All right, y'all, welcome back to Santa War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton, and check this out on Lou Rockwell's blog, Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy that does lessons on everything you could possibly learn in any school anywhere ever, is a Rothbardian on banking and has a YouTube all about fractional reserve banking and how that works.
I can't wait to watch this later.
Oh, maybe we'll listen to it live on the show in the third hour.
But anyways, now to our first guest on the show.
It's Will Grigg from the great blog ProLibertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing great, and it's always a pleasure to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, but I'm sad for the occasion.
You know, it had to happen.
Here we are in the future already, and so now the cops have drones.
Indeed they do.
And this is Rodney Brossart.
As I understand it, Mr. Brossart and his family are farmers who live near what would have to be called a hamlet named Lakota in the state of North Dakota.
They farm corn and soybeans, and for the last 10 or 15 years they've been involved in a number of controversies with the local school district.
They now homeschool their school-age children, and with the sheriff's department there in that county in North Dakota.
So I don't know what the state of their relationship would be with their neighbors, with the others who live in this small hamlet, but they're not on good terms with the Nelson County Sheriff's Department.
For the last 10 or 15 years there have been a number of issues of the sort that really should be handled without government intervention that have created controversies.
For instance, back in 1996 Mr. Brossart was cited for improving a small tract of land on his own property in defiance of one of the myriad statutes governing that type of activity on what should be private property.
And he ended up being found guilty of some offense, appealing it to the Supreme Court to overturn the conviction.
But that seems to have been sort of the ur-conflict, if you will, in this long-standing dispute between Mr. Brossart, his family, and the Nelson County Sheriff's Department.
And on a couple of occasions since then the sheriff's deputies have gone out and been involved in shouting matches with Mr. Brossart.
He was accused on one occasion of assaulting sheriff's deputies by yelling at them and then by tensing his arm when one of them took him to the ground and then used a mandibular joint pain compliance technique on him.
So as I'm able to read the situation, I've not been able to contact any of the principals on the ground.
I've made many efforts to do so.
It seems to me that whatever you say about Mr.
Brossart and his family, they may be eccentric, they may be abrasive.
It seems to me that really the local sheriff's office out there has been sort of a persistent source of harassment and needless trouble for this family.
And back in June, I believe was the 23rd of that month, a handful of cattle, I think six cows, stray cows, wandered onto the farm property that is owned by the Brossart family.
And the sheriff's department showed up and demanded the cattle.
And as I read the livestock law, and bear in mind I don't have a whole lot of expertise on that subject, it seems to me that there's a procedure outlined in the century code, which is the state statute for North Dakota, that would not entail simply having the sheriff's deputy show up and demand the cattle as they did.
And that appears to be the position taken by Mr. Brossart.
And the predictable conflict ensued.
Mr. Brossart told them to get off his property, they didn't leave.
The deputies went hands-on, tasered him, threw him to the ground, and arrested him.
And in the course of this, Scrum, one of Brossart's daughters, placed her unhallowed mundane hands on the sanctified personage of a deputy.
So she was arrested for assaulting that timid, cringing creature.
And then Mr. Brossart's wife, I believe her name is Susan, was asked about firearms on the property, which of course is none of the business of the deputies to begin with, that they're legally owned, and she wasn't cooperative.
So she was arrested for supposedly lying to law enforcement, which would be an intrusion on the monopoly the police have when it comes to the privilege of lying.
Police are trained to lie.
It's a job skill, it's part of their skill set, part of their toolkit.
They don't face legal consequences when they lie to us, but if one of us is less than forthcoming in spite of the fact that we have supposedly the constitutional right, the constitutionally protected right, better stated, to avoid incriminating ourselves in some circumstances, we can find ourselves arrested and charged with obstruction of disorderly conduct or anything else that a police officer can pull out of his retreating aperture by way of a bogus cover charge.
And that appears to be what happened here.
The following day, deputies went back out to the property and they were confronted by three of the adult sons of Mr. Brossard, who supposedly were carrying rifles, and told them to get off the property, which of course is perfectly appropriate in light of the fact that North Dakota is a castle doctrine state, as every state should be.
And as a result of this, the sheriff, a fellow by the name of Kelly Janka, contacted the Department of Homeland Security, which tasked a Predator B drone to conduct overhead surveillance of the Brossard farm in order to determine where the suspects were and whether they were armed.
And at the same time, to read from the Los Angeles Times account of this, the sheriff created what has to be considered sort of a full-spectrum military task force that included elements of the state highway patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances, deputy sheriffs from three other counties, in addition to the Predator B drone.
After it was determined by use of this overhead surveillance conducted from an altitude of about two miles, I think, that the three Brossard sons were unarmed, the police went in and arrested them without incident, without any additional violence apart, of course, from the armed abduction that takes place whenever police arrest one of their bettors.
So that's really, in microcosm, I think, a perfect illustration of the vertically integrated, militarized, homeland security apparatus that exists now, even in rural North Dakota.
When you're dealing with a dispute that involves some arcana from the livestock ordinances of that state having to do with what's called estuary laws.
An estuary, of course, is wandering livestock.
It could be a horse, it could be cattle, it could be a dog.
As I read the livestock law once again, if you are somebody whose property is violated by trespass by estuary livestock, then you have the right to destrain, that is to say, to seize said livestock until you can get satisfaction by way of security from the owner or some kind of court-mediated settlement for the damage that is done to your property.
And bear in mind, this is somebody who's a subsistence farmer.
He farms corn and soybeans.
The cattle invaded his property and he wasn't content to turn them over to the sheriff without finding some way to get satisfaction, apparently, for the damage that was done to his property.
And yet, out of this incident, you have blossom this meddlesome precedent here, where somebody who, because of his supposed political affiliations, which is a big part of the story, is targeted for the same type of scrutiny and the same type of multifaceted military response that you see being used overseas when you're talking about subsistence farmers in Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or elsewhere who are considered to be suspected militants because of their political inclinations.
Mr. Brossart allegedly, and I emphasize that adverb, had contact with a fellow by the name of Elvick, who's a mover and shaker, supposedly, in the so-called sovereign citizens movement, a movement about which I know next to nothing, but has been identified by the quasi-private Stasi called the Southern Poverty Law Center as a potential domestic terrorist group.
As a matter of fact, in the Bay Area this week, if I remember correctly, there's a sheriff's department that is conducting some kind of training seminar with the help of the so-called Anti-Defamation League on the subject of the sovereign citizens movement.
We don't know whether or not Brossart had any connection to this guy, but Sheriff Jonka said they were able to associate him with Mr. Elvick because Mr. Elvick at one point lived in an apartment in Lakota and then he moved to California.
But the fact that the sheriff was able to forge that association meant that Mr. Brossart was to be considered a domestic terrorist and apparently thereby a suitable target for this type of treatment involving a Predator B drone.
And it's important to point out as well that among the criminal charges that have been tacked on here as a result of this needless conflict, Mr. Brossart and his three sons have been accused with terrorizing law enforcement, which consists of either rejecting their aggression or being seen in the presence of law enforcement with firearms.
Boy, all right.
Well, I got 10 follow-up questions.
We're going to try to get to them on the other side of this break.
It's Will Gregg from Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
The book is Liberty in Eclipse.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Will Gregg from Pro Libertate.
That's freedom in our time.blogspot.com.
Send in the drones.
The Predator state goes domestic.
It's just a matter of time.
Come on.
Everybody shrug with me now.
We're talking about the case of this guy in North Dakota who, because the Southern Poverty Law Center said that he lives in a city that an activist that lives in California now used to live in, this guy is to be considered, I guess, I don't know, Timothy McVeigh or David Koresh or some aggressor like that.
Based on that, they called in drones from the Department of Homeland Security in order to accomplish their arrest of this, you said, terribly violent militia guy, right?
That's the way he's been depicted, particularly in the local media.
If you take a look at the media accounts between June and then in, I believe, early November when finally he and five other members of his family were arrested on bench warrants, they had not appeared at a preliminary hearing because they were worried about bringing in their harvest.
Bear in mind, once again, these are people who are not part of the federally subsidized agricultural combine.
This is a group of people who run a family farm.
But during that two and a half, three, four month long controversy, you had these breathless media accounts that were pretty much rip and read from SPLC propaganda depicting Mr. Brossard and his family as if they lived in a rural compound.
And it's always a compound.
Once again, you may live in a wiki up or a tar paper shack or a yurt, but it becomes an armed compound when the government decides that they want to target it and kill you or at least take you into custody.
And that was the caricature being urged on the public by the local media that were they were dealing with terribly violent militia type people when in fact by the time that Sheriff Gianco was actually able to talk with Rodney Brossard, I believe in early October, Mr.
Brossard made a point of saying, look, we actually don't have guns, we have hunting rifles, we don't have an arsenal to speak of, and we're not violent people.
I don't know where people have gotten the idea that we are violent, but it's probably because these individuals, this family, is possessed of a number of political ideas that are not considered mainstream, but that isn't to say necessarily that they adhere to any of the so-called sovereign citizen tenets that the SPLC said they must believe, because at one point Roger Elvick, one of the people who'd been involved in the so-called sovereign citizen movement and spent some time in the state penitentiary there in North Dakota, he briefly lived in Lakota.
So obviously by virtue of proximity, Mr. Brossard must be a disciple of this guy, ergo he must be considered a militant, a dissident, a potential terrorist.
At least that's what the SPLC would describe as the logic of the situation.
It's kind of funny in a way, Will, you gotta admit, it's like a slippery slope but with rocket boots or something.
Exactly.
We're really gonna go ahead the first time?
Well, I guess, you know, the week that they're passing this thing in the Congress, ratifying the power Bush and Obama have claimed all along anyway to have any of us turned over to the CIA or the military, you know, fly predator drones over our houses, turn them over to our local sheriff's departments for using against us.
The association is going to be the sovereign citizens activist used to live in the town where this guy lives, because the ADL or the SPLC, which I think is the same thing as the ADL, maybe you could clear that up.
Are they actually joined at the hip, you know, corporately or just in spirit?
If they're not, they're entirely fungible.
They're running the same scam and dividing up the loot.
All right, and really that's it?
It's really because he lived in the same town, huh?
I guess that's police work, that sounds about right.
That's what Sheriff Gianca said.
By the way, while this so-called siege or this confrontation was going on back in June, he actually took a call from the SPLC and gave a quote to their online publication, I believe it's called the Intelligence Watch or some such nonsense, but he was willing to talk to the SPLC, take their phone calls, return their phone calls at a time when supposedly the Brossard clan was menacing the fair population of the besieged town of Lakota.
But the thing that I find really interesting here is that it was Sheriff Gianca who said we have been able to associate him with.
He didn't say that Brossard was associating with Elvig to his knowledge.
He said we were able to associate him with Elvig.
That, I think, is a really good example of the potentially lethal mischief embedded in the NDAA's provisions having to do with identifying American citizens.
Well, ask a hundred thousand dead Iraqis.
Sure, there you go.
All you have to do is find some way in the perspective of the people who would use lethal force to associate people with others who have already been designated as targeted enemies of the state.
All you have to do is create that association in their perception and then basically there's no limit to what can be done to the person thus targeted.
It could be summary detention.
It could be summary execution.
The same sort of thing happened with Mr. Al-Waki and his son, his 16-year-old son, both of whom were killed in predator-facilitated missile strikes within about three weeks of each other.
They had both been associated by the Obama administration with Al-Qaeda.
That isn't to say that either of them had ever been materially proven to have some kind of connection to have been engaged in some overt act witnessed by two people or confessed to an open court, as the Constitution requires, the one crime listed in the Constitution, which is treason.
They were simply associated by this cabal, this nameless, faceless committee in the executive branch that compiles the rosters of people subject to summary execution by death squad or drone-fired missile or whatever means the president might employ.
In the case of Mr. Brossard, you have an unarmed, to the best of our knowledge, Predator B.
There's at least one account I read where they said that there was more than one used to run down this supposed menace to society.
So far as we know, the drone or drones would have been unarmed at this instance, but the fact that they were able to run the table of responses, beginning with hands-on and then taser-aided takedown of the guy on his property, up to and including the use of a Predator drone, illustrates how quickly somebody can be targeted by this apparatus and treated as an enemy of the state and potential terrorist, once again, even living in the wilds of rural North Dakota.
Yeah, maybe especially there.
By the local sheriff, I'm sorry.
Especially there, the unknown we can fear, where I bet you those arms, rednecks are ready to do god knows what up there, whatever, right?
All you got to do is imagine, just like the Branch Davidians were preparing to march on Waco and enslave the good people of that nice town, you know, where people stopped to pee on the way to Dallas.
Yeah, that was the same kind of rhetoric that you heard and saw with respect to the Branch Davidians and with respect to Randy Weaver and his family up in the northern part of Idaho, where I live.
Mr. Weaver and his family lived in a rural redoubt.
Well, hold it right there for a second.
On this topic, real quick, you say they're charging him with terrorizing the courts, but does that mean, like, specifically they're charging him under a North Dakota anti-terrorism statute or a federal one or what exactly is it?
They're not bringing federal charges against him.
They're being charged under North Dakota statutes.
But under terrorism statutes?
Yeah, well, it's called terrorizing and I'm trying to track down the origins of that, but it would surprise me down to my marrow if this weren't something that were either passed or revised recently to bring it into compliance with the post, at least post-Oklahoma City, Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that was sort of the ancestor of the Patriot Act.
It was produced by Joe Biden, with the help of Joe Biden in any case, and he's sort of the grand progenitor of both that act and the post-911 Patriot Homeland Security nonsense.
Yep.
Yes, safe bet.
I guess we'll find out.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm certainly going to follow up on that.
Yeah.
Well, let me mention, you mentioned the LA Times article, it's called Police Employ Predator Drone Spy Planes on Homefront, and I don't know, I guess my question is, how many years you give it before every Sheriff's Department is buzzing a couple of drones around all the time?
I mean, here in Austin, for example, they use the Starflight helicopter to help the cops all the time, but then sometimes they're not near where they need to go rescue somebody who's injured and needs a helicopter, you know?
So they'll say, well look, we could just give them drones and then the Starflight helicopter can just do its own thing.
Oh, they're very cunning and canny at devising rationales for getting the toys that they want, and once they have it, they will use it.
They'll find an excuse to use it.
But I think that probably before the end of the decade, every significant municipal police force or every sizable Sheriff's Department is going to have this capacity.
If they don't have proprietary UAVs, they're going to be able to task them out of a local Air Force base somewhere.
And one of the things that Glenn Greenwald has done, an immensely capable journalist and one of the best bloggers in the business, if not the best, he points out that there is a huge and ever-expanding lobby on behalf of the UAV industry that's trying to find ways of getting these into the hands of everybody.
Yeah, well it's just like the cameras.
Once they're cheap enough, up they go.
Nobody votes on it.
No democracy, nothing.
Exactly.
All right, well, thanks very much for your time as always, Will.
Appreciate it.
You bet.
Take care, Scott.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com for Will's blog, Pro Libertate, and get his book, Liberty in Eclipse.
