All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And our next guest on the show today is my buddy, Will Grigg.
If you go to freedominourtime.blogspot.com, you'll find his blog, Pro Libertate.
He's also the author of the book, Liberty in Eclipse.
One of my favorite writers.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you?
Scott, I'm doing wonderfully, and thank you so much for having me as a guest.
It's always a privilege and a pleasure.
Well, thanks very much.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Do you notice anything ironic in the news lately?
Well, the news is always very irony-rich.
Unfortunately, we live in a time in which people are sort of irony-deficient, if you will, and we've been trained not to notice such things.
But the fact that we have a government ruling us right now that is the largest source of criminal violence in the world lecturing us about the supposed danger of what is called violent rhetoric is an irony that I find to be almost indigestible.
Yeah, well, you know, we played the Martin Luther King speech, Why I'm Against the Vietnam War, or the War in Vietnam, I guess is the proper title of it, earlier on the show today, since it's Martin Luther King Day.
And that was one of the points, I don't know if that's the exact quote out of that speech or not, I forget, but where he described the U.S. government as the largest purveyor of violence on the face of the earth.
And really, that hasn't changed this whole time, right?
It's not like it's from time to time, depending on how you measure it.
Ever since the days before Martin Luther King got killed by, I don't know if you think it was the state that killed him or not, that hasn't really changed that fact, that the U.S. government is the most violent force on earth?
It is, and what's happened, this is a point you've made on several occasions on your program, Scott, is that now that we no longer have the counterexample of the Soviet Union to provide a useful and healthy contrast, the empire ruling us right now has sort of lived down to the measure of its creation, if you will, by essaying, in a remarkably similar way, the dissent of an imperial power similar to that that we saw on the part of the Soviet Union, up to and including being mired in Afghanistan, which really is a 30-year conflict now.
More than 30 years we've actually been involved in Afghanistan from the time that Zygmunt Brzezinski and his pals decided to induce the Soviets to invade and occupy that country back in 1979, I guess it was, until today.
But we no longer have that counterexample of the Soviet Union as a way of measuring our decline into undisguised tyranny, and so without that presence in the debate, we find ourselves living under a state that is a corporatist tyranny.
It's not exactly, by any means, like what happened to the Soviet Union, but the criminal violence essayed by the government ruling us is certainly of a very similar magnitude, much more extensive in a geographic sense, and there's a greater sanctimony on the part of the people responsible for it than what you found on the part of the Brezhnevite nomenklatura.
These people honestly believe that they're carrying out God's errand by bombing entire populations out of existence or starving them to death the way they did for 10 years in Iraq.
Well, and then when some lunatic with a grudge commits an act of violence against a judge and a congresswoman, they act as though it was three Oklahoma bombings in a row or something for all the tears shed, and Lou Rockwell wrote a thing about peons don't count that wasn't about people killed by the state, it was just about Americans killed in the line of duty at 7-Eleven or who knows what, and how the state never cries over them this way.
But when something happens to the state, you would think that, you know, never even mind 9-Eleven, you would think the one shooting of this one congresswoman could possibly mean the end of America forever if we don't bow down to whatever the poor victim state wants now.
That's exactly the message being disseminated right now, that somebody has laid an unhallowed hand on the sanctified personage of one of our betters in the coercive class, and because we have the death of this federal judge and the death of a congressional aide who's a federal employee and a congresswoman who was critically shot, that is what we need to focus on.
All these liturgies of officially sanctioned grief that we've seen over the last week or so have been designed to impress that distinction on us.
It's not just that these people were innocent when they were gunned down by this, apparently gunned down by this deranged man, but he struck at the heart and soul of our country because he struck at people who are part of the political elite, and that's simply unconscionable.
Sure, we find every single day in this country SWAT teams breaking down doors and killing or otherwise terrorizing people to gunpoint, and in terms of death threats, either actual, verbal, or symbolic, we are immersed in them most of the time.
This is something we've been trained to be blind about is the fact that everything the government does contains an implicit death threat, and anytime we're in the company of somebody wearing a state-issued costume who's bearing arms and is clothed in the presumed power of discretionary killing, we're dealing with an actual death threat.
Yet we're supposed to believe that the fact that people using hackneyed and clichéd boilerplate political rhetoric involving such common idioms as lock and load, reload, using targets with respect to the congressional district and other things of this sort, this supposedly is unconscionable, this is supposedly what is poisoning the discourse, and this is supposedly what's precipitating the violence that we're dealing with now.
We always hear these discussions take place in the form of climatological metaphors that supposedly you see the clouds, the violent and extremist rhetoric, and out of these clouds precipitates this violence on the part of people like Jared Lochner.
Just this morning, as a matter of fact, I read a couple of articles talking in exactly those same terms.
You have to tone down the rhetoric because you don't know how it will affect these people who are mentally unbalanced, never giving thought to the possibility that when the government kills people with impunity and terrorizes people with even greater impunity that that creates an enabling condition, that that teaches lessons that are learned by people who are perhaps not terribly tightly wrapped.
But what we're told is that by criticizing what the government does in terms of the force and fraud that are its daily and constant routine, that supposedly precipitates violence.
And that only makes sense, of course, if you go through the looking glass and you end up in Orwell's universe.
And quite frankly, I think Orwell might not have been cynical enough to imagine where we are right now.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the thing I don't understand is that, you know, we're all brought up to believe in America.
I mean, I'm not that old.
I'm, you know, still early mid-30s.
Still a crippling.
But, you know, I remember not very long ago, and even still, you know, they beat it into our head that, you know, America is freedom and all these things.
And yet it's very incongruent when, you know, police have total impunity, when the government and its military overseas have complete impunity to do every wrong thing right in front of everybody's eyes.
And I just wonder, you know, how come it is that when they never found the weapons of mass destruction when it came out that they were torturing people or whatever, that people don't finally say it's too many lines have been crossed, too many old ladies got their heads beat in by the local deputy sheriff's SWAT team, and at some point stop.
It seems like all we get is, you know, people like, you know, on the complete outlier edge going crazy under all this stress, you know, goes wild and kills one congresswoman.
But there's not, you never see the American people saying, well, wait a minute, you know, there's got to be a line somewhere, and how come, I don't know, I still can't understand why everybody isn't as outraged as you and me, Will.
Or are they, but they just don't know, that's what they do, right?
They lash out in ways that aren't, you know, fully informed by what's going on.
So they hate Mexicans or gay people or their one local congresslady or whatever instead of understanding what's wrong with the system and how it got us to this place.
I can't understand either why it is that people, instead of focusing their hostilities on each other, aren't taking greater care to focus their hostilities on the apparatus of official coercion that we call the government.
I sort of live by the credo, if you can't say something nice, please make sure to say something about the government.
Unfortunately, we live in a very collectivist society for all of our self-vaunting and our unearned self-regard with respect to America being the last bastion of individualism and freedom.
We are a hopelessly collectivist country pending, and I'm going to contradict what I just said to a certain extent, pending the re-emergence of a healthy and principled skepticism about the use of power by anybody.
You look at the founding documents and the dicta of the founders, particularly Thomas Jefferson's famous statement about how in matters of power let us hear no more of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
That's the perspective that informed our founding.
If you take a look at books such as, I believe, Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, you can find a lot of that type of rhetoric, the sort that's regarded as poisonous now.
Yeah, well, you know, Jefferson ain't perfect, but I learned all my libertarianism from him before I ever heard any of these Murray Rothbard's and all them.
There's some pretty radical stuff in a lot of that writing, a lot of painful stuff to read, too.
All right, we'll be back, y'all.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Will Griggs on the line.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton trying to keep up with my buddy Will Griggs talking about the illness of American empire.
And one of the things about America and its current state of corruption, Will, that struck me in my ironical bone recently was the proposal, I guess, as far as I know it's already started, but at least proposed house investigations into the terrible terrorist threat of Muslim extremism in America to be chaired by Representative Peter King from New York.
And you have an excellent write-up on the history of this guy, Peter King, and who he is and what he's about, and just how ironical it is over there at prolibertatefreedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And I was wondering if you could help illustrate some of that to my friends in the audience here.
You're referring to his role as what could be described as a bag man for the Irish Republican Army for 25 years or so.
It ended in 2005, but he had been involved in canvassing people on behalf of NORAD, which was a group identified as early as 1977 as the financing arm of the most violent faction within the Irish Republican Army.
In the essay, I take care to say that I'm not going to condemn outright the Irish Republican cause.
It's just not one that we should be entangled in.
And I do think that there is something profoundly troubling about the fact that this guy, who's a putative conservative Republican, found himself working alongside people who were in the Marxist-Leninist core groups of some of these grouplets that spring off of the IRA that do pleasant things like conduct extortion and kidnapping and murders and bombings of all sorts.
There are thousands of people who have been killed this way, and many of them, of course, are people who have no political involvement at all in these disputes.
They're just innocent bystanders.
But this guy, for 25 years, was raising money from people who share his ethnic and his religious outlook and his ethnic background.
He was canvassing people and donating this money overseas, and then he would fly across the Atlantic and actually go to the pubs and hoist a few in the company of people who ended up in prison.
He went to the Felons Club, which was a joint that was watering a hole for people who had served time in prison as a result of terrorism convictions over in Ireland.
And now he's the head of the Committee on Homeland Security in the House of Representatives, and what he wants to do is he wants to use the investigative tools of that committee to conduct a broad and apparently open-ended investigation, inquiry, witch-hunt, really, within various American Muslim congregations on the assumption that these people, by virtue of their religious and ethnic background, should be considered terrorists, and at best, latent seditionists.
And the thing that is just, once again, unconscionable about this, apart from the fact that you're dealing with staggering hypocrisy on the part of Representative King, who, incidentally, last week proposed a measure that would ban mundanes like you and me, Scott, from having firearms within 1,000 feet of one of the consecrated vessels of the Holy State, the federal employees, if that would be enforceable.
That tells you a lot about his fundamental mindset and inclination.
Yeah, we were joking on the show about, oh, well, maybe every member of the House of Representatives needs to have their own secret service detail and private jets and just never come near us ever again.
Yeah, that's where they're going with this.
They want them to be surrounded by a Praetorian Guard or, as another member of Congress suggested, insulated literally by plexiglass in the House of Representatives.
Oh, man.
But with respect to this inquiry into the American Muslim congregations that Representative King wants to conduct, is that if you take a look at those acts of terrorism, or supposed acts of terrorism, this is the point you made before, Scott, that supposedly have been gestating within the various communities in this country, at Dearborn, Michigan, and New York, and New Jersey, and California, and so forth, in almost every case you have an instance where the FBI, working for the Joint Terrorism Task Force, has insinuated provocateurs into a given Muslim community for the purpose of facilitating terrorism.
That expression was actually used in a recent federal prosecution.
They referred to the provocateur, a fellow from Pakistan, as a terrorist facilitator.
There was another instance in Orange County I've written about, where a fellow by the name of, I believe his name is pronounced Craig Montiel, who was a three-time loser, a bunco artist, con man, he'd served time in prison, was recruited by the Joint Terrorism Task Force to infiltrate a mosque, and to precipitate some kind of supposed terrorist act.
He was so vulgar and obvious in what he was doing, and so offensive to the actual Muslims who were attending this mosque, that they called the FBI, and said, we have somebody in our midst we think is a terrorist, could you do something about this?
Well, what they did, was they ended up framing one of the people who complained about this, for a bogus terrorism-related charge, and spent a year and a half trying to throw him in prison.
And this mosque had gone so far as to take out a restraining order on the FBI provocateur, and it was because of that restraining order, because of the publicity, that the FBI wasn't able to consummate this blackmail against this hapless Afghan immigrant, who had no connection to terrorism at all whatsoever.
But this sort of thing is happening pretty much in every Muslim community in this country right now, and you have Muslims who are patriotic, and who are faithful to their religious teachings, which do not, contrary to what most people are led to believe, which do not sanction wholesale violence against the innocent.
Those people are doing what they can to try to beat back people who are actual terrorists, and you have this guy in Congress, who is a retired bagman for an actual terrorist group, presuming to use the power of the federal government to try to target these people for official persecution.
And that, as you said, Scott, is a really good slice of the regnant corruption today in the American imperial system.
Well, you know, I don't know, I guess this is another one of those lines, like, we'll see if they can cross it, but I guess they can.
You look at the mosque controversy in New York, so-called controversy, from recent months, I guess if they wanted to turn this into a straight-up, there's an American Muslim terrorist under every bed, nationwide witch-hunt, they could.
The American people would just join up for the thing.
Make them all put green crescents on their clothes, so we can identify them.
Well, there are literally people who are professional, what I call compulsive mosque baiters, who want us to believe that every mosque is an arms depot and a forward operating base for jihad.
And this is a modern, if you will, transliteration of something that was being said a century ago, with respect to Roman Catholics, of whom Peter King is one, that every parish hall, every bingo hall, every convent, every parochial school, was being used by the forces, the papist forces of the Antichrist, to gather arms to prepare for something that would make the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre look like a slap fight.
And this actually led to the passage in some states of laws that permitted warrantless searches of Catholic-owned properties, in the name, supposedly, of finding out if the Knights of Columbus were actually assembling arms for a holy war.
Oh, thank God the government saved us from that terrible Catholic plot, I had no idea.
Exactly, and now you just update it by a century and change the tune, so translate it, transpose it into the key of Muslim bashing, you've got the same thing that Peter King is promoting right now.
The guy is absolutely deaf to the historic resonance of what he's doing, and I think he must be an individual incapable of detecting irony, or having even so much as a particle of self-awareness, because I think that by this point, this must be obvious to a person of even average intelligence, for that matter, even somebody like Sean Hannity.
Yeah, I don't know, well, we will not hold our breath waiting for him to pick up the irony on this one, but there we go, alright, I'm sorry that we're all out of time, I really appreciate yours on the show today, Will.
You bet, thanks so much, Scott.
Everybody, that's the heroic Will Grigg, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Liberty and Eclipse is the book, at Barnes and Noble.com.
