02/14/08 – Christopher Ketcham – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio and Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and the next guest is Christopher Ketchum.
He's a freelance reporter who writes for Harper's, Mother Jones, GQ, Salon, Antiwar.com, and more.
His blog is called Habeas Corruptus, available at ChristopherKetchum.com.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
Hey, how you doing?
I'm doing great, man.
How are you?
Pretty good, pretty good.
Good to talk to you again, and I really like this article that you did for Good Magazine, which I had never heard of, but it's called Most Likely to Secede, and it's about the Second Vermont Republic.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that movement, I guess, starting with why is it called the Second Vermont Republic?
Well, basically, the Second Vermont Republic is a group of people in Vermont, you know, citizens of Vermont, who want to secede from the United States of America to form, or to reform, rather, what was the Republic of Vermont, which existed for around 14 years, up until 1791, when the good citizens of Vermont voted to join the Union.
Prior to that, their independent-mindedness, their contrarianism, basically directed them away from joining the Union, and away from being part of this large new unit of, you know, the unified colonies, and they wanted to remain their own country.
And these now are people, the so-called Blue State secessionists, as I call them, who now are just, they just don't want their taxes going to things like the war in Iraq, you know, military, the military-industrial complex, just the whole massive, wasteful agglomeration of spending that is the federal government.
Now, didn't Vermont, back even before the Revolutionary War, weren't they part of New Hampshire and seceded from them?
I think, perhaps, I mean, I know that the...
It's been a long time since I read that history.
No, they were part of New York, and they seceded from New York, and that actually was a bit of a violent conflict.
Ethan Allen was, of course, one of the Green Mountain boys, the militia up there spearheaded that.
And so, again, there's a long history there among Vermonters of simply wanting to go their own way.
Now, there's an interesting history of secession.
I read in...
There's this great book called When in the Course of Human Events, arguing the case for southern secession by a guy named Charles Adams, who's a northern libertarian, I believe, from Pennsylvania.
So it's not a, the South will rise again, boy, kind of book.
It's just, I think, a pretty fair look at secession and the Civil War, why the North refused to let the South secede, and all that kind of thing.
And he points out that, in early history, there was a movement for the North, for at least, I guess, New England, to secede from the Union over Madison's War of 1812 through 1814.
And there were further threats of secession from the northern states over the issue of slavery, actually, before the Civil War.
Absolutely.
Listen, there was something called the Hartford Convention in 1812, 1814.
I think it was finally ratified in 1815.
That was the states of New England basically said, listen, this War of 1812 messed up our commerce with England.
We had no interest in it.
We did not want to pursue it.
Let's secede.
And that was the first, really, the first document that established, in a formal, sort of codified format, the right for states in the Union to secede.
Now, up until the Civil War, on the eve of the Civil War, and even during the Civil War, there were hundreds, hundreds upon hundreds of northern newspapers that, like Mr. Adams, a northern libertarian, allowed for the right of secession and argued that precedent and custom and law up to that moment basically allowed for the southern states to secede if they wished.
That was just considered a sovereign right of the states.
The states had acceded to join the Union, and therefore they had the right to secede from that same journey.
It was just as if it was a marriage compact.
Every marriage compact comes with a tacit agreement that you can get divorced.
I mean, listen, not a lot of people will get married if they didn't know they could get divorced.
Right.
And I guess it was Daniel Webster's argument that it wasn't a compact.
The Constitution wasn't a compact among the states.
It was the people and perpetual.
And the states didn't have the authority to secede.
And I guess that's the argument that won out violently in the 1860s.
But yeah, wasn't it even the case that during the constitutional conventions that the states, basically, at least a few of them wrote into their charters ratifying the Constitution that we reserve the right to secede at any time and that kind of thing?
Yes, there were a number of states like that.
I believe New York was among them.
I believe Virginia was among them.
All right.
Now, let's get to your personal opinion here.
Chris, are you ready to go ahead and call it quits for the USA and have this country break up into constituent parts?
Well, I got to tell you, I just don't, you know, I spend half of my year in Utah, right, in a little town called Moab in the middle of nowhere.
And the other half I spend often traveling for work all over the country.
But a lot of the time I'm in New York City.
I was just in Washington, D.C. for a couple months.
And, you know, when I'm out in Moab, I realized that this is not it's not the same country.
It's literally not the same country.
Maybe people are speaking the same language.
They've got some of the same institutions, but their interests are quite different from those of a brownstone Brooklynite in the heart of Brooklyn or a Manhattan ad salesman on Madison Avenue.
And so for the to conflate, to confuse the interests of the Manhattanite and the Moabite and the Utah resident is just ridiculous.
To think that a country of 320 million people can be represented by 550 people in a remote location known as Washington, D.C., is kind of ridiculous when you think of it rationally, when you think of when you think of the whole idea of, let's say, regional food distribution systems or localist food distribution systems or local accountability to local government.
It just it doesn't seem to me to be a rational, reasonable standard for how a republic can operate.
You know, if you look back at, for example, Rousseau talked about the ideal size republic would be something like twenty five to fifty thousand people, not tiny.
The reason he argued that is that, you know, you just can't have a functional relationship between the representative and the citizenry if it's too big.
You know, Aristotle talked about the ideal number, the ideal population of a republic being something like two hundred thousand people, again, smaller, more accountable, closer to the people.
Now, that's not to say this would be the that suddenly all problems would evaporate.
Of course, there's always corruption in all levels of government.
But it's just that when you have corruption on a local scale, you know, it's like in Brooklyn, for example, local government and a lot of corruption in Brooklyn.
But you know what?
You can see you can walk in and find your legislator and punch him in the mouth if you want, because he's right there in D.C.
I mean, you've got a representative, let's say a representative from Utah spends very little time out in his district in Utah, which encompasses huge swaths of desert and far flung town, spends a lot of his time in Washington, D.C., not with his people, not with his constituents.
You know, I'm wondering, what is he doing for those people in Utah?
Why is he in Washington, D.C., when he should be in Utah?
Now, I have to tell you, I'm completely sympathetic.
I'm with you.
300 million people and 535 representatives.
It's crazy.
I wish I had, actually.
I have it somewhere on the computer, but not where I can find it.
I have a great soundbite of Charles Manson talking about how insane it is to think that there are nine men on the Supreme Court who are the final word in these things.
Charles, Charles Manson, you mean the guy who killed Chan Tate and cut out her baby?
And then, yeah, that's great.
Yeah, the psychopath with the swastika carved on his forehead, calling the Supreme Court insane.
And of course, he's right.
That's the thing.
So what, are you comparing secessionists to Charles Manson?
No, no, I just thought it made a great point that when, you know, Mr.
Froot Loop is calling your system crazy and he's right, then you have a serious problem.
Well, that's true.
Hey, Charles Manson for president.
To heck with Obama.
Yeah, right.
We shouldn't have to agree with Charles Manson, I guess is the point.
And it's just funny to hear the guy talk.
Anyway, though, so I guess one thing that jumps out at me with the idea of secessionist movements in America breaking up is I'm worried about ethnic divisions, that basically what you would have, I've seen people talking about this in different places, and you literally have people saying, yeah, we'll make, you know, Florida, Israel West, and we'll make the South Blackistan, and then we'll make, you know, the Southwest will be new Azatlan and all this.
And that's not what I want.
A bunch of tribal and ethnic divides in what used to be the land of individualism.
Well, you know, the Southwest, it may become inevitable that the Southwest will turn to some sort of quasi-Mexican sovereignty simply by population growth.
I mean, there's a great book that I'm sure you've read.
It's called The Long Emergency by Jim Kunstler, James Howard Kunstler.
It discusses the various scenarios possible with the end of cheap oil.
And one of his scenarios, the chief scenario, is that the country would indeed break up into regional local economies because these large-scale transportation distribution systems would be impossible without cheap oil.
And one of the things that he notes is that, yeah, Azatlan, I mean, already the Southwest is becoming a form of Azatlan.
There's huge numbers of Hispanics there.
In many cities, they are eclipsing the Anglo population, or however you want to refer to that population.
So, you know, there may be certain places where, just as in, for example, in the occupied territories and in Israel proper, you have this skyrocketing birth rates of Arabs that the Jewish population is not keeping up with.
So it could be simply a matter of demographics that these changes will occur.
And, you know, for example, look at the second Vermont Republic.
Vermont is probably the whitest state I have ever been in.
I grew up in Brooklyn.
So, I mean, my whole experience at just being sort of socialized as a kid was that my friends were Black, Hispanic, Jewish, you know, German, Irish, you name it.
It was a whole range of humanity.
Vermont is a pretty homogenous society.
It is not a very inclusive society.
I mean, so the second Vermont Republic could be called Whitestan if you want to, you know, if you want to break things down in sort of ethnic terms.
So what you're saying could happen.
I mean, I don't think it would be a good thing.
On the other hand, if the country breaks up into separate republics that are not envisioned as under these sort of primitive rubrics of ethnic affiliation, but rather under reasonable, rational standards of how do you feed, employ, and create a cohesive society on a smaller scale than the one we have now, then the kind of scale that we have now that is failing and unsustainable, that's the problem with the United States.
The system that we have is unsustainable, and if we keep on going in the direction we're going, we are going to collapse, whether we like it or not, simply by all the traps that we've laid for ourselves, economic, fiscal, militarily.
One of your guests recently was Chalmers Johnson talking about the $1.1 trillion that we now spend in the military that eclipses the civilian economy, that Chalmers calls a suicide pact in the economy, the incredible wasteful spending that goes on in Washington, D.C., that just has, I mean, literally, just the money disappearing into these black holes, $100, $200 billion a year in black budgets for the CIA, DIA, all the various intelligence agencies, this subprime lending crisis, which is due to huge consolidated banks preying on the poor, I mean, again, all systems, all these large entropic systems that are destined to implode.
And so the Vermont secessionists, both as an idea, as a thought experiment, and as a sort of practical preparedness for the future, are saying, listen, let's face facts.
The United States has messed up.
We have squandered our resources.
We've created these large-scale entropic systems that are not going to last.
Let's prepare for a better future.
And their better future is that they want to get off the ship.
They think the United States is a Titanic.
They see the iceberg coming.
Nobody else does.
It's too busy partying.
They want to get off the ship.
Well, and, you know, I guess people would probably maybe assume that secession would come with some kind of package of isolationism and so forth, but there's no reason that Vermont couldn't secede and maintain absolute free and open travel and trade with all of the neighboring states and with Canada and with everything else.
There's no reason that they should have to be economically isolated.
I mean, to the degree they want to, I guess that's fine, but it doesn't seem to be a mandatory part of the secession package.
No, secession is not anti-capitalism.
I mean, yeah, of course, I mean, Vermont would die, would wither on the vine if it didn't have, if it couldn't trade and couldn't welcome other, it couldn't welcome the rump United States citizens into its valleys and its mountains to enjoy, for example, its ski slopes, et cetera.
So, no, we're not talking about isolationism here.
We're talking simply that the Vermonters don't want their money going to this far off back water, you know, this former swamp, Washington, D.C.
They just, they want to keep their money at home.
They no longer want to be associated with a government that, oh, let's see, eavesdrops on its citizens, spies on those who dissent, gathers lists for martial law in the event of martial law for the roundup and detention of citizens, sends citizens off to gulags, far-off gulags, Camp X-Rare, where have you, you know, participates in extraordinary renditions to Middle Eastern countries where those who've been renditioned disappear into the maw of torture, of dungeon.
They just don't want to participate anymore.
They don't want to, I mean, the Vermonters argue, for example, that without, by severing their association with the United States, that one of the, that they will no longer, for example, be attacked or be targets for attack, such as the United States was on September 11th, because, of course, September 11th didn't happen in a vacuum.
September 11th happened because of certain actions taken by the United States in the Middle East, and, you know, certain aggressive, violent actions by the United States.
So, you know, the Vermonters say, listen, our foreign policy, yeah, it would be non-interventionist, but not isolationist, which, by the way, accords very much with Ron Paul's foreign policy.
Yeah.
Now, what about, well, anybody but Ron Paul's policy when it comes to allowing Vermont to secede?
When the South seceded, Abraham Lincoln said no, and the North conquered the South and forced them back into the Union.
And any idea, really, even, you know, the Texas treaty that says, you know, we can secede from the Union because we used to be, you know, that was like right in the treaty where Texas signed to join the Union in the first place.
All that was completely repudiated.
Any understanding that the states could secede, even Texas, was repudiated by their defeat in the American Civil War.
So what kind of sea change would have to take place for Vermont to be allowed to secede without being conquered?
Well, I suppose, you know, John Rawl, the philosopher and ethicist, talks about the idea that secession should only be allowed as a remedial right.
That is, a means of righting a wrong.
So, for example, Rawl would argue that the secession of the Southern states was wrong and not allowable because it was done in furtherance of a violent, horrific, unethical system, slavery.
On the other hand, Rawl, who looked at the Vermonters, might say that, all right, this is a case of the remedial right to secede, which is the right of a group of citizens who want to no longer or want to right the wrong being imposed on them by a government.
Now, connected to that would be, let's say, Vermonters hold a popular referendum and 95% of Vermonters vote to secede, then you'd have both a remedial argument and a democratic argument that is saying, listen, the polis has spoken.
They don't want to be part of this country anymore.
Now, that would be the moral argument.
Legally, then, you'd have to go through a, you would literally have to have the equivalent of a constitutional amendment in which you'd have two-thirds of both houses and two-thirds of all the state houses, all the governors, voting in favor of the secession of that state.
Now, that would likely be impossible.
The second case, of course, would be a crisis and violence in which you have already a country shattering under various economic and social political problems, and Vermont, unilaterally, declaring secession.
That might be met with a military reprisal and attack and occupation of Vermont.
But we're talking events that, you know, this could happen in 50 years, could happen in 100 years, and the oil runs out and people start freaking.
But for the foreseeable future, it would happen, ideally, and this is the argument of the Vermont secessionists, it would happen as a, you know, a peaceful effort that basically asked of fellow Americans, asked of the world to say, listen, we have a democratic right as a people to leave this country, and we feel that that is a moral right, should be recognized as such.
We know there's an investment advisor, a libertarian named Richard Mayberry, puts out the early warning report, and he has a theory where he says that, you know, there's just some better than 50% chance that at some point, somebody's going to set off a nuke in D.C.
People around the world are not going to put up with being, you know, butchered by the American empire forever.
Somebody at some point is going to fight back and nuke D.C. just as a matter of probability.
And then he said the next step from there, obviously, will be to move D.C. or create a new federal capital at buzzer breath Wyoming somewhere, and then somebody's going to nuke that.
And then when that happens, and all the governors and state legislatures realize that they can't create a federal government in their state, or it's going to get nuked, that basically at that point, we'll be forced to just go back to the Articles of Confederation, that the USA will still be the USA.
We just won't have the federal empire anymore.
And he actually pointed to France and said, you know, what number government are they on their their 50th or something?
And yet, Paris is still Paris and the wheat still grows in the fields.
And France is still France, you know, no matter how many different revolutions they've had.
And so I kind of look forward to that.
And then I guess you look forward to a nuclear attack on Washington and come on.
Oh, no.
Well, I mean, I didn't mean that part of it, but I meant the the idea of going to going back to the Articles of Confederation, I guess I always consider that like an intermediate step on the way to secession.
You're skipping my Articles of Confederation and going straight to getting out of the union.
Well, you know, I just finished a feature article for Radar magazine about looking into martial law plans.
Oh, yeah.
And the federal government and the extensive plans that have been developed.
And I expect that if there was a nuclear bomb attack or radiological bomb or dirty bomb or any kind of large scale weapon of mass destruction deployed in Washington, D.C., that you would have that you would see immediate declaration of martial law.
And the country would, in fact, be broken up, but it would be broken up in the military directorates and and where military government governors would literally be taking over controlling regions.
And when's that article come out?
That will be out in the May issue of of Radar magazine.
And that's all about the these martial law plans.
I mean, there's a long standing martial law plans developed inside FEMA, which has now been zoomed into the Department of Homeland Security.
And they also these plans also include lists, these large scale lists that have been that have been maintained for years by the U.S. government for detention of citizens of troublemakers, you know, trouble like you.
You'll probably be on the list.
Oh, good.
Yeah, I'll be in a concentration camp with all my favorite writers.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, hang on.
It'll be like a it'll be like a salon, you know, a salon with no food and rats.
Yeah, it'll be great.
Yeah.
Hey, aren't you, James Bovard?
How's it going, man?
It'll be like, all right, all right.
This is a shoe leather.
This is one of the things that I learned about politics, actually, that got me really interested back in when I was a kid was the executive orders going back to, I guess, Eisenhower and especially Nixon that if put into effect would centralize all power in the country in the presidency.
And I remember Bill Clinton had an executive order 12919 that basically described he and the head of FEMA's authority to seize all property in the country, all transportation, all medical resources, all food supplies, all everything would be under their jurisdiction in the event of a national emergency, as declared by the president.
And so I guess you're talking about the Bush-Cheney evolution of those same plans.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, Clinton, listen, the major, yeah, there were a number of executive orders with regard to that in the 1950s.
The major ones were all signed under Kennedy, in fact, 1961.
And indeed, they do allow for FEMA and the executive branch particularly to basically nationalize all transport, all waterways, all railways to take control of all private jets and airplanes to control, to centralize basically everything.
And yeah, they're out there.
They exist.
They are, they will be put into effect.
I mean, if you talk with people in government and ask them about this, they indeed allow that these executive orders will be put into effect in the event of a national emergency, which of course is defined in the most vaguest terms to be determined at the will and whim of the executive branch.
Most recently, there's the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 51, I believe it is, or maybe it's National Security Presidential Directive 20.
Maybe I'm reversing them.
But anyway, this was signed in May of 2007, and it reiterates the power of the central government to take control of, or to rather, it reiterates the notion that in the event of national emergency, which again, vaguely defined, would allow for the executive branch to have power over all the other branches.
So that all the other branches would be literally at the knee of the executive branch.
And of course, that effectively spells the end of the Constitution of the Republic, as we know it.
Well, and this actually, these same plans, I guess it's all the same continuity of government plans, to a degree, were put into effect on 9-11, right?
And didn't Tom Daschle and Dennis Hastert both complain, the Majority Leader of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, that when the shadow government was being set up at Mount Weather, they weren't invited?
That's correct.
That's correct, yeah.
Dick Cheney became the de facto head of the shadow government that was put into effect immediately after September 11th.
You had over 100 pre-selected individuals who were dispatched to these various underground cities, these underground FEMA facilities, on a revolving 24-7 basis.
And indeed, yeah, Congress was kept out of the loop, the regulatory bodies in Congress were kept out of the loop.
It's a totally secret operation run at the behest and accountable to one guy, Dick Cheney.
Yeah.
Now, if anybody in the, well, I don't know, like you mentioned that these plans have been around even since Kennedy.
And I remember being told when I first became interested in this kind of thing, martial law plans and so forth, that if they were ever going to do something like this, Nixon would have done it in 1968, when the country was completely coming apart at the seams.
And if they've been so ready to do that and overthrow what's left of our constitutional system for so long, what are they waiting for?
I mean, it seems to me like this isn't just, you know, Dick Cheney's best idea for how to respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or something like that.
This is something they want to do and want an excuse to do, right?
No, I don't think that you could get so many officials in government to go along with that.
I really don't.
I mean, it's just like a lot of the conspiracy theorists talk about the huge numbers of people being involved in September 11th, in managing and overseeing the success of Al-Qaeda or piloting the radio-controlled airplanes or whatever, whatever conspiracy theory you want to pick about September 11th.
I mean, implying huge numbers of people will be involved in the conspiracy, I just don't think without a real national crisis, we're talking about some sort of like a couple of hurricanes coupled with like 20 tornadoes, coupled with a nuclear bomb, coupled with, I don't know, like an insurgent movement in California or something.
Like, you'd have to have a real coalescing of horror to get the bureaucracy to go along with that.
Yeah, I guess that was kind of my point, was that, you know, Nixon didn't even try it in 1968.
It was, you know, it's something that, you know, looks good for a totalitarian takeover on paper or something, but I mean, really, how is FEMA or anybody else supposed to seize all the transportation and all the medicine and all the food?
Exactly.
And that comes back to another thing.
I mean, one, to get back to our original topic, I think part of what drives secessionists in Vermont today is that, you know, this is ridiculous.
Our government is spending huge amounts of money on secret plans to deal with a national emergency that could be the figment of the imagination of a president of the White House.
I mean, again, secrecy, I guess one part of the driving force behind a secession is simply that they're tired of a government that is couched in endless secrecy, endless labyrinths of lies and trickery and deceit, and being paid for by taxpayers.
You know, I was at an intelligence conference in New York, just as I was in the audience, and it was a panel.
At one point, there was a panel of journalists up there.
Tim Weiner recently wrote Legacy of Ashes about the CIA.
There's Dana Priest, who's a reporter at the Washington Post.
So the question-and-answer period came up.
So I asked a question.
I said, in a democracy, is it not an insult to the American people, the people paying for the government, that there should be any secrecy in government?
Well, the answer I got was that, well, you know, you should never divulge that certain things have to be secret if people's lives are at stake.
Fine.
That's a fine argument.
If a government agent's life is at stake, fine.
You need secrecy.
But, you know, on the other hand, the government is constantly lying.
So how do you know when the government tells you that somebody's life is at stake that the secret that you want to expose is really going to actually jeopardize the life of that secret agent or whatever?
Right.
And we probably have too many secret agents whose lives are at stake intervening in other people's countries where they don't belong in the first place.
Exactly.
And that's exactly it.
Exactly it.
This panel of so-called journalists sit up there, and they accept the consensus trance, the shared hallucination that it is right and ethical to have secret agents traipsing around the planet, messing with other people's lives in other countries, and intervening in other people's affairs, and spying on other people's activities.
I mean, it's nuts.
The predicate for that, of course, is that if you have an empire that wants to control the world, then you need those spies.
And if you agree with that rubric, if you agree with that type of government, then you become a journalist like Dana Priest and Tim Weiner, who actually believe and who tacitly back up, who tacitly support a system of violence and cohesion.
And it's this nonsense that you're saying is driving people, this overreaching, protecting government secrecy, drawing up all these plans for totalitarian takeovers.
This is why people want to secede from the Union before it's too late.
Before it's too late, or before the, you know, it's just, it's like, why is the government, for example, wasting time developing massive detention lists of Americans, as I'm going to report out in this Radar article, when perhaps they should be developing, let's say, oh, I don't know, how about emission standards for automobiles that might force automakers to make more fuel-efficient cars that might allow us to prepare for a future of scarcity of fossil fuel scarcity?
Why not, let's see, why not start rejiggering the horrific sprawl suburbs of places of hellholes like Las Vegas and Phoenix into livable cities by control, by zoning, by control, by basically making an effort at sustainability, creating a society that is cohesive, that literally, that has some future to it.
And no, no, we'd rather spend all our money on bombs and on killing people overseas.
Well, that's great.
Well, and we're really better off doing all those things from the bottom up anyway, aren't
Well, exactly.
I mean, that's the other point.
And that, again, comes back to this secessionist argument.
They're basically saying, listen, this huge system unaccountable to localities is not working.
It's not getting the job done.
And if it doesn't get the job done, then we have to try it elsewhere.
We have to do it from the ground up, indeed.
Now, you wrote in your article in Good Magazine that you went to this conference in Chattanooga and that there were all these different groups who were there to support secession and discuss it.
Tell us about that.
All right.
Well, actually, I didn't attend the conference, but I was regularly briefed on it.
Yeah, there were about 11 different groups.
They represented 36 states, or they represented secessionist movements that would cover the territories of 36 states.
You had the United Republic of Texas as a group, and that wants, as you noted earlier, that wants to take advantage of that clause in the state constitution.
And I hope that's a separate group from the criminals, Richard McLaren and the goofballs that tried to evict George Bush from the governor's mansion and all that garbage.
I don't know.
I hope this is a separate group.
I don't know anything about them.
Oh, I'm really not sure.
I don't even know who this McLaren guy is.
But if he's trying to evict George Bush from the White House, from the statehouse, that sounds great.
Well, yeah, I mean, the thing was, they were saying that, you know, the will of the millions of people who live here, the results of the Civil War that they've never heard of, all these things, notwithstanding, back in 1836, it says we can secede.
And if you spell it in all capital letters and you dot all your I's and T's, then the government of Texas is completely and totally illegitimate.
And they went to evict, you know, judges and legislators and governors.
And it all sounded nice, but they were basically saying, we, I'm the governor of Texas.
I'm the attorney general of Texas, not you.
And it was, you know, a ridiculous kind of technicalitarian attempted coup that didn't go very far.
The leader's now doing 99 years in prison, I think.
Wow.
Yeah, I was sort of adjunct to the Patriot movement in the 90s here in Texas, the Republic of Texas.
Now, I hope, I don't know, but hopefully the group that you're describing is a different group.
Well, listen, I gotta tell you, just as a caveat here, a lot of the, not a lot, but a number of the secessionist movements are, for example, the League of the South.
League of the South is a group, is a sort of old Dixie, old Dixie nationalist movement, if you will, of some of whose members have espoused, you know, they've espoused ideas, very racist, very backward, very rather vicious ideas about returning the South to plantation slavery and that kind of thing.
This is a secessionist group.
The Vermont Second Republic, the members of Vermont Second Republic have regularly met with the members of the League of the South because they figure, listen, they both want to succeed.
They want to break up the United States.
And, well, so their common enemy is the United States.
And so that has made them a kind of, a sort of, formed a sort of friendship between them, or an alliance of convenience.
So, you know, this United Republic of Texas, I don't really know much about the group, but it may very well be associated with the group of insurrectionaries that you're talking about, the McLaren insurrectionaries.
On the other hand, you've got, you know, and the thing about the secessionists generally that have been arising in the past eight years of the Bush administration is that they span the political spectrum.
They go from, literally, the Second Vermont Republic is a weird amalgam of old left and old paleo-conservative libertarianism.
You've got a group in Washington state, they call themselves the Republic of Cascadia, which would unite Oregon, Washington, and parts of British Columbia.
You have a group that wants to establish Ecotopia.
Ecotopia will be portions of California and Oregon.
Again, politically, they would be much further to the left than, say, the League of the South.
You've got a group in South Carolina called Christian Exodus.
Christian Exodus, or as the name implies, these are hardcore, fundamentalist Christians who believe that we are in a godless, godforsaken society and want to cede and form a Christian republic guided by the principles of the Bible.
I gotta say, you know, in a way, it sounds kind of bad.
You know, like the idea of the South being separate and, you know, return of Jim Crow or worse, something like that.
I mean, there was a time in this country where people said, you know, separation of powers be done, troops out of Nam and into Selma.
Somebody's got to do something to protect the rights of black folks in the South.
I hate to see, you know, reversals along those lines, but I guess, ultimately, the solution to all these things, universal rights have got to be locally enforced.
We can't go to our boss's boss to put our boss in check.
We have to do it from the bottom up.
Yeah, and listen, you know, at the same time, the fight over control of the central government has been a fight over two, literally, in the past 20 years.
It's been the fight over two value systems, and I dare to say the two value systems have been those of the North and the South.
The South and Southern values, and by that, I mean Bible Belt values, this weird amalgam of social conservatism allied with big business and corporatocracy and corporate socialism has been in a fight with, now I'm not saying the North has been, you know, so-called Northern values are shorn of big business and corporatocracy, but peculiar, you know, I mean, look at how many Southern leaders we've had or Southern presidents we've had in the White House over the past couple of years, Carter, Clinton, Bush, so-called Southern, I mean, adopted Texas, and again, catering to this, I mean, you know, some of the backward value systems of the Bible Belt where, you know, going on and on about crap like abortion, for example, all right, who cares about abortion, right?
If a woman wants to abort a baby, fine, let her abort the baby, it's her baby.
You know, it's like, my point being is that maybe, maybe there is something to be said for, you know, if there are groups of people, if there are states that want to govern themselves in a certain way, let's say Alabama and Georgia want to govern themselves in a certain way that's totally antithetical to the way that Vermont and New York and Maine want to govern themselves, then why should they be caught in this constant wrestling match over control of the central government?
Why not just let them govern the way they want to govern?
Yeah, let them govern themselves.
It's better than being governed by them from the central power.
Yeah, I mean, but on the other hand, you're absolutely right.
I mean, I think there's tons of racism still in this country.
There is a, I mean, the hatred of, you know, white hatred of blacks.
Yeah, it's palpable throughout the South.
You can feel it.
Even go down to Baltimore.
Baltimore is a really racist town, totally segregated.
The blacks shunted off into these horrific ghettos.
You know, it's weird here in Austin, you have, nobody's, well, very few people, the smallest percentage of people would be avowedly racist here in Austin.
Everybody's, you know, way too politically correct, even for school.
And yet, I-35 is a dividing line right up the center of this town.
There's no doubt about that.
Right.
Well, Austin's also sort of, what are they called?
A blue island and a red sea kind of thing.
I mean, it's different culturally.
It's got, you got the, what do you got?
The University of Texas there.
And a lot of government employees too, yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, Austin is one of those anomalies.
But I mean, I'm not, listen, you know, New York City.
I mean, even we are divided.
I mean, I-35, if you're black or brown, you live east of 35.
And if you're not, you don't.
I mean, that's basically, I hate to broad brush it that broad, but it's, that's pretty close to the absolute truth right there.
All right.
And listen, listen, in New York, I grew up in Brooklyn.
Totally segregated place.
I'm not saying the North is some paradise for, in terms of racial relations.
But, you know, if, yeah, indeed, if you had a group like Christian Exodus take over South Carolina, yeah, I can see a lot of horrible things happening to the brown and black-skinned folks down there.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I can see why, you know, liberals, I guess, generally just make the choice that it's better to have the fight over the central government and to hope that they can, you know, force more enlightened values on the more backwards people.
And ultimately, I mean, you know, if the rights of individuals are the most important thing, you know, spinning off the authority over those rights to the southern state legislatures and so forth didn't work in the past might be backwards, you know, might be counterproductive to human liberty if that's ultimately what we're working toward.
So, you know, I don't know, maybe Hamilton had it right.
Yeah, listen, it could be that secessionists are completely wrong, and my enthusiasm for them is completely wrong, but on the other hand, we have a government now, a Congress especially, I really think the problem comes down to the Congress, where that is basically the enemy of the citizens of the Republic.
I mean, the legislation that this Congress, this Congress, through bipartisan efforts, passes is just astonishing.
The Military Commissions Act, more recently, the Violent Radicalization Homegrown Terrorism Protection Act, I believe that's the name for it, the Protect America Act, which is now going to immunize telecoms from their participation in spying on the American people.
I mean, again and again and again, the Iraq War Authorization Act, the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, the Patriot Act, I mean, the amendments to the Patriot Act, there's endless, endless, endless legislation that abrogates basic rights, that just centralizes more power to the central government.
You know, again, a government that does this repeatedly on both sides of the aisle with smiles and handshakes and agreements and flowers on the podium is a government that is morally bankrupt, that deserves to go down.
Right, yeah, turn into a bunch of torturers to protect you from the local sheriff.
Yeah, and we are now a torture state.
I mean, we, the only, you know, Paul Craig Roberts, great writer, I love him, he has written an anti-war comment, the only terrorist you're probably going to meet, okay, statistically in this country, is a guy with a badge and a gun.
No doubt about it.
Because police brutality is skyrocketing in this country.
It is.
The militarization of police units, of local police units, is skyrocketing in this country.
You got these podunk sheriffs running around with armored cars and gatling guns and just, you know, lunacy.
Swat teams to serve warrants on a speeding ticket.
All right, now listen, we're already over time, so I'm going to keep you a couple more minutes because I want you to tell me about this movie that's coming out that you wrote.
Oh yeah, it's based on an article in Harper's that I published in December 2004.
That article was called Meet the New Boss, Man vs.
Machine Politics in Brooklyn, and it's all about, as I noted to you earlier, corruption.
I think I mentioned, you know, my Brooklyn, very corrupt place.
Municipal government is always pretty corrupt, and so I was writing about this character named John O'Hara, this guy who basically tried to change the system, got ruined for it, but decided to make a comeback of sorts.
And so I turned his story into a script, and yeah, now it's coming together.
I'm just securing financing now and trying to push it forward.
And at what point are you?
You're already filming it, or?
No, no, we're not filming.
I just finished another, like the 15th draft of the script itself, and I've got a line producer, I've got a casting director, I've got a couple of executive producers, and I'm talking with a variety of people.
Financing is a real question, so I'm getting financing together and that kind of thing.
I have a director lined up, got a couple of actors attached to the project.
Cool.
Well, man, good luck with that.
I hope everything continues to come together.
I can't wait to see it.
Yeah, I can't wait to see it either.
I mean, these things take, I've only been working on it for four years, so who knows?
All right, well, I don't know if you know, but I'm an anarchist, so I guess my last question for you is, did I do a pretty good job of playing devil's advocate status?
Yeah, I guess.
I guess, you know, you're an anarchist in the old school, Godwin Kropotkin school of anarchy, right?
Well, you know, I haven't read all the anarchist writers going back over the days.
I just actually had two excuses left for having a state, national defense and criminal justice, and I talked with Hans Hoppe, and he said, look, national defense is a myth, there's your last excuse, and by the way, look at our criminal justice system.
You're telling me having a monopoly on that guarantees, you know, what kind of good result?
Give me a break.
So that was my last two excuses, so I just gave it up.
Yeah, that's it.
I was a minarchist, but then I ran out of reasons why these people deserved any sort of benefit of the doubt at all.
National defense, this government's been at war since 1791.
Yeah, yeah, I know, this war, I mean, the war, that is the real problem today.
War, as Chalmers Johnson has noted in the program and in his blowback trilogy, war is now the American product.
This is what we produce, and again, this is what drives the secessionists away from a country like that.
They are not into the idea of being part of a war economy, which depends on one thing, homicide for its success.
Yeah, I'm with you, and I think the prescription ahead of us is clear, to decentralize and repeal as much as we can, to try to go back to the Articles of Confederation if we can, to secede if we can, and then to try, I guess, I hope as best we can to push in the market of ideas, the belief in universal human liberty and natural rights, and try to emphasize in as many ways as we can that they must be enforced from the bottom up, and hope that, you know, you don't end up having a South African situation in Alabama or whatever, and trust that people can put liberty first, put their own liberty first, and be able to secure it.
But centralized power is not getting the job done, it doesn't seem like.
No, it's not.
It's failing.
But you know what?
Listen, maybe if it came down to that, the northern states could have a program wherein they could fund a massive exodus of black people from the South, and then the whites down there could just torture each other.
Yeah, I mean, if that's what they really want to do.
Hey, if you like torturing other human beings, then do it to your own race.
Well, you know, Antonin Scalia says it's just so-called torture now, so we can go with that.
That's right.
Yeah, so-called torture, that's not a felony on the books that I've ever seen, so there you go.
Waterboarding, swimming pool, there's no difference.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
What's waterboarding?
Isn't that like a boogie board?
Waterboarding is a boogie board, yes.
All right.
It's called boogie boarding now, from what I hear.
The CIA is referring to it as such.
Yeah, you know, Jon Stewart said, yeah, let's hop in the Jeep Liberty and let's go waterboarding.
It's an extreme sport.
All right, this has been really fun.
Thanks very much for your time today, Christopher Ketchum.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
All right, everybody.
Christopher Ketchum, he's a freelance reporter, writes for Harper's, Mother Jones, GQ, Salon, Good Magazine, Antiwar.com, and his blog is Habeas Corruptus.
You can find it at ChristopherKetchum.com.