Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at 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 that 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 their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright you all, introducing Mike Meharry.
He is the National Communications Coordinator for the 10th Amendment Center.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing man?
Hey Scott, man.
It's great to talk to you.
It's been a while since I've been on.
Yeah, it's been way too long.
And hey listen, thanks for letting me reprint all of your great stuff about your activism and all your writings and everything at the Libertarian Institute.
I appreciate it.
I need to get better about actually going over there and doing it myself.
That'd be good.
Or just send me a link, man.
I'll get it done.
Or, you know, I'll have somebody else to do it for me.
Hey listen, the 10th Amendment Center, man, you guys do such great work.
You and Michael Bolden.
And in this case, you.
So here you are.
Lexington, Kentucky is the dateline.
Activist wins open record lawsuit.
Forces city to release information on surveillance cameras.
Activist meaning yourself, right?
That's true.
If somebody told me I should get business cards printed, this is Mike Meharry, activist.
Hell yes.
I think that might be kind of cool.
But yeah, you know, this started about a year ago.
And I noticed some surveillance cameras had been put up in a park that's around the corner from my house.
And, you know, having worked with the 10th Amendment Center, I've been on before.
We've talked about the efforts to turn off the water at the NSA facility in Bluffdale, Utah.
So, you know, I know about surveillance.
And when I saw these cameras go up, I'm like, dude, there's got to be stuff going on that we're not seeing.
If I'm seeing this, then there's other stuff behind the scenes.
So I did an open records request to the police department, basically asking for information about whatever surveillance equipment they happen to have.
And as it turns out, they admitted that they own 29 mobile surveillance cameras.
Now, you're probably wondering what in the heck is a mobile surveillance camera?
Well, that's a really good question because they don't want us to know.
And so they hid these records relating to these cameras behind a couple of loopholes in the open records law.
And the first step I took was I went to the attorney general and I appealed when they refused to release the documents.
And that's the process here in Kentucky.
And the attorney general looked it over.
A few weeks later, he came back and said, City of Lexington, you're full of crap.
Hand over the documents.
And that was the point that the city actually filed a lawsuit against me.
Did I just hear you right?
You said the attorney general of the state took your side?
I did.
Was that a partisan thing or he was just doing the right thing or what happened with that?
You know, from my understanding, I'm shocked and surprised.
I'm not sure I believe you.
Go ahead.
The government actually told the government that the government was doing something wrong.
That's basically what happened.
But, you know, honestly, historically, Kentucky has been pretty good on the open record stuff.
And I don't know what to attribute that to, but they tend to follow precedent.
They tend to pretty much follow the letter of the law.
And it's one of the things in Kentucky that's actually pretty, pretty strong in support of the people.
We have pretty good access to information here.
And so, really, the two arguments that the police department were making were pretty bogus.
They were, of course, officer safety and, oh, my God, homeland security.
If Mike Meharry knows about these cameras, terrorists are going to come rolling down Main Street in Lexington.
And it was transparently bogus.
And so, yeah, I was a little bit surprised.
But given the environment with open records here in Kentucky, I have to give them credit.
They've been historically pretty good on that.
I was not expecting to get sued by the city, and that's the next step.
And that's the loophole in the open records law that pretty much sucks because either party, if the attorney general finds whichever way, either party can actually go to court and sue to have that overturned.
And the city did that.
It was clearly a bullying tactic.
I'm sure they thought, who is this dude?
We'll just sue him.
He'll go away.
There's no way he's going to have the wherewithal to pursue this in court.
And they actually wanted me to pay their court costs, which is kind of nuts.
I'm already paying their court costs.
I pay taxes in this city.
But it was clearly a bullying tactic to make me go away.
And fortunately, I've worked with the Tenth Amendment Center for a long time.
I've got some good connections across the country.
I was able to make some contact with some folks I know at the ACLU.
One person talked to another person, and ultimately the Kentucky ACLU represented me in this case, which honestly, if it had been just me, I wouldn't have had the money to pursue it.
So I was fortunate in that.
Yeah, that's great.
We went to court, and the judge found in my favor.
He looked at what the attorney general said.
He said, yeah, this is right.
You guys are not making the case that these documents should be hidden.
So the city now has 30 days to turn over this information.
And hopefully we'll find out what in the hell these cameras are and how they're using them.
And I don't know.
I have no idea.
So it'll be interesting to find out.
Man, well, I want to see that footage, because this is a skate park.
And I just Googled it, Berry Hill Skate Park.
This looks great, man.
Big old spine and 12-foot deep end.
Nice.
Can I come and visit you and skate your park?
Absolutely, dude.
We got a couch for you.
I bet there's some great footage from those spy cameras.
So let me make a couple of distinctions.
The cameras that are in the park are distinct and separate from the cameras that the lawsuit is involving.
So the cameras in the park, they put those up there in public.
They put signs up saying, oh, this park under surveillance.
That was what led me to make an open records request to find out what else they've got.
So these other cameras that I'm being sued over are actually operated by the police department, and they're mobile.
We don't really have any idea what it means or what they are.
But I actually have footage from the skate park.
And if you go to We See You Watching Lexington's Facebook page, I don't think you're on Facebook, but if people want to check that out.
I actually have a little blurb where there's a wasp flying around one of the cameras, which is kind of cool.
I actually got some footage from it from doing another open records request.
Very cool.
Well, yeah, I want to check out some of that footage, see if there's some good stuff.
But yeah, it looks like a fun park, man.
I love a good spine.
It's pretty cool.
And now we have cameras there to make sure that the bad skateboard kids don't do anything nefarious.
You know what?
This is the first thing once they started building the new generation of public skate parks.
I was like, you know what this means, though?
This means that the rule that, hey, kids have to wear their helmet is not enforced by one of the kids' dads who owns the thing.
But now it's enforced by the sheriff's deputies rolling through.
If you're not wearing your helmet, it's the government's business.
And this kind of thing.
Oh, we don't have that here.
Well, and of course, they all competed all the private skate parks out of business, too, which I hate.
Oh, yeah, that sucks.
But, yeah, no, I mean, in fact, there's a skate park in Pflugerville just northeast of Austin, which is a really nice skate park, a lot like this one.
And that was the first thing I noticed when I pulled up was cameras all over those poles.
Oh, yeah.
I thought these were for traffic and stuff.
What are they doing back here at the back of the skate park?
Catch some kids with a roach or something?
Right.
Well, and that's the excuse they use.
But I think that and this kind of leads us into a little bit of a deeper discussion of surveillance and what's going on in the United States.
I think part of it is government wants us to get used to being watched because when they can watch us, they can track us.
You know, all of this stuff is stored.
You have facial recognition equipment now that makes it possible to pinpoint where a person is at a given time.
You look at what's going on in China.
It's really creepy.
They're literally tracking people around various cities.
This is the ultimate endgame so that they can watch and control.
I know this sounds like, oh, Harry's conspiratorial and paranoid.
This is absolutely going on.
I wrote an article not too long ago about how the Homeland Security Department is using the transportation system, so like bus lines, trains, to create this huge network of surveillance cameras that's taking in all of this data and storing it.
And they use it to basically track what everybody's doing.
And obviously the first thing that people are going to say that don't have a problem with surveillance is, well, Mike, if you don't have anything to hide, you've got nothing to fear.
But when it comes to government, we all have something to hide ultimately.
And it's usually the right-wingers, the conservatives who will give you this line, the thin blue line dudes.
They trust the police.
And I say, look, you guys tell me that you're never going to give up your guns.
Well, when some politician comes and passes a gun law and they're going to take your gun away, how do you think they're going to find you?
They're going to use all of this surveillance crap that they put up everywhere that you've been cheerleading for the last decade.
So people need to be careful what they wish for.
And I tell people all the time 1984 was a warning.
It was not an instruction manual.
But government's using it as an instruction manual or seeing this rapidly developing surveillance state.
And these local surveillance technologies are almost always tapped into federal surveillance.
They have these fusion centers.
All of this information is shared and all of it's getting dumped in these giant databases.
And anybody who cares about basic privacy, civil liberties, limited government, however you want to put it, should be concerned about the growing nexus of surveillance, especially when they can do it in secret.
And when you try to find out about it, they sue you.
Well, it's just like that horrible Terminator 3 where, hey, oh, I get it.
Skynet isn't a mainframe.
It's software.
It's the network itself.
And so that's really the thing about it is now we're living in the future.
It used to be that one day they're going to have all these databases all networked together.
Yeah, well, one day is now.
And you know what's scary about it?
I don't know if you're familiar.
And by the way, feel free to, in your soliloquy here, to incorporate a little bit more about what you know about what's going on in China because that really is some interesting stuff.
Well, yeah, OK.
Let me say back to that because what I was going to say – and you're probably familiar with the church commission or the church hearings that happened in the 1970s.
And it was kind of in response to the FBI.
The FBI was kind of out of control, and it was spying on everybody, and they were spying on other politicians and creating these dossiers to manipulate each other.
And they were spying on the anti-war movement, and they were spying on the civil rights movement.
And so they held this commission, and Senator Frank Church, who was way ahead of his time and maybe called him a prophet, he said at that point that the technology that was available and the surveillance network that was in place in 1975 had the potential for total tyranny.
Now, think about that a second.
In the 1970s, when we weren't all on the internet, nobody was using email, nobody had cell phones or tracking devices in their pockets.
If we had the potential for total tyranny in 1975, where are we today when police departments routinely have devices that can tap into your cell phone and listen to your conversations, when they can track you through facial recognition, when they can track you through your license plate?
We are way beyond that, and yet here we are 40-plus years later, and Congress still hadn't done crap about it.
In fact, they just made the situation worse, and I think eventually we are going to end up with what you have in places like China.
And I wish I could remember the specifics of the article I read.
It's been several months ago, but they're using these camera systems and facial recognition to basically target people that they want to keep track of.
So let's say that you are a political dissident or you said something that's raised the eyebrows of the government officials.
They can actually tag your face in the system and track you everywhere you go because there are so many cameras in places like Beijing that virtually you can go nowhere without being within a camera range.
And they can lock onto your face and track you every single place that you go.
And again, to me this is creepy.
Like if I went and followed you around everywhere you went, you'd probably turn around and – I don't know.
You might punch me or certainly you would say, dude, you're a creeper.
Go away.
And yet we let the government do this.
And so I really – this is part of what – the reason that I started this effort in Lexington was just to get people to think about what ubiquitous surveillance means before we get to China, before we get to 1984 or back to 1984, I guess, if you want to look at it.
Literal date.
Yeah, no, I mean and people might forget if they read Orwell in high school or something that this was one of the major facets.
It wasn't just the telescreen in your house, but there's a scene where Winston Smith is meeting Julia, his girlfriend, out at the public rally.
And he's kind of whispering out of the corner of his mouth because there's cameras everywhere.
And if the cameras knew that these two were even in a relationship together at all, he had to stand behind her and sort of like just whisper stuff at the back of her head and hope she could hear him and this kind of weird thing.
That was a big part of Orwell's vision back in the 1940s when he wrote that.
Yeah, people say, well, that will never happen here.
And yet who would have thought that you would lock up 100,000 Japanese behind barbed wire?
Of course it can happen here.
It can happen anywhere.
The nature of government is to take control and exercise power.
That's what this lawsuit is about.
It's about, hey, little dude, you are not going to challenge we the powers that be.
And, you know, Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, did a really good TED talk on privacy and the implications of it.
And he did a fantastic job of making people realize that your idea of doing something wrong is a lot different from the government's.
You know, we think, well, I'm not doing anything wrong.
OK, I'm not stealing stuff.
I'm not beating anybody up.
I'm not killing anybody.
I'm not raping anybody.
So therefore I'm good.
But the government's idea of doing something wrong is pretty much anything that threatens their power.
So even by pushing back against surveillance here in my hometown, I'm doing something wrong in the eyes of government, in the eyes of the powers that be.
That's why we need to make sure that we're taking whatever steps are necessary to limit the growth and the proliferation of this type of surveillance technology.
And what we're pushing for in Lexington, we actually, you know, I'm not just complaining.
I'm not just trying to find out information for the heck of it.
We're actually trying to push through a first step, which would be an ordinance that would require any government agency to get permission from the city council before they obtain any type of surveillance technology or start using it.
They would have to lay out a surveillance plan.
They would have to say this is what we're getting.
This is how we're going to use it.
This is how we're going to ensure privacy is protected.
This is how we're going to handle the data.
This is how we're going to share it.
All of that would have to be laid out beforehand and approved after a public hearing and a public discussion and public announcement.
Now, granted, we've got one part of the government overseeing another part of the government, so that's not ideal.
But it's a first step, and it allows the people to interject, and it will create a situation where at least they won't be able to operate in the secret.
At least we'll know beforehand, and we won't have Mike Meharry having to be the overseer of the government getting sued.
Because that's really the position I'm in right now, and I don't really want to be the overseer of the government.
So that's what we're pushing for.
Yeah.
And now, so what exactly did the judge rule in this case when he ruled in your favor?
Well, basically, he sided with what the attorney general said.
If you want to get into the weeds a little bit, the argument that the police department was using is that we have these secret cameras.
They're hidden surveillance cameras, and we use them for investigations.
So reading between the lines, I'm guessing they may be something that they can hide on the street or something that nobody would notice.
Or maybe it's – maybe there's some body-worn cameras.
I don't really know, but they apparently use them a lot for investigations or maybe for drugs, whatever they're investigating.
Their argument was is if I know what kind of cameras they have, then the bad guys are going to know what kind of cameras they're going to have.
And therefore, it's going to put officers' lives in danger, and it's going to ruin their investigations.
Now, here's the question.
Hey, my training and experience says so.
Sorry.
So here's the question that my attorney brought up in the hearing.
If these cameras are hidden, what difference does it make if you know what kind of camera it is?
I mean if they're really hidden, then you can't see them.
It just doesn't make any sense.
So what the judge ruled was that in order for the government to hide documents, there has to be what they call a compelling government interest.
That's the legal term that they use.
And he said, granted, there are compelling government interests that could allow you to keep certain documents secret.
But he said the burden of proof is on the city, on the government agency, to prove that there really is a compelling government interest.
And he said that the city has failed to do that.
So in other words, all they're doing is they're saying, well, this might happen and this might happen, but they haven't produced any kind of evidence or any kind of compelling argument that backs up their claim.
They can't just say it.
They can't just say, well, we have a compelling government interest.
They have to prove it, and they've not been able to prove it.
They tried twice, and they've not been able to do it.
And quite frankly, it's because it's a bunch of BS.
There is no way that me knowing that you have this kind of camera is going to stop an undercover officer or wherever they hide them.
There's no way it's going to stop that from happening.
Just because you know that it exists doesn't mean you're going to be able to find it.
So it's a bunch of BS.
It's typical government doublespeak.
And I think more than anything, they entered into this process thinking this guy is going to go away.
They didn't really have a good reason.
It's just like we don't want to give this information up.
They didn't expect to fight, and now they've backed themselves into a corner.
All right, y'all.
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QR code commodity disc which is a really cool currency silver one ounce disc with a QR code tells you the instant spot price on there and just go scott wharton.org slash donate there's also a PayPal for single donations or you can sign up to do monthly donations on PayPal as well and take all different kinds of digital currencies especially Zen cash Zen system.io for Zen cash and of course all the different kinds of bitcoins and etc.like that so check all that out at scottwharton.org slash donate and hey by the way if you like this show review it for me on iTunes, Stitcher, etc. if you like the audio book it's now available on iTunes as well as audible.com so leave a good review on there if you like that and help get that out thanks yeah yeah that's good you know I like how you know it comes up here in the article because of the context was they claimed that oh yeah no we had to get a community buy-in and you know everybody approved of this first or this kind of argument but as you put it here and you could be speaking about every town in America which is what like 700,000 towns or something I don't know in fact there was no notice given to the community there were no community meetings the cameras just appeared one day and isn't that the history of our country since 1994 that's exactly what happened and it's I went back and watched they did have a council hearing when they decided to put up this it's a pilot program they want to put cameras in all the parks in Lexington they picked this skate park quite frankly because I think that they thought that skateboard kids would be less likely to throw a finger fit than if they put them in the park over on the north end of town where a lot of minorities live I think they thought the white kids it wouldn't be as big of a deal so we'll start it here and then we'll expand it because what they really want to do they had a few murders in a park about three years ago so this got everybody all upset and but the park was in one park they can't put the cameras there to start with because then they'll be perceived as being racist so I think that's why they put them over here but yeah and here's what they said okay so let me give you a little bit of kind of the demographics of my neighborhood it's it's a pretty solid I'd say middle to lower middle class area there's a lot of rental homes it's it's a pretty diverse community there's there's there's Hispanic families there's several black families there's a couple Muslim families in on my street so pretty diverse but a lot of renters pretty transient an older neighborhood and so their argument was and get the arrogance of this their argument was well these people in this neighborhood are mostly renters so you know they don't really get involved so much with government activities they don't have a neighborhood association we didn't really have any way to notify them like like what we're too poor to care what going on I don't I I don't know it's just like this really condescending hoity-toity attitude that they took and here was the point that I that I'd made on a number of occasions you don't have any problem getting me all your campaign crap when you're running for office so don't tell me that you couldn't put a flyer on my door telling me that there's going to be a discussion about cameras in the park again total bunch of BS you know a bunch of pointy-headed politicians thinking that all we can do whatever we want and once it's there nobody's going to notice or pay attention well I noticed and I paid attention and there's a lot of people that are pretty mad about this especially here here's the funny thing the best thing they could have done for me is suing me because I've been able to get media attention I've been in the newspaper I've been on the television stations because everybody thinks why the hell is this guy getting sued so it's actually worked out pretty well in terms of activism so yeah activism tip for all of you one of the activists out there get sued and it'll help your it might help your uh your work right yeah it might to sue carefully yeah exactly all right so well so what are you gonna get yourself sued over next then well I don't know I mean there's so many opportunities you know we're we're continuing with the with our work at the 10th Amendment Center with the effort to push back from the state level at the NSA and we actually had a pretty big victory in that front a couple months ago you know let's talk about that so we had at the 10th Amendment Center you and Michael Bolton ran this great project I guess is the project itself still going off now yeah it's it's it's still alive and well we've kind of changed our focus a little bit on on what we've done nuts and bolt wise but the overall goal is still the same it's to encourage state local governments and even individuals to push back against the surveillance state wherever we can so we developed this piece of legislation called the Fourth Amendment Protection Act and your regular listeners will probably remember this was the piece of legislation that had the potential of turning off the water at the Bluffdale Utah NSA facility so they use city water the city is under no obligation to supply water to the NSA they could terminate that contract and so this piece of legislation would have actually forced them to do that it would have prohibited any cooperation with any government agency that's engaging in warrantless surveillance that's the the overriding idea of the bill so we weren't able to get that done in Utah and granted it was a lot to bite off and we actually were making some progress and then the the commander of the National Guard there in Utah apparently got involved politically and put some pressure on state legislatures legislators there and kind of killed the bill but we can also pass this bill in any state any state can refuse to cooperate with warrantless surveillance and Michigan did just that they passed this bill it was like unanimous in one house and just one vote against it in the other and effectively prohibits the state from providing any resources or personnel for conducting warrantless surveillance cooperating passing information on to the federal government and so in practice what this will do is when the federal government comes along and says hey you know Detroit Police Department we need you to help us set up the stingray device so we're going to do some surveillance oh no we cannot be involved in that they're absolutely prohibited from being involved at all it also prohibits the court system from using any information that has been gathered through warrantless means so in other words when the NSA is gathering this information on people and then secretly passing it on to prosecutors and states that will absolutely be non-admissible in court you can't even use that information to get other information so in other words you can't say uh we know this so now we're going to get a warrant and find this out all of that has been stopped so even though there aren't any NSA facilities currently in Michigan it creates a kind of a wall it says NSA you're not welcome here it's going to make it less likely that the NSA might put a future facility in Michigan so it's a great first step we had a similar bill that passed in California when we first launched this initiative but it didn't go as far as this Michigan bill so we're really excited and we're hopeful that this will create momentum next year as other states say oh we can do this that we will see other states jump on board and do the same thing the other thing that we've really been focusing on with off now is addressing individual technologies because like I said all of this stuff basically what we've created is a giant national surveillance state and the federal government is using state and local governments to run it so way it works is the federal government has all kinds of grant money out there all kinds of uh you know uh funding available through homeland security for local police departments to get things like stingrays these are the devices that can track and listen to cell phones license plate readers facial recognition technology drones all of this stuff the federal government funds it the local government buys it and operates it and then the federal government taps into the information so we know for a fact that the DEA has been running for years a license plate program where they are storing massive amounts of license plate data gathered up from states all over the country through state and local governments to basically be able to track and you know push in scott horton's license plate and say oh he's been here and he's been here and oh he's been over here and oh look he went to a gun show here and uh oh you know so we know this stuff is going on when individual states limit surveillance technology it by default limits what's getting to the federal government so if say for instance a state like illinois that recently passed a bill that prohibits the use of stingrays for listening to cell phone conversations at all it requires a warrant for the use of them in tracking that means that the federal government will not be able to tap into that information it can't get information it doesn't exist so when states limit the amount of information being gathered and stored and prohibited from being passed on to the federal government it has an impact on limiting that uh that surveillance state so until we can get somebody with the guts to turn off the water at the nsa in utah or turn off the electricity to the nsa facility in san antonio texas we're going to continue to work at the state level to try to limit and and push back against this uh this increasingly invasive surveillance state yeah well you know it's interesting uh i was just talking with bruce fine about how when you have a world empire you can't also have a limited constitutional republic of any kind um and yet there are some things about the constitutional system that they haven't been able to overthrow yet in fact you might even argue in a sense and i'm no lawyer so i don't know but it's actually a pretty liberal in a good way interpretation of the 10th amendment to say that the states do not have to you know carry out and enforce federal laws for the federal government it doesn't exactly say that in the 10th amendment but that's even though they've thrown out the 10th amendment as applying in a million circumstances they've used kind of a broad interpretation of it in that case and so that's actually still a thing so yeah you know with as you're saying in michigan um there was enough of a difference to make a difference on the margin there to actually get a thing passed which just goes to show that you can really do that you can really use state governments i mean not easily but it can be done to use state governments to nullify and interpose isn't that some crazy old-fashioned thing or that's really a thing here it's really a thing and it's it's you know the beauty of it is as you said it has been enshrined in america's legal system i don't know how they accidentally did that uh you know it's it's funny it's actually ironic if you look at the history it was a gun case too right it was it was tell me if i'm wrong about this it was the sheriff the militia guy uh is it sheriff mac sheriff mac that was who was because he didn't want to enforce the background checks and it wasn't a second amendment ruling it was a 10th amendment ruling in the 90s on this right that is correct but it actually goes back farther than that it goes all the way back to 1842 in a fugitive slave case and uh it was joseph story who generally i hate uh he's you know like most of these these national politicians he wanted to expand the power of the federal government and he had this brilliant plan that backfired on him so the case was prigg versus pennsylvania and basically a uh a runaway slave had run from maryland into pennsylvania and so the the court case was about whether or not pennsylvania could take any action to stop uh that slave's owner and i use air quotes around owner because you can't own a person but that's the way they looked at it the argument was whether or not the state of pennsylvania could do things to stop maryland from interjecting and grabbing the slave and taking her back to maryland and joseph story found that because the fugitive slave law was a federal law that it was up to the federal government to enforce it so the federal government couldn't force the state of pennsylvania to enforce the fugitive slave law now it couldn't interfere he said of course the states interfered anyway which is the beauty of it and we're all for that but this is what story said he said the states could not interfere directly but they could not be forced to cooperate so that was really the first time that we got this whole idea of anti-cooperation and this goes all the way back to james madison who said that the principal author of the constitution sorry go ahead yeah yeah and he said the solution this was a debate what are you going to do you've got this document it says that we're going to have this limited federal government what do you do when the federal government oversteps its bounds and james madison said one of the things that states can do is refuse to cooperate with officers of the union those were the exact words that he used so he gave us the blueprint before the constitution was even ratified and it works it works so beautifully and the the place that we've seen it most effective is in the world of marijuana just yesterday the people of okla-fricken-homa voted to legalize medical marijuana now if you had told me four years ago that one of the reddest of red states would ever legalize weed for any reason at all i would have gone like no no way dude that's not going to happen we actually have 32 states now that have legalized marijuana to some degree now the federal government says you can't do that the supreme court says you can't do that but the states are saying screw you we're doing it we're going to legalize it we're not going to enforce federal law federal government if you want to try to enforce your drug laws go for it and they've tried believe me they have tried but they don't have the personnel or resources to do it so when we just say no screw you the federal government is basically hosed and that's the beauty of what's going on right now it's approved by the courts and i generally don't really care what the you know the nine black robed politically connected lawyers have to say but in this case it works to our advantage we're going to use that tool and we can apply the marijuana strategy to anything we can apply it to health care we can apply it to guns we can apply it to hemp we can apply it to all kinds of different issues any place that the state is assisting the federal government in the operation of any federal system or the enforcement any federal law the state has every right to just say no we're not going to do it and the federal government can't do anything we're seeing it right now and with the sanctuary cities out out and you know particularly california but all across the country nobody is mad about sanctuary cities because they don't work they're mad because it does work when state and local governments refuse to cooperate the federal government can't get crap done and you know as far as i'm concerned the less the federal government can do the better off we all are yeah well so in the case of oklahoma by the way uh was there a particular right-wing approach to that or you know i was wondering if maybe they were invoking ptsd and veterans or this kind of thing you know right from the right i didn't follow real closely the actual campaign that was going on in oklahoma so i don't know what kind of messaging or talking points they were doing i do know this that in the uh the red state so to speak we've seen more success with marijuana when it goes to the ballot and i think really that's the bottom line i think is as individuals i mean this is an example of individual nullification we've got people and you know people have been nullifying weed laws for as long as weed laws have been in existence let's be honest about it and so the people's willingness to use this drug whether just for the pleasure of it or because it provides them some type of medicinal benefit has created the foundation to build this nullification effort on so ultimately it comes down to people i mean you can't just have governments passing laws you got to have people that are willing to do what is supposedly prohibited but i think really what's happened is as we've seen you know it started in california and then it grew and it grew and it grew and it started more in in you know your quote-unquote left-wing states and as people have looked at it and they've said you know what california's had medical marijuana now since 1996 and and the sky hasn't fallen down there and we do have a lot of veterans that have found benefit with the ptsd and and uh dealing with pain i think people are just more accepting of it and i think they recognize that having the federal government tell them that you can't have this plant is just stupid and i think that kind of transcends the whole party division it's one of those issues where where anybody that's rational if you're not jeff sessions you can look at it and go you know what this is stupid let's legalize this let's let people use it it's not hurting anybody it's beneficial to a lot of people and so the laws have have fallen away as people have basically just said you know what we're going to do this anyway and and that's that's the message just do it anyway be free you know and and uh and we'll keep pushing and try to keep the government off your back well and by the way too when you're mentioning the different things uh what about the state guard units and the national guard units is there anything really that the states could do or would dare do to interpose themselves between the people and the war machine well i think that's two different questions is there is there anything that they can do and is there anything that that they will do uh i think right now the the momentum of the country is too gung-ho pro-military you know we got to support our boys as they bomb people in yemen you know because apparently some of my freedoms got loose and went to yemen as as i understand it i'm not real sure how this worked but apparently they're protecting my freedoms in yemen because my freedoms got loose or something but to answer your question yes the states have authority over their national guard units they could say you know what we're not going to send our national guard units on overseas missions unless there is a declarational war i mean there's all kinds of ways you can stipulate it but absolutely state governments have the power to call back their guard units and and there have been a few bills there's a legislator i wish i could remember his name i want to say it's mckeon and i might be saying that wrong but he's in west virginia and he's introduced this bill a couple of times he is he's pushed hard for it and more power to him because that is not can you imagine trying to push that west by god virginia not a popular thing to do and we need more people that have um have the the willingness to take these steps because i think at some point the tide is going to turn i hope and people are going to get tired of the warfare state i mean i know i am sick and tired of it so i think as this momentum builds popular popular demand maybe it'll it'll start to push back but i want i want to touch on something else and and hijack uh hijacked conversation for just a second but it just reminded me of something um i don't know if you're familiar you may be had you heard about the uh the hearings that had gone on in north carolina regarding uh torture and rendition had you heard about that no in north carolina yeah so it's really interesting because there was an airline a corporation private airline that was actually a cia front and they were operating out of two airports or maybe three regional airports in north carolina and they were actually flying rendition missions out of north carolina so they would fly from north carolina to dc to someplace else and then they would pick up this poor schmuck in iraq and then they would take him to uh you know libya so he could be tortured and uh you know all the valuable information uh withdrawn out of him and so this was actually running out of north carolina it came to light that this was going on and so there's a movement in north carolina right now where people are saying you know what we don't really want our state involved in rendition and torture and i've actually had some contact with some folks they did some hearings about two or three months ago where they actually had some panel discussions they talked about it they've actually done the research and figured out like which uh victims of torture and rendition were uh moved about out of this uh operation from north carolina and so here's another way that states could push back states don't have to let people that are involved with rendition operate out of their public facilities these were public airports so this is another way i'm actually trying to work up some legislation uh over the summer that we can get introduced in north carolina next year to prohibit cooperation with torture and rendition now who could be against that you tell me i don't know probably a lot of people but we're going to do it anyway yeah man you're doing such great work on so many levels here and i can't tell you how much i appreciate it and appreciate your time on the show as always i'm always glad to be on we need to we need to make them more of a habit of it yeah absolutely well uh let's get our email communication methods straight here and uh we'll make sure and keep it well yeah well we could we could steal tom wood's shtick and we can do like tenth or tuesday every once in a while oh that makes sense yeah something like that there you go we'll have to name it something different but yeah all right hey listen appreciate it it's great talking to you friend all right guys that's michael meharry he is the national communications coordinator for the 10th amendment center over there with michael bouldin and uh so check out this piece activist wins open record lawsuit forces city to release information on surveillance cameras and also surveillance cameras at barry hill skate park an overview that's at we see you watching lexington.com all right you guys and that's the show you know me scott horton.org youtube.com scott horton show libertarian institute.org and buy my book and it's now available in audiobook as well fool's errand time to end the war in afghanistan hey it's endorsed by ron paul and daniel ellsberg and stephen walt and peter van buren and matthew ho and daniel davis and anand gopel and patrick coburn and eric margulies you'll like it fool's errand time to end the war in afghanistan and uh follow me on twitter at scott horton show thanks guys
