All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Our first guest on the show today is a former Kelly girl typist.
He's also the author of most books in the world.
Well, the ones that Tom Woods didn't write, I think, James Bovard wrote, including Lost Rights, Freedom and Chains, the Fair Trade Fraud, The Farm Fiasco, Shakedown, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal and The Ultimate, The Magnum Opus, The Belongs in a Frame Above Your Fireplace, Attention, Deficit, Democracy.
Don't put it there until after you've read it.
Excellent book.
God, I love that book.
In fact, it's been so many years now, two or three.
I want to go back and read that thing again.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on.
Thanks for letting me join your hell raising.
Well, I'm happy to have you here.
Did I say your name, Jim Bovard?
Yeah.
James Bovard.
You can find his website.
It's jimbovard.com.
He also writes for the American Conservative Magazine and of course, the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
All right.
Now, so 10 years ago today, Jim, the Congress passed what was called the USA Patriot Act.
Sounds pretty good.
What do you think?
Are we celebrating?
Well, you know, I'm grateful.
It gives me a reason to drink.
What's the matter?
Don't you love America?
Well, you know, this is the Patriot Act was the biggest bait and switch in U.S. constitutional history.
Instead of targeting terrorists, Bush and Congress awarded all these powers to federal agents to go after anyone suspected of committing any of the 3000 federal crimes in the books.
This Patriot Act treated every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent, like a proven angel.
And we still don't know how the Durham law is operating because as Senator Wyden and one or two others have pointed out, there is a secret guidance.
Now we have no idea in Hades, how far these folks are intruding or, or who has been targeted.
That's one of the biggest problems with the damn laws.
We don't know who the feds have gone after.
We don't know how many dossiers they have of American citizens.
And the government's been able to drop this iron curtain around it because of this war on terror panic mentality.
And here we are 10 years later and there's not been enough effective pushback.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I guess it was Milton Friedman that says there's nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.
And it seems to me like when you talk about the Patriot Act and, you know, the department of Homeland security, the transportation security administration, all these revolutions, if at, if at some time soon, these things are not repealed, if the pushback does not come strong and quick, it's going to, we're going to just be way past the point of no return.
And we'll just always have a department of Homeland security.
We'll just always have a Patriot Act till America falls.
Well, you know, Scott, I'm just hoping, hoping that, that your guy, governor Perry rolls us back when he becomes president.
Oh yeah.
Well, you know, he has to pretend to be a fascist monster to get elected, but once he's in there, I'm pretty sure he's going to be just great.
Yeah.
Well, you know, people said the same about Richard Nixon.
Uh, you know, it's, it's, it's frustrating that the only candidate out there who's really calling for rolling this stuff back is Ron Paul.
And he's treated by such a, he's treated like such a pariah by almost all the mainstream media.
Uh, and yet these are fundamental ideas.
You know, once, you know, there's a broad swath of Americans, once they realize what the facts are, they will say, well, this is BS, but, um, it's, it's amazing.
Here we are 10 years after, and okay, the, the, the media is not quite as cowardly as it was in the first month after nine 11, but still, um, it's just, it's just amazing how much of this stuff goes unchallenged.
Right.
Well, even the ACLU from the beginning said, well, I think we should maybe roll back some parts of this instead of just, you know, staking out the claim that no, this whole thing needs to be undone.
Yeah.
Well, it's just, and there are, there are principles, political and legal and moral principles upon which this law is based.
And that has, what has helped drive the vast expansion of government surveillance because, uh, the, the, the Patriot Act was like the starting gun.
And after that, there was one new law, one new policy, and they've gone vastly further.
For instance, the thing that Homeland Security does now, uh, for Americans coming back from abroad, Homeland Security claims the right to be able to copy your entire hard drive for your laptop or your cell phone data or whatever, simply based on their need to, uh, have, um, all possible information on everybody.
Yep.
Well now, so, but the Patriot Act doesn't say they can do that, right?
As you say, that's kind of the starting gun.
After that, it's almost like the Patriot Act just says, go ahead.
And, and that's really the text of the thing, right?
Well, you know, there was, it's the, um, I think the Patriot Act has had perhaps had more influence, uh, as far as in its principles than some of the specific details, because there was a lot of things that the federal government has done after, after the Patriot Act was passed, that was a bad or as worse than the Patriot Act itself.
But there was, there was, it was, um, what, what George Bush in Congress did with the Patriot Act, it showed how far the government can push with almost no resistance.
I mean, Ron Paul was one of only three Republicans to vote against the Patriot Act in the house.
Uh, Senator Feingold was the only Senator to oppose it.
And he did a very courageous job.
And that's part of the reason he's no longer a US Senator now.
Yeah.
Well, and, um, you know, I saw this poll the other day, which is to be expected as one of those, you know, shocking, but not surprising things.
I forgot who wrote this, that, um, uh, they did a survey and Republican support for the Patriot Act is the same as it always was democratic support among the voters, not, uh, you know, in Congress, but among people who vote Democrat, their support for the Patriot Act has gone up substantially since Barack Obama took power.
Oh my God.
That's, you know, I've not seen that poll.
You know, I am shocked and sad.
Well, I'm not shocked and sad, but, uh, but it's still appalling.
I mean, why in God's name would people trust the law more when there's a simply another dishonest politician pulling the strings behind the curtain?
Yeah.
I mean, it's not like Barack Obama just brought his friends in to run the FBI or whatever.
It's the same FBI as before.
Well, it's the same FBI, uh, as before it's probably more arrogant now because it knows that even the Democrats, even the supposed liberal takes over the white house, that, uh, that the FBI is still going to be sacrosanct.
I mean, it's, it's, it's possible that the white house has little or no idea what the FBI is doing.
That's how it was often throughout the FBI history.
And now, um, Glenn Greenwald pointed out, uh, this economist piece to me where they had like a little chart that, that showed how the Patriot Act is used in every kind of case, uh, except terrorism, basically, or, you know, terrorism is thrown in as afterthought.
And of course, most of those are just, uh, entrapments anyway, as we know.
Right.
Or, or, or it's a charge of material support, which, which meant that someone sent $10 to Hezbollah, uh, whether they knew it or not.
Right, right.
Uh, that's true.
I mean, there's, I mean, a part of what has compounded the, the, um, the, the ill effect of the evil effect of the Patriot Act is that the government's been able to expand these, these lists of enemies and these so-called terrorist groups.
And, uh, uh, it's just, it's all very arbitrary and it's, um, you know, it all comes out of a black box and it's almost impossible to challenge it.
The ACLU's, the ACLU's done a lot of excellent lawsuits over the last 10 years and they have, they've, they've fought the good fight mostly, so.
Yeah.
Well, um, you know, I guess we're almost out of time for this segment actually.
Uh, but when we get back, I want to talk a little bit more about, you know, the actual different things in the Patriot Act that make it so objectionable.
Cause I think that, um, you know, it started out that people knew that this was really kind of a coup they got away with, with this thing.
Um, but then because the substance, the individual parts of it aren't explained repeatedly, like you said, the media is just mostly falling down on the job here.
Um, and since we've lived through an era of torture and of unlimited warrantless spying and American citizens being assassinated and tortured and God knows what, the Patriot Act is almost, uh, you know, a moot point.
It's almost, uh, you know, not that big of a deal anymore or whatever.
It's, uh, we're already past that point where it goes without saying we're going to keep it forever, I guess.
Um, uh, most people think so anyway.
So I was hoping maybe you can shock the hell out of people.
Like this thing was brand new.
What's really in this Patriot Act.
And then we can talk again about what you said about Senator Wyden there and how we don't even really know how far it goes.
Whole other subject.
It's Jim Bovar, jimbovar.com.
Attention deficit democracy is the book.
Please read it.
So good.
It's so good.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the phone with Jim Bovard, author of attention deficit democracy, which is so good.
Seriously.
You got to read that book.
It's awesome.
Just the torture section alone is worth the whole thing.
Um, all right.
So we're talking about the Patriot Act today is the 10th anniversary of its passage.
Uh, as Jim said, one Senator opposed it and a very small handful of congressmen, of course, including Dr.
Paul.
Um, but now I want to ask you guys in the audience to just pretend for a minute that you're not accustomed to this terror war.
Pretend this is brand new for a minute that Congress was just now passing this bill, the USA Patriot Act, and think what you would think of that.
Tell him, Jim, what's in that thing?
Well, there's, um, well, there's a lot more that's been turned out to be in there than what we suspected.
Uh, the, uh, stuff that allowed them to do national security letters, uh, which is basically a warrantless search, uh, based on some government, uh, FBI agent or somebody else simply typing out a memo and saying, give me the damn information to a bank or telephone company or some other, uh, entity, uh, library.
Uh, this is something which was not flagged heavily at the time the law was passed, but it's, uh, they've been using that up to 40 or 50,000 times per year, 40 or 50,000 warrantless searches.
And, uh, it does not need to be linked to a terrorist case, you know, the, and the government doesn't need to show any evidence that simply needs to snap its fingers and a person's private data is turned over.
Um, something you'd said before the break is that you hope that I could shock people with some of the details on this basically for, you know, in the first years after the law passed, uh, when stories would come out of abuses or, uh, indicating that government was going much further than that previously indicated, I had thought some of those would have shocked people, but again, and again, I've been wrong over the last decade because I had thought again that the government had gone too far and that finally it was going to be a backlash time and again.
And, um, at this point, I don't know where that backlash is going to happen or if it's going to happen because people have rolled over for so much.
And, and the news media have been such utter, so utterly craven, if not dishonest on so many of these key issues.
Um, it's, it's, you know, it's hard to see where the, uh, crip wire is going to be.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I, I hate to break it to you.
I saw this thing the other day, assuming this is true, but they had, apparently they surveyed thousands and thousands of people for the sample and they said that, uh, 79.3, I think it was percent of Americans are for the president killing American citizens overseas.
If they're up to terrorism, which of course has included if the president says they're up to terrorism in it.
And then it was less than a fifth that said, no, first you have to give an American a trial, then you kill him.
Well, yeah, there was a story in the wall street journal a couple of days ago.
It was actually a fair minded portrait of the Ron Paul campaign.
And it said that one of the difficulties that he's having with the conservatives is this, uh, Paul's outspoken opposition to this, the drone killing of the American, uh, in Yemen.
And I am confounded that folks about, uh, swallow, swallow the notion that government should be allowed to kill anybody that it says is a bad guy, because that's what this comes down to.
You know, uh, should government be allowed to kill anyone who the politician says a bad guy.
And yet, I mean, this is such a bullshit notion and yet, you know, folks are kind of like folks are just nodding along and, um, there's, you know, all of history is full of examples of politicians killing innocent people.
And then afterwards saying, well, but he was a bad guy.
Think of Waco for goodness sake, think of Ruby Ridge.
And yet people, um, people just aren't making those connections.
And it's, um, um, I'm especially puzzled that the conservatives, the many of whom just have a visceral dislike of Obama, think that Obama should be allowed to kill Americans based on his own secret memos.
Yeah, well, and yeah, I mean, the, the, uh, the process of, uh, Americans getting accustomed to this thing, it's funny, I guess, maybe that's not even really at play.
Like maybe they could have put up cameras on every block in every town in America, 30 years ago.
Maybe they could have outright lied us into war.
I mean, in Vietnam, it sort of escalated slowly for 15 years before the Gulf of Tonkin, you know what I mean?
But, but, uh, you know, the Iraq war, the blatant, you know, trust me, we got warehouses full of VX gas, we're going to show you in just a couple of days kind of thing on the eve of that war.
Um, maybe it's not a matter of people getting conditioned to it.
Maybe Americans really are just that bad of sheep.
I mean, here's this piece in the blaze.
Ron Paul calls TSA jack booted thugs in response to highway checkpoints.
And they're just absolutely shocked.
How could someone call federal, not quite police sort of pulling people over on the highway for no reason and checking to see if they're Al Qaeda terrorists.
How could someone disdain them?
And obviously here's the quote from the cops saying, well, they're probably not going to be at the airport next time.
They'll probably be on the freeway.
Hence our fishing for terrorists on the freeway.
And, and in this insanity, he's the crazy one.
For saying, how can we do that?
How can we let this happen to our society?
Yeah.
I mean, it's again, uh, on the Patriot Act, the biggest impact I think was on the, on the moral and political and legal principles as far as how they're perceived in this country.
And the most important thing is that the fourth amendment, which was the most important ball work against America for American's privacy to restrict unreasonable government searches, churches without a warrant that has been completely thrown aside.
And the whole idea that TSA would be, uh, running these dragnets and in Tennessee, I mean, I always had a pretty good impression of Tennessee, but the people in Tennessee put up with this nonsense.
Maybe they're, um, you know, well, I'll, I'll, and the thing is, it's not even up to them.
I mean, they can be made to go along with it anyway, but well, it's just, I mean, I think the cameras, you know, I complained about the cameras a second ago, worked that in.
I never heard of a boat on cameras ever anywhere in any town, in any jurisdiction, in any state, any County in this country, they just, the government, I'm not talking about the camera at the Texaco station.
I'm going to ride the government cameras on every street corner.
They just put them up and a less 51% or more rally against them and stick to it.
They stay up.
It's just, well, this has been the history of the Patriot act because there've been specific issues, uh, during the summer of 2003, uh, when there'd been a lot of controversy over library searches, uh, searches of people's, uh, library records and things like that.
Uh, uh, uh, John Ashcroft did a, a Patriot act victory tour across the land.
And, uh, there was so much hostility to it that it was almost always, it was simply speaking to closed audiences with a bunch of local police and politicians.
I mean, but, uh, there was a fervor about it then, which we've lost in the subsequent eight years.
And, and now it's just like, you know, it's just like one more government, uh, law on the books.
It was the librarian thing, I think was a good kind of symbol in the media.
Cause everybody knows librarians.
How can you, how can you bully them?
They're not criminals, you know, how can you threaten them, shut down their free speech and intimidate them and whatever.
I think that really kind of was symbolic to people, but then they claimed at least to back off the librarian part, right?
Well, yeah, I, I, um, I, I think that they made some PR adjustments, but part of what is perplexing to me is that this, this doctrine that Homeland Security announced three years ago, that they have the right to search and copy.
Anybody's hard drive is coming into the country.
Any American's hard drive, uh, that has not been intensely controversial.
And they even announced that like our guidelines from now on is we don't even need to have suspicion or reason to believe that a crime has been committed or anything we can now just, the guidelines have been changed.
The rules and regulations have been changed.
We can now begin an investigation into any American, whenever we feel like in a way that used to be banned from doing officially anyway.
Yep.
And the interesting thing about the Homeland Security stuff is the official federal register notice says that they can do this absent individualized suspicion, and it's not only your, your hard drive or your cell phone, but it's any paper you have with you.
And that strikes me because, um, in the eighties and nineties, well, the not nineties, especially when I was traveling abroad, I was often working on a book manuscript.
And if I, if I was doing that now and I had the, a hard copy of the 200 pages of the manuscript with me, the government could take that and copy it when I was coming back in the country and show it to the federal agencies that I was attacking.
And so, and yet, you know, I, uh, I'm just mystified at how much people are putting up with.
And I'm just wondering how much of the spirit of liberty is still left out there.
Hey, do they used to take your papers when you were traveling in the Eastern block when it was still under Soviet occupation?
Uh, yeah, I was, well, there was, there was experience once I had when I was traveling from a communist Czechoslovakia to communist East Germany, I was stopped in the Czech East German border and the, uh, East German guards searched every inch of my car.
They found about 70 pages of pages.
I had a photocopies plus a small book and I was, uh, and it was marched away under military escort and interrogated for three hours, uh, that they seized my passport and they were just, uh, um, and they eventually seized all my papers, but that was okay.
I made copies before I went behind the iron curtain, but it was, it was that, it was that kind of a, um, thing.
It was amazing to see how much power they had.
Well, you know, I mean, the fact of the matter is in 89, the American people, Peter Jennings never just spoke too soon.
They didn't tear down the Berlin wall.
They just moved it to Washington, DC.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
Thanks for yours, Jim.
Appreciate it.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
That's the heroic James Bovard, everybody.
Attention Deficit Democracy is the book.
Go read it and read them at FFF.org too.
