Nick Hankoff, member of Year of Youth and Young Americans for Liberty, discusses the November 24th We Won’t Fly protest against TSA body scanners and groping searches, how former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff’s enthusiastic promotion of body scanners has become a conflict of interest and the growing outrage among people of all political persuasions against government attacks on their dignity and liberty.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is my friend Nick Hancoff from Year of Youth and Young Americans for Liberty.
And now, something called We Won't Fly, Los Angeles.
Welcome to the show, Nick.
How's it going?
Hey, Scott, I'm good.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for joining us on the show today.
Well, We Won't Fly is putting on the national opt-out day, which is the day before Thanksgiving.
And it's a day that we're encouraging people to not fly.
And if you do have to fly, there's certainly opt-out of these just grotesque methods from the TSA, especially the body scanner machine.
So what's the problem?
The problem is there's no, well, I mean, where is there not a problem might be a better question.
I mean, there's no sense in having these machines there except to fill and line the pockets of some former Department of Homeland Security guy who's now a lobbyist for another company that makes these types of machines.
That's all that they're really there for.
So the burden, though, they've placed on the citizen to give us a good reason why you won't go through this machine instead of being held accountable for any of their actual effectiveness in the airport.
So people now are beginning to hear stories of, like, Mr. John Tyner a couple days ago in San Diego refusing.
There's entire pilot unions standing up.
So after several years of people muttering under their breath or whispering or even making jokes back and forth with the TSA agents, where we all pretty much know that we're wasting each other's time here at the airport, but, hey, we got to do what we got to do.
After all that passive resistance, now that people are actually taking, you know, their safety and their liberty into their own hands and saying that the TSA has gone too far, now, you know, there's a public outcry about it.
And it's the popular thing now to, you know, be against the TSA's, you know, pat-downs, its enhanced groping, and these x-ray machines.
Yeah, well, you know, it is kind of heartening to see sort of a mass movement about this.
I don't know if, you know, the right-wing radio show hosts told people to be mad, and so they just do whatever they're told or exactly what the thing is.
But, yeah, apparently it's working, and people are getting mad about this.
And I see, you know, tourism industry people complaining, hotel industry people complaining.
And so, you know, that is a good thing.
It's very rare that you have a mass movement for liberty.
Usually it's a mass movement to, I don't know, say, for example, persecute helpless Muslims.
There's a thing in the paper today about people protesting a church, a Christian church in Phoenix, because it looks sort of like a mosque, and so they assumed it was.
And so they're over there trying to oppress their neighbors.
But in this case, hey, you know, I guess they want only Muslims to be frisked.
Oh, and by the way, this is just a little thing, but call it frisked, not pat-down.
Pat-down sounds nice or nicer.
And what it is is it's a frisk.
It's just like if you were, I don't know, poor and brown, and the cops pulled you over for walking down the street and slammed you up against the wall and frisked you.
And I think, you know, people object more to the idea of their grandmother and their daughter being frisked as opposed to patted down.
Yeah, it is.
It is assault.
So, you know, or it would be assault if anyone else did it.
You know, the problem is, is the TSA has a record of violating people's rights.
There was a story back in May of this year about TSA stealing people's items at the JFK airport.
So you can imagine, you know, being inside these X-ray body scanners with, you know, nothing in your pockets.
You basically, you know, you might as well be going in there naked in the first place.
So you have none of your belongings next to you or within your eyesight.
So, you know, the body scanners are great for TSA thieves that are out there.
And also, you know, besides, you know, if you are going to opt out and you go for these enhanced, you know, these enhanced frisks, as you call them, or, you know, whatever you want to call them, when you're getting felt up, it's not, you know, it's not so much a threat to me as it would be towards other, you know, more vulnerable people in our society, like the elderly or the very young.
Take, for instance, you know, there's videos online now of young boys and girls.
Just, you can watch for yourself.
It's really an unhealthy development when you have to have a society where you tell your children, don't let anyone touch you there except mommy, daddy, and the doctor.
And now the cops.
Yeah, yeah.
And the TSA hired a child predator not, you know, but a couple of years ago.
You mean one who'd already been busted for being one, not someone who's getting a job as a TSA agent right now because he is one.
Right.
Well, I need one or two here and we're real short on time, but I got to throw this in.
I wonder if anybody who wants to opt out of this or what percentage of the people opting out of this understand that if only they would insist that their government stop murdering people around the globe, they wouldn't have to worry about retaliation in the form of terrorist attacks on their airlines.
Yeah, and that's going to be part of our message.
You know, there's going to be people demonstrating at airports everywhere, but in Los Angeles where I'm located at LAX, I'm trying to organize people.
So if there are people in Los Angeles interested, go to meetup.com/we won't fly LA, or just go to wewontfly.com or find us on Facebook.
You know, it's not that hard.
And we're going to try and inform the greater general public about all sorts of issues that have brought us to this point.
And you know, Nick, the thing is, us masses, we got no power, but well, we have no political power, but we do have economic power.
And the airlines, they get all the free money from the government that they want.
So they don't really count, but the hotel industry and the rest of the tourism industry, they have lobbyists and they can beg with some effect their Congress people to perhaps revise things a little bit.
I don't think it's completely impossible if we focus our boycott in such a way that, you know, it hurts people who actually have some power, you know, so it looks like a really great project you guys are involved in.
Again, it's wewontfly.com, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Well, thanks for the time, Scott.
Great show and congratulations on making it on KPFK on Fridays at 6.30.
Cool, thanks, Nick.
See you, kid.
Nick Hancock, everybody, from the Young Americans for Liberty.
