 Hey guys, this is Stowe Bishop with Radio Rothbard, and I want to let you know about an exciting event we have coming up on September 23rd in Nashville, Tennessee. One of Ron Paul's favorite lines was, truth is treason and the empire of lies. Americans around the country are waking up to this reality, war across the globe, regulating free speech at home, printing trillions of dollars. The regime accepts no limits to its power. Speaking on this topic, we all have brave truth tellers, including Ted Carpenter, Michael Rectonwald, Jonathan Newman, and many more. Again, this is on September 23rd in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee. You can find more about this event and get your tickets at Mises.org slash Nashville 23. Welcome back to Radio Rothbard. I'm Ryan McMakin, I'm a senior editor with the Mises Institute, and of course with me is Stowe Bishop, my co-host here on Radio Rothbard. And so we're going to talk a little bit today about political crime and how political crime becomes more prominent as regime paranoia increases. And by regime paranoia, I mean all this stuff you're hearing from our current regime, but of course is a common phenomenon among governments. You're hearing a lot about insurrection, about misinformation, about people undermining elections, how dare people question the outcomes of elections. And there just seems to be a heightened fear on the part of the regime about all of these people out there who are saying bad things about the regime and doubting the regime's elections and its institutions. And to a certain extent, we have documented evidence that they're not completely off base in recent years. Public faith in government institutions has gone into even steeper decline than normal. I think a recent Gallup poll showed about 6% of registered Republicans view, say that they have either moderate or a lot of faith in the presidency, and only 18% of independence. So one in five Americans who aren't Democrats think that the presidency is something that requires your faith. Of course it's odd that the Congress is despised, even the Supreme Court has gone into deep decline. The police have suffered, even the military has seen double digit declines in how much people place their faith in this institution and how much integrity they think this institution has. And normally the military's been untouchable. And so certainly there's something going on where people are starting to figure out that these institutions are corrupt and certainly don't have your best interests at heart. And so what does that mean then? Well, we often find that when states start to suspect that the public is doubting its legitimacy or when the state encounters big problems in terms of its military successes or its ability to rule, they start to crack down then. They start talking more and more about dissidents and about doing something about all of these people that oppose the regime. And I think that's why we hear more and more about misinformation, about the need to control the flow of information, about how there's all these people out there lying about the regime. And we know that the Biden administration is actively involved in getting private corporations to deplatform people to control what they say. I wouldn't really call it censorship because it's not direct control and judicial prosecution as it is historically, but it's certainly government attempts to get around to the First Amendment and silence its critics. And if the state felt that most people were fine with the regime, I don't think you'd see that sort of thing happening, let alone all of these draconian sentences being handed down to the January 6th defendants where you've got people. And I noted this in an article that we published Friday, which is on this irony of how real crime is surging in the nation, unsolved mystery, unsolved crime or unsolved murders at a 30-year high, high increase in both property and violent crime. Yeah, not back to 1970s or early 90s rates, but certainly significant increases of 30% year over year in some cases. While that's going on, instead, what we're seeing is the FBI pulling out all the stops to find everyone they can who might have been associated with January 6th or other quote-unquote crimes against the regime. And so you have people handed years in prison for putting their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk or for walking through her office that the head of the Proud Boys hand or their currently prosecutors are seeking a 30-year sentence for this guy who wasn't even in Washington on January 6th. And meanwhile, of course, the FBI is blithely casual about real crime, sexual assaults, which I document in the article as well. Clearly, their primary interest is protecting the regime. And political crime just seems to be their primary concern. So I think we're seeing that more and more. And certainly they're directing most of it toward this idea that there's all these right-wing operatives out there that are trying to undermine the regime and they're engaged in quote-unquote anti-democratic activities, which in an early article I noted is just the modern stock phrase for what the Soviets used to call anti-revolutionary activities. Regimes come up with these phrases where it sounds like it's against some sort of value that everybody loves and values, when really all it means is anti-regime activity. So when you hear anti-democratic, all it means is anti-government, anti-regime. In the Soviet Union or in Cuba, when you heard anti-revolutionary, all that meant was something the regime doesn't like. So my impression is that there's an increase in this sort of regime hysteria, regime paranoia over all of these topics. But maybe that's just my impression and you talking to the normies out in the real world that maybe there's just as much faith in the regime as ever. But I would suggest that some of the documentation gives the regime good reason for being a little bit more paranoid than usual. Right. If people in DC were talking to the people I interact with on a daily basis, they would have good reason to be paranoid. I really like that term that you're pushing their regime paranoia as creating the spectrum. I think it's important to put this kind of within a broader context because some of these dynamics that we're talking about are kind of built into the system. These are within the structure of state placing. One of my favorite articles of yours in the past, the classic MacMacon-Banger, was a 2019 highlighting that fewer than half of violent crimes are solved in America. So this is before the craziness of 2020, the summer of love that we saw then. This is something that has been baked into the pie in terms of the priorities that various police institutions have in terms of focusing on high revenue generating crimes, offenses, civil asset forfeiture, drug crimes, et cetera, et cetera, that just the very basic economics of state controlled policing. Dr. Tate Feigli gave a talk about this at Mises You. If anyone's interested in that topic, I'd recommend looking at his lecture and his work broadly on this, that we don't have an incentive structure for policing, that market for defense that really prioritize or can prioritize violent crime given the structure. But what we've seen the last few years is back in 2019, we weren't arresting a bunch of burglars and violent criminals and then releasing them back on the streets for political reasons. And we saw that play out during the riots inspired by the George Floyd case. We've seen this in recent years where there is this anarcho-terrannical dynamic to it where certain people of a political bent have a very low level, a very low threshold in terms of what the police are willing to do. We can go into factors in terms of the explicit politicalization of DAs and the like. I think everyone feels this gradual partisan dynamic within the criminal justice and it's only been amplified after January 6th, which was the perfect situation to help allow for this aggressive escalation on this anti-regime behavior on the oppositional class that has been used ever since. And you look at something right now, I think one of the themes that we talk about that is very important is the continual erosion of certain norms. There's always been, again, so long as we have a state, there's been various inefficiencies, there's various incentive problems in that ultimately what really governs a political body, what really governs a state is less the constitution, it's less anything written down in law. It has kind of accepted upon code of norms, which inevitably in the time of crisis tend to be broken. Often those changes are not healed afterwards. We have this ratchet effect in terms of how the state operates. And what we're seeing right now, I think particularly with, say, the charges levied against Trump and Georgia, the important part of that is less the charges against Trump, which we're probably all tired of talking about, it's a continuation of a variety of these indictments. It's a continuation of this larger regime versus Trump sort of narrative out there. But the escalation there is the willing to prosecute his legal team. It's the willingness to prosecute the chief of staff. It's all these different individuals that were serving in a sort of professional role for what their client, Donald Trump, was wanting to do. And that focus on going after them is something that is highly, highly irregular. And it continues this escalation of the breakdown of accepted norms within this, going after and reflecting, I think, this regime paranoia that you have right now. And that you talked about the decaying faith institutions, going back to the military polling. One of the things that's most interesting is that the group of Americans right now that are the least optimistic, have the least amount of confidence in the military is that independent voter. And so you see kind of particularly this line of independence, their faith, which you would expect, right? Republicans, Democrats, right? Okay, you have a Republican in the White House, Democrats are going to respond to that. Republicans in the White House, Democrats are going to respond to that. Fine, whatever, you're going to have that sort of binary dynamic. It's that independent voter that is losing all of this faith, no matter who is in charge, that again, I think it's reflecting this just general breakdown on who can you trust within the regime. And again, that creates the opportunities for those of us that see the regime for what it is, should that be able to be focused into some sort of toppling, some sort of reform, however you want to, whatever the end result is. But it does reflect in just this mass understanding that what is going on right now is not normal. It's not okay. And the regime is doubling down on protecting itself and all of its own special interests while the crime rates in inner cities. And really beyond that is going up. And of course, it's difficult to get accurate measures on this. We've talked about in the past, the reporting of various crime statistics from the FBI and the like, the most recent data from the FBI goes back to 2019 before we saw this uptick. And so there's also that sort of cover up dynamic as well if you were to take a cynical aspect and dare I say we might be cynical on some of the reporting of these federal agencies. But there's also that move to hide exactly how bad things are going. And so we have various media outlets trying to say, try to convince people, well, everything's hunky dory. Your average person is not feeling that right now. Yeah, I think they have it's not just the news. Normal people, I think they can just look around their city and just see how much disorder there is in terms of homeless camps. And some cities are certainly worse than others. It's silly. Foreigners like to do this a lot. Oh, I visited San Francisco and I can't believe America is so dirty and awful now. Yeah, well, San Francisco is a long way from me. So trying to describe America, quote unquote, according to the filth of places like California is perhaps going a bit far. But I think when you can see just the the general urban disorder that exists, that's alarming to people and they don't like living in filthy cities where they're constantly accosted by homeless people and they don't know what those people will do. It's it's not pleasant and they wonder why they have to live this way. And they wonder why while all that is going on, the regime seems primarily concerned with controlling, quote unquote, misinformation, where God forbid somebody might criticize Pfizer Corporation online. And I think people get a sense of that's where the real priorities of the regime lie. Now, we should note, of course, historically that this is hardly like the first time this has happened, right? American history is filled with these panics over some sort of enemy group that is trying to undermine the regime. Right now, it just happens to be Trump supporters or people who are sympathetic to that at all or people who didn't want to take the vaccine or people who maybe think that that counts in elections are not 100% accurate, which of course is the realistic view. And so we can look, of course, about various panics during World War One, the alien sedition acts in the 1790s. And of course, the Cold War was a great flowering of paranoia over foreign agents and communists and all of that, all of which, of course, greatly increased the power of the state. Or we recently passed the 31st anniversary of the Ruby Ridge double murder committed by federal agents of innocent people at the Randy Weaver compound in northern Idaho for which no federal agents were punished, of course. But this was clearly a case where it was just regime paranoia over Randy Weaver. Oh, he had some guns that we decided were illegal. The guy hardly had any sort of arsenal that was a threat to the public at large. And they spent countless hours and resources trying to get this guy and then set up an entire operation around his house in the middle of nowhere and killed him and tried to convince him of various crimes on which they didn't get him for much at all. And so there you go. There's just the 1990s hysteria over militias and right-wing Aryan nation people and that sort of thing, which of course proved to be no threat to the general public whatsoever. And so we can find many, many cases of this. But perhaps the golden age of the retreat of the state in terms of this sort of thing was in the 19th century after Jefferson's victory in 1800 and they got rid of the alien and sedition acts and just really scaled back the federalist attempts to clamp down on freedom across the nation so that throughout certainly the first half of the 19th century, you had no federal laws about sedition or conspiracy or any of that stuff. Anyone who was convicted of treason was convicted of doing it against the state. And that, of course, was extremely rare. And the only paranoia you really had was actually in the slave states where there was constant paranoia over slave insurrections and abolitionists who were sending fliers and stuff in the mail to encourage anti-slavery activities and stuff. In most of the country, their political crime just simply wasn't an issue at all. It was after the Civil War then that the regime started to introduce all of these made up crimes like seditious conspiracy and all of these acts you might engage in that counted as a lesser version of treason. The reason they couldn't expand treason was because treason is so clearly defined in the Constitution precisely for purposes of limiting state power. They knew that monarchs of old had defined treason anyway they wanted and this was a way to screw people over. And so they carefully defined treason very specifically. So what did the feds do? They invented a bunch of crimes around sedition and insurrection and that sort of thing. And so, yeah, let's not get nostalgic or think that this isn't something that regularly occurs. It occurs in all states and it certainly occurs in the United States as well. It is restrained somewhat by the Bill of Rights, however. And so, of course, you can be sure that if it could, the regime would outlaw, quote unquote, misinformation that they would imprison people for criticizing vaccines online if they could or on the news. They can't because constitutional jurisprudence to the extent that still holds up is in the way. So if they could overturn that tomorrow, they absolutely would. I have no doubt that this is a long-term goal that they would like to have. And censorship is very much on real censorship with that comes with criminal penalties is very much, I think, a goal of regime backers. And you saw how the right wing works with this 20 years ago during the panic over terrorism and that people, anyone who spoke out against the regime's illegal wars was said to be for the terrorists. That was the official line from Cheney and friends, Cheney the Elder. And so it's certainly not a partisan thing and that it applies to anyone party. It tends to just be worse with whoever happens to be in power at any given time. But, of course, my overall position on this is that political crime isn't a real crime at all, including treason. We, of course, quoted Lysander Spooner more than once on that. You can't be convicted of treason for some sort of document you never signed, for you had no part in creating this fake social contract that only upholds your end of it, by the way. You have to pay taxes. You have to submit to it at all times. If the state just lets your children be murdered in a school or makes good on the fact that it is known that police do not have to actually provide you protection, if they just ignore you, if they just don't keep up their end of that keeping you safe bargain, it's fine. You just have to keep paying for it. It's a one-sided social contract and thus not a contract at all. And so any attempt to claim that people who don't uphold this social contract or don't hold to it are guilty of some sort of betrayal, treason, sedition, that sort of thing. It's all nonsense. If people are engaging in violent activities, they should be convicted of those violent activities. If they shot someone who did not attempt to attack them at the Capitol, then they're guilty of assault or attempted murder or even murder. But the whole purpose of these political crimes is for the regime to add additional penalties and to make it easier to get convictions. This is historically the role of political crime and to make it worse for the defendant. And certainly we're seeing that now with January 6th, but we've also seen it with all of the spying that takes place around terrorism and now domestic terrorism. And these are all attempts to get around the established law and create special tribunals or more less attention to the needs of evidence and to whip up public furor over this supposed threat to the public that occurs with these so-called political crimes. And it's all attempts to really build the power of the regime. And so anytime you see anyone being accused of one of these political crimes, you should ask why are they being charged for this fake crime and not for some sort of real theft or real type of assault that would be considered crime in any other circumstance. It's just the fact that the government gets special treatment and any attack on government property seen as some sort of special crime in reality it should not be. Of course, there's an economic dynamic to this as well, because we've seen it as one of the ways that the regime has sought to actively subvert the Bill of Rights has been outsourcing their censorship, the tools of controlling the conversation to large tech companies. And there is a very interesting Supreme Court case pending to be adjudicated there. I've already had some wins. It's Missouri versus Biden, where the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt has filed lawsuits against the Biden administration. It's kind of in the aftermath of the Twitter files. And what you have there is a number of individuals whose content was censored at the direct insistence of the regime, of the Biden administration. And they're working their way through that process. One of the people involved in that case was Dr. Aaron Cariotti, who spoke at our Medical Freedom Summit in New Hampshire this past week. And I highly recommend our listeners looking at his talk as well. It's a very great, it's kind of almost a Rothbardian breakdown of sort of the major players, kind of the economic incentives into the biomedical security state. But we've seen the regime could utilize these sort of proxy corporate entities, all of which, right, you know, they're dependent upon the permission of their permission being perhaps overly being a little bit of hyperbole there, but they ultimately they they're their entire rule of business can be directly damaged by various government entities and agencies. Should they not do the bidding of the regime? I think this is where it separates a great deal from where we were at during the war on terror days, where I remember, you know, being able to go on YouTube and watch, you know, loose change, you know, promoting 9-11 as an inside job, right? You could you had access to all of this alternative information undermining the various narratives of the war on terror of what was going on at the Patriot Act, all these things. You know, over time, the regime has adapted to that and has co-opted various platforms that once were allowed for genuine free speech and sort of dissonant thought they have now become kind of lockstep within the power structures that be. And, you know, thinking back to kind of this history of regime paranoia and these political crimes, it's also worth recognizing that, you know, there is a history in this country. You know, if you think about the reconstruction period after the Civil War, right, where the federal government went in and basically destroyed existing political structures by the states, you know, you had carpetbaggers moving into southern states to do the bidding of the Republican Party during the Grand Administration. You had scallywags who were, you know, Republican opportunists within these southern states that were perfectly fine taking up the mantle of the federal government. You had massive restriction on the vote for southerners who were against the, you know, the Union during the Civil War. You saw massive expansion of the franchise for various voting groups that the Union saw would vote reliably Republican. And so you had, you know, very much this entire dynamic of an imposed political structure on these, you know, states that had, you know, fought against the country. And it also played out within broader political conversations. You had the waving of the red shirt, of the bloody shirt being evoked. You write this entire sense of trees and this entire sense of, you know, lack of loyalty to the government was regularly used as a political hammer going against anyone that spoke up against, you know, what was a very corrupt, objectively corrupt Republican government during the Grand Administration. So these dynamics, these are not alien to the United States. I mean, I get that, you know, I understand that you're talking about the 1870s, you might as well be talking about the, you know, the 1070s for many people. But there is, even within the general constitutional framework that Americans had, we've seen this play out on American soil. And while we haven't gotten quite to the point of having, you know, various military districts governing red states that are refusing to bend the knee to whatever Washington wants, when we think about, again, this gradual breakdown of political norms and we think about moves right now to ban Trump from the ballot in certain states. Now, obviously, most of these are going to be places like California where, you know, the chance of Trump winning there generally, you know, isn't very relevant. And so, you know, from a practical standpoint, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to have a major electoral impact in terms of national politics. But you can think about states like Arizona, where you have a Democrat regime there. You can think about places like Wisconsin and Michigan. You take a few of those states off the board entirely by using the label of insurrection to remove certain candidates that they don't want on the ballot in general election. And immediately you have, you know, political disenfranchisement in this country on the scale of which we haven't seen in a very, very long time. And again, all this comes back to this underlying culture, this underlying fear of what D.C. has right now, which again, it's a very paranoid regime. And as we've talked about in the past, paranoid regimes are the most dangerous regimes. These are the ones that are far more likely to act out. They are far more, you know, that threat to their power structure leads to aggressiveness, it leads to recklessness. Stable regimes are a lot, you know, for all the sins they will commit, and that is many, they are far more likely to allow certain things to play out, being confident in the, you know, kind of the feet they have underneath them. And I think right now, you know, when you see just the absurdity of what's going on, you know, when you have Biden falling asleep in, you know, Maui, you know, during an event honoring, you know, children, I mean, again, 1,000 plus children that have likely perished in a fire there, which itself, you know, we talk about the inability for the regime to provide stability, as our own Conor O'Keeffe wrote in an article last week on the Mises Wire, the number of state failings, you know, whether it goes to, you know, water supplies for putting out the fire when it comes to the lack of alarm systems that are there on the island that were not used. You know, the regime is so focused on chasing these political crimes where there's so many, you know, day-to-day basic security order, you know, those sort of services that you would expect to be carried out even by a bad government. Those things are completely falling by the wayside with the obsession over these overtly ideological, political, you know, dominating sort of agendas out there. And again, I think this is something that Americans are recognizing. But the question is, you know, what does that actually look like in practice to push back again, particularly as you have various entities that get raked through the coals by the existing power structure, you know, when they are effective at standing up against it? Yeah, that's a good point, right, is that when regimes are afraid, they tend to act out. Certainly, historically, this is abundantly clear that it's when states start to see that the wheels are coming off. That's when it comes down, all of the prosecutions for treason and undermining the regime. And many people have pointed out that it was after 1942, for the Nazi regime, after they started to lose in the war, that that's when all of the most draconian sentences started coming down against any sort of German dissident. These were ordinary Germans who suddenly found themselves caught up in the net, the third Reich net, simply for expressing some opposition to the regime. And that wouldn't have happened in 1935. But once things started to go badly for the regime, it became certainly something that became downright common. And in those sorts of cases, then, prisoners start to get treated more badly, more concentration camps, prison camps get opened, not just on the third Reich, but in all these sorts of regimes. And thankfully, that's not quite as much of an issue in the United States. But nevertheless, I think there is an upside to that, of course, is that, well, as long as the regimes paranoia is founded on real developments, as we've suggested it probably is, that does suggest a real lack of faith in the regime, which is, of course, dangerous in terms of setting yourself up to reprisals from the regime itself, but as good and a beneficial development in terms of ideological trends, because you want people to lose their faith in the regime, and to start to see how little it offers in exchange for its crippling taxes and regulations and nonstop propaganda, and all of the demands it makes on regular people, though when a bridge collapses in the middle America, oh, it's going to be a few years before we can replace that bridge. Oh, but by the way, we'll make sure that men can use women's bathrooms, because that's our real priority. And so there, of course, there's outcries over those sorts of things, and which forces the state to back pedal. And that's all to the good, but that makes people in Washington very uncomfortable, because they don't like being criticized. They don't like people making them do things they don't feel like doing. And consider, for example, these laws saying that, oh, members of Congress can no longer invest in stocks actively. These are exactly the sorts of good legislation you get from real losses of confidence in the regime. The fact that that hasn't been illegal for 100 years is really quite shocking, actually, but just shows how naive most Americans have been about regime power and its legitimacy. And so, especially among conservatives who have traditionally been among the first to proclaim their support for the regime and wave its flag, I think that's all to the best. I think they should take a step further and stop using the regime's language in terms of things like treason and betraying public order and law and order and that sort of thing. The government's law is, I mean, some of those laws are legit laws, but many of them are garbage and don't deserve your respect or any sort of praise for their enforcement. And I think we're starting to see how law, especially during COVID, is used against innocent people shutting down business, sending out the police to destroy your life because you wouldn't close your business down or you leapt your house. And I think a lot of people saw that and will now remember it. And that has greatly harmed, I think, their views of regime legitimacy. But stop using words like treason and just follow the law, comply, which have long been conservative mottos and rally cries. He should have just said what the police did. Really should those of those people who had the cops shut down their businesses during COVID, should they have just complied? Should they have just done what the police did? And it's refreshing and good to see that many conservatives who traditionally have been stuges for the regime on this issue, useful idiots who could always be counted on to support regime and its concepts of law are now starting to turn the page on that. So I would encourage those people who are starting to have their doubts to very much consider continuing to do so and to finally make that jump into recognizing just how arbitrary most of these laws are and that the idea of that political crime, that is crimes against the regime are somehow worse than crimes against normal people, that that's all nonsense and should cease to have any sort of respect in the minds of ordinary people at all. It should also be rejected this entire notion of complete impotency in response to this, right? Like what you get right now is a bunch of, you get a handful of congressmen that go in front of hearings and they yell at certain figures and rightfully so. And I think a lot of the ones that actually do that are much better on this issue than the majority of their peers. But the reality is that the Republicans have the majority of the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives controls the budget. And so rather than simply talking about the weaponization of the government, having hearings and doing all these sort of things, which is better than doing nothing at all, I'll take the show over doing nothing, that's fine. But if you're really convinced that the FBI is being weaponized against your voters, which you should be, right? If you don't have that, that's another problem that you should not be in office, but hopefully we'll see how voters respond to that. But if you have that position, then the answer is to defund the FBI. The answer is to defund these various entities that are working against the interests of your constituency base. And until you have a Republican party, in this case, just given the current dynamics here, but whenever the party that is at the greatest risk of persecution by the standing authorities, as long as they're willing to continue to rubber stamp budgets and to huff and puff and then eventually give in when push comes to shove and are willing to stand and take what might be short-term, politically unpopular views to get serious about funding the very mechanisms that are being used against your people, then we're going to have this continue. One side is no problem right now doing all sorts of heinous things, breaking all sorts of norms in order to achieve their ideological goals. If the other side refuses to play that game, if they were refusing to use the leverage that they have, but the state level, federal level, et cetera, whatever you have a foothold of political power, if you're not willing to be, to rise up to the time and to use whatever leverage you have to stop these things, to protect the people that you are supposed to represent in theory, then we're going to continue to see this continual one-sided slide towards effectively a national party dictating the punishment of their enemies and the awarding of their friends. There's this shift within the rhetoric. You've seen various entities that make up the more intellectual side of conservatism or whatever word you want to use to call it, identify some of the sort of stuff, but until that's followed through with action, until you have political leaders that are willing to do this, then one side is going to continue to roll over on. It's going to continue to tread on the other half of the country that is very much upset and concerned about what is going on right now. And again, this goes to your point earlier about how democracy, in any words about democracy, you're simply defending a regime. And when you have now it becoming a, you know, the concern is the actual holding of elections for the political process. I can't think of anything that makes more blatant these, you know, just how shallow this views of democracy really are. And of course, you've been writing about, you know, just the way that the term democracy can be used as, you know, whatever catchall you want to be for a very long time. But again, hopefully there's more Americans waking up to that very reality. And so, you know, whatever you learned watching Schoolhouse Rock in the 80s no longer applies to the way that the structures of power really exist and are utilized here in the United States of America in 2023. Right. Well, we'll go ahead and end on that for this episode of Radio Rothbard. Thank you, though, for joining me. And we will be back next week with another episode and we'll see you next time.