05/01/15 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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It's Will Grigg from freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
All right.
So of course, you wrote a great thing or maybe two about what's going on in Baltimore here.
And I know you must have heard the news that these cops are actually being charged.
But so now I'll just be quiet and let you tell us what you think is wise about all this stuff.
Well, in particularly, in an entirely predictable fashion, albeit particularly zealous fashion, the Fraternal Order of Police has started to push back against State Attorney Marilyn Mosby.
As a matter of fact, the FOP got its letter out just before the indictments against these six officers were handed down, demanding that she recuse herself because of purported conflicts of interest that didn't exist until she had indicted these six officers.
She's somebody who works very closely with law enforcement.
If there are conflicts between a prosecutor and somebody in this affair, they would include her working relationship with state and local law enforcement offices throughout the state of Baltimore.
And she's a cop.
Oh, that doesn't count.
That doesn't count.
However, she has some distant connection to the defense attorney, not the defense attorney, but the civil attorney representing the Gray family.
And apparently she's married to a city councilman, which I don't know how that could be construed as a conflict of interest here, given that the city council is part of the same political elite that is served by law enforcement.
But the point is, you're already seeing the police and the police unions in Baltimore and throughout Maryland, and probably throughout the region, if not the country, starting to rally here on behalf of these six officers, rather than withholding judgment and insisting that these people be subjected to the type of scrutiny that the law would dictate when they're charged with depraved heart murder.
This is one of those instances where we're likely to see something akin to a police riot in the sense that, not necessarily the sense that they would be conducting rampages on the street.
That's what's been going on in Baltimore beneath the radar right now, according to people who live in that city.
You have sort of a slow-motion police riot going on all the time, where you have gratuitous infliction of physical injury and indignities that are routine for people living in Baltimore when they confront the police.
I'm talking about potential work-related protests or the organization of a national constituency demanding the exoneration of these six officers, irrespective of what the facts would reveal or what the prosecution would produce.
I suspect you're going to see a lot of pushback, quietly, but definitely on the part of the unions and the police officers they represent.
This started several days ago with this intentional leak of this facially ludicrous story that Freddie Gray, somehow, in response to being arrested in trust like a game hen, managed to sever his own spine.
The only type of people who would believe this are those who are predisposed to apologize on behalf of the police, on behalf of law enforcement, at all times and at all hazards.
The support your local police committee mentality here, that irrespective of what the police do, they are to be supported because they are the paladins of public order.
They are the physical barricade that protects us against the depredations of the lawless, and when they do something wrong, gee golly, Ned, it's a war crime, but they're on our side in the war against crime, and so as a matter of identity, we have this moral obligation to support them.
And nobody but people of that disposition believed it, but this is the sort of thing that the police unions were doing in order to win the news cycle.
Put it out for one news cycle, entrench it in the public mind, put it out in the information bloodstream.
This is the sort of thing that was seized upon by Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and people of that ilk who play to the putative populist segment of the population.
Get this out there and predispose the public to accept the idea that irrespective of what happens in Baltimore, the people who are really to blame are the ones who are receiving the police violence.
And we're going to see that campaign continue, I think, in the publicity realm and probably in the practical and professional realm as well.
Yep.
All right.
Now I'm sorry for such a short segment, but we'll be right back with the great Will Grigg, y'all.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
On the line I got the great Will Grigg, author of the great blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
You can also read him all the time at lourockwell.com.
We're talking about Baltimore and we're talking about the fake police spin that somehow this murder victim, Freddie Gray, had broken his own neck and how now the state prosecutor has announced charges against six cops for this, which is amazing in its own right.
As Will is explaining, the police union is already pushing back like crazy here.
Go ahead, Will.
You might recall that after the controversy following Eric Garner's, I think the appropriate word would be murder, last summer, that the NYBD conducted what they called a work stoppage in certain areas of the city.
The work that they perform, of course, consists of harvesting revenue at gunpoint through fines and citations and fee enforcement and the enforcement of taxes like the cigarette tax that was the proximate cause of the police contact there with the late Mr. Garner.
This is the sort of thing I think we're going to see, not necessarily in Baltimore, but perhaps in the surrounding areas or perhaps in sympathy nationwide, as a way of pressuring the political elite because the political elite is the constituency of law enforcement.
It's not the public at large.
Any benefit they provide to the public at large is derivative and incidental to their primary purpose, which is to be the enforcement arm of the people who presume to rule us.
Now, what they did earlier this week in ventilating this, as I've said before, facially ridiculous story about Freddie Gray severing his own spine is consonant with at least three episodes I described at this most recent essay in three different cities over the last three and a half or four years in which young men were taken into police custody for trivial offenses.
In one case, he had gotten involved in some kind of a domestic dispute with his family and the family made the fatal mistake of calling the police.
Never do that, by the way.
But these three young men were handcuffed in the back and then put in the back of police patrol cars and they were subjected to a body search as part of being taken into custody.
But they all arrived at the police station with fatal bullet wounds to the front of their body or to their head.
And in each of those three occasions, the police department was able to convince a credulous public and a compliance and prosecutor that these were what has become to be known as Houdini suicides, where these people had the type of flexibility and athleticism that one would associate with the acrobat of the Cirque de Soleil, and they had somehow managed to contort the bodies in such a fashion that they were able to retrieve a handgun that these diligent and conscientious police officers not seen and kill themselves, because presumably that's what some people simply do.
In the third of the cases I described, the police chief actually went so far as to say that because this story has been accepted in other jurisdictions, this is obviously what happened in this period of a 17-year-old, slightly built young man who didn't have the capacity to hide a large, bulky .45-caliber automatic of the same caliber as those being carried by the police to take him into custody.
He simply didn't have any place to hide this gun if he had wanted to.
And the gun that was supposedly used in the suicide meets the description of what police call a drop gun or a throwaway weapon.
That's the sort of thing that they keep in case of just such an emergency.
They will sometimes deposit knives or guns at a crime scene in order to bolster the narrative that they're using to justify misconduct or professional ineptitude.
But these are three instances where previously the public had been told, and the relevant public had accepted the idea, that an otherwise healthy young man who was arrested without obvious cause decided to kill himself in a particularly painful and improbable way.
And the public, for the most part, responded to the Freddie Gray story here with a large degree of skepticism apart from the dwindling and aging audience that is played to by the likes of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.
So it's good to see that at last the public at large seems to have found its moral gag reflex when being fed lines of that kind.
Yeah, I mean, come on.
You know, it reminded me of the other Scott Horton's great journalism on the story of Joseph Hickman and the Guantanamo so-called suicides, where, oh yeah, you know what they did?
They killed themselves in an act of asymmetric warfare against us to try to make it look like murder, to make us look bad.
The nerve of these Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Yeah, that is very much from the same vein as the story about Freddie Gray.
And that's one of the reasons why I included that in the essay.
Scott Horton and his colleagues at Harper's Magazine did a wonderful job on that story, demonstrating beyond rational contradiction that it is impossible for these three people to abound themselves hand and foot, and then stuff rags down their throats, and then somehow hang themselves from the ceiling of their cell blocks simultaneously in three different parts of a camp there at Guantanamo Bay.
But that's, I think, broadly congruent to the lie that was being fed to the public this week about Freddie Gray, and it was being peddled by the same kind of people for the same reason.
There has to be something put out in the public domain that can be grasped with a certain desperate eagerness by people who are seeking to validate the claims of the state's enforcement cast, because otherwise they have to start thinking critically about what these people do and why they do it.
And that type of critical thought, of course, as you and I both know, is a very swift solvent of the type of delusions upon which the state depends.
Yep.
Well, and that's why your work is so important, because you're the kind of person that maybe they could hear it from for a minute instead of, you know, where they, you know, people, you know, I'm not calling you a right-winger, I know you're very libertarian, but in a sense you have that kind of conservative background where you don't sound like a whining hippie, you know, complaining about your arm hurts because they twisted it behind your back.
You're just saying, you know.
You shouldn't be twisting people's arms behind their backs for no defensible reason.
Yeah.
Well, I guess that may be mine and the lesson being, read the damn article all the way through to the end and then you'll know whether there's a reference to the Guantanamo Suicide Senate or not.
But I didn't go all the way to the, you didn't start, in my defense, you didn't get to that point until like the fifth to last paragraph.
I wasn't sure whether that's a case of burying the lead or simply inducing something that is the same thing.
But I mean.
Yeah, everybody remember that one time?
Exactly.
But it just struck me as I was hearing what was being said and reading what was being published this week that it had a very familiar odor about it and a very similar unpalatable savor to it.
And it reminded me not only of these Houdini suicides, but I said, well, for heaven's sake, this reminds me of this so-called asymmetrical warfare of the summer of 2006 where the people who of course are wearing body armor and bursting with weapons and enjoy privileges that the rest of us don't have access to are so vulnerable that even when they kill somebody, they're the real victims.
Oh, look what you made me do.
Look at the horrible things I had to do in carrying out the state's errand.
And that's the same kind of inverted self-pity that you can read about in Hannah Arendt's study Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she was talking about the way that the people who are carrying out the orders of that state, the National Socialist German state, had actually taught themselves to believe that they were the real victims when they were dishing out violence.
Now, that's not unique to the Nazis, obviously, it's not unique to the Soviets.
This is something, unfortunately, that is part of well-established human nature.
And we're seeing that attitude assume a certain saliency in what our government is becoming.
And as I was looking at this and hearing people regurgitate bulimically what they were being fed by the servitors of the torture state, it struck me that people who would believe such things really deserve to live in the kind of country that we're becoming.
But the rest of us, of course, don't want to be dragged down into that hell, at least I'd hope so.
And so there's a certain qualified sense of validation in knowing that at least there's going to be some semblance of due process here, that the six police officers implicated in this apparent crime are going to be held accountable to some extent.
But don't for a second indulge the fond belief that this means that this whole apparatus, this whole institution of enforcement and institutionalized coercion, that the people who work in that realm are going to allow this to happen without doing everything they can to appease and to obstruct it and to intimidate policymakers into protecting them, to preserving their immunity.
Good heavens, as I wrote several months ago, there was a case last fall where a fly cook in southern Utah posted something admittedly disturbing and unsavory on his Facebook page about dead cops.
Within several days, he was fired from his job because of a nationwide social media campaign organized primarily by police unions to drive down the social media ratings of the restaurant that employed him.
We've reached that level here of hypersensitivity on the part of law enforcement and their hangers on.
It stands to reason that they're not going to allow this to happen in Baltimore.
That is to say, the specter of accountability to reach a full, tangible reality, they're not going to allow that to happen without doing everything they can to prevent it.
So I think we're going to be seeing the counterrevolution begin.
If what happened on the streets of Baltimore and in some policymaking precincts in that city had about the good aspects of a defensible revolution, the counterrevolution is going to begin.
And that's when things might really get ugly.
And it wouldn't surprise me at all.
I've been saying for the last year or so that we're going to start seeing the other side of the equation.
After the public had become surfeited with impunity on the part of police, we saw some things start to happen and the dialogue start to change in a certain way.
And now, of course, the forces of the putative elite are going to assert themselves.
So I have a certain qualified sense of optimism here that at least there's still the semblance of accountability.
But behind that, of course, is my understanding that the other side is going to be heard from.
And they're the people who have not only the guns and the armor, but also the qualified immunity.
And so things from this point on are going to become more turbulent, not less, in my estimation.
Yep.
And they also got the local news in every town in America, no matter what is on their side.
We'll always tell it their way.
That's certainly a thing.
Yeah.
And that's what he called it back a couple of years ago, that we're getting there.
And it seems like, well, yeah, I mean, as you say, in this case, we're still we're only at charges now.
It's a long way till sentencing.
We'll see how it goes.
And obviously the cops have a hell of a lot of fight in them.
When you say they'll do what they can to stop this, that is a hell of a lot.
No doubt about it.
But then in the larger sense, we have a situation where, as I think everybody can can see and agree, now that this police abuse, especially murders of black men, but broadly speaking, you know, police brutality nationwide as an epidemic, now that that has broken into the mainstream in the way that it has really with the death of Mike Brown.
It's not going away.
No, they can't make it go away, because as I think Progress has it on their blog today.
Yeah.
Ninety.
There you go.
Three people a day killed in the month of April.
Just like in the hyperbole.
Yeah.
Three a day.
Yeah.
No, really.
Three a day.
Ninety people were killed by cops last month.
And not all of them had a viral video to go with it, but enough of them.
And and so now that this, you know, and they're not going to stop with their, you know, wanton executions of the populace anytime soon unless they have to.
And they don't seem to think that they have to.
Not yet.
But it seems like it's a real collision, right?
It's you have their their kind of unassailable power and their custom there.
They're, you know, they're being used to doing this for so long with just complete and total impunity and having all the all the advantages going for them that we're talking about up against the people who all of a sudden are kind of realizing all at once white people to that.
Hey, man, this is a real warfare state aligned against us and under the illusion that we the people in all of that stuff and that these cops have been their security service up until now where now all of a sudden they're seeing it as a threat and they believe that they have the right and that it's within their power to change this.
And so now you got, you know, could be if, you know, as the stories keep coming in, irresistible force of the American people determined that they want to roll this back versus immovable object of the police state that has already made such gains that, you know, how in the world can you expect them like you're talking?
There's a you mentioned the you're talking about the power of the police unions here.
There's a brand new story breaking at the intercept about the power of the police unions in Maryland, and they're one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the entire state.
I mean, imagine that the security force is the most powerful lobbying group in the state.
Well, so what's going to happen?
It's amazing and interesting, and it's going to be pretty bloody and ugly and crazy.
I don't know.
We think we're dealing with about 45 years of accumulated inertia here on the part of what you might call the constituency for law and order, the punitive, popular, I refer to them as the punitive populist constituency.
That, of course, is something that happened as the result of Richard Nixon cynically declaring war on drugs and war on crime and creating more or less the ideological template that was picked up by Bill Clinton the generation later.
I mean, the new Democrats Hillary Clinton and company are very much invested in this and very much implicated in the militarization, centralization of law enforcement, the imposition of mandatory minimums, the expansion of the prison industry.
This is stuff that the Democratic Leadership Caucus and Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, that whole group embraced and used to advance their purposes.
Then again, you can actually indict everybody back to Truman in this.
So yeah, we're dealing with decades of accumulated privilege and decades of institutional layering here that creates this very formidable monolith we're talking about.
And in Maryland, which is a state where, if I'm not mistaken, government at every level is the chief employer, it doesn't surprise me to find out that the domestic arm of the homeland security state or the anti-terrorism state, the warfare state, is very, very powerful and that the unions would be one of the chief lobbyists in that state.
That doesn't surprise me one bit.
So I think we're seeing, as you said, Scott, something that's going to be an ethical collision between the public and the deeply entrenched interests of those who presume to rule us.
And I do think that we're going to find that a great deal more heat than the light will be released as a result of that collision.
And there's going to be a lot of secondary and tertiary effects that we can only guess at right now.
But this is something that had to happen.
If we had any hope of avoiding our descent into a quantum singularity of outright despotism, this is where it had to take place.
We're literally at the event horizon of that social phenomenon right now.
That's a good way to put it, for sure.
All right, well, listen, sorry about the late start and sorry for keeping you over time, but I'll let you go now.
But thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about this very important subject with us again, Will.
Thank you so much, my friend.
You take care.
All right, Sheldon.
That is the heroic Will Grigg.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com is his great blog pro libertate freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
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