10/18/10 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antidote War Radio.
I'm sitting here hanging out with my pal, Anthony Gregory.
Welcome to the show.
Anthony, how you doing, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
It's great to be here.
And I'm so excited to actually be, I don't know how many times I've done your show, but this is the first time I've actually got to be in the same room.
It's very exciting.
Yeah, I like the in-studio interviews.
This is really good.
And yeah, so I don't really know where to begin.
There's so much to talk about.
But I think I just want to start with one of the things that I heard on the top of the hour news there.
And that was what, they didn't call it this because I guess they figured that nobody in the Fox News audience could spell any of this or understand what it means.
But it's the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
And that is that no matter what John Ashcroft did while he was the Attorney General, what he did to people to violate their rights, to violate the law in order to violate their rights, he's got sovereign immunity.
Like the King of England back in the old days or something, I guess.
Well, how does that work?
Didn't they cut off Charles I's head and say, no, dude, you're not immune.
See, you're dead now.
Well, sure.
But let's keep in mind, I mean, that many of these parliamentarian types who did that to Charles went on to assert that the Parliament's word was law, that it was impossible for Parliament to violate the law, that Parliament could suspend habeas corpus.
So they weren't saying that the law applies to everyone equally.
They weren't saying that the state is not above the law.
They were saying the king is not the state anymore.
And that is hard work, but we're making progress.
Well, it was progress on one level.
But I'm kind of becoming, I'm not an expert on the period, but just a little bit learning more about it.
I'm becoming a contrarian on the whole question of whether there was a step forward to say that now instead of one guy who claimed absolute authority, a doctrine that was being questioned slowly, now we have the people, democracy, that has unquestioned authority.
And really look at how insidious this doctrine still is, America, the greatest democracy on earth, or if you're conservative, the greatest republic on earth.
I don't care what you call it.
The idea is it's representative government.
It's actually the will of the people.
But what's the will of the people?
It's an executive branch that supposedly calls the shots for the people, and the executive branch claims the right to murder people and get away with it, even if it's illegal.
So it's not just saying we're above the law.
It's saying that even when we break the law, presto, change-o, it should be so obviously immoral to anybody who hears the idea that these people can do things that no one else would be allowed to do.
But of course, that's the very nature of the state.
I mean, sovereign immunity is the state.
Right.
Well, you know, that's what's funny, too, is I think a lot of these things, kind of like you said, it's obvious to everyone, or ought to be, but sometimes you just kind of got to hear it out loud in English.
What exactly is the state?
Well, it's the sovereign immunity.
That's what it is.
It's the people who have the right to commit crimes that the rest of us are banned by them from committing.
Yeah, that's precisely right.
It's the monopoly on legal force.
This is not a kooky anarchist definition of the state.
This is what most statist political science books will say, introductory texts, legal theory.
The state's a monopoly on legitimized violence.
So it's just, first of all, it is a monopoly, which everyone seems to dislike.
Just, you know, that's why one reason they say we need a state, in fact, is to fight monopoly, even though that's all the state is, is the monopolizer writ large.
And it's a monopoly on violence, and it's just by definition that violence which the people have been kind of tricked into accepting, or they do accept a lot of, of course, people would say it's good that the people accept this.
But it's just criminality that's socially acceptable.
That's government.
Well, and so, you know, it reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend of mine when I was in Austin.
Miss Austin.
And we were talking about the Constitution.
And he's saying, well, you know, the rules, we can change the rules for, never mind, you know, the law applying to the state.
This is just, you know, how it applies to the rest of us.
Change the rules.
But the importance of the Constitution is it, is it outlines how the rules themselves are to be changed.
And so to change that should be more difficult.
And so, but then that's where I said, yeah, but they quit amending the Constitution because it was too difficult.
So they just decided that, hey, it's a living Constitution, they can do what they want.
And really, my friend's point was that, yeah, it really is a living Constitution.
It is not just what the state says it is, but it is what the people say it is.
And so if the people accept that, for example, presidents have the right to kidnap and torture people to death in the name of keeping them safe, then they do.
And that really those laws against that kind of thing aren't for presidents.
They're the commander after all.
And the Constitution creates the office, but the power that that office exercises is based on what the people believe.
Now, of course, we're subject to lies and propaganda of every description all day, every day, and forced to go to government schools when we're kids and all the rest of these things.
But ultimately it is we, the people who decide whether this is the kind of thing we want to cheer for or try to oppose.
And it seems like most people would rather just cheer for it.
You know?
Well, you know, as an individual, I mean, I agree that it is, that's very true.
But of course, I quibble as an individualist.
It's not all of us people.
And it is the public ideology or just public attitudes that allow for the state to do what it does.
Now, this isn't instantaneous, this feedback mechanism.
If 50.5% of the people think maybe we should legalize pot, that doesn't necessarily mean it will happen right away.
But if, you know, 85% of the people think that putting people in cages for pot is just wrong, flat out wrong, the way that most people think that, you know, rounding up children and gassing them willy-nilly, thank goodness that, you know, even, I'm not a defender of these people, but of course, I think even Bush and Obama wouldn't quite just do that because they, not just because the people wouldn't put up with it, but that is kind of the point here, that the people wouldn't put up with it.
But I don't think even they, I mean, I think there are some things that even people that I consider evil or to have done very evil things, even they have a line, right?
So, but that's it.
I mean, it's not just, oh, everyone, you know, the people are okay with this policy or that policy, that determines exactly the policy.
But you can't have slavery if everyone's against it.
I mean, how would that even work?
You can't have taxation if everyone's against it.
And we couldn't have this war if people were really against it and not just against it, like, I wish that my president didn't do that.
Maybe I won't vote for him, but he's a murderer.
It's mass murder to do this and we just won't put up with it.
I mean, that's the way that, so yeah, it is we, the people on that, on that.
So really the lies that I learned as a little kid that, hey, it's a democracy and this is what the people wanted.
So I think mostly like in the context of the new deal.
Yeah, it was all unconstitutional, but it's what the people wanted.
It was such a crisis.
They needed the government to become powerful enough to do something about it.
And that's what they did.
And they're your great grandparents, respect your elders.
And they, they chose to do that because they knew what they were doing, because after all, whatever the majority goes along with at any given time is obviously the right thing or why would they go along with it?
And so, however it is, even today, however it is, this is what the people want.
This is their government and we, the people, are the government.
And so, like you said, presto chango, ipso facto, get reversed and all that.
And whatever the government does becomes the definition of what's good and acceptable and what we all wanted in the first place.
Yes, my one caveat here is that when people say that the government is the reflection of the majority of the people or whatever, what they're failing to acknowledge is this isn't only true with nominal democracies.
You could have a fascist regime, an autocracy, and if the vast majority of the people just hate it, it'd be much harder for it to persist.
But if people at a minimum tolerate it, it'll be there.
But the thing about what we would call a democracy is that it's just kind of a PR mechanism by which the people are tricked into thinking it's good that this dynamic exists.
Well, you know, when you say democracy, a lot of times people have as part of that definition, you can't do things like call some innocent Muslim a material witness and hold him without charges indefinitely and basically give him Gitmo light.
That part of having a democracy means having a rule of law that protects the rights of the accused.
And of course, that's all part of the warfare state.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the Dang Island Show here, man.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Sitting here with Anthony Gregory, and we're talking about, well, man, democracy, and state, I guess.
So again, the top of this thing was the impunity with which John Ashcroft got away with violating directly the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution, pretending to call thousands of American Muslims material witnesses to things that, obviously, they weren't material witnesses to whatsoever, in order to hold them without charges.
And these people were abused, repeatedly strip-searched, and humiliated, and kept under hot lights and extreme cold.
And basically, given not the worst of what they did to Qatani down at Guantanamo, but what they did to a lot of those guys at Guantanamo, to kind of just treat them like damn dogs, worse than American prisoners, convicted American prisoners in a lot of ways.
Yeah, well, I mean, in fairness, to John Ashcroft, there were, I mean, I think the material witnesses, many of them were probably treated about as bad as they treat illegal aliens that they jailed, some of whom, and maybe not even as bad.
I mean, all the time you read about illegal aliens, forgotten, these jails, these kind of quasi-jails, and then they die and stuff.
So no accountability whatsoever.
Right, and the point I'm trying to make here isn't to defend Ashcroft, but it's very easy.
We should be particularly upset when they're just like brazenly violating the most obvious protections that they're holding up and claiming they're bound by the Sixth Amendment, and the war on terror has brought out some of the worst.
But at the same time, this isn't all that unusual.
I mean, just look at the prisons, look at the whole system.
So I mean, of course, I side against Ashcroft on almost everything.
I mean, maybe we have similar taste in soda or something, but he's not my kind.
He's an enemy of Liberty, horrible, horrible.
But he's not an exception.
He's not an exception.
He was a somewhat particularly bad AG, and he had a particularly bad roundup there.
But I'll tell you, the material witness abuses, these roundups of some people, not that it matters morally, but some of them weren't even Muslim or Arab.
There were even American citizens they rounded up, didn't believe they were citizens, just to show how procedurally messed up it was and how hypocritical they are.
But it could have been even worse.
I mean, that's what we need to remember.
I want everyone to never forget what the Bush administration did, and if justice can still happen, I'm for it, but these days I notice that when people talk about civil liberties and complain about Obama, about half of their complaint is that he's not jailing or investigating Bush officials.
But what about his officials?
They're continuing to do basically the same stuff, in some areas worse, in some areas not quite as egregious.
This is just, it's not just Ashcroft.
Well, here's the question.
What about if there was another September 11th-sized attack on the United States or worse, the next real red alert?
Bush called the governors and said, I would appreciate it if you would call out your guard units and put them at the airports.
Now, he could have done a lot worse than that, and we know he could have done a lot worse than that.
He created the Office of Homeland Security until the Democrats and all their government employee unions hectored him into creating a full-fledged national police force, the Department of Homeland Security.
And I mean, I would expect anything, just making things up, that if there was another full-scale attack like that on this country, that we would just immediately see Homeland Security and FBI and whoever embedded in every one of the 18,000 separate county and police, city police jurisdictions across this country, that we would have a full-fledged national police force.
We would have national guards outside permanently.
I believe that on surveillance, on national police, on a lot of these issues, on most of them, I think that the Obama administration, with a second attack, would probably be far worse than Bush was.
And in fact, I don't think that it's unambiguous that Al Gore, for example, would have been much better.
And in some ways, he might have been worse.
You're right about the Department of Homeland Security.
Also, of course, the airport security, the Democrats wanted to be national.
On the ID card, I remember the administration's original position was, we don't need a national ID card yet, right after 9-11, when most people wanted one.
And with Obama, of course, not only would a second 9-11 just ratchet everything up, but with Obama, even if he was a little better, unless he's willing to go all out challenging the fascists, which is kind of a funny thing even to say, because that's definitely not who he is.
But even if that is who he is, politics pushes him to be more fascist than the Republicans have to be, just to get people on board.
One example I've been thinking about lately is, what do you think George W. Bush would have said about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque?
Sometimes I think he would have been better defending the First Amendment and property rights and the dignity of just Muslim Americans doing their peaceful thing than Obama.
As he waged war against Muslims across the planet Earth, he always said, we're not at war with Islam.
Right.
And I think that he believed it, more or less.
That doesn't mean that his rationale was any more justifiable or less murderous.
But he was always very careful.
And remember, the right wing was critical of him, but not as critical as they would be if Obama really stressed this.
So I think Bush would have come out and, I mean, remember when Bush wanted to have the Dubai company take over port security, of course, corporatism, cronyism, but was it an Islamist plot to overturn America?
Like Charles Schumer?
It reminded me of that movie, Network, where he's lecturing the guy and he goes, look, we gave the Arabs a bunch of money, and now they have to give it back.
And you're messing with the laws of nature, dude.
There is no such thing as Dubai, OK?
It's one planet.
It's ruled from New York and DC.
Get over it.
Right.
And of course, that more captures the reality than this idea that Bush was caving to the Islamo-fascists.
Right.
And so now the lid is off on the right now.
Yeah.
And the Democrats are not afraid to appeal to our fears, to our xenophobia.
Look at deportations, just normal immigrant deportations have skyrocketed under Obama.
Of course, no one talks about this.
For the first time in years, people are all worried about the immigrants.
But Obama is the most rigorous immigration law enforcer since, I don't know what, Carter?
Because, of course, Reagan toned things down.
He enforced the law, but he toned things down.
Yeah, well, he did the immunity and all that.
All right, well, so I didn't really give you a good introduction other than you're my friend.
He's at the Independent Institute, writes for lourockwell.com, and the Future Freedom Foundation as well, and lots of other stuff.
Strike the root.
And man, if you go to Anthony's archives at lourockwell.com, there's some really, really good stuff there going back years and years.
The latest one is called War Worship.
Anthony Gregory on collectivism and hate.
America is not a normal country.
The persistence of red state fascism.
The crime ring called the Fed.
The new Brown scare.
How the left learned to stop worrying and love the FBI.
It's great stuff.
Always read through to the end.
So Anthony, I was out of town, but there was some big shindig where all my heroes showed up.
Well, yes, and this was great at the Hilton in Universal City.
There was Libertopia.
It's the first time they've had this conference.
I was fortunate enough to be a speaker, and I got to catch up with a lot of friends and see a lot of speakers.
A lot of people were sad you weren't there.
But of course, we understand, but we miss you.
But we had a lot of great speakers, Roderick Long and David Beto and Sheldon Richman.
Brad, what was David Beto's speech about?
Voluntary communities talking about how the government welfare used to, the history of welfare, private welfare, fraternal organizations.
How, believe it or not, people are capable of taking care of each other without guns being involved or without threats of people being put in cages if they don't hand over their money being involved.
That, in fact, the history in America shows that this was the main way people helped each other out.
And it was a lot cheaper and easier to do so back before we had Leviathan involved in every economic transaction.
When you're just free to get together, I mean, that is what freedom is, the freedom to get together and do things that are peaceful together and cooperate in any way that you want.
Magical things happen.
But then when you need to get permission to have too many, to have seven people sleeping in the living room or whatever, it's a lot harder for the poorest people to really get the help they need when regulation and all the rest is away.
So great stuff.
Yeah, he's a great civil rights activist and libertarian historian.
And Liberty in Power is the name of the blog he keeps over there at the History News Network.
I urge everybody to read it.
It's great stuff.
So Roderick Long, what did he talk about?
He talked about anarchy, why people should be anarchists.
He addressed some objections to anarchism.
I believe his was the first talk or the second talk.
It was one of the first talks.
And it was just like, all right, what a way to start the weekend, cut right to the chase.
And I think that of all the speakers, maybe one or two was not a full-blown anarchist.
But it kind of felt good to be around.
I've been to libertarian events in the past where there'd be times I felt like I was the only libertarian in the room.
I'm not trying to diss people for being moderate or anything.
I'm a big tent guy when it comes down to it and when it comes to getting together.
But you've been there with me, libertarian events.
And then someone dares to question the story of Pearl Harbor, as most Americans think of it.
And someone's horrified and leaves the room.
And you're thinking, wow, I thought this was an anti-state, anti-war type group of people.
What's going on here?
But that kind of thing never happened.
All right, so what was your speech at Libertopia?
My speech was, it had a long kind of clumsy title.
But I'll just say it because it sums up the idea.
Do not be co-opted by the machine, how libertarian energy is diverted into statist ends.
And so I have this theme I've been kind of harping on lately about how libertarian energy and, broadly speaking, the old classical, old liberal just sentiment has often ended up pushing one side into power, pushing through certain reforms in government that leave us no better than we were before, really.
And that how we often see the state itself co-opt our language, co-opt the ideas of liberty.
You were talking about how a lot of people say democracy isn't just majority rule.
It's a majority rule with rights for the individual, with some minority rights.
Well, that's more good PR that the state employs.
The state says, oh, we are a democracy.
So now not only are the people of the state, but the state is libertarian, right?
I mean, that's the myth of democracy.
But you can't have it both ways.
You can't have majority rules, and the minority is protected from the majority's rule.
It's a contradiction.
It's a paradox.
And majority rule always means rule by 1 10th of 1% anyway, because they get to dictate what TV says, and that's the end of that.
Yeah, it's still an oligarchy.
I mean, pretty much all forms of government are oligarchies, or I guess some are more autocratic.
But you've got a small elite.
And all you have to do is look at how much government employees get paid versus other people.
I mean, economic liberals are especially sensitive.
They say, oh, like teachers are underpaid, for example.
They always say public school teachers are underpaid.
But they're paid more than the average person in society, actually.
So what's that mean?
I mean, even a full-blown Marxist would conclude they're overpaid, because they're taking more than their share.
And this is how government officials are.
I'm not saying that.
Hey, now hiring deputy sheriffs, starting at $80,000 a year, man.
Yeah, Barney Fife.
That's more than I'll ever make a year in my life, I guarantee you.
Well, assuming they don't go Zimbabwe on us, that is a lot of money, right?
Which they just might.
Which they just might.
So let's hope you don't.
I mean, like $80,000 will be my weekly pay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's not necessarily better.
Yeah, back in my day, a small slurpee was just a quarter.
Yeah, you're older than I am.
Just a little bit.
I lived in Texas, too.
California prices, man, I'll tell you.
Oh, yeah.
All right, so let's talk more about the warfare state.
Because liberals always hear libertarians talking and think, man, you guys just want to set the corporations free.
Rich white man's anarchy for you.
But of course, what's the worst part of the prison industrial complex, the war industrial complex, whatever?
It's the merger, that fascist public-private partnership where General Electric and the generals are the same people.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is what- You just want to turn the whole damn thing over to General Electric now, Anthony.
Well, but you can't turn it over to General Electric.
Couldn't profit from this war if it had to pay for the war.
I mean, the only reason that the whole deal is the big businesses reap the rewards.
The costs are socialized.
We're forced to pay taxes.
People are murdered.
And a small elite gets rich.
That's the deal.
That's always been the deal.
That's always what all governments are about.
And that's always what they'll always be about.
Because that's what they are.
And it's, I mean, not all of them commit mass murder all the time.
But it's just a scam.
The idea that the ruling class can be something other than the state, that the state can be the underdog, that the state can stick up for the people that are least powerful by being more powerful than anyone else.
It's the most absurd contradiction if you really just think about it.
And of course, the state uses massive brainwashing to get people to ignore this simple concept that, of course, the people who have the most access to everything else in society because of money are going to have the most access to the state.
And there's no way to ever change that.
Get over it.
If you don't like that, you have to reduce the political power, ideally eliminate the state.
There is no military industrial complex without the state.
There's businessmen working all day and all night trying to get rich.
And maybe some of them will get rich.
But they can't get rich by taxing you to kill people.
And as soon as you believe in the state, that's what you believe in.
And as soon as you believe in that, you believe in the state.
It's the same thing.
So maybe I'm not being completely articulate here, but just any kind of left, from whatever you consider any sort of left, whatever, private power is dangerous.
These evil corporations, Noam Chomsky talking, these top-down private tyrannies, total control over everything.
And you're saying it's the state's fault, not their fault.
I'm saying that, well, it's probably both of their faults.
But the state is the main problem here.
And the state, including almost any so-called leftist whoever has any power over the state, ends up cozying up to the very corporations that everyone thinks are the worst.
And those almost always are the corporations that are most in bed with the state.
Obamacare, the insurance industry, TARP, and all of these banking regulations, the banking establishment itself, foreign policy, all of these contractors that the left hates are the ones that brought Obama to power and that Obama is expanding their power.
And this is not an accident.
Liberals often ask, how do we stop this?
How do we remedy this?
But I think democracy, voting, because one man, one vote, no matter how rich you are.
And in that way, the little guy can stick it to the big guy.
But of course, the thing is, when it ever does happen that the masses of disenfranchised people overtake the regime and really take it over and kick out the old elite, they're just as bad.
Or they're worse, because they've, you know, look at communism.
That's what that is.
And people say, well, it never really, we never really got it.
Well, they sure tried like a couple dozen times.
Sometimes it was just a terrible, horrible catastrophe of suffering and tyranny.
And other times, it was far worse.
So that's the way it works.
You know, you could try socialism.
We as a species have tried all these different ways to stop other private interests or other barons or rich people or whatever from controlling the poor.
But it doesn't work, because it can't work.
And the state is the problem.
I mean, they've tried.
So now are you saying then just turn it over to these barons?
Turn what over?
Turn what over?
Security, at a minimum.
But see, the security apparatus that we think of when That's what everybody says.
Look, if there's no government here to prevent another one from replacing it, then it'll immediately devolve into like H.G. Wells, the king of Michigan.
And he's at war all the time and whatever, that it'll just be smaller warlords instead of the big ones we have.
Well, that can happen.
You can have smaller warlords.
And I'm not for warlords of any sort.
But the problem is that a state is just a warlord that people put up with.
When you're embracing the state, you're embracing the idea that one criminal gang has to be made non-criminal to stop the other criminal gangs from being criminal.
And it's always bad.
So if you don't like people being pushed around.
Look, the question is the debate about whether to turn it over to private enterprise.
Turn what over?
Are we talking about turning over the idea of the law, of how we deal with legal questions, how we deal with national defense?
Are we talking about the actual infrastructure and the policies?
Because, of course, we don't want to privatize the war on drugs, for example.
The war on drugs is evil.
You don't privatize the war in Afghanistan because it's evil.
But these things can't be done privately.
You need taxes because they cost more money than they bring in.
Dick Cheney actually committed the high treason of going to a foreign country to complain about his own government's foreign policy.
Nobody dixie-chixed him at the time.
But he went to Australia and he complained about Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iran in 1998.
And he said, hey, we're all businessmen here.
What the hell?
I'm trying to make some money.
These sanctions are in my way.
The Iranians are people, too.
We can do business with them.
And then, of course, once he becomes president, dictator-in-chief, really, him and David Addington up there with the commander-in-chief clause in full effect, torturing people to death, he did everything he could to get us into a war with Iran.
Well, yeah, and Dick Cheney's a great example.
Horrible man, but in the private sector, his own greed makes him humanitarian by any measurement, at least compared to what he's like when he's in power, which is a mass butcher.
Or what about- And he's got all these flags and yellow ribbons and team spirit and all this stuff behind him, where he's not just forcing us all to pay to send the army overseas.
The army is our neighbor's kids, if not ours.
Sure, and even most of his political opponents will say, well, but we respect the office.
We respect the democracy, so we have to- I mean, it's horrible.
Another good example of this is in the Fog of War, where we have McNamara.
And there's the interlude between when he's working on butchering Japanese and when he eventually becomes more famous for butchering Vietnamese.
There's this whole period where he's in the automotive industry.
And people talk about this segment in the movie and how he's corrupt, and he ends up- And yeah, of course he's corrupt, and it's not a purely free market there either, by the way.
But isn't it better than what he was doing when he was serving the public?
Yes.
Well, and there was accountability, right?
He lost his position.
Yeah, he lost his position.
That was why he went back to government.
That's why he went back to government.
That's why he decided to enter public service again.
And there were millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians and loyations who died thanks to him and his fellow servants.
So that's public service, and it can't be reformed.
You can, and I would hope to one day live under a state that's less bad, and not all states are always at war outright, but to the extent you have a state, you have jails, you have police, you have police brutality, you have people being impoverished, you have the economy being dragged down, you have winners and losers being picked, for political reasons rather than for serving customers.
The state is a scam, and our state is one of the biggest scams in the world, especially given its rhetoric.
But they're all bad, and there's no way to fix them, because they're not broken.
This is what they are.
The empire in Star Wars, it wasn't broken.
It's not that the empire needed to be fixed so it would stop blowing up planets.
That's the function of an empire, and it's the function of the state.
Well, it also didn't overthrow the Republic.
It was the Republic, just grown up all the way, that's all.
Right, that's true.
I mean, I hope people really get the lesson from the...
If they get anything from those very mediocre prequels, at least some of the politics is kind of good.
I don't think they handled it that well, but the story, I know...
I don't know if I'm allowed to diss the prequels on your show.
Oh, no, please, go right ahead.
No, no, but...
Yeah, I mean, it is the story of how the Republic becomes the empire, and that's what Lucas always said, he wasn't interested so much in one country getting conquered by another, or something like that, he was interested in how do you get people who are nominally free to give up their freedom and to love it, talking about Rome and Germany as examples, where people basically turn power over to those who they knew were to be dictators, you know what I mean?
They killed Julius Caesar, but then the Senate still gave the total power to his nephew.
Yeah, and I remember the great Harry Brown, when people were all worried that the Muslims were going to take over the country, and in 2001 and 2002, when he was really...
When we needed him, and he was there, saying all the right stuff.
But one thing he would say is, what are you afraid of, that they're going to take over, that they're going to tax half our wealth, that they're going to force us into a retirement system that doesn't work, that they're going to indoctrinate our kids, that they're going to jail people for doing non-violent things?
Now, of course, the fact is, we would never be a Muslim theocracy here, because the culture wouldn't put up with it, but we can be this kind of secular theocracy, or whatever we got, and in a lot of ways, it's not quite as bad as the Taliban.
It's Abraham Lincoln is the god of this thing.
Yeah, Lincoln.
But we're already conquered, is the point.
We've already...
We don't need to be worried about being conquered by a murderous empire or murderous regime.
We have been.
And most of us still, well, almost most of us still show up at the polls and cheer the thing on, and they think that they're trying...
Right now, we're on the brink of the Republicans probably taking back over, but it's just...
I don't see how anyone could believe that it matters at all at this point which party wins these elections, but we can talk whatever...
Yeah.
All right, well, we'll be right back.