04/02/07 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
William Norman Grigg, my first guest today, is a former senior editor at the New American Magazine.
He's the author of the books Global Gun Grab, Freedom on the Altar, and America's Engineered Decline.
He also wrote a great introduction to my favorite, Philip Drew administrator, A Story of Tomorrow.
His blog is freedomintourtime.blogspot.com, that's the pro-libertate blog.
And his brand new online zine is TheRightSourceOnline.com, TheRightSourceOnline.com.
Welcome to the show, Will.
Thanks so much, it's great to be with you.
Yeah, it's good to talk to you again.
Now, let's get this straight, if I can set this up a little bit for the audience.
You are a conservative, you are a Christian, you are a former member of the John Birch Society.
You left them not because you left Robert Welch, but because the rest of the John Birch Society did.
You, if I remember correctly, and my long-term memory still works pretty well, you used to write articles that said, support your local police, because hey, they're at least better than the feds, right?
Exactly, that's correct.
And in fact, I remember even reading articles that you had written in The New American to that effect, that said, hey listen, you might not like your local cops, but if it's not them, it's going to be the FBI or somebody worse.
Exactly.
And now, I look at LouRockwell.com the other day, and you've got an article here where you're attacking this local police department in Delaware pretty viciously.
Why is that?
I certainly am attacking and assailing and criticizing the Wilmington Police Department and also the state police in Delaware, because of the murder, and I don't think any other word is adequate, of Derek J. Hale, a Marine veteran who was gunned down on November 6th while he was sitting on the front porch of a friend's home in Wilmington, Delaware.
He'd been taken there, he'd gone there as part of a humanitarian errand.
He had joined a motorcycle club, a somewhat disreputable one, admittedly, called the Pagan's Motorcycle Club.
It's regarded as an outlaw motorcycle club in some circles.
Mr. Hale had a completely clean criminal background.
His background was utterly antiseptic, he had a concealed carry permit from the state of Virginia where he lived, I should say, with his wife for about a year prior to the shooting.
And so he was somebody who would be considered by any applicable standard to be a decent and honorable man.
He had gone once again to Wilmington to promote the Toys for Tots program.
He had been on the front porch of a friend's home in Wilmington when he was suddenly surrounded by between 8 and 12 heavily armed police officers.
He had not known, Mr. Hale had not known, that he was part of, or he'd been targeted, rather, by a counter-narcotics investigation.
He had nothing to do with drug smuggling or gun running or any of these other activities.
He had been under surveillance for at least most of the day of November 6th.
It was about 4 o'clock when he was suddenly surrounded by these police officers.
And without warning, he was told to stand from the stoop he was on to remove his hands from his hooded sweatshirt pockets.
And immediately after being given that command, he was hit with a taser blast, so he couldn't comply with command.
Well, we all know from even just watching the demonstrations on the TV news and so forth, when you're hit with that taser, pretty much every muscle in your body spasms involuntarily.
You don't have control over your muscles anymore.
It's an incapacitating weapon.
It's designed to scramble your neural circuitry, so to speak.
And it's not a non-lethal weapon.
You could consider it to be a less lethal weapon, given the fact that something on the order of 80 or 100 people over the last several years have died as a result of being hit with a taser blast.
You cannot really consider it to be a non-lethal piece of ordinance.
Yeah, no small number of those in my hometown of Austin, Texas.
That's what I understand.
He was hit with this first taser blast, and of course his immediate reaction was to fall to the ground, and of course he was immediately paralyzed.
And as he slumped to the ground in seizures, he desperately told the police, don't do this here, there are children present.
There were two children, an 11-year-old and a 6-year-old, who were on the front porch behind him along with their mother, a friend of his by the name of Sondra.
They were watching in horror as he was being hit with a taser blast.
At some point, he was hit with a second taser blast immediately after this happened.
This caused him to roll over to the left and start vomiting into a flowerbed.
By this time, obviously, he was no threat to anyone.
It's been a threat of any kind.
By this time, that threat had been neutralized.
A contractor, a building contractor, I believe, who was in the neighborhood watching this spectacle unfold in front of him, strode over to the police and said, stop it, it's overkill, he's not harming anybody, that's completely unjustified.
At which point, one of the dozen or so officers peeled away from the group and snarled in the face of this witness, all blanking show you overkill, basically caused him to leave.
For reasons that are not specified, he considered this to be a threat of some sort.
By this time, Derek had been hit by two taser blasts.
Sondra, his friend, was screaming at the police that he could not remove his hands from his pockets.
Derek was saying, I'm trying to remove my hands from my pockets.
I can't remove my hands from my pockets.
And then he was hit with a third taser blast.
Those are three 50,000 volt shocks that were administered to this man in the space of a couple of minutes.
And he's completely helpless and paralyzed at this point.
And for reasons that have not been explained.
Well, hold it right there, Will.
Had it even been a couple of minutes at this point, sounds like we're talking 15, 20 seconds or something by this time.
It might have been.
But the point is, the entire episode I'm describing took place within about a 180-second span of time.
So it's not clear from the narrative that I've read, the various eyewitness accounts, exactly how long it took.
But it takes very little time for a taser to recharge.
So it could have been within a minute, it could have been 30 seconds, it could have been a minute and a half.
And it might take a while for a human to recover from being tasered enough to have their wits about them to do anything about complying with their commands.
Yeah.
The eyewitness accounts which were collected by the Rutherford Institute, which is mounting a lawsuit on behalf of Derek Hale's widow, leave you with the impression that it took place somewhere within probably less than a three-minute time span.
But after being hit with these three taser blasts, Derek, of course, is completely incapacitated at this point.
The leader of this strike force, this police strike force, Lieutenant William Brown of the Wilmington Police, approached him.
He was close enough to slap the cuffs on Derek, and he wanted to arrest him.
Certainly there were enough of them to where they could arrest him bodily to the ground if he was considered a threat.
And bear in mind, he had been hit by three taser blasts.
But in any case, Lieutenant William Brown shot him at point-blank range, three times the chest with a.40 caliber round.
And this, of course, killed him.
And this happened in front of, once again, an 11-year-old and a 6-year-old who were by no means out of the potential firing range at this point.
They were within the field of fire had this become an actual gunfight.
But after Derek was killed, his pockets were inspected, and he had in his possession at this time, according to the police, a switchblade knife and a bottle of pepper spray, a canister of pepper spray.
It's not clear whether or not these actually belonged to Derek because according to his stepbrother, who lives in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which is where Derek was born, Derek never owned a switchblade knife.
He had a small Swiss Army knife, but he never owned a switchblade.
In any case, one of my good friends who's a former LAPD officer, somebody who spent 10 or 15 years on the LAPD, also a Navy veteran, points out that this looks like the sort of a throwaway knife that might have been planted at the scene by one of the police officers.
It doesn't seem to be in any way disproportionate in any case for somebody to be shot three times after receiving three taser blasts if all he had in his possession was a switchblade knife, especially when you bear in mind that there were 8 to 12 heavily armed police officers on the scene.
This happened last November 6th.
One of the stories that really sticks in my craw is the fact that, once again, Derek Hale was somebody with an almost Simon Pure record.
He had served two tours of duty in Iraq.
He had been honorably discharged for medical reasons related to combat in January 2006, just a few months before he was killed.
A few months earlier, just before his discharge, he had married a young lady, and he had inherited two stepchildren.
When he was killed, the story was that he was part of this investigation.
He was suspected of being part of some kind of a drug running ring within the pagan motorcycle club, but there was no record to corroborate this.
Within a few days of his killing, the Wilmington police, the Delaware State Police, started to build a back story to justify, after the fact, the arrest of Derek and his murder by police under color of authority.
I would characterize it.
What they did was they contacted the state police in Virginia, which is where Derek's widow and orphaned stepchildren were living.
Members of the state police from Delaware perjured themselves, essentially, effectively, by telling the police in Virginia that a warrant for Derek's arrest had been authorized, that he was a suspect in this drug smuggling ring, and that they needed to conduct a search of his home in Manassas, Virginia.
As it happens, no warrant was ever issued for Derek's arrest.
He was never charged with drug smuggling or any other criminal offense.
That was completely made up after the fact.
But on the basis of this disinformation, a sworn affidavit was entered in the relevant court in Virginia, and the search of Derek's home in Manassas was conducted purely as an exercise of creating a phony back story.
And in doing so, they further traumatized, I believe, Derek's widow and his shattered stepchildren, who had just lost their stepfather and their husband, respectively.
And this was done purely as an exercise of spin control, cynical, opportunistic spin control, in order to create the legend that this guy was somehow a dangerous outlaw biker, who in some way supposedly justified the treatment he received from the Wilmington police in Delaware.
It's utterly horrifying, and it implicates pretty much the entire law enforcement establishment in the state of Delaware, and at least part of the law enforcement establishment in Virginia, because they maintained that story until just a couple of weeks ago, when they were forced to admit that there was nothing in the record that would justify treating Derek as a suspect of the criminal case.
It's just perfectly abhorrent, and it's altogether too typical of what's happened to our law enforcement establishment in the United States.
Well, Will, is there any indication of what they were doing there that day?
Were they there to arrest him, or just take him downtown for questioning, or what?
Well, if you take somebody downtown for questioning, you don't show up with 8 to 12 heavily armed people who immediately treat you as a dangerous suspect.
So why did they want this guy?
What were they going to do?
That's a mystery, and I'm hoping that that's something that's dislodged by the lawsuit that I mentioned that's been filed by the Rutherford Institute in cooperation with a private law firm in Virginia.
It's really difficult to know at this point exactly what's going on, because nobody is being candid about it.
The standard operating procedure now, and this is something that represents, I believe, a critical and dangerous change, alteration in the police culture of our country, the standard operating procedure now is to treat the public as a pool of suspects, as antagonists, and to withhold as much of the truth from the public as possible until you're able to arrange some way to sweep an instant of this sort under the rug.
Things like this happen all the time now, in large measure, because of this abominable fraud called the War on Drugs, which has created this plague of militarized law enforcement.
It's now, once again, standard operating procedure to send SWAT teams out to deliver warrants, or to exercise search warrants.
Yeah, of any kind.
Yeah, of any kind.
And this is really since Waco, isn't it?
Well, Waco was a really good example of this in action, because...
It was kind of the threshold for everybody else gets to do it like them from now on.
Yeah, exactly.
There's a very strong tendency towards mimicry on the part of law enforcement agencies across the country.
And once Waco lowered the bar to the point where it is now, everybody wants to act in pretty much the same way.
Waco was made possible because Ann Richards, at the time the governor of Texas, was able to create a narcotics nexus to the investigation of the Branch Davidian Church.
Somebody claimed that there was a meth lab on site at the sanctuary there on Mount Carmel.
And, of course, that was untrue when they hit Mount Carmel on February 28th of 1993.
Nobody took any precautions of any kind regarding the type of hazardous materials that would have been involved had there been a meth lab on the property.
There was no effort to contain the damage.
Nobody had any mop suits.
They hit the Branch Davidian sanctuary in the serene confidence that there was not a meth lab on the property.
But by asserting that there was this drug nexus, the state of Texas was able to get the military involved in the planning and operation of the February 28th raid and, of course, the subsequent 51-day standoff that followed.
And that's sort of the paradigm for what's going on now.
Yeah, and if I can just throw in there, Will, the meth lab story comes from David Koresh when he took control of that property back.
He cleaned it up.
He called the local sheriff's department, had them come and clean it up, and the ATF knew that.
They knew they were lying about that.
Now, hang on.
I want to get back to this guy, Derek Hale, here.
The article is in the vault today at LouRockwell.com on the right-hand side there.
And you can, of course, find it by looking at the blog ProLibertate at FreedomInOurTime.blogspot or going to Will Griggs Archives at LouRockwell.com.
But one of the things I read in here about this guy, Derek Hale, in your description of him as a clean-cut guy, where you're making the case that this guy's not a criminal, you cite his honorable discharge from the military, and you also cite his concealed carry permit, which you made the point that, look, he couldn't have had a concealed carry permit unless he was not a criminal, you know, had passed the background check with flying colors and so forth.
But it occurred to me, Will, that this is why they came armed to the teeth, ready for a battle, is because they saw that he had a weapons permit.
Yeah, that underscores one of the dangers here of the idea that it's somehow a token of a free society that we would have a permit to carry something that we have a natural right to have, which is a firearm to use for the purpose of self-defense.
It seems to me that somebody was aware of the fact that this individual, Derek Hale, had a concealed carry permit, that he might have been carrying a concealed weapon, and that really underscores and somewhat accentuates the irony here, because obviously, if he had been a criminal, the state of Virginia would not have issued that concealed carry permit to him.
But by virtue of the fact that he had a concealed carry permit, he was treated as somebody dangerous for the purpose of arresting him.
And so the mystery deepens and the curiosity broadens here, and the paradox becomes more acute.
I don't know why they did what they did, and nobody might be able to find out why they did what they did until people are put on the stand under oath, under penalty of perjury, and compelled to tell people what happened.
The policymakers responsible for issuing the orders and sending the policies have to be brought to the dock.
The officers who were on site at the time were part of the raid.
The lieutenant who commanded the raid, they all have to be put on the witness stand, under oath, under penalty of perjury, and we need to extract from them, through that means, the details of what happened and why they targeted Derek Hale, and what exactly happened that day.
It reminds me of the story of Randy Weaver and what happened to him.
The ATF got themselves all worked up, and the marshals said, this guy's a former Green Beret, he's a former Green Beret.
And so they were the ones who escalated everything to the point that his whole family got killed, not him.
Yeah, that's very much of a piece with the Randy Weaver tragedy, as well as being very similar to Waco in terms of the mindset involved here.
I need to underscore something that is very important.
I did, as a senior editor, former senior editor for the New American Magazine, write a number of pieces talking about the principle of supporting your local police on the assumption that local police would remain locally accountable and locally funded and locally equipped.
We no longer have local police in this country.
Every police force in this country that receives so much as a scintilla of support from the federal government is considered by the Bush administration, which I prefer to call the Bush regime, to be an appendage of the central government.
That's a principle which is made very obvious in the case of Joshua Wolfe, the blogger down in San Francisco, who was accused of having footage of a riot that took place during a protest where some police vehicles from the San Francisco police department were damaged.
The Bush regime claims that the police vehicles of the local police in San Francisco are federal property because the San Francisco police department receives Homeland Security subsidies.
Really?
I had not noticed that wrinkle in that case.
I bring it up quite a bit.
Take a look at the Joshua Wolfe case.
It's really quite fascinating, not only for the freedom of the press issues which are involved here.
I believe he's still in detention for contempt of court because he won't turn over his B-roll footage.
Right.
But also for the question of what you might call the Wickard v.
Filburn principle at work with respect to law enforcement.
Wickard v.
Filburn was a New Deal era Supreme Court decision holding that which the federal government subsidizes it controls.
Well, the Bush administration really has taken that to, some people might say ludicrous lengths, but I say very understandable lengths given the natural tropism of government towards absorbing everything by saying that to the extent that any police department receives any kind of federal subsidy, it is property of the federal government.
Whether you're talking about subsidies to the Department of Homeland Security, whether you're talking about the various grants for counternarcotics enforcement which are just a plague to our local communities now.
That's the direct source of these paramilitary raids we're talking about are these grants that are issued for counternarcotics enforcement because they become self-perpetuating.
They create perverse incentives for police departments to create circumstances that supposedly justify these paramilitary raids as a fundraising mechanism.
But to the extent that we have local police departments anymore, they're only local part-time because the people who actually run them are the folks in Washington, D.C. who are setting the subsidy and funding priorities and who claim the right to take control of these local police agencies when it suits the whim of their masters in Washington.
So we don't have local police to support anymore.
And that's one of the reasons I suspect why I have the philosophical and ideological falling out with the Birch Society that resulted in my firing last October was because I kept urging the leaders of the John Birch Society to reexamine that slogan and that campaign in light of what's actually going on right now in the reality-based community.
We don't have local police anymore.
We now have an army of occupation.
Now, say if we had a limited constitutional republic with checks and balances, separations of power, stuff like that, some prosecutor would be able to make his mark and make his success by taking on these lying, perjuring, murdering police in Virginia and Delaware, right?
Certainly.
If we had that type of system up and running right now, and we have the vestiges of it, perhaps, and we have a fond memory of it, right now, unfortunately, the priorities of most prosecutors are as skewed and as antithetical to liberty as the priorities governing too many of our police agencies.
They're both bent in the direction of Washington rather than looking out for the interests of the communities that they inhabit.
And too many prosecutors, this is another very important issue here, too many prosecutors look at their job description basically as one of climbing a ladder.
I mean, just as too many police officers have little organic connection to a local community, the prosecutors basically are looking to make brief stops to the given community before moving on to better and more prominent postings.
So we're dealing with the careerist tendency on the part of many people.
It's certainly something which is not new.
None of these things are new.
They're all innate to human nature.
You know, I once had a conversation with a prosecutor from Harris County, Houston, the county on earth that puts more people to death than China.
And I asked this woman, hey, what's the deal with you people?
You don't care if people are innocent or not.
You just prosecute them anyway for your numbers, right?
And she says, well, everyone is like that except me.
I don't do that.
I don't do that.
But yes, it's true that every other prosecutor and every other assistant D.A. in Harris County, Texas, has the theory.
This is what she called it.
If they really didn't do it, they'll get off on appeal.
Oh, good grief.
And of course, you know, for those of us who went to sixth grade, that means if they really didn't do it, then they'll get out when the burden of proof is on them.
Exactly.
Well, it seems that there's an assumption on the part of most people who are either police or prosecutors or judges, for that matter, that their role is not to defend and vindicate the rights of the law-abiding citizenry, but rather their role is to validate the power of the state.
And that's a complete polarity shift in our system.
I mean, I don't know at what point it took place.
I don't think it's a recent development.
I think that it's reached a level of acuity now, perhaps, that is making itself more obvious and more keenly felt.
But that's certainly something that has happened that represents the complete polar opposite of what we were originally supposed to have when our Constitution was created a couple of centuries ago.
We were supposed to have a system of government that primarily bound the government on the assumption that it would be rather an extraordinary thing, an exceptional thing, for the government to be taking an active role in the lives of people.
And that the only purpose of our law enforcement bodies, which were supposed to be locally and state controlled almost exclusively, would be simply to protect the rights of the innocent against the force and fraud of the lawless.
And today, of course, the priorities are, first and foremost, to vindicate the power of the state and to uphold and promote its agenda.
And that's, once again, the antithesis of what our republic was supposed to be.
I dearly miss the old republic.
Well, you know, I wasn't born until the 70s, Will.
I don't know if I've ever had an old republic in my lifetime.
Have you?
I was born in the 60s, but I think I probably didn't either.
I mean, Woodrow Wilson was a long time ago, man.
TR?
That's entirely true.
All right.
So, folks, this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with my friend, William Norman Grigg.
He is the editor of TheRightSourceOnline.com, and you can read his great blog, ProLibertate, at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And I'm a big fan of this guy, Will Grigg.
I've been reading his writings for a long, long time.
And if you've heard me on the radio in Austin over the past oh-so-many years, you may have heard me read his articles before.
But, you know, an ulterior motive for having you on, and I'm sorry that we only have four or five minutes here for wrapping this part up, Will, but an ulterior motive of having you on besides learning the story of these murderous cops in Delaware and their innocent victims is also this left-right alliance, this realignment.
I learned in school that when FDR took power, that was the realignment when everybody except a few intransigent individualist liberals joined the New Deal consensus, and there was a realignment in America.
Well, I'm looking for a realignment.
I want to see the very best paleoconservatives like yourself, the very best of the hardcore commie socialist left who oppose empire and oppose the federal police state to come together, preferably around the paleolibertarian Rothbardian types in a new, not necessarily political party or anything like that, but a new philosophical and political ideological realignment where conservative, Bible-believing Christians like yourself, you know, heathens like me, and the commies that I have on my show sometimes to talk about what's going on in Iraq, where we can really, seriously, all be one big anti-imperialist league and realign and defeat the Republicans and the Democrats, the collectivists that control this country, and are taking it so quickly over a cliff.
Well, about a year ago, I discovered a new term that I've never heard before, and that's trans-ideological, and I think what you're describing here would be a trans-ideological coalition, and I'm certainly down with that idea.
One of the things that I have discovered here is that the abhorrent spectacle of Bush-era conservatism is making a lot of converts to the idea of limited government under law in some unlikely precincts.
For instance, I hear people who profess to be Marxist suddenly talking about the merits of federalism as a way of limiting what the central government can do.
Right?
I love that.
Count me as one who loves it if you hear somebody who's a professed Marxist talking about the virtues of limited government or federalism as a structure intended to impede the centralization of power, which is exactly the opposite of what you'd expect a Marxist to say.
There are a lot of people who are traveling a road to Damascus here as a result of what George W. Bush and his adult handler Dick Cheney are doing, and I think that's a healthy development, assuming, of course, that it lasts.
I was shocked about a year ago to see a piece of The Nation magazine talking about the evils of the Federal Reserve System.
That's the sort of thing that I think could be a very hopeful augury of the type of trans-ideological principle movement you're talking about.
It's badly overdue, and it's something that's desperately needed if we're going to retrieve some semblance of ordered liberty from the current method that is being made of our lives by our masters of Washington.
Yeah, and a note to libertarians.
We have to purge all the so-called pro-war libertarians from our movement immediately, or else how the hell can we be the leaders of the best of the left and the right?
Yeah.
I'm wholeheartedly in agreement with that.
You cannot be a pro-war libertarian any more than you can be a pro-adultery clergyman, I suppose.
It's a functional oxymoron.
It's another contradiction in terms.
Too often what you find is that, once again, you have this tropism toward the central government, the imperial capital, and it draws all kinds of people in that direction.
You don't make much of a career as a media libertarian or as a media conservative if you're speaking in terms of limiting what the central government can do, because most of the people who are in charge of the media outlets and most of the people who have access to the funding mechanisms and foundations are battening on the Leviathan government, so they're not going to be funding people who are principled opponents.
And I think that what's going to happen is that there's going to have to be a backlash on the part of those of us who live outside the imperial capital or on the receiving end of its dubious benevolence if we're going to recover any kind of integrity for the libertarian movement, for the conservative movement properly understood, or simply on the part of liberty-loving people of whatever political description.
Right.
And here's the thing that's unescapable to me, and this is probably why I even bothered thinking that maybe something could be done about it and I ought to try to help, is that classical liberals basically, or even regular socialist kind of liberals, at their core, their root word is liberty, and that's ultimately what they believe in.
And many conservatives, not all, but many conservatives, I think when they say conservative, if you ask them, what they really mean to conserve is Jeffersonian principles, the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution.
And, you know, a paleoconservative is, you know, almost indistinct from a classical liberal.
It's all this newfangled left-right stuff that's a corruption.
It's real liberalism and real conservatism can get along just fine with liberty.
Exactly.
I've often said that it's not a question of right or left, it's a question of up or down.
You want the power to be consolidated at the central government level, and if you do, then I don't care how you advertise yourself, you're a totalitarian.
It doesn't matter if you call yourself a republican or a democrat, it doesn't matter if you call yourself a libertarian.
There's some libertarians who are fine with that arrangement, or professed libertarians, I should say.
The question is, do you want centralized control of the political power in the name of fighting wars, both foreign and domestic, or do you want an order of politics that is conducive to individual liberty?
And if it's the latter, then we can get along, irrespective of what your brand name might be.
That's William Norman Grigg.
He's the editor of The Right Source Online.
You can read his excellent blog, and seriously, a half-hour interview is hardly enough for you to understand just how intelligent this guy is.
Go here and read the freedomintourtime.blogspot.com.
There's some incredible stuff on that blog.
Thank you very much for your time today, William Norman Grigg.
Thank you, Scott.