05/19/10 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and our final guest on the show today is the great Will Grigg.
He's the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse, and he keeps the blog ProLibertate, freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you?
Scott, I'm doing well.
I really appreciate this opportunity.
It's always great to talk to you, my friend.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show, and I just, I'm speaking for half of the American population at least here.
I am so fed up with the cops, Will, I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to do either, but I understand why people are outraged, and the frustration is going to continue growing until there are significant institutional changes, at least I hope so.
All right, well, we got to talk about this latest atrocity in Detroit here.
Yeah, you're talking about the death Sunday morning of Ianda Jones, this seven-year-old girl, a winsome and just irresistible personality, at least that's what the photos suggest.
She's the age of my older daughter Katrina, and she was sleeping on her couch shortly after midnight when her home came under assault by a paramilitary team called the Special Response Team.
It's the Detroit SWAT team, and they use tactics that are pretty much indistinguishable from what are being used in Afghanistan under General McChrystal, as they raid the homes of suspected insurgents, suspected Taliban sympathizers.
Since the beginning of the year, there's been a real uptick in these nighttime raids, despite the fact that McChrystal supposedly is trying to gear down the use of that tactic, because it's creating a huge amount of rancor and blowback, understandably so, because people don't like seeing their fellow citizens come under assault in the middle of the night by paramilitary raiders.
But the same tactics were used, and he had a similar result.
There was a flashbang grenade thrown in through the window that apparently severely burned the seven-year-old child in front of her father, and seconds later she was dead from a gunshot.
And there's some dispute now as to whether that gunshot occurred during what's described as incidental contact between the lead officer who was first through the door and the child's 47-year-old grandmother, or if, as the attorney for the family suggests, that shot was fired through the open door blindly.
The story which is being told now by the SRT and by the Detroit police really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
You always hear about these guns that spontaneously discharge in circumstances of this kind.
From what I am told by people who are veteran law enforcement or retired law enforcement personnel, guns don't simply discharge sua sponte.
You're dealing with negligent gunfire at the very best, or deliberate malice at the very worst, but in either case you've got a girl, a seven-year-old girl, who was killed in the course of a raid that was being carried out under terms of engagement that amplified force protection at the expense of protecting the civilians who were on the receiving end of the violence.
When you're talking about police conduct today, officer safety is the prime directive.
It's officer safety uber ala.
Secondly, this is being done for purposes of Homeland Security Agitprop because there was an A&E network film crew along to chronicle this very telegenic full-force raid against a residential dwelling where there were children living.
There were toys strewn on the front yard.
The neighbors warned the police that there were children in this residence.
You had an A&E camera crew along to film this SWAT team, which has already been profiled in another A&E Agitprop show called SWAT.
What I think and what I have written about this subject is that you have an instant here where they were searching for a murder suspect.
That, of course, is a serious crime.
They have to bring this guy in.
They had reason to believe that the suspect was at one or another of the two units in this duplex.
The police still aren't saying which unit he was in, whether the death of Ayanna took place in the unit of the duplex where the suspect was actually found or whether that was the other unit.
They had a warrant to get the guy.
I don't see any reason at all why they had to send in the paramilitary goons unless they were posing for the cameras.
Well, the show is called 48 Hours, Will, with the first 48.
Yeah, the first 48, that is the first 48 hours after a homicide.
It's supposed to unfold a la law and order, I suppose, describing how you build a case and you arrest a homicide suspect and bring him in.
But there's no reason on earth why they could not have staked out that dwelling and simply waited for the suspect to come out.
He eventually would have to come out or wait until they were sure that the children and any other potential innocent victim was clear of the line of fire, then send in the police and get the guy.
But that wouldn't be telegenic.
That wouldn't look as good on camera as throwing the paramilitary force through the front door amidst the clamor and rancor and highly curating favorable violence and conflict.
Well, no offense, Will, but you're older than me and I'm old.
There are people who are listening to this show who were born in the 1990s or something, maybe in the late 80s in the chaos audience.
And here's a phrase that probably none of them have ever even heard except maybe if they saw an old Western.
We have you surrounded.
Come out with your hands up.
Exactly.
And that's not part of American culture at all anymore, is it?
No, we've sort of degenerated to the point that and here's something that's going to date me as well.
The former I don't know if he's a former comedian, but he's a former Soviet comedian, Yakov Smirnoff.
I think he's since been put out to pasture in Branson, Missouri.
I think he owns a theater there and he's trying to milk whatever career he can out of his fading notoriety.
But he came to the United States in 1986 as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union.
I have a chance of meeting him and interviewing him in college when he came to Utah State and put on a convocation there.
But he used to say way back in 1985, 1986, that he really liked the fact that American police fire warning shots because the Soviet Union, they shoot the guy and consider that a warning for everybody else.
Yeah.
And you've got basically the same type of a mindset here.
There are a number of people.
This is something that reflects what I've started to call punitive populism.
The idea that you sympathize with the guy on the delivering end of official state violence rather than the person on the receiving end.
The punitive populists are saying that the family is to blame here because they were harboring a fugitive.
We don't know for sure whether they were harboring a fugitive.
That's, of course, a question of fact.
Even if you make the worst case against the family here, even if they were harboring this guy, who knows whether they were trying to persuade him to turn himself in as a suspect in the horrible, apparently gang-related shooting of a 17-year-old about 30 hours earlier.
There's no excuse for using a modality here on the part of the police that is almost perfectly calibrated to get some innocent person killed.
They are supposed to have, as their most exalted priority, protecting and serving the public.
That means that if you're going to be dealing with a suspect in a residential dwelling of this sort, and you don't have a ticking clock, you don't have a barricaded gunman, this is not a hostage situation.
There's no reason on earth, apart from PR considerations, to choose a full-force midnight raid against this dwelling involving a flash-bang grenade.
That's a detail that's been criticized by a lot of veteran law enforcement officers in Detroit.
They said that you'd never use those unless you're dealing with a barricaded gunman situation.
This was not such a case.
There's no reason to use that approach, not at all.
You say so many interesting things that I've got to stop you at some point to go back over some of them here.
All right.
The first thing I want to point out here is this is sort of, and I guess this was really the case even before 1993, but especially now, it really is, well, isn't it, Waco every day?
The only thing that was notable about Waco is they fought back and won on the first day, and so there was this 51-day siege, and they were this kind of weird religious group, and so there was this whole kind of strange narrative.
Meanwhile, Waco-style raids are taking place right now, probably in every state in the Union, and in the next hour, too.
Oh, almost certainly.
The best information we have, the numbers have been crunched by Radley Balco of Reason Magazine.
Something on the order of 150 SWAT raids take place in this country every day, on average.
Of course, there are some more days than others.
There are fewer some days than others.
But the way that it evens out, daily you're going to have 150 incidents where people are going barreling through the front door of a house, screaming search warrants.
150 every day?
Every day, on average.
That's the way that it works.
And a lot of this, of course, is driven by the longest and bloodiest war that the government has ever waged directly on the citizens, and that's the war on drugs, which is a consummate failure in terms of the metrics defining addiction and usage and popularity and so forth, but it's been a staggering success when it comes to enhancing the power of government and expanding the discretionary violence which is used by police to target people who, for the most part, are involved in consensual nonviolent behavior.
And the SRT in Detroit has been deeply involved in training their narcotics enforcement team.
I think there's actually a Department of Public Morality in Detroit that is involved in enforcing drug prohibition that really has sort of a Saudi ting to it, because there's a Department of Morality that enforces the laws of the Saudi kingdom that are called the religious police.
But the Department of Public Morality and the Department of Narcotics Enforcement are trained and they carry out, they're trained by and they carry out raids in tandem with the SRT, and they're average of two or three of those that take place just in Detroit every day.
And that doesn't include the asset forfeiture raids, which have spiked dramatically since about 2005.
Violent crime has increased in Detroit, but it's nowhere near the problem that it should be by conventional reckoning, given the fact that it's an economic moonscape.
You've had the complete collapse of the economy in Detroit, unemployment's over 30% in some parts of that city.
And in spite of the fact that you've not had a dramatic escalation in violent crime, asset forfeiture by the police as a way of funding their operations has gone up 400 and 500% over the last several years on the part of some of these departments.
So you've got literally a type of onslaught, a type of siege being carried out.
And the SRT, which has been once again sort of the poster children for the Detroit police, they've had their own TV show, and they have the cameras along Sunday morning, they really are sort of the point of the spear here in this onslaught, this urban warfare being waged by the police in that city, which has sufficient problems already without dealing with this as well.
It's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9, and I'm talking with the great Will Grigg.
His website is freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
The day of a couple of agents or a couple of detectives walking up to somebody's front door and knocking on a door in three-piece suits to execute a warrant of any kind is over.
And that's where we stand.
We stand between the caressers of the world and everybody here.
We stand.
All right.
So there you go.
The days of men in three-piece suits knocking on a door and serving a warrant of any kind is over.
And that was actually a bit hyperbolic when Nat Pig said that at the Waco hearing, but that was quite a few years ago now.
It's no longer hyperbole at all.
This is the deal.
And now here's the deal, too.
We're getting back to this murder of this seven-year-old girl in Detroit.
These guys threw a flashbang grenade in the window.
And then according to the lawyers, as you said, who have seen the tape from the TV show that these guys were starring in, one of the cops shot in the window apparently right after the flashbang grenade.
And that was how this little girl was killed.
Meanwhile, they came out and blamed it on grandma and said that, well, you know, grandma was resisting arrest in the living room and caused the gun to discharge.
Yeah, that was the original story, that this 47-year-old grandmother got involved in what was described as a tussle with the lead officer, a tussle with the lead officer who came barging through with his machine gun at the ready and the ballistic shield in front of him.
And that was the original story, that somehow the gun spontaneously discharged, killing this little girl by shooting her in the neck.
Then the father of this girl, this is a detail I think that the New York Times reported, was thrown face down with his hands cuffed behind his back and his face was basically jammed into the bloodstain that had been made by his daughter after she was laying there dying from this supposedly accidentally discharged round.
The original story is that the grandmother was to blame for this.
She was taken to the hospital and treated.
She was held overnight by the police and then she was released.
And after she was released, the story was modified.
They said, well, it wasn't so much a tussle, rather there was incidental contact between this grandmother and the police officer, a fellow by the name of Weakley.
And of course, the story we're getting now is that, well, there wasn't any contact.
She's disputing that she had any contact at all whatsoever with this officer.
There's not another police officer who's been able to attest to this contact.
But even if there was incidental contact, chances are what happened is the guy went barreling through the door and simply bowled her over.
But the key point that you pointed out, Scott, is that Jeffrey Fieger, the attorney for this family, claims to have seen a videotape and as it happens, it wasn't the videotape taken by the A&E film crew.
He claims that there was a separate recording made of this incident that showed that a gunshot was fired through either the open door or simply into the house within milliseconds, perhaps, the flash bang grenade being thrown through the window.
And that's, of course, a detail that's going to come out of these as the lawsuit unfolds and whatever investigation proceeds.
But anyway, you look at it at the very best, you can say that this is this is homicide by virtue of depraved indifference, which, of course, would be considered second degree murder if this were done by anybody other than the exalted personages in government issued costumes.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, as long as we're on the theme of America as the Soviet Union today, I'm having so much fun with this.
I have the proof on my Facebook page from the first time I linked to this.
Cindy Sheehan put out the the notification out on the Facebook and I retweeted it or whatever you call it.
And the ABC News link automatically generated the title Will Cops Searching Home Shoot Seven Year Old Dead.
OK, that was the original headline at ABC News.
Yeah, they read that in a hurry, didn't they?
Yeah.
Someone said to someone else there, no, no, change it, change it, hurry.
That conversation took place.
OK.
And then they changed it to Detroit police say seven year old shot in home search.
Yeah.
Detroit police say seven year old girl fatally shot when officers weapon fired.
And now I'd just like to point out and and I know that this at least half of this argument applies to you.
It used to be the whole argument would have applied to you.
The people who defend local cops and like local cops are the same people who defend the right to bear arms.
The average populist right winger in America, liberals to own guns.
The people who love the cops are the same ones who say, don't you touch my guns?
Guns don't kill people.
People kill people.
So which is it in this case?
Did the cops gun?
You know, was it possessed by a Muslim and it murdered this innocent girl?
Or did the cop murder her with his finger and his trigger and his inanimate object in his hands?
Yeah.
This is a case of selective embrace of the sympathetic fallacy, which is that there are objects that are innately evil, that are possessed of independent will and can somehow bring about these horrible circumstances, horrible, horrible events all by themselves rather than being the instruments of independent human will.
And unfortunately, there is this intellectual disconnect on the part of many people of a populist persuasion who, of course, are very prehensile when it comes to their gun rights, their ownership of their own personal firearms, and talk about how they will only surrender those arms of their pride from their dead, cold, grasping fingers.
But on the other hand, they reflexively side with that element of the state apparatus that would be in charge of seizing their guns from their dead hands if it came down to cases.
And I wish with every particle of my being, with every impulse of my soul, that these people would think through their premises and become intellectually consistent in applying them here.
What you said about the way that that news story was recaptioned is incredibly significant, because you're dealing here, obviously, with the state-tropic media trying to manipulate and massage public opinion, and very successfully doing so with exactly that cohort of people you described, those people who are most receptive to claims of arbitrary authority by the government.
And this puts the lie to another one of the hoary cliches, which is that the media is a liberal institution.
The media is a statist institution.
It's not liberal.
It's not conservative.
It is state-aligned.
It is state-centered.
The people who are in charge of setting the editorial tone, whether you're talking about atrocities being committed overseas by way of pilotless drones, or being carried out by the night raiders working for General McChrystal in Afghanistan, or the people who are conducting urban warfare in the inner cities of the United States, they want to make sure that the message that they put out is sculpted in a way that will serve the interests of the government that is more or less the center of their lives and the focal point of their aspirations.
All right, well, there's so much here, and so little time, so here's what's going to happen.
Grab a pen if you need to.
Jot a couple things down.
I'm going to mention some news stories, and then you say about them whatever you like, okay?
All right.
The first thing I have in front of me here is Radley Balko at Reason.com, the hit-and-run blog, More Militarized Than the Military, and it's an email that he got from a US officer in Afghanistan saying, our rules of engagement for a nighttime raid against people who are the under-mentioned, who it's obviously perfectly okay to kill their women, their children, their elderly all day long.
When we raid their houses, we have much stricter rules about how we do it than the average American SWAT team.
Then the next thing I want to mention here is this SWAT raid where the dogs were killed in front of the kids there in Columbia, Missouri, and the backlash from that, which there has been a bit of backlash for that.
Then let's see, in Bel Air, Maryland, is it?
Oh, no, no.
This is near Houston.
A cop acquitted after shooting an unarmed black guy.
California District Attorney, police killing a bystander justified.
He was wearing the same color shirt as a robbery suspect and was accidentally standing somewhere near them.
Pajamas Media, who I hate to quote, but I guess right-wingers care about guns and ammunition.
They wrote something here about how it's not the financial crisis or anything like that.
The reason for the massive continuing shortage of ammunition in this society, Will, is because every deputy sheriff now has an M4 rifle and a ton of ammunition.
They are sucking up all the supply there.
The Supreme Court rules that when your sentence is over, the state can continue to hold you as long as they want, as long as they say there's something wrong with you sexually.
Then to the drug wars, agents swarm Newburgh in raid against gangs.
This is in Newburgh, New York.
It was a massive 500 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers on a massive raid against the gangs there in this city.
Apparently, they're into the black market drug trade, Will, and now I'm going to be quiet.
You say whatever you want for the rest of this show.
Oh, hell, I'm going to have to keep you over time, too, because we only got three minutes now.
All right.
I'll run down the list, starting with more militarized than the military.
I've been contacted by people in the military who made a similar point, which is that the rules of engagement when carrying out raids overseas are more exacting and more restrictive than the rules of engagement governing SWAT teams.
One of the things that we need to point out is that what's going on overseas is actually a reflection of tactics and approaches that have been developed in the inner cities in the United States.
Here's a really good case in point.
There's a mobile strike force that has been created in the city of Chicago, which is under the command of a fellow by the name of James Russel, R-O-U-S-S-E-L-L.
He's a 30-year Chicago PD veteran.
He's also chief warrant officer in the Marine Reserve.
He was seconded for service in Fallujah a few years ago, and prior to that, he had been working in the special operations section, the counter gang unit in Chicago, and basically what he did in Fallujah was he applied the tactics that they had been using with SWAT teams in Chicago.
He refined them over in Fallujah, and then they're bringing them back here to be used and further refined and further amplified on the streets of Chicago.
The Chicago PD, of course, the counter gang unit, is one of the most disreputable and corrupt units of its kind in the known universe.
I think that there's something to be said for the proposition that the armed agents of the empire overseas act with more restraint and circumspection overseas than they do here at home, which is a terrifying thing.
The SWAT raid in Missouri, of course, is something that went viral by way of the YouTube video, and you have here a very common thing, which is the summary execution of a family pet as a way, I contend, and on the basis of conversations I've had with people who were involved in training law enforcement, as a way of inflicting a psychological injury, an incapacity in disorienting psychological injury on the people who were targeted.
That's a very common thing.
It's interesting to point out that the same unit in Detroit that was involved in the death of Ayanna Jones over the weekend three years ago was involved in another SWAT raid that involved the killing of dogs in front of children, and you had children, one infant, who were within basically the, not the direct line of fire, obviously they're still alive, but they were within the radius of action here when these dogs were shot, and the person who was the first through the door, the SRT officer by the name of Weakly was first through the door Sunday, was involved in that raid as well, and there's a lawsuit going forward on that subject.
I'm trying to talk to the attorney, I have a call out to him today.
And you're saying that the purpose in the training, you kill the dogs in order to terrorize the people.
Exactly.
In order to put them in a state of shock.
That's exactly right.
Right, okay, now let me say one thing real quick here, which is Mark and Nathan are up next, Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, Newton's Cradle, and I'm going to go ahead and keep recording you here for another few minutes if I can, Will.
That's fine.
I can't remember the specifics of the Houston incident involving, I believe it was Robert Tolan, if I'm not mistaken, but you had an acquittal here in a case that's likely to have some very serious social repercussions in Houston, because this is by no means an isolated incident, there are a number of similar incidents that have taken place over the last couple of months, and things are becoming downright incendiary in Houston.
I would put at the top of the list of cities likely to erupt if you have another really dubious use of force or conspicuous example of a needless police lethal violence in that city.
That's a city that's very likely to go up in flames, and that's something I do not look forward to.
You referenced the situation with the shortage of ammunition and the fact that it's being devoured by pretty much every law enforcement or administrative agency in this country.
That's something else that I've been paying attention to, because I have a lot of people here in western Idaho who are involved in the gun culture.
I live in rural Idaho.
You run the math.
A fellow with whom I do practice target shooting every month or so is, of all the unlikely things, a prison guard across the Stake River in eastern Oregon.
For about a year and a half, he's been making that comment, and the professional circles he travels, he points out that it's become pretty much common wisdom that everybody who is a trigger puller for the regime is buying up as much ammunition as possible, and they're up-armoring themselves dramatically.
That's not merely something that PJ Media's been reporting.
There's plenty of evidence.
I'll be most of an anecdotal, but that's what's going on.
That's appropriate.
The government's sucking up all the available capital in the economy right now.
Why wouldn't it be sucking up all the available lead as well?
When you refer to the Supreme Court decision here regarding indefinite civil detention, there is an element of this decision, I've read about half of it, that I find very important.
That is the fact that they're not confining this specifically to sexual dislocations in a personality, mental illness plus some kind of a sexual offense in one's background.
Four of the five defendants in this case were found guilty of possession of child pornography.
The fifth was found guilty of an actual sexual assault.
That's sufficiently disturbing, because I don't see how you can lock up somebody in perpetuity because he's in possession of pornography of any variety, unless he's actually committing an act against some other person involving violence or the seduction of a minor child.
I don't see where that's the same type of thing as somebody who actually commits a crime of violence or seduction.
Especially when he probably got the child porn from the Republicans in the first place.
It's reasonable to believe that might be the vector involved.
But the other thing that I find really disturbing about the decision, well there are a number of things, but this one particular element I want to focus on, is the fact that they talk about other potential grounds for treating somebody as being perpetually dangerous, irrespective of whether he has served his sentence.
And this takes us in the direction of the old Soviet penal code that allowed the government summarily to lock up or dispose of people who were called socially dangerous persons.
They've really embedded that now in the practice of law and the administration of what they're pleased to call justice here in the United States.
That's another very important landmark in our descent into outright Soviet-style despotism.
I've not followed the Newburgh, New York drug raid here, but this is of a piece with a number of things going on on both coasts.
There was a big counter-gang operation starting last December called Operation Everywhere, focusing on some of the things going on in Hebbett, California.
That's a town of about 70,000.
They had a number of instances that apparently targeted their gang suppression unit.
And so they sent out a task force of federal, state, and local law enforcement, DEA, ATF, FBI, everybody they could think of.
They basically emptied the whole jar of alphabet soup there, and they pulled in dozens of scores and hundreds of suspects, and they did this across four states.
And it was a cynical exercise of the bring-in-the-usual-suspects variety, basically bringing in people who were on probation or parole, people who had incidental or trivial warrants.
And the Attorney General of the state of California, would-be Governor Moonbeam, the once and future Governor Moonbeam, was saying that they were dealing with urban terrorism, because apparently somebody had rigged up a zip gun to take a shot at a gang suppression officer, and somebody else had vandalized a squad car, and the idea was that they were going after the Vagos Motorcycle Gang and any white supremacists they could happen to find.
This once again is Homeland Security theater, and one of the things that I was able to find out is that in the city of Hebbett, you've got an attrition going on with the police department.
It's down to 68 officers from 93 a few years ago.
There's been a proposal that they would actually do away with the police department and contract with the county sheriff for law enforcement coverage, which I think is a splendid idea, and suddenly they have this melodrama about the police being under siege.
You have the State Attorney General talking about urban terrorism, and this is all being staged for the edification of the public and for reasons of cynical budget negotiation, and probably police union negotiation as well.
We're going to see a lot of that sort of being spun off from this war on drugs and the war on terror and the war on everything else as budgets constrict and revenue streams dry up and police unions start putting pressure on the local governments here to find some way of preserving their perks, their benefits, and their jobs.
I think that's not the first or last we'll see of that kind of thing.
Well, you know, Will, one of the problems with being an individualist is, well, you know, that whole one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic thing of Joe Stalin's doesn't really work on me.
When I hear that there are two million plus Americans in prison right now, seven million plus when you're talking about parole, probation, the local jail, out on bail or whatever, waiting trial, whatever, seven million people inside the criminal justice system, that's seven million individuals, and it's got to be more than that anyway, that's still seven million individuals at the very least paying monthly rent on their freedom to some parole officer or probation officer or something and being treated like a slave.
And so we're not just talking about, well, and back to the little girl in Detroit, you know, this is a, it's like the little girl in the red dress and Schindler's list or whatever, like, Hey, look, these are individual human lives that are being destroyed here by a government that's just completely out of control.
I mean, it seems like this is the kind of issue at this point where even like mainstream political types would see political advantage and saying, listen, we're going to redo the rules about when we use SWAT teams or something, you know, but, but I just don't see it anywhere.
It's like the whole society is just rolling over for this.
Well, ironically enough, the new prime minister of England has actually been soliciting suggestions as to what laws should be repealed.
He's taking suggestions to the public about reigning in the aggressive nanny state, the bullying nanny state police agencies that are making the lives of everyday Britain fellish.
Yeah.
I hadn't heard that.
Yeah.
I don't know how far it will go, but ironically enough, that's starting on the other side of the Atlantic.
I don't see that necessarily catching on over here, but I certainly hope whatever it is that this guy's come down with, we'll catch a big dose of it soon.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and here's one more thing too.
And I guess we can end it here, uh, race, you know, people will talk about Israel nowadays and they say, listen, Israel's on a path, uh, maybe it's already the case, but pretty soon anyway, it'll be the case where it's an outright minority ruled apartheid state.
And in fact, it seems to me like America is headed the same way.
I mean, uh, eventually, uh, and in not too many decades, the, uh, certainly the, uh, descendants of the English, but white people in general from Western Europe will be the minority in this country and all things being equal.
They will continue to hold the power in this country over the majority at that point.
And uh, we'll be inflicting this very same police state against that majority.
And that's really, you know, the technical difference between an apartheid state and the one we got now.
But um, if, I guess if you ask, you know, black folks in East Austin or East, whichever town you live in, they'll tell you that, uh, it's, it's been apartheid this whole time.
There are certainly elements of that historically talking about the Indian reservation system and how that came into being.
There's a really good predicate for the type of situation you're describing right now, but there is a real effort to get people to think of themselves as being cattle penned in one of these ethnic collectives for the purpose of public policy.
And the government ruling us has been cynically playing that game for over 40 years or longer.
And no good can come of that.
And that's of course, one of those, I wake up screaming scenarios that frequently torments me when I try to get some sleep at night, by the way, I have to correct something.
It's deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, who's been taking suggestions about what to do by way of reigning in the police state, Britain, not the, not the new prime minister, but still the fact that that conversation is even taking place.
Yeah.
Well, and Clegg was the King maker, so he's not nobody.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So anyhow, I think that's a very small flicker of distant encouragement, but if it happens there, it might happen here.
I certainly hope so.
And I certainly hope it happens soon.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's like the immigration thing where people say, oh, well, you know, all the Mexicans, they come in droves and they're changing our culture.
And my thing is, well, treat them like individuals then.
I mean, if that's what our culture is about, then it doesn't matter what your culture is.
All that matters is that you agree with me about the bill of rights and the declaration of independence.
That's all it takes to be an American.
So why don't we just teach them that?
And then we don't have to worry about what changes they're making to our culture because we know that they care as much about the bill of rights as we do.
That's exactly right.
They're defining themselves in terms of free commerce, mutually beneficial commerce, mutual respect for individual rights, the non-aggression principle.
Learn these things, teach to other people.
You know what?
It doesn't really matter what the incidental characteristics of the people would be.
You're dealing here with a much better situation for everybody if that type of an ethic prevailed.
Back to the numbers.
And back to the racial thing, because race and economics have always been very tied up together in the United States.
Like the unemployment rate for blacks is always much higher than everybody else, or I don't know much, but it's always a certain kind of percentage error, a margin of error higher than everybody else, that kind of thing.
And when we talk about millions of people in prison, that's really mostly who we're talking about is poor black and brown people, and not necessarily ones who've committed violent crimes against, or even fraud or any kind of real crime against anyone else.
When you want to talk about the prisoners of the drug war, there's a really good illustration of it.
And here's something that I can't for the life of me understand.
Why is it that the people who agitate about matters of race don't use their energy to try to bring about an end to the drug war, which is the single largest source of dispossession and imprisonment, and the single largest factor blighting the lives of so many young black men and young Hispanic men?
Here's a really good example of the type of myopia we're talking about.
Our good friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center are making a campaign out of the needless death of a 73-year-old man from Homer, Louisiana, named Bernard Monroe.
He was gunned down on his front porch about a year ago in a police raid, of course.
Because the police were after his son, they've never been able to find out why the police were after his son.
He's a 73-year-old man, no criminal record, pillar of the community.
And the way that the SPLC is pursuing this is they're saying, well, obviously this is a racial incident because Homer, Louisiana, for many, many years, however long ago, had an active clavern of the Ku Klux Klan, and that sort of seeped into the local culture and it's infected the minds of the police, and that's what they have to target.
Now, why don't they talk about the fact that this is all being done pursuant to a federally funded drug crackdown?
Why don't they talk about the fact that you have a black man here who is a father and a grandfather who was collateral damage in a war being waged against the government of the United States, against the black community, and against the rest of us.
Why don't they talk about going after the root of the problem, which is the war on drugs?
I suspect it's because the SPLC is sort of organically fused to the law enforcement culture.
That's where they make their money, among other things, is by training and indoctrinating the police about the dangers of anti-government extremism, and they know that the big sugar daddy for law enforcement right now is the federal government, and one of the big packets of sugar that he uses to keep these people addicted is the subsidies they get for the war on drugs.
They're not going to go and ruin their chances here, or ruin a perfectly good racket, by taking aim at one of the major conduits of funding for the people who are buttering their bread.
And you know what?
Even if the guy, the cop that shot the old man, was a racist, and the judge that let him off, or the DA that never even brought the grand jury to order on it, wears a white hood and is off time, still, what were they doing there?
What's the whole thing about?
What's the circumstances in which that sheriff's department even needed that many cops that they had to hire this racist goon in the first place?
Exactly.
Exactly.
They may think about it, but I suspect they made a cynical decision not to pursue that angle because there's no profit in it for them.
So they're just another group of drug war profiteers to that extent, I suspect.
Yeah, you know, it's a funny thing, we go around blowing up the whole world in the name of perfecting it, and yet, look at how flawed our own society is, and how flawed we all already know, and understand, and agree it is.
We, all of us, 300 million of us, know we have got to completely redo the criminal justice system in this country.
This is madness.
Everybody knows that part of your sentence, if you go to actual prison, is to get raped, and that's just part of the comeuppance of if you commit a crime.
That's just unsaid in the jury's decision on the sentencing there, but people just joke about it.
It's just a widespread thing.
I like to talk bad about the Afghans, oh yeah, all these Afghan soldiers always going off and acting gay in the meantime, and whatever, but that's okay.
We have an entire society where criminals are just subject to rape, and not necessarily that they all get raped, but they're all taking their chances anyway, and we just laugh about it.
No big deal.
And we know that most of them are black and brown, even though most of us are white, but oh, you know, whatever.
Yeah, and that wheel will never turn, apparently.
This is a really good example of how we should be cultivating our own guard and not presuming to weed everybody else's by force.
Yeah, it really is sad, too.
I mean, especially when you talk about they got less respect for us than they have for the Afghans that we know they have no respect for at all.
How can the rules of engagement against Americans be less than Afghans, who, from our government's point of view, don't have a single right we're bound to respect?
Never could.
Yeah, that is a perfectly terrifying thing.
Absolutely.
All right, listen, I really appreciate your time, as always, on the show today, Will.
You're putting them in check over there.
Thank you so much, Scott.
It's great to be with you, and I certainly hope you're right.
I hope things get better soon, because I don't want to see them get much worse than this.
Well, at least, you know, we can move toward a consensus.
What we all agree is wrong with this thing.
Exactly.
All right.
Thanks again.
Take care.
Everybody, that's the great William Norman Grigg.
His book is called Liberty in Eclipse.
And boy, you got that right, and boy, is it a good book.
And check out his great blog, Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.