah, that's Lord John Dalbert Acton.
I don't really...
I never knew his middle name.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
So and this is not power corrupts.
This is something else.
Right, right.
It's liberty provokes diversity and diversity preserves liberty.
Meaning if you have like a monoculture, then the monoculture is like would quickly become a majority and then suppress the minority.
But a group, a society made up of tiny minorities is a multiple tiny minorities is it tends to lean towards freedom because no one lets the other group oppress them.
And no group becomes too large of a monoculture to actually oppress the others.
And, you know, you think about it and I guess, you know, times have evolved a bit from the beginning and this and that.
Just the relationship in America between, for example, Catholics and Protestants being I don't know exactly what the proportions are in any given northeastern state or this or that.
But and really even all the different denominations of Protestantism among the American colonists on the East Coast kind of in the first place.
There were enough divisions there and they decided instead of fighting about it to not fight about it.
Right.
And to forbid the establishment of an official religion so that we can all just get along like Rodney King said.
Exactly.
Exactly.
All right.
So, okay, you're making sense to me here.
Now, so let's talk about what happened in New Zealand with this guy.
I forgot his name.
They censored his name out of the news.
I like that, man.
I really do like that.
These guys seek fame and they want their names immortalized a lot of the time.
And I love how New Zealand doesn't mention them in any of the in any of their reports.
I mean, they went a little further by jailing people for for reading or sharing his manifesto, which I think, you know, that's information that people should be able to to read anything they want, but without fear of persecution from the state.
But the the fact that the other countries don't plaster these guys faces on the you know, on every TV and and essentially glorify their their violence and their terrorist activities that I really get behind that.
It's the opposite of what we do in the United States.
Yeah.
And I mean, it certainly does make sense is, you know, school shooters and different, you know, massacre perpetrators have said at various times that the fame involved was high on their list of motives for doing such a thing in the first place.
So certainly makes sense there.
But anyway, so this animal, this that's what you call them here.
This Nazi decided to to go to a mosque.
And I forget now, was it during Friday prayer?
Go back and remind us this story from a few weeks ago here.
Yeah, yeah.
Unfortunately, the mosques that he chose, they were they were full and and it was shooting fish in a barrel.
He live streamed it.
He had been talking about doing it for weeks in the forums.
You know, we I didn't link to it in there, but we have the cast versions of the forum that he was on and which he was sharing the live stream and and and and told everybody that he was going to do it.
And I misunderstood that.
I, I had heard that, you know, he was in the chat room, you know, as it was about to happen.
And I read that in your piece.
But I guess I did not understand because you complained that people were kind of egging him on rather than turning him in.
But I still understood that to mean in the minutes before the attack.
But you're talking about in the weeks leading up to the attack.
He was saying he had been.
Right, right.
And no one thought he was for real, I guess.
And then once he started doing it, you know, then instead of like instead of turning him in or I guess alerting authorities or whatever, this these these people in this this 8chan group were praising him.
And it's it's a scary state of affairs, man, when when hundreds of these people not I'm not talking like one or two people.
I'm talking there are hundreds and hundreds of comments like telling him good shoot.
Oh, I saw you smoke that child.
Nice, you know, or and these are innocent people, man, regardless if you disagree with their religion or or whatever, you know, there's no ever any type of any any justification for for going after innocent people like they did, like he did, or more glorifying it like his entire group did.
And of course, you know, the reason that this group, at least many of the peoples I was reading about, the reason they were there is because of the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which America had deliberately helped to provoke and sustain.
And the Soviets sure played their part and the worst part, the worst role in the whole thing, of course.
But it's these wars from the white European and American north, essentially, that have rained such chaos on the Islamic parts of the world.
That would say the Islamic world like it's a moon orbiting Earth.
You know, it's on the other side of Mars from here, something like that.
The Islamic part of this world that we all live on together, we've rained.
Our governments have rained such chaos down against them that then, yeah, no wonder they're fleeing for safety inside the line of the empire that's attacking them because it's like the eye of the storm.
And then, you know, of course, our governments are making decisions on behalf of these populations.
And so then you have this kind of reaction that you have people who they are essentially from another civilization.
That doesn't mean they're any less human in any way, but it is a different civilization coming and crossing lines into other ones and where, you know, people get so reactive about it.
And yet, of course, who's zooming who and who's the one who started all this in the first place?
It's like Clint Eastwood, the super patriot, complaining about Laotians in his movie, like living in Kansas City or whatever.
It's like, well, who do you think they were running from when they came to Kansas City in the first place?
You know?
Right.
U.S. foreign policy creates these refugee crises all over the world because of our foreign, you know, because if we invade these countries, we turn them into rubble and then these people have nowhere else to go.
And the ones that are, the refugees that are escaping most, you know, the overwhelming majority of these people are peaceful.
The ones who are radicalized typically stay behind and they fight, you know, they fight the insurgency.
They become ISIS or Al-Qaeda or maybe just somebody who's pissed off that their child was blown up by a U.S. drone strike.
You know, so the death toll that the U.S. has caused in these countries is astronomical.
You know, we're talking a million citizens, civilian, a million civilians in the last couple of decades since the Iraq war kicked off and or since the Afghanistan war kicked off.
So that there's a million civilians and many of which were innocent children.
You know, you kill somebody's child, you're going to turn that father or that mother or that brother into an extremist.
It's it's as simple as that.
I mean, I know if if a drone strike hit my house and my child got like, you know, maimed or killed, that would be the first thing I would do.
I didn't care.
I would I would swear my life to destroying whatever person or whoever whoever made the decision to do that.
And the U.S. knows this, you know, so it's right.
I mean, what we're dealing with here is political radicalization, human radicalization.
You know, this side versus that side sort of radicalization.
But as long as the people that you're bombing are Muslims, then you can just blame Islam for whatever their reaction is.
Just like, you know, if there was a bombing campaign in your neighborhood and you fought back, they would blame your most sincere religious beliefs instead of accepting responsibility for driving you to this point.
You know, no one wants to say no one wants to say, oh, come on, this is all Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton's fault.
And then Bush and Obama just made it that much worse.
Like, why should it be so hard to say that, like you are Ronald Reagan and you can't divorce your tiny, poor little ego from an insult against him or something like that?
You know, he supported the terrorists.
Then his successor, his vice presidential successor, betrayed them and stabbed them in the back and occupied their holy land and picked a terrible fight.
And that's, you know, you don't have to be anti-American to be anti-government to be realistic about who really is whom and who here.
But anyway, so sorry.
Back to the, well, of course, the backdrop, as you say, it's the terror war is the backdrop to this.
George Bush invaded Iraq, knocked over the whole Middle East.
And then you say a million terrorist flowers bloomed and this kind of thing.
That is the world that we're living in is the post-Bush and Obama world here and how they made everything that much worse.
But so in this specific case, then in in New Zealand, it's this anti-Muslim sentiment that took place here.
And then again, it was what you say, 50 people died in it.
Was that it?
Yeah, it's roughly 50 people that died in the two different attacks that he waged.
And then so now it's easy to say, oh, well, you know, the terrorists attacked us on 9-11 because of troops in Saudi Arabia or this guy attacked Muslims because he hates Muslims.
And that much is true, right, for whichever reasons.
But it only still is raising the question of still what's the point of the attack itself and the strategy involved?
We saw, of course, with September 11th and everybody should have learned this lesson by now, that they were trying to get us to overreact.
They weren't trying to get us to turn tail and run, which I guess they would have figured would have been nice, but they weren't counting on that.
They were trying to get us to go crazy and drive our empire straight into the ground and destroy it the same way we helped them do to the Soviet Union in the 80s and that war in Afghanistan.
So that makes sense.
As Saul Alinsky said, the point of radical political action is to provoke a reaction.
And so that counts for terrorist attacks, too.
Doesn't have to be a terrorist attack.
The action's in the reaction.
That's what Will Grigg taught us.
And, hey, you quote him in your article, too.
The great Will Grigg, he wrote that right after September 11th.
The action is in the reaction.
Don't let them get to you.
Use your brain, not your emotions.
You know, do the smart thing.
So what's this guy about?
Why was it he didn't do this just to entertain his friends in the chat room?
What was his point in attacking these innocent people, Matt?
Well, you saw all the memes that he incited during his live stream.
You know, he kind of channeled the right and put up all these, like, follow PewDiePie, talked about Candace Owens.
He was doing this deliberately.
Like, this was very well thought out to create a divisive intent behind it so he could garner support and push people away on both sides.
So it's like it's driving a wedge right down the middle of any common ground that these two groups, like the Islam and the far right.
So it helped to further create that divide.
And this guy was a socialist, but he was just, he was doing, what he did was it's classic propaganda techniques.
And the people, the government and people played right into his hands.
He garnered so much support for his supremacist cause, and then the government went and moved to restrict the people's rights.
So this is exactly what he wanted.
You know, New Zealanders got their guns taken within just a few days.
The white nationalist anti-Muslim crowd grew vastly over the next few days.
And then we see Facebook pushing them into, like, Facebook announcing that they're banning white nationalists from the platform and redirecting them to these anti-hate sites or something like that.
So what he's doing is, like, that's the whole intent of the article that I wrote, is he's doing the exact same thing that ISIS does, these propaganda techniques, which is to eliminate any middle ground.
And middle ground is referred to as the gray zone, like where black and white mix.
Not necessarily like a black person and a white person, but, you know, all the ideas mix and they're talked about peacefully and resolutions are met.
Now, if you have resolutions being met, then your extremist cause fizzles out and you can't wage your war against whatever you think is the enemy.
So both the New Zealand shooter and ISIS and al-Qaeda and all these people apply this exact same technique.
ISIS has even written about it, you know, in their own publication that they wrote the extinction of the gray zone and how they cheer on the fact that, you know, some Americans are getting more anti-Muslim and more extreme and then how some of Islam is becoming more extremist and anti-Western.
And that's exactly what they want because both sides get to beef up their ranks and to wage this war.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey everybody, buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
And it's available all over the place in EPUB format and of course in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.com.
And you can also get the audiobook version at audible.com.
If you want a signed copy, check out scotthorton.org slash donate and help arrange that for you there.
It's Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
Find out all about it at foolserrand.us.
There's a great analogy, I guess, was made when, right at the rise of the Islamic State.
I think it was Juan Cole, but somebody was writing about socialists or communists, very far leftist terrorists during the Cold War who used the phrase sharpening the contradictions.
That their enemy really, as they saw it, was the socialists and liberals.
And like you're saying, the gray zone, the pink zone, maybe.
Those who can compromise with the other side and move forward when what they wanted was a severe and serious revolution and total overthrow of the system and replace it with something else.
And so one of the things to do then is set off a bomb here, set off a bomb there and try to get people to hate each other as much as possible and see each other as irreconcilable so that they can have a fight.
So then, yeah, again, Will Grigg, use your brain.
Don't react because you're mad.
Think about who is manipulating you.
And then, I don't know, maybe try to do the opposite of what they want.
You know, that's my initial kind of inclination.
Someone's trying to manipulate me and probably not go along if I can see through it.
So.
Right.
Here we are though.
Exactly.
And everybody's going right along with it.
The government, the extremists, the people that were probably on the verge of maybe accepting that the fact that not all of Islam is violent and that there's peace to be made.
You know, the technique that this New Zealand shooter uses is called propaganda of the deed, which is like a decades or centuries old technique used.
It was like started by communism in which like a terrorist act is taken care or is carried out.
And then that is used to either like to garner support for a cause or blame an enemy and then stoke even further divide and confusion.
And it gets the government, the reactionary governments to play along.
And then it either provokes the serfs into a revolution or furthers the government oppression of the people until eventually they do provoke a revolution.
And that's exactly what's going on here.
And then no one in our government or New Zealand government or not very many people see that that's what's taking place here.
But that's exactly what's happening.
And then, of course, just a few days after this, there was an attack by a Muslim terrorist on a bus in, I think, in Belgium, who killed like five innocent people, something like that.
And so the tit for tat, you know, continues, this kind of thing escalates.
And now, so the real thing of it is, though, that I don't know if it's coming to a head or if it's just simmering like crazy.
And it's we're going to keep having these sort of back and forth.
Essentially, I don't want to play it down, but you know what I mean?
Low level attacks where it's not enough for, you know, the entire European state system to deport all these all the Muslims or anything that radical.
But at the same time, they keep bombing their home countries and radicalizing them and and provoking terrorist attacks.
And you're going to have more and more right wing nationalists doing terrorist type attacks of their own.
But it doesn't seem like we're headed toward any sort of resolution, either the hard way or the easy way.
Right.
This kind of thing could get really bad and stay that way for a very long time.
Unfortunately, you're right.
And I think that the solution is right in front of us.
But which is the Internet and the free exchange of information.
But we're seeing a radical shift towards not allowing this free sharing of information.
So as these big social media platforms move to to limit the amount of information that people can get, like, for instance, you know, removing white nationalism, whatever that is.
I mean, there's a yes, there's there's racist out there that that will, you know, identify with just their whiteness and think that that's superior to other races.
But then you have like this group of conservatives who get lumped into that and they're they're not racist at all.
And so by censoring this information and this free flow of information, you further you disallow the free exchange of information, which pushes people more and more apart.
And then that just promotes more extremism.
So instead of by by trying to stop extremism, these these tech giants are actually are fueling it.
And it's scary, man, like the Internet was going to free this free society from this, you know, and it has done so much to do that in the past, you know, 20, 30 years.
But it seems that we're moving in the opposite direction now where this censorship is actually might stoke even more of this hatred.
And when you make a white supremacist feel like the victim, that's a dangerous thing.
And if you make a if you make a person that's not a white supremacist accuse him of being a white supremacist, then that's even a more dangerous thing, because then you're creating a white supremacist, you know, out of this.
You're forcing people to identify with their race and their nationality, and you're forcing them into a corner in which, you know, fight or flight will eventually kick in.
And that's the danger that that we're seeing right now.
And it's scary and it's materializing into stuff like what happened in New Zealand last month.
So and by the way, you say that the shooter himself was a socialist, but he seemed pretty right wing to me.
Are you sure he wasn't just trolling the left the same way as you say he's trolling Candace Owens and these other people on the right?
Well, I think in his manifesto, he even mentioned things like this, like like universal health care and universal income and stuff like that.
So that's where I got that from.
Yeah.
Although you usually.
OK, well, I didn't read the whole thing.
I guess I should go back and look at it.
But it seemed like the whole point of the thing, though, too, was like you're saying, get everybody pointing fingers at each other, saying that Candace Owens helped to free his mind and set him on this path.
Stuff like that is he's obviously just picking fights and making fun of people.
Yeah, well, it was but it was carefully planned.
He might have said like Viva Ostasio Cortez or two.
But that doesn't mean he really means it, you know.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I don't think he'd identify with with Candace Owens at all on on very much.
You know, she's not she's not this like anti-Muslim hater or anything like that.
I don't know much about her, but I'm pretty sure she wouldn't be the inspiration for a Nazi to mass murder a bunch of innocent people at prayer.
No matter how much a bunch of liberals might want to believe her.
I believe that about her.
But anyway.
Hey, guys, check out this cool near future dystopia.
Kesslin runs by our friend Charles Featherstone.
You might remember him, a regular writer for Lou Rockwell dot com.
And this is a great story of.
Well, I don't want to ruin it for you, but you'll really like it.
Kesslin runs.
It's on Amazon dot com by the great Charles Featherstone.
Hey, listen.
So let me change the subject a little bit to to just your Web site in general.
And maybe we can talk about some of these stories.
But I just want to say a little bit more about what an important Web site this is and and all the great work that you're doing here.
You know, a few years ago, an old friend of mine who's not a political guy.
Right.
He's just an old friend of mine, but he lives on Facebook like everybody else, I guess.
And I guess this was before Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin and all that, maybe right before that.
But it was when, you know, before Black Lives Matter and the celebrity of all of this stuff.
But it was sort of like, you know, this stuff was culminating in that protest movement breaking out, essentially.
But I remember him saying to me, hey, man, what is going on with the cops right now?
Because when I look at Facebook, all I see are these local news stories, essentially, that never make it out of local press.
But I've just absolutely horrific police abuse and they're just getting away with it and getting away with it.
No one seems to be stopping them.
And it's just kind of out of control.
And then, of course, for anyone really thoughtful about this, it's pretty apparent, too, that it's in many ways been like this all along.
And in some prior eras, maybe much worse.
But what's really changing now is everyone, virtually everyone, has a high quality video camera in their pocket and access to Twitter and Facebook.
So that these local stories and for that matter, the Free Thought Project online, where these local stories that would never see national attention, then do.
They become national stories because you make them national stories.
We tweet and share and make them national stories, whether CBS News would have ever told us it was important or not in a previous era.
But then, so when you're exposed to so much of this, at some point you begin to think that this is a real crisis.
Like probably a cop is killing an innocent person right now.
I think it was Radley Balko said there are 50,000 SWAT raids per year in this country.
A thousand SWAT raids a week?
Then that means you're behind the curve in the atrocities you're covering here.
That means this society is just committing suicide.
And anyway, I'm sorry, I'm just going on and on and on.
But I just think your site is so important for bringing all of this stuff together and showing people the lawlessness of so-called law enforcement.
And the lengths to which they'll go to do whatever they want and the lengths to which the system will go to let them get away with anything.
I mean, hell, from here you could just pick your favorite story from today.
Yeah, exactly.
There's a particularly gruesome one that we put out today that happened in Albany, New York, where these three innocent men were savagely beaten.
And it was all caught on the police officer's own body cam.
And the cop, actually, because there was video footage, one of the police officers was actually charged with felony assault and official misconduct.
And the guy, his victim, was just holding his arms in the air.
And this cop lost it, clearly like on some type of roid rage, and threw him to the ground and started punching him in the face.
And then when his fist got tired, he grabbed his baton and started smashing his head in with the back of a baton, and blood was splattering all over the place.
It got so bad that one of his fellow cops had to go in and push him.
He's like, stop it, chill the fuck out.
And that's how bad it got.
Because when a fellow cop stops another cop from carrying out brutality, which is an extremely rare act, that's when you know it was getting to a particularly bad point.
And so that's just one instance today.
We have no shortage of footage anymore.
We used to have to scour the internet, and people would send us in their videos, and they'd be low quality.
But now there's no shortage of police brutality footage, and so there's too much to cover.
So it used to be the opposite of that.
We had people that were, like when Ferguson was going on, we had people on the ground taking our videos for ourselves because there wasn't enough people filming.
And that was just in 2014.
And like you said, the high quality video has gotten so much better that more and more people have these amazing devices in their pocket that can record that.
And then more and more departments have gotten body cameras.
So we see more and more departments trying to keep that body camera footage secret.
It's a vicious cycle that goes back and forth.
The citizens wanted to see more accountability with the police officers, wanted to see less.
So it's a serious problem.
And a lot of it could be stopped by police overnight, literally.
We could just stop enforcing the drug war.
That's one thing.
Legalize all drugs.
Stop kicking in people's doors for plants and let them do a substance that makes them happy.
And if we can do alcohol, you should be able to smoke weed.
You should be able to do cocaine.
You should be able to do whatever you want.
I think when Ron Paul was debating in the 2012 presidential debate, he said that he wanted to legalize all drugs because this would stop a vast majority of injustices against citizens.
And Mitt Romney asked Ron Paul, he's like, so you want heroin to be legal?
And Ron Paul asked Mitt Romney right back, he's like, Mitt, if heroin was legal, would you do it?
And it just shut Mitt Romney right up.
And that's the point.
The illegality of a substance does not prevent somebody from using it.
All it does is criminalize an act that, in some cases, that is like a mental illness, like addiction.
And it criminalizes addiction, which is something that needs to be treated, not caged.
And so we have police officers acting like the medical arm of the state, which is trying to stop people from doing things that they think is bad.
And that's what's causing all this problem.
The majority of these instances are all started by victimless crimes.
And we could tell that.
We have a pretty low violent crime rate in the United States, but we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
And in fact, the state that I live in, in Louisiana, we have an incarceration rate 13 times that of China and 20 times that of Iran, which we say is oppressing their people.
But I mean, look at Louisiana.
We put 20 times more people in prison than Iran.
And that's a problem.
And until we address that factor, the drug war, then I don't see this problem going anywhere else.
And then once the drug war is taken care of, then we could go after victimless crimes and we stop pulling people over for window tint and then killing them.
Or, you know, stop people stop oppressing people because they are taxing poor people because they forgot to put on their seat belt.
You know, that's that's the problem that we have here is that police are acting more like revenue collectors than they are, like enforcing law and protection and upholding the law and the rights of others.
And they're doing the exact opposite, in my opinion, by enforcing these victimless crime laws and extorting people for things that cause no harm to anybody else.
Well, yeah, I mean, you're really kind of touching there on the self-licking ice cream cone sort of police industrial complex aspect of this, where what do you say, tail wagging the dog or however you want to put it, where you end the drug war.
You're putting the entire law enforcement industry out of work.
You're putting the prison industry out of work.
And all these pigs are going to have to get real jobs.
And so that's why they can't admit that.
Yes, it's true that all 320 million Americans know that prohibition created Al Capone and all 320 million Americans know that we've had a drug war all this time and it hasn't gotten rid of drug abuse yet.
It's helped to destroy our Bill of Rights and and the lives of so many people in the meantime.
There's no even pretended excuse left for this policy other than it's a jobs program for a bunch of government tax suckers.
Exactly.
A good point that I like to always bring up is it's a pro-law enforcement point to ending the drug war, and it's statistically proven.
So if you go back at the height of prohibition in the 1930s, you can look at the death rate for police officers as in they're killed in the line of duty.
And more cops were killed during that time than in the history of all police in the United States by a magnitude of like 300 percent.
So there was literally a war on cops back then, and it was solely due to prohibition and the mafia that was created out of that act of making alcohol illegal.
Prohibition created the mafia, just like you said, and prohibition on drugs creates cartels and it funds cartels.
Let me tell you something.
I learned that in government school in elementary school.
I learned that.
I've known that my whole life.
That's no conspiracy theory.
That's no secret.
That's no revisionist history.
That's the history of prohibition.
That's why our wise leader FDR ended it, because it wasn't working out.
And even the government had to admit that, you know what, people just like drinking so much that this ain't going to work.
And we made the trade in it a criminal activity, which just meant the worst criminals kind of took it over.
I mean, we're talking about Ph.
D. level libertarian lessons regurgitated by every homeroom teacher across this country.
Everybody knows that.
How in the world would Al Capone ever be an alcohol dealer if the cops hadn't have made it a crime to sell alcohol to people, for God's sake?
There's no way to even try to pretend to not understand that.
Everyone knows that.
So the fact that we continue like this is just… Anyway, let me ask you this.
Is it a murder a day?
A murder a week?
A murder a month?
I know it's not a murder a month.
I know it's more than that.
How bad is this epidemic of people getting killed by these cops?
Oh, it's far more than that.
It's every eight hours.
And I mean, the majority of these people that are being killed are armed.
But the culture and the police culture that we breed in this country, it tends to shoot first and ask questions later.
There's another story on the website this morning.
A guy was walking down the street in Southgate, Los Angeles.
He's just walking down a sidewalk.
A police guy called to a disturbance call.
He was completely unarmed, and the only thing he did was just walk away from police, slowly walked away from police.
Three cops pulled out their guns and dumped 16 rounds into him.
Yeah, and then they said waistband.
His hand was near his waistband.
And some judge a long time ago just made up, there's not a law passed in any state in the union that says that that's okay, or by the national government either.
Some judge made it up that if a cop says his hand was near his waistband, that that's okay to kill him.
Can you imagine if someone had killed a cop and said, yeah, but Your Honor, his hand was near his waistband.
I thought he might draw on me.
And especially if the cop was actually unarmed.
You just assumed he had a gun because his hand was near his waistband?
Yeah, right.
You would be convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death 100% of the time if the role was reversed.
Everyone knows that.
And the judge who made that law up, he knows that too.
Yep.
The system set out to pretend it so.
In fact, you know what, sorry, I'm just ranting, but you have a story on your page that's about the waistband right now.
It's a famous case.
This guy has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for swatting an innocent man at a totally unrelated address when he was trying to swat some guy he was mad at playing video games.
And he put in the wrong address and the cops sent out the SWAT team.
And as your headline reads, the gamer swatter got 20 years.
The cop that killed the guy who answered the door, huh?
Gets away scot-free.
He's still a cop even.
And I know from reading, I'm not sure if it's in your piece or not, but I know from reading this elsewhere that the cop that pulled the trigger said waistband.
And that was good enough for him to take this.
Everyone agrees 100% innocent man's life.
Yeah, there were like 12 other cops with their pistols and rifles pointed at this guy, not a single one of them shot.
And the cop's name is slipping my mind right now, but the guy, the victim's name is Andrew Finch.
And he was an innocent father of two who just happened to walk outside at 1 a.m. and find a SWAT team at his front door.
And they murdered him in cold blood.
And the cop who killed him did not suffer a single slap on the wrist or anything.
And he's back to being a cop.
And you see how this works and you can hear it all the time in their language gives them away.
I mean, all of these guys are a bunch of meathead idiots anyway.
And so they'll say like the rules are you can shoot if the guy's hand is near his waistband.
You can shoot if he's running away, but you can say later you thought he might do something else or whatever.
They never say they never talk in terms of have to.
You know, if you had committed a homicide and the question was whether it was a justifiable homicide or not, the question would be whether you had to kill someone in order to immediately defend your own life or that of an innocent person.
Had to.
No choice but to.
That's the standard for a civilian.
Can.
Here's when you can kill a guy.
If he has a pocket knife and you scream unintelligibly at him at the top of your lungs and he doesn't immediately drop that knife on the ground, then you can shoot him nine times in the chest.
You can.
You can.
And so that's when you do is when you have the opportunity to kill a person and you know that you're essentially within the limit of the regulation on your hunting license, that later you can say, hey, waistband or I thought his phone was a gun or whatever garbage.
That was one they just got away with the other day, right?
The guy in his own backyard who had a phone in his hand who they murdered in L.A.
Yeah.
Man, I'm so glad this is your job, not mine, because the wars already drive me crazy enough, but I just can't stand reading your website and I love it and I do read it.
I'm not trying to chase people away from it.
It's important that we bear witness to this stuff.
It's just, you know, it's unfair, as we all might say, you know, when we're young.
Hey, that's not fair.
No, I've read one.
I don't know if you had covered this one or not, but might as well have same difference anyway, where the cops in Chicago had got the wrong address and raided this four year old boy's birthday party.
Yeah.
You know, I remember my fourth birthday party, you know, like, I don't know, I got a pretty good memory for the past and stuff.
But and then they knew that they were in the wrong place immediately.
They had to have.
But instead, they went and put everyone through the nth degree anyway, smashed the little boy's birthday cake, treated all these people like Palestinians or Afghans or something like they are subhumans with no rights at all.
And they may very well have been trained by the shin bet in exactly how to treat an American citizen.
And then and I just think, man, how can this go on?
How can we live like this?
How could anyone think, well, maybe that's some, you know, poor black single mother in Chicago.
So she's different enough for me that I don't have to care about that.
I don't know, man.
It's this is the kind of thing where there should just be a general strike.
I'm just talking to you over your interview here.
There should be a general strike where we just say, no, no more of this.
Waste band is not an excuse to kill somebody.
Not sorry later is not a good enough excuse to raid a family home like this instead of knocking on the door politely and serving a warrant, unless there's a real hostage situation going on, etc. like that.
There just has to be an end to this.
I don't know.
I know you feel the same way.
Is there is anything changing?
Is there is there any kind of moves in Congress or anything better than kind of superficial reform on this level?
There there actually was some good moves made in Houston recently.
I'm sure that you know about the case of my gosh, I feel terrible.
I can't remember their names, but an innocent couple was raided by the police in Houston.
And yeah, they the police kicked in the door, shot their dog.
The couple saw that all these cops were in plainclothes.
A couple the husband grabbed a gun because he didn't know he thought he was he was on a home invasion, which he was.
It was a home invasion.
And so he fired back and the cops killed him and then they killed.
They shot his unarmed wife in the back.
And so they murdered this family.
And it turns out that the the wife was unarmed and shot in the back.
I that was certainly not what they said at first.
And I'm sorry that I missed that updated detail there.
Thank you for mentioning that.
I'm certainly not surprised to find out.
Right.
They claimed that she went for one of the officers guns and that's why they had to kill her.
And so these people were immediately smeared in the in the media after, you know, that that little rat that was for that represents the police union.
And Houston came out and told everybody that this is a product.
These people were scumbags and dirtbags and that anybody who who talks bad about police, they need to you know, we're going to be watching you.
And so it would eventually come out that the entire raid was based on lies from one of the cops involved in the raid.
And these this couple was innocent.
They weren't dealing black tar heroin like they they were accused of being doing.
And so Art Acevedo, the Houston chief of police, actually made the decision to stop conducting no knock raids, which is a huge step in the right direction.
You know, I mean, it's not ending the drug war, but it's a it's a it's a major breakthrough in terms of policing because these no knock raids are when dogs get shot, when children get flash bang grenade in the face.
And, you know, and and four year old parties get raided like that.
You know, all they had to do this.
That four year old's party in Chicago got raided because the police suspected that somebody was living in the house that was selling MDMA, you know, ecstasy.
And so they sent 18 cops with guns drawn, battering rams, sledgehammers, and they smashed this family's house up for someone allegedly selling MDMA there that hadn't lived there in over five years.
And they knew that.
And the attorney representing the family was able to find that out in less than 30 seconds from just going on the Internet.
What's the point if they knew he didn't live there anymore?
Or is it like some of them knew he didn't live there anymore, but they suck so bad that they didn't the guys doing the raid weren't updated on that or something like that or what?
Man, they just you know, the mindset.
So I used to be part of this machine.
I was in the Marine Corps.
I did the I did the state's bidding for a long time.
And I know the mindset, you know, the mindset is let's go smash some heads.
So there no one gives a shit what address that they're going to be.
They're being sent to.
They don't even care.
They just they're they pointed like a like a hammer and told to go smash that nail in.
And that's that's the mindset.
And I had that exact same mindset.
So can you can you please talk about the and I know you're right about that.
That is the attitude that somebody else's responsibility.
Somebody pointed them in this direction.
Whatever.
That's all I need to know.
Good enough for government work.
But now so one more here, speaking of which, the Taco Bell slaughter of this aspiring young rapper in Oakland, California last month.
Yeah, man, that was tragic.
I don't know if you saw the body camera video that was just released.
I don't want to watch it.
I don't want to watch.
I mean, I know that what I read on the first day was that the only reason he was up in the middle of the night is because he was working 24 hours a day on his art.
He was up there kicking ass at the recording studios a mill.
He's not out causing trouble.
He's not out drinking and selling drugs and fighting and being a gangster.
He's a recording artist who stopped to go get a taco.
And then.
Yeah.
And that was the last time he existed.
Yep.
And he had he had committed no crime.
I don't know that they haven't.
They haven't elaborated on whether or not the gun was legal or not.
But I mean, in Vallejo, California, chances are it wasn't legal because it's so hard to get a legal gun in Vallejo.
But so, I mean, the dude wasn't armed.
He wasn't committing armed robbery.
He had no warrants out for his arrest.
He hadn't done anything wrong except falsely practicing his Second Amendment right.
He said in the drive through.
So some robbery.
Right.
Obviously, he's not doing anything except getting tacos.
But he just kind of crashed out waiting in line for the guy in front of him, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, maybe he had been maybe he'd had a couple of beers or smoked a couple of bowls or something.
But still, that doesn't mean anything anyway.
If that had helped him to go to sleep, unfortunately, you know.
Right.
Yeah.
There was no reason whatsoever to do what they did.
And it was it was disgusting.
And none of those cops are I think all the cops are back to work.
There's none of them are going to be held accountable for that.
And it was it was an execution, in my opinion, and just way over the top.
Instead of yelling through a loudspeaker and having some balls, you know, to to just ask the guy.
One of my friends passed out in a gas station parking lot.
Not recently, but this was years ago.
Passed out in the gas station parking lot.
He had an open air Jeep, you know, with no doors on it and everything.
And he had his nine millimeter sitting on the.
The midsection of the vehicle and it's in plain sight.
And the cops could have done exactly what they did to this rapper in California.
But instead, they the cop just shook him and said, hey, man, you've probably a bad idea to fall asleep with a gun right there, you know, and then that was it just went about his day.
Yeah, and that's the assumption was that just because you have a gun doesn't mean you're committing a crime with it.
This is America.
Right.
Exactly.
This is an England where if you have a gun, you better have a good reason.
You fox hunting or what's going on here?
Right.
But yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Oh, but yeah, no, a black guy with a gun.
Yeah, no.
It says right there in Dred Scott that, you know, black guys can't have guns.
That's why we know they don't have rights, because if they had rights, that would mean they have the right to own a gun.
And we can't have that.
Yes.
Which actually, I think Dred Scott might have been overturned, but maybe not.
Maybe defect, maybe de jure, but not de facto there.
Hey, man, I'm sorry that I have to go because I want to sit here and ask you about things all day and and talk over you when I should be asking you questions.
But I can't think of one.
But I think that you do such great work here at the Freethought Project.
And I read it all the time and I know it's tough work.
And I really appreciate everything that you do there, Matt.
Thank you, man.
I appreciate you reaching out and doing this.
We'll have to do it again sometime.
Absolutely, man.
I look forward to it.
Okay, you guys, that is Matt Agarest at the Freethought Project, thefreethoughtproject.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
You can find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
