02/17/10 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
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All right, now on to our guest today.
It's William Norman Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
He's the author of an awesome book that you got to read.
Seriously, you should read this thing.
It'll freak you out.
It's called Liberty in Eclipse.
He also hosts Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network, and you can find what he blogs often at lourockwell.com slash blog as well.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Good.
I'm doing great.
Thanks so much for having me on again.
Well, thanks for joining me.
Your articles, man, they really bug me.
They bug me, too.
Well, I guess I should say first, everybody, really, this guy, he's a master of history.
He's a master of the simile and the metaphor and of the English language and written prose.
It's always great stuff.
And exactly, it's always on point for, you know, if you worked for me, this is what I'd have you write.
Sorry, I don't have any money.
I really appreciate that.
Yeah.
It's the thought that counts.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm glad you feel that way.
All right.
So I'm looking at your blog here.
In fact, before that, I'm looking at Lou Rockwell's blog here, Paramilitary Thugs Steal Private Arms Collection.
Oh, say it ain't so, Will.
What is this story here?
You're dealing with a fellow by the name of Gerard, who lives in a small town in Massachusetts.
And over the last several months, he, like many other people in this country, have become concerned over the possibility that what we're seeing in terms of the blending of law enforcement and the military will eventually coalesce into outright martial law.
And on previous performance, there's ample reason to believe that if we have something akin to outright military rule in this country, it'll proceed along the lines of occupations in places such as Haiti and Somalia and Bosnia and elsewhere, which is to say it would involve the confiscation of privately owned firearms.
That's something that's happened in New Orleans post-Katrina, that's happened on a number of occasions here in the United States when there have been local or state-level emergencies declared by various governments.
If you have emergency rule enforced by the military or by militarized law enforcement, that's probably something that will be a feature of our life, heaven forbid.
And so this fellow decided that he was going to acquire, legally, filling out all the paperwork and obtaining the proper permits, a small but impressive array of personally owned firearms.
And he also included in his arms cash a number of other things that apparently can only be possessed by people who wear government-issued costumes.
He had a number of police batons, which of course are small sticks, basically.
Something akin to a baseball bat, I think, would be a pretty good description of your typical police baton.
He also had a number of non-lethal weapons, including- Wait, wait, we're talking about, this is in England somewhere, right?
He's not allowed to have a billy club?
Yeah, apparently so.
Among the charges that were filed against Mr. Girard after his wife contacted the police to express concern about his state of mind was the unlawful possession of what was called an infernal device.
Now, that's a term of art that you can find in some of the archaic laws in England and also in France referring to an explosive.
But the explosives in question were non-lethal rounds.
We're talking about pepper spray, for instance, weaponized, I guess, if you want to be technical in the application of that term, in the form of small rounds that would be fired by something akin to a shotgun or a tear gas rifle.
But you're not talking about the possession of hand grenades or landmines or something else that would be intended to kill or maim.
You're talking about something that would incapacitate through the use of pepper spray.
Well, hey, let me stop you here for a second, because, I mean, your point of view on this so far seems to be that, well, the guy had some guns.
But it seems like, obviously, the cops must be saying they must be charging this guy with a conspiracy, with some kind of Columbine-like plan to go on some killing spree, right?
They don't have evidence that he intended to hurt or harm anybody.
They simply criminalized his possession of these non-firearms-related items.
He's not been charged with a firearms violation because, as they admit, he had the proper paperwork, he had the proper licenses.
I'm of the opinion that you don't need a government certificate of permission to express or to carry out the exercise of a right that's vested in you as a result of being a creature in nature.
But what they're saying is that he'd actually jumped through all the hoops, he'd crossed all the T's, dotted all the I's, filled out all the forms.
This is Massachusetts we're talking about, that's a state not notable for being hospitable toward the personal ownership of firearms.
Yet he's not been charged with a firearms violation, he's been charged with the unlawful acquisition of so-called dangerous weapons.
And the dangerous weapons in question are billy clubs and explosive pepper ball projectiles.
Now those are non-lethal weapons when they're in the hands of the government's enforcement cast, but when they're in the hands of private citizens who have no criminal records and no demonstrable intent to harm anybody, they're considered to be unlawful.
He was also, I don't think he's been charged yet, but accused of possessing what was described as an illegal ballistic plate as part of a second-floor indoor shooting range that he had created in the home that he had shared.
It was a multi-family dwelling of some sort of duplex or triplex or quadplex or something of that sort.
But he had apparently improvised an indoor shooting range and nobody had come to any harm or mischief as a result of it.
But he had, among other things, a large metal plate that he would use as a target.
And it's apparently a standard issue item that's used in shooting ranges throughout the country.
But it was described as an illegal ballistic plate, which means I guess the possession of pig iron of a certain weight and thickness is also considered a criminal offense in spite of the fact that you're harming nobody and threatening nobody by owning one.
Well, does this guy have process available to try to get his weapons back at all, or did they just...
I mean, did the cops explicitly say, we just don't trust this guy with guns and so we're taking them?
Or what are we talking about here exactly?
They weren't nearly that explicit, but the language they used suggests that they believe that there is no way that he can recover the property that has been taken from him.
There's been the ritualistic invocation of the idea in one of the press conferences held by the police after the seizure, that the community is safer now that these guns are off the streets.
Well, the guns were not on the streets, they were in this man's private home.
He'd legally acquired them.
He'd paid all the excise taxes and other fees associated with exercising what the state of Massachusetts considers a privilege of private firearms ownership.
But because he had expressed, apparently within the earshot of his wife, who's a psychiatrist and apparently not on the best terms with him, the opinion that at some point the government might be going out and confiscating firearms through paramilitary raids, he was subjected to a paramilitary raid to confiscate his firearms.
It reminds me of an episode that took place in East Germany circa 1986 when a group of political dissidents were rounded up and sent to prison for protesting the government's policy suppressing freedom of speech.
When the East German government was pressed about it, some functionary for the East German government said, well, they accused us of suppressing free speech and it's impermissible for them to say that.
So we sent them to prison.
It's the same type of totalitarian bootstrapping fallacy that we see here.
He protested the possibility that someday the government might send people on paramilitary raids to confiscate privately owned firearms.
So of course that meant that they had to mount a paramilitary raid to confiscate his firearms.
And now he's being subjected to a dangerousness hearing.
In other words, he's being treated as somebody with psychological infirmity because of his political views.
I don't know whether the guy has problems or issues.
He's obviously not on the best of terms with his wife.
And for the life of me, I can't wrap my mind around the idea that you're dealing with somebody who, as I commented in the blog item, might have the surname Morozov after Pavlik Morozov, the guy in Soviet-dominated Ukraine who turned in his father as an enemy of the state under Joseph Stalin.
You're dealing with that same kind of perverse dynamic here where somebody who's supposed to be basically one flesh, according to the biblical concept of government marriage, with their husband, turning in her husband because her husband owns guns and has expressed politically deviant opinions according to the prejudices that prevail in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.
Man.
Well, so how unreasonable is it?
Say this guy, I don't know, sat around all day reading freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Could he reasonably come to the conclusion, Will, that we are at a point where the government is going to, you know, like that old Jell-O-Bee offer skit, just declare, forget the Bill of Rights and all that, now you just do what we say or we'll kill you kind of thing.
We've reached that point and it really isn't the case where you'd have to be reading my blog or Lou Rockwell or antiwar.com or any of these other supposedly extremist sites in order to come away with that impression.
All you have to do is pay careful attention to the statements and official pronouncements, whether in print or in verbal speech, by the people who presume to rule us in terms of what they intend to do with our property and of what our liberties and privileges consist.
I've often said that a paranoid, as defined by the statist or collectivist media, is somebody who notices things without official permission, and a conspiracy theorist is somebody who draws politically unacceptable conclusions from those facts that he observes as a paranoid.
Yeah, David Koresh, man, he was just ahead of his time.
Well, he was up to date with his time, and in some ways I suppose slightly ahead of where he was in 1992 or 1993, but that's a really good marker here in terms of what the government is willing to do, first of all, for PR benefit.
That was a glorified PR exercise conducted at gunpoint, which is why the codename in February 1993 for the ATF raid was Showtime.
They were literally doing this, what was the phrase from the movie Wag the Dog, as a pageant.
It's not a war, it's a pageant, and it's being staged in this instance, a domestic war as a pageant.
Like a surge into the Helmand province.
Exactly.
That's the same kind of thing, and in the Helmand province over in Afghanistan, you've got in addition to the Marines and whatever people that have been able to bully or bribe into going along the so-called Coalition of the Willing from the NATO forces and the Afghans who were along just for local color, I suspect, you've got people from the DEA over there.
You've got all kinds of people representing the DEA.
You're probably still surprised every time they find a CIA guy running drugs, too.
Well, either they're surprised that they've been freed...
What do you mean, we've been set up again?
Well, you know, you shouldn't surprise them, given the fact that the DEA was basically spun off by the CEA from the old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs back in the late 1960s and late 1970s, it was the CIA who decided who was going to go where.
And we need to drive up these prices somehow.
Exactly.
It's really a type of stock flipping that they're engaged in.
It's an exercise just that cynical in terms of engineering the price of a commodity that the CIA works in a cartel-like fashion to produce and to market as a way of having an off-the-books source of revenue to carry out its activities of subversion and sowing terror and mischief throughout the world.
Of course, which is how they got Ann Richards to sign off on the National Guard helicopters for use in the original Vietnam-style raid.
Isn't it interesting how the circle is complete there?
Well, I mean, if you want to talk about martial law in America, it's all about Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's war on drugs, Will.
That's the war on the Bill of Rights right there.
Forget terrorism.
Exactly.
I mean, they've got a template here, the specifics of which they can plug in owing to the given circumstances we find ourselves in.
It's the war on blank.
You could talk about the war on booze from almost 100 years ago.
At least in that war on drugs, the war on the sale, possession, and marketing of banned spiritist liquors back during Prohibition, that group of Prohibitionists had the honesty to say and to recognize that they had to change the Constitution in order to give the federal government at least the pretense of authority to do something that doesn't reside within the natural function of any government, which is to claim jurisdiction over an individual's bloodstream.
But they changed the Constitution in order to provide themselves with the constitutional pretext for doing what they did.
Now you don't even have that basic, decent, hypocritical gesture of fidelity to the Constitution behind the current war on drugs, or the current war on terrorism, or the war on obesity, or the war on whatever attribute, attitude, or tactic the federal government seeks to invoke next time it wants to expand its powers, which are already, of course, bloated beyond description.
Yeah, it's true.
You know, that was one of the first things I learned about, you know, as a teenager learning about politics was, wow, so the CIA runs all the opium in Southeast Asia and they run all the cocaine in South America, and then they have their, like you say, their cousins over there at the DEA round up everybody who dares consume the product that they're supplying, and you know, as a lot of people have pointed out, you know, locking generations worth of young black men in prison for right around the time they'd be old enough for reproducing themselves and things like that, you know, turning the Bill of Rights completely inside out, and at the same time, everybody knows that the CIA push is dope.
Everybody knows that Oliver North and all those guys had to pay for their secret war somehow back then, and yet we still go along with the drug war, even though we know that, well, let's see, the number one supply of heroin on earth is Afghanistan.
That's been under the occupation of the U.S. Army and the CIA for eight years, coincidentally enough somehow.
I mean, what, are we all blind and stupid or something?
I think a lot of it's neither blindness nor stupidity.
I think that it's a sort of moral cowardice that induces people to accept the lies that are mutually agreed upon for the purpose of political and cultural convenience.
I think that when you're talking specifically about the issue of the so-called war on drugs, what really infuriates me is the way this is being used as a way of indoctrinating, propagandizing young people who go to government-run mine laundries that we call public schools, and on the one hand, they can be receiving Ritalin, which is a scheduled narcotic that does horrible things to young people, and in the next room, they can be attending their DARE lecture and being harangued about the necessity of saying no to all but, of course, government-prescribed and government-approved narcotics, and also being lectured about the need, every red-ribbon week, about the need to eschew violence unless violence is used to the greater glory of the state.
And so we've got a situation where everybody is supposed to be involved in this from the very beginning of their time as a product of the government school system, and it becomes the centerpiece, really, of a lot of what the schools do.
They are being put through this process where they're being tutored in the need for unconditional submission to the state, which is not only really the highest and holiest of all public institutions, but it really defines its own morality, and it defines the morality that we are compelled literally at gunpoint to accept, no matter what violence it does to our intellect and our conscience.
Well, you know, it's funny about that, because I remember being in 10th grade and thinking, I'm glad that everything here is so arbitrary and stupid, and I'm glad that we're not allowed to wear hats or shirts we like and we have to be quiet and walk on the right side of the hallway, because this is going to turn everybody into an anti-government extremist nut like me.
We're going to be a generation of pissed-off people, and yet, nah, it was like me and maybe a couple other of the skater kids, everybody else is like, yeah, this is great, I like being bossed around all the time, I'm used to this, it gives me structure in my life, which is what I really want, you know, I'm thinking about joining the ROTC now.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Well, this...
I mean, I really thought it was a good thing, I was like, good, we're getting it over with, we're young, man, you people imprison us for 12 years in these things, and then when we get out, man, we're going to take you on, I thought.
Here I am, standing out here by myself, if I could do the Bill Hicks crickets chirping thing, I'd do it.
Oh, I know.
Well, you, like me, like I was, and like my oldest son William Wallace is, sort of the rams among the sheep, unfortunately, my experience has been that too many people, once again, for matters of social convenience, more than any other necessity or perceived necessity, go along with this, and they react with annoyance that becomes hostility very quickly, if you try to point out some of the fundamental hypocrisies and contradictions that we're describing here.
When we're talking about the way that children are taught deference to constitutive authority, that of course is the most important function of the school system, those of us who have schooled our children at home, as my wife and I did for a while when we were able to, or those of us who seek to find alternative means of providing them with an education that actually involves development of their talents and mastery of useful forms of knowledge, we're always told that if we take them out of the government school system, what will happen to them?
They won't be socialized.
In other words, they won't be turned into people who are fundamentally docile and who are willing to accept with equanimity whatever the state sees fit to inflict on them.
When you talk about the ROTC, that of course is bound up entirely with all that we're talking about here.
Every single one of the school functions that involve some kind of community outreach now, even in a town as small as the one my family lives in, Payette, Idaho, circa 8,000 people, it's in western Idaho up against the Snake River, this is rural America, rural red state America, it doesn't get much redder than Idaho.
Here in Payette, every single social function or public function the school is involved in has got some kind of a militaristic subtext as if the idea is that, well, the default here is that when it is necessary, the children are going to surrender everything about themselves, including their lives, in the service of the state.
When you're talking about people who have to get driver's licenses now, in many states they have to undergo selective service registration as a condition of getting a driver's license, or the way that little messages that sort of scatter through the promotional and motivational literature of schools, I mean, this evil of militaristic collectivism really is infused into the very warp and weave of that system, and also in much of what goes on by way of public entertainment.
Try watching a football game, if you can stand to, try watching a NASCAR event, or another event of that sort, without getting bludgeoned with propaganda on behalf of the military.
It really is a self-contained system in that sense.
And it is every bit as statist as any of the countries that were supposedly our main enemy during the Cold War.
Yeah, well, you know, I think that's really the problem, is we don't have the Soviet Union to compare ourselves to anymore.
And so we can't even see how far we slid down that path, you know?
Yeah, we don't have, if you will, the canonical measure here that we could use as a way of deciding at what point we've descended here in our trajectory from relative freedom as a constitutional republic, or an aspirational one anyhow, to what we are right now.
And it's really difficult to explain in terms of historical memory what the Soviet Union was.
You know what?
I got a shortcut for that, because I was a kid in the 1980s when the Soviet Union was still around, and the Cold War was still on, and yet I got the kid version.
And the kid version basically was, yeah, they have elections, but they're a joke.
And they have a constitution, but they're a joke.
And they have trials, but they're a joke.
And here in America, you basically can do what you want, as long as you don't commit a crime or really hurt somebody, then you'll have to mess with, then the government will come mess with you.
But other than that, you can just go ahead and live your life, choose your own life, choose your own job, do whatever.
Whereas in the Soviet Union, you basically have to ask for permission first for everything.
Geez, I mean, if these are the standards, oh, and the militarism and the enslavement of people in their colonies, things like that.
If these are the measures of the Soviet Union, then we live in Soviet America right now.
We even got our own red domino theory about spreading our ways throughout Central Asia.
Indeed.
Well, you make mention of the operational principles, which literally, in so many words, enshrined in the criminal statutes of the Soviet Union, there actually was a passage in the fundamental canons of Soviet law, or what they were pleased to call law, saying that which is not explicitly permitted is forbidden.
And when you talk about the rudiments of the Soviet system of what they called administrative justice, it's difficult to find a practice or a claim of power made by the Soviet regime that is not actively being pursued by the government ruling us.
Take, for instance, the very notion that the president of the United States can, of his own supposed authority on his own initiative, order the summary execution of American citizens as a counterterrorism measure.
That's something that Obama has been doing with great dispatch and enthusiasm.
He's been pursuing, of course, not only the use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere, but there was an attempt made last December to kill an American-born Yemeni Islamic cleric.
He was born in New Mexico, and there was an attempt shortly before the underwear bomber incident on Christmas Day to kill that man through a drone strike on the assumption that he was somehow connected to a terrorist group.
Not on any sworn evidence at all, just that they say so.
On the whim of the president of the United States, who has the same supposed authority to declare anybody an unlawful enemy combatant and sentence them to indefinite detention and torture, as pleases him, for as long as he sees fit to do so, and this is supposedly not reviewable by any judicial body that is not controlled by the executive branch, which under the Constitution has no right to control any judicial body.
It's supposed to be a co-equal branch of the federal government.
But if you take a look at the practices and assumptions of the Soviet law and compare them with what's going on right now, beginning with the fundamental foundational tenet of the government ruling us, which is that no state, no community in this supposed union has the right to withdraw peacefully, that's been settled through violence, you're dealing with pretty much an Americanized version of what happened in the Soviet Union.
It's the Orwellian pig-man type convergence that's going on right now.
How often do we hear people discuss interposition and nullification and secession, and the conclusion is...
Hey, the principles of 98!
Yeah, the principles of 98, exactly.
Radicals, disreputable people like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson talking about the constitutionally indispensable power of states to nullify unconstitutional acts by the federal government, that's something that was explicated in the Federalist Papers.
The Kentucky and Virginia Resolves make that power and that function perfectly clear and irrefutable.
But we're told that this was all transcended by virtue of what happened in 1865, when Abraham Lincoln, who was the true progenitor of Vladimir Lenin, supposedly settled that question through the application of lethal force.
The ultimate ratio-rageous, the last argument of the tyrant, is the canon.
And just this morning, the execrable so-called Justice Scalia is being quoted in a letter that he wrote to a screenwriter, saying in so many words, well, that settled, that was settled by war, and the outcome of the Civil War means that the constitutional issues are now completely moot.
Well, that was the same claim being made by the people who fused together the Soviet Union, so-called, and it was held together by nothing more than force.
And any system that is rooted in, founded on force, power without limit, resting directly on force, follows Lenin's definition of what a dictatorship is.
He said that the fundamental definition of dictatorship is power without limit, resting directly on force.
That's exactly what we're being told now, by way of supposedly refuting all these invocations of the principles of 1798.
Well, you know, we really don't even have time to do too much addressing of this, but I'm sure you probably saw this thing in the New York Times about the Tea Party, light spews for rebellion on the right.
And so here's this thing where there's, I guess, paleo-conservative, libertarian-ish populist, right-wing-ish people like yourself who stayed good all this time, through the 90s, through the Bush years, and on through today.
And then there are millions of people who now all of a sudden want to sound like William Norman Grigg, even though they were Dick Cheney's biggest fans, and they can't remember a single year ago, you know, how things were at all, or how they got that way.
They got, they picked the vice president from the Republican Party from last time is their leader now, instead of you, instead of Ron.
What the hell?
What are we going to do?
Because this is the problem, especially if we're facing Great Depression coming up here, and we have everybody divided on this silly left-right thing?
I mean, what are we going to do?
The powers that be are doing their best to keep that arbitrary and completely stupid division alive and acute.
They want to make sure that people are divided along partisan lines, as opposed to thinking about up and down.
They're thinking about left and right, as opposed to whether they're on the receiving end of government.
And we have far more in common across the ideological spectrum when we're talking about the protection of individual liberty by the law, not by what the government presumes to call us as law, but by the law, meaning the innate right of the individual to defend himself and his property.
That is the law.
And what's happening right now is that you've got Sarah Palin being used basically as the Borg Queen, trying to re-assimilate everybody who may have gotten independent thoughts, and she's trying to bring the drones back into the hive mind, the collectivist hive mind.
And this is something that was entirely predictable.
What I'm hoping is that the vociferous tendencies within the Tea Party movement are going to be as indomitable as the movement would be if it caught fire on a national level.
That is to say, oh, people start withdrawing from the Tea Party movement as the effort's being made to reclaim and re-assimilate.
Yeah.
Everyone secede from everything.
Exactly.
I mean, that would be wonderful.
That would be very healthy.
And what's going on right now, of course, is an effort to transmute this into an instrument of consolidating power.
Well, that's transmutation in reverse.
Transmutation is supposed to be the conversion of a base metal into gold.
The movement towards independence is actually something more akin to a precious metal they want to transmute into a base metal.
They want to turn it into leaden, conformist, right-wing collectivism.
And I'm hoping, on the basis of my experience last weekend speaking at a Tea Party movement rally in the Clarkston, Washington area, and having spoken with the young people in particular, I'm hoping that people are going to prove to be as resistant to assimilation within the Republican Party as they are opposed to assimilation by the federal government headed by the Obama administration.
The 16-, 17-, 18-year-old kids in the Tea Party movement are speaking the right language.
They're saying, we wish you people would have been joining us five or six years ago.
That's when George W. Bush was contracting trillions of dollars worth of debt, getting us involved in useless foreign wars and institutionalizing torture.
There's a really interesting generational rift developing there between the geriatrics who watch Bill O'Reilly and the younger people who have no use at all for television news.
They're too busy texting, messaging, tweeting, reading independent sources, and thinking for themselves.
And so I'm hoping that really you'll have a youth rebellion within the Tea Party movement that will preserve its essence at the expense of efforts to try to homogenize it.
Yeah.
Well, everybody, that's William Norman Griggin.
He's leading the way from his blog, Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Again, the book is Liberty in Eclipse, and you can hear him on the Liberty News radio network for Pro Libertate Radio.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Will.
Appreciate it, man.
Thanks so much, Scott.