09/03/10 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Orton, and our first guest on the show today is William Norman Grigg.
He keeps the blog ProLibertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com, and he's the author of the excellent book, Liberty in Eclipse.
Welcome back to the show.
Will, how are you, my friend?
Scott, I'm doing well.
Thank you so much for having me on again this morning.
Well, and thank you so much for joining us, especially on this short notice.
You people always come through for me.
By you people, I mean my wonderful guests that I bring on all the time.
Yesterday, with seconds to spare, I got Patrick Coburn and Michael Hastings lined up before I went on the air here in L.A. on KPFK, and I kind of like working on a deadline.
Ask Eric Gares, he'll tell you I'm always late, but I like working on a deadline.
Well, we're always eager to be on your show because it's a wonderful forum, and we appreciate everything you do.
Well, cool.
So let's talk about the cops.
I hate them, man.
I just hate them, but, Will, you're eloquent, so say it smart, man.
I am one of those people who, until relatively recently, had sort of a reflexive respect for police officers on the assumption that they represented the institutionalized effort to protect our rights.
And contrary to my initial prejudices and over some reluctance, I've come to conclude that Edmund Burke, ironically enough, was right when back in 1756, as a very young man, he wrote an essay called A Vindication of Natural Society, in which he said that police societies are a natural social artifact that rest on institutionalized terror, and that we have much more to fear from the so-called forces of order than we have from the unrestrained anarchic impulses of individual human beings.
Edmund Burke said that?
Come on.
He must have been kidding.
Well, he was very young, and unfortunately his views sort of calcified as he got older, but I don't think that he ever really overcame the suspicion that characterized a lot of his politics regarding the exercise of fundamentally unaccountable government power.
That's one of the critiques that he offered with respect to the French Revolution, that rather than replacing absolutism, they had taken the worst elements of absolutism and multiplied them several fold.
But way back in his youth, when he was still feeling his oats, and perhaps had a commendable instinctive, distrust of constituted authority, he did write about what he called police societies.
And I was one of those people, once again, who assumed that of all the implements of coercion that government has at its disposal, that police were somehow, if you will, sort of a qualified representative of that function of government.
Because without the police, of course, we would supposedly be at the mercy of those who would seize our property and threaten our lives.
The problem here is that the obvious priorities of any government law enforcement agency begin with force protection.
That's something that's become very obvious now.
The prime directive of anybody who's wearing a state-issued costume, replete, of course, with state-issued costume jewelry, and given a weapon and then clothed in the supposed authority to push people around and kill them, his first priority is to make sure that he gets home that evening safe, and that his comrades, likewise, are able to return from their shift safe.
So their first priority, their prime directive, is officer safety.
Second on that list would be the maintenance of the public order that provides them with their livelihood.
That is to say, their second priority is to make us submit.
And then somewhere down on that list, incidental to this entire proposition, is the idea that they might have some marginal benefit to the public in terms of protecting us from criminal violence, or at least punishing those who commit criminal violence.
But my studies over the last five or six years have led me to believe that that is, as I said, incidental to what police do.
They are first and foremost interested in protecting themselves, individually and institutionally, and secondly, they are the apparatus of enforcement for the government that rules us.
All right, now, I read Anatomy of the State, and Murray Rothbard says, that's the name of the game that always has been.
There is no such thing as a government that's really a security force.
All these people are the criminals who robbed you, and then followed you home, and insisted on being your protection racket, no different than the North Jersey mob, only with shinier costumes or whatever, with pretended authority that the mob just takes.
I would actually prefer to find myself at the mercy of the New Jersey mob.
And once again, I find myself referring to Edmund Burke.
He pointed out, and I'm paraphrasing, of course, that he would actually rather take his chances with somebody who is a private criminal, somebody who's exercising violence and expressing his malign motives by a direct face-to-face assault, because he can defend himself against somebody who is a private criminal, but if he finds himself on the receiving end of officially sanctioned violence, if he succeeds in resisting that violence, the people who are in charge of vindicating the supposed authority of the state will not relent until something is done to destroy him.
And so he appreciated, way back in the mid-18th century, what you might call the Waco dynamic, which is that if you resist successfully a criminal assault by people or agents of the state, the state will pitilessly and remorselessly escalate until you and everybody around you has been destroyed.
And that's something that Rothbard understood, Burke, as I pointed out, understood long ago.
I'm a little slower on the uptake.
It took me 20 or so years of engagement in public issues before I finally reached that conclusion.
Well, you know, I think like you, I used to be more of a conspiracy theorist, and it used to be, to me, more about, you know, the Rockefellers or the skull and bones or the personal networks of power.
It's always, you know, some standard oil lawyer that's the Secretary of State or whatever.
And then I ended up realizing that, no, the state is the conspiracy that I'm against, and I don't prefer the AEI to the CFR when it comes down to it.
I kind of want the CFR back.
I'm not, of course, of the opinion that any of the groups or individuals you mentioned are commendable in any sense, but they tend to be, if you will, symptoms of the underlying problem.
The underlying problem, of course, is the praxis of coercion that we refer to as the state.
That's what Rothbard pointed out.
De Grief Augustine pointed out the city of God over 1,500 years ago when he talked about the famous parable of the pirate and the emperor, or in that famous passage in Book 4, I think it's Book 4, Chapter 4, where he says, justice being taken away, what are kingdoms but vast robberies?
He understood how that racket worked.
He wasn't entirely on my page in terms of a philosophy of individual freedom, but he certainly diagnosed the problem correctly.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, so now you talk about officer safety as paramount in all this, and you know what I wonder is, I guess I'm feeling old.
I got a few white hairs on my chin now.
I'm 10 years older than my new roommate, and he's a full-grown adult, so there's a problem there, I realize.
You know, when I was a kid in the 1980s, I just remember being four, and these are the people in your neighborhood, and all that on Mr. Rogers, or was that Sesame Street?
And the sheriff, the Travis County sheriff, he was one of the people in my neighborhood, and when I was in kindergarten, maybe first grade, around that age, if we saw a sheriff while we were walking to school, we would wave at him, or whatever.
Maybe that's a Texas thing, too, everybody just waves at everybody.
But we just assume, like, oh, good, that's the guy, I recognize the car and the shiny badge and whatever from the propaganda.
He's the guy, even though I don't know him, he's a stranger to me, he's a guy that I can trust by default, he's here to protect me, whatever.
I believed that when I was a little kid, but you know what I wonder?
I wonder whether that's even plausible to a little kid now.
I mean, I believed that up until I was about 11 and started skateboarding and had to actually deal with a cop in real life, myself.
And nobody ever held a gun to my head in my life except a Williamson County sheriff.
So I learned really young about who these people really are and how they really think and how they really treat people.
But I wonder now whether a four-year-old would even believe, Mr. Rogers, that these are the people in my neighborhood at all.
Or whether they would just say, yeah, right, dude, these are the enemies in my neighborhood.
That proverbial four-year-old might believe that, but he really shouldn't.
The default assumption should be that if you're dealing with somebody who represents the government ruling, that you're dealing with the most dangerous personality with an eye shot.
And in trying to raise our children, Corinne and I, my wife Corinne and I, are trying to instill in my children two attitudes which may seem contradictory, but I think they're complementary.
The first is that they should be, by default, respectful towards everybody, including people or government employees, while looking on government employees in particular as people who are highly suspect in terms of what they can do to them or what they can do to our family.
We've had a couple of experiences in our lives over the last couple of years where we found ourselves on the receiving end of completely unwanted and unwelcome attention by the forces of public order, including one incident where we were hotlined by some very kind anonymous informant for, suppose, child abuse, and I had to get my family out of the county and then come back and confront the police.
That was, I think, an ironically useful incident in terms of forming the attitudes of our kids.
Yeah.
Well, and I urge people to read about that.
Just go to Pro Libertate and search around for, I don't know, the CPS.
Maybe we'll give them a couple of good keywords when we get back the title of a piece, because that's a very interesting read, that story, how you handled the situation.
Very useful to people, I think.
We'll be right back.
We're talking with the heroic Will Grigg.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners any time at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I really appreciate y'all tuning into the show today.
And it's a good one.
Margulies will be here.
Josh Rubner will be here.
I've never spoken with him before, but he looks like a very interesting character.
Other Scott Horton will be here.
And right now we're talking with my buddy Will Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And I thought of ten different ways to start this segment back up again here, this interview back up again.
But I think I just decided to throw all those out and start with this instead.
I'm just looking at my own Facebook page here, which is facebook.com slash Anti-War Radio, incidentally.
And I'm looking at this lady.
I haven't even had a chance to really read the whole story, but all I know is here's a woman with a big frown on her face and two black eyes and a miscarriage.
And she's suing the Indianapolis police.
And then below that is your piece about the criminals with badges.
That is the militarized gang that terrorizes the people of Denver, Colorado.
And I guess we could be talking about any town in America, I guess.
What I'm learning, especially with the Facebook and the YouTube and the way things are now.
Oh, here's one a little bit further down.
Grandmother shot seven times by cops for refusing to answer the census.
And it goes on like this.
And I just, you know, I don't know if it's the change in the technology, Will, or, you know, police brutality, not just for black folks anymore.
Now it's for everybody.
Right at the same time.
It's getting worse.
Right.
Same time that the technology is getting better, where, my God, man, it's like the cops kill at least one innocent person in America every single day.
Maybe more than that on average.
I'd be surprised if a word more than that on a daily average.
But I think you're dealing here with a combination of heightened visibility and a certain institutionalized impunity that didn't exist a generation ago.
I do believe that the culture has changed and it was programmed to change to the extent that government can actually bring about a change in the aggregate attitudes of the public.
I think we've seen that because people do react in a certain way when they are incessantly barraged with all-encompassing propaganda about threats that can only be mitigated or dealt with through the intervention of government.
People do make different calculations about their behavior and they perceive government policies differently if they believe that they're under some form of assault that only government can deal with, supposedly.
And we've had a barrage of that, pretty much an incessant barrage of that for over a generation now, in terms of the so-called war on crime and war on drugs and the way that the rhetoric dealing with the police has been altered to reflect a military mindset, I think has given birth, particularly when you're talking about that self-selected cohort of people to become members of law enforcement agencies, it has given birth to an attitude that these are soldiers in a domestic war facing a 360-degree battlefield.
And when they're dealing with so much as a tremor of resistance or even non-cooperation on the part of a member of the public they're supposedly protecting, the instant reaction on many occasions, or at least the cultivated reaction, the reaction that they are trained to display, is to use some form of pain compliance that is often lethal, whether you're talking about a taser, which is a lethal weapon.
Let's not by any means wrap this in the guise of euphemism, a taser is a lethal weapon.
If you grab a taser from a police officer and shoot him with it, you'll be prosecuted for felonious assault with a deadly weapon.
If you use a taser, if you're armed with a taser, and the rules of engagement of a local police department dictate that a firearm can be used to deal with deadly force, that a police officer, according to those standards, will be justified in shooting you and killing you if you threaten him with a taser.
Now if a police officer uses a taser against a citizen, or what I habitually refer to as a mere mundane, it suddenly becomes a less than lethal weapon.
And usually when, and if, a citizen is killed as a result of that encounter, then a medical examiner will struggle valiantly to try to find some other contributing factor, such as heart disease, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, diabetes, some underlying medical condition, often they'll talk about it being a result of excited delirium.
The idea being that the police officer didn't kill that individual with a taser, the police officer used a taser and the individual just happened to choose that moment to die.
That's how they go about trying to sculpt the narrative, if you will, trying to finesse the narrative in order to preserve the idea that these are implements of, I guess, what, peace and public order in the hands of these anointed officers of public coercion, whereas on the other hand, if we use them, they're considered to be lethal weapons.
But they are lethal weapons, they're reliably, consistently lethal weapons, people are dying every day because they're being used for pain compliance, whereas 15, 20 years ago we were told that they'd only be used in circumstances in which lethal force would be justified as an intermediate rung on the escalation ladder.
But they're the implement of first resort, increasingly, for police officers who are dealing with the momentary hesitation on the part of a civilian.
Well, and it's all too predictable, too.
And I think people probably don't even, a lot of people don't even really remember that, that, look, the cops, a lot of times they got no choice because they're in a situation where they just can't win with their bare hands and they end up having to pull their gun and shoot somebody.
So now we'll give them this less than lethal gun, basically, so that if they're in a position where they would have to shoot, maybe now they can shoot but not to kill with this taser instead.
And I guess, you know, there will be people with heart problems who die of their heart problems while they happen to be getting tased.
But still, that's better than getting bullets straight through you, at least you got a better chance than that.
And yet, like you say, they don't reach for their, when it's a time when they would reach for their gun, they reach for their gun.
When it's a time for them to reach for their taser, you know, they've already used it 10 times.
You know what I mean?
Like they use that instead of a headlock, instead of a, you know, try to grab somebody by the wrist or anything.
It's their first resort.
Or instead of de-escalating the situation.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a completely lost art now.
When I was growing up in a small town in Oregon and later in a different small town in Idaho, I spent a lot of time in the company of police officers, where they're talking about street officers, just commonplace, everyday beat cops.
Or I spent a lot of time doing ride-alongs as a teenager with the deputy sheriff I knew in the little town of southeastern Idaho where I grew up.
And I had long conversations about subjects of this sort.
And usually the police officers I knew at the time made it a point of pride to tell me that they'd never actually drawn their weapons and that they were trained to try to find ways of diffusing a situation in such a way that everybody would go home.
That you'd be able to resolve a situation without taking somebody to jail, without, of course, shooting somebody or otherwise brutalizing somebody.
But that changed.
That is something that I think is a definable change in law enforcement, just during the last generation or so, largely as a result of this insane policy called the War on Drugs, which is a very literal shooting war taking place within the borders of our country that is claiming lives every single day and resulting in deeply entrenched corruption, and best as importantly, creating an outright, undisguised military mindset on the part of law enforcement.
Now rather than dealing with people as people, that is to say as individuals who may or may not pose an actual threat to the property and persons of others, now the idea is that you must make them submit.
You must command your battle zone.
That's the military approach.
That's a martial law assumption.
The idea that you simply have to obey anything that dribbles down the chin of a tax-fed functionary is part of a martial law mindset.
You have to submit.
And in the grand scheme of things, the hierarchy of society, because you're not dressed the way they are, and you're not paid by the public fisc to go out and compel people, you are below them.
You're subordinate to them, and you have to recognize that at a time of their choosing.
And that's a very ominous change in the culture that has happened within the last generation, and it's not getting any better.
God help us when the people come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly in Afghanistan where a lot of these people are going to become drug addicts because they're protecting the government to run opium supplies over there, but they come back to this country and they can't find honest work.
They're going to go into law enforcement.
They're going to, in that field, employ everything they learned in these all-encompassing battle zones, and things are going to get measurably worse if we ever see an actual de-escalation and de-mobilization from these wars overseas.
So we really got a mess on our hands that's going to last for a generation or longer because it's taken us a generation to get into this mess.
Yeah, well, this is the part of the show where I get to fix blame.
It's the American people's fault, Will, because you know what happened?
The cops saw the reaction to the Waco massacre, which was, yeah, kill them!
And they said, wow, this is great.
We can do this from now on, and then they used the exact same pattern of demonization and the very same accusations against Quresh.
They turned around and used the exact same model against Saddam Hussein.
He's crazy, so we can't deal with him.
He's bad to his own people, and he's got illegal weapons, and we're going to send in the Delta Force to torture and burn them to death.
And now they're doing the exact same script against Iran, too.
And the people love it.
Show us an enemy, tell us why they're a demon and ain't human, and it's okay to kill them, and then we will sit, we, the American people in their vast majority, will sit cramming their mouth full of popcorn and watching the fire on TV and loving it.
It's better than a football game.
Sure, drinking their Brondo, and otherwise behaving like beautiful citizens of idiocracy.
Oh, man.
All right, everybody, that's Will Gregg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Thanks so much, man.
Take care, Scott.
We'll be right back, y'all.