 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Once again, the Mises Weekends, we're joined by an old friend of mine, a writer with whom many of you are already familiar, the great James Bovard. So, Jim, how you doing today? Hey, dude, good, Jeff. Thanks so much for having me back on your program. Well, I wanted to talk to you for a few reasons. One is kind of a follow-up to a show we did last week with Ryan McMakin, where we discussed police abuse and the FBI. Among other things, Jim has a conscientious, excuse me, a contentious article out in the Hill about the FBI as a secret police. But for those of you who are not familiar with Jim Bovard, he is a longtime author. He's written many books about federal government overreach, a longtime writer at USA Today, at the Wall Street Journal, at places like the Hill. And he's actually got a new book coming out. It's available on Kindle. It's called Freedom Frauds, Hard Lessons in American Liberty, and it features some of the articles he's written over the years for our friends at the Future of Freedom Foundation. So, I'm gonna recommend that to you. It's on Amazon under James Bovard. So, that said, Jim, let me get, one of your great themes over the years is this moronic tribalism in politics. Give us your thoughts on the Roy Moore debacle. Ha, ha, oh God. Well, it was a mess, but this is, I mean, it was, you know, there are a lot of Alabama voters who felt like they had to choose between a child molester and a baby killer. And it's a default of the entire political system when it comes down to a choice like that. And they're supposed to sprinkle their holy water in one of the candidate's heads when many, if not most of the voters were mortified by both candidates. Same as what happened last year with the presidential election. But we see this recurring. It never seems to end, this, what aboutism? Where people accept something from their guy or gal, which the same conduct they denounce when it's the other side's guy and gal, guy or gal. How do we ever get past this? Is there ever a political end to this? I'm supposed to say something optimistic here, right? Yeah. Well, it's probably not gonna have a happy ending and the point that I've made, similar points to what y'all have made for a long time is that the second best solution is to minimize the power of winning politicians because it's almost impossible for voters to put a leash on them. It's almost impossible to know what exactly they're doing or exactly who is giving them favors, be it money or promises or sex or whatever. We find out years later and we're shocked. It's like, no, this has been the history of government and it's become far more. So once the government's become far more interventionist, once there was a federal law and policy for almost everything under the sun. Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it? How neither side seems to understand the folly of granting all this power to an organization that might not be controlled by them. One of the great things about your career is as libertarians, we're conceptually opposed to the state, but a lot of times we're not all that interested in the details. But the rest of the world is very interested in the details and one thing you've always done is you've gone in and in a journalistic fashion, exposed some of the rottenness of organizations like the FBI most recently, but the FDA, all kinds of boondoggles. Do you think as liberty-minded people, we do a bad job of showing the details sometimes? Here again, I'm trying to sound positive today. I mean, it's almost Christmas. I think you're right. I think many libertarians simply don't care about the details. Once they read Ayn Rand or read some other theoretician, they think they have all the answers and then they think that they should simply tell other people the theory and then people, if people are smart or honest, they will say, yes, that's the truth. I mean, it's a little bit similar to what Marxist did in the late 1800s where they had Marxist theory so they didn't need to understand how the economy worked. My experience is it's far easier to persuade people of the value of freedom and the danger of government if it's possible, quote, chapter and verse of the horror stories of what government has done. And part of it is I've always had kind of a twisted sense of humor and going after some of these programs and studies and it's fun to dig in and try to find that single detail that will make people's eyes open up if not make their head snap back. It's like, you know, to try to get the holy Shazam response to a federal horror story. But it's also giving you a bigger platform, right? As opposed to writing some theoretical libertarian article about the state, when you write a nitty-gritty article about, let's say, the drug war, somebody like the Wall Street Journal is far more interested in that than they are something about, let's say, Austrian economics. Sure, that's true. I mean, it's been an unforced example. The, you know, the Wall Street Journal has been supportive of the drug war probably since I don't know when. There was a really good editor they had in the 1980s, Tim Ferguson, who pushed back against that, but he, you know, he didn't last that long or long enough. So, but no, there've been other places that have been open for the issues in the drug war, but it's just, you know, I've found it's a lot easier to persuade people if you have specific examples. And maybe that's partly because the area that I live in is full of government workers and people who are very pro-government, but every now and then there's someone who I talk to and it's possible to watch their eyes and almost sense that the wheels are starting to turn and they're starting to say, oh, well, that's not good. And then to try to build from that to help them make the induction, to make them recognize the government does a lot of bad things across the board. Well, this article you wrote earlier this week in the Hill, it's called Yes, the FBI is America's Secret Police. We'll link to it. Tell us, what was the genesis of this piece? Did the Hill solicit it or how did it come to be? There was an article, there was a lot of controversy on the FBI lately because of questions about their role in the 2016 presidential election and questions about their investigation with the Trump campaign. And there was a Fox News commentator that said last Friday that the FBI become America's Secret Police. Well, there was a liberal group called Politifact, which gave a pants on fire label for that criticism of the FBI's Secret Police. I saw that and I said, ooh, this is a nice setup because not only did the liberal group say, it's not true, but it went through and basically said, well, you have to recognize that the FBI's democratic accountability, it has to obey the law, there's checks and balances, they're very careful. And those were basically a series of setups for me to do chapter and verse of Evan is the contrary. Well, it's a great article and what strikes me not only by the Politifact review of it, but also some of the comments is just this credulousness that people continue to have towards the federal government. It just seems like it's an enduring feature of the American mindset. Enduring feature, I mean, you know, maybe it's a question, is it a bug or a feature? And certainly the history looks more like a feature. And it's interesting, during the 1990s, after Waco and Ruby Ridge, a lot of conservatives recognized that the FBI had far too much power. After 9-11, there was a rally around the government, reflex the number of Americans who crossed the government to do the right thing doubled in the weeks after the 9-11 attacks. Consumers became far more supportive, but a number of liberal groups became saying, no, wait a minute, you know, the FBI's helping lock people up without charges, we can't find out where they went. We have no idea how many people are locked away and the FBI starts all these entrapment operations. So however, you know, it's gone back and forth. Once Obama became president, liberals became much less critical of the FBI. And now that the FBI's apparently in the front of the Trump investigation, liberals have put a halo over the agency. And this is appalling because liberals have done a lot of great work from 1924 onwards, pointing out the danger of a secret police agency with vast arbitrary power. Yeah, and let's not forget, as Ryan and I pointed out last week, there's no constitutional provision for federal police, and we see what federal police are doing in Spain to the Catalan's. It's not a happy thought that we need another layer of cops. Yeah, and there are so many evidence, so many layers of evidence that show that's the case. And yet, you know, it was interesting pulling together some of the research for this piece and trying to say, okay, so there's quotes that FBI agents are taught in their ethics course of the FBI Academy that it's okay for them to lie to people or to lie to targets of FBI investigations. Okay, that's interesting, that's abstract, but then I was doing a little more digging and found this great Washington Post piece from two years ago that talked about how false FBI trial testimony had helped sentence over 30 people to death who might have been innocent. You know, I would think that liberals might give a darn about that, but it's like, well, you know, he's a Russian agent. I mean, that was, you know, that was one of the more popular comments, responses to the Hill article labeling me a Russian agent, but you know, I don't even speak Russian. Well, it's amazing to see the civil liberties left just become what, they're formerly civil liberties left become what it's become. And one of the great examples of this is, you really touch on a sacred count here. The left is really shameful when it comes to anything dealing with the Branch Davidians or David Crash. It's some sort of hot button for them. Yes, and you know, there are exceptions to that. I mean, the folks at Counterpunch have always been great and the people on Counterpunch are still great on the FBI. There are some other liberal organizations. I think the folks at Fair Fairness and Activity and Reporting are probably still good. I haven't seen much of their stuff on the FBI. And there's other, Glenn Greenwald is probably very good on this. He's done very good civil liberties stuff. But if you look at the Washington Post or the commenters or most of the mainstream media, it's like that they've all, you know, put on your blindfolds and gotten in line. And it's interesting, back in the 1960s, conservatives, some conservatives would put bumper stickers on their cars saying, support your local sheriff. Well, nowadays, I expect to see on Priests, bumper stickers saying, support your secret of all powerful federal agents. I want to see a Priests with a bumper sticker that says support your local coal burning power plant. That's great. Yes, I mean, it's, and so, and those folks are so pious. It drives me nuts. It almost drives me to drink. But this latest round of public comment on the FBI, it's all about Hillary and the election, isn't it? It's all, when Comey was, when they thought Comey had blown the election for Hillary, the FBI was a rogue agency. Now that they think the FBI is behind the Mueller investigation of the Trump Russia idea, the FBI is an agency that has to be respected. Well, you know, it's one thing to have respect, but it's something completely different to venerate them. And that's the thing which has me kind of shaking my head ruefully is that you have all these liberals who are basically trying to expunge the FBI's entire history. It's like, well, Martin Luther King, well, that's an asterisk. Cointel Pro, that's an asterisk. J. Edgar Hoover's secret list of up to 20,000 Americans who would be seized and locked up in six federal detention camps were built in the 1950s, which supposedly was some kind of a BS conspiracy theory, but no, that's what they actually did. And we didn't find out about until long afterwards. Well, imagine J. Edgar Hoover with today's spying technology. Oh, yeah. I mean, to have J. Edgar Hoover tracking every email and J. Edgar Hoover knowing exactly who's, with J. Edgar Hoover knowing exactly which members of Congress sent which pictures of their anatomy to other people. So that could get ugly fast. Well, it's interesting though, because we've heard talk about members of Congress, members of various administrations fearing the CIA and what the CIA could do to them covertly that the CIA is unaccountable, even Truman said that he regretted creating it. We haven't heard that as much about the FBI. If I was a member of Congress right now who had some things in my past that I didn't want to come out that were potentially findable via metadata or electronics, I'm not sure I'd be out front criticizing the FBI. Well, yeah. And there was a comment that Hale Boggs made in 1971. He was the House majority leader at the time. And he said that the fear of the FBI had completely stymied a congressional criticism. And it was great. He made that comment and his pushback helped spur on probably the church committee, which did a great report in 1976. But nowadays there's a handful of congressmen who speak out, but it's hard to find congressmen with both intelligence and courage as you might recall your time as Ron Paul's chief of staff. So... Well, you know, you've been around DC, you've been writing for a long time. You know, give us your take. Do you really think that things are different today? Do you think that the atmosphere is more poisoned, more divisive than it's ever been? Or do you think that we just know about it because of social media and comment sections on articles like yours? I think it is harsher now. And I think it is more divisive. I don't know if it's more divisive than it's ever been. I mean, I was in school when Watergate went down. So I wasn't really, you know, I was, so I can't do an honest comparison. It's more fierce than any time which I can recall. And it's interesting, the number of folks, there was a woman I was kind of friendly with. She was some hypergroups I'm with and, you know, she was very upset that I wasn't calling Trump a fascist, whatever, fill in the blank. And so the level of personal attacks that I've seen and experienced from folks who knew me is like, you know, I don't, it's puzzling, but you know, again, this is modern life. This is modern life. And so, okay, so people are gonna hate you for, people are gonna hate you for not attesting the latest catechism on politics and the president and everything else. It's just like, okay, fine, you know, I'll have another beer. But even though, this friend that you pointed out, even though she knows you and you're working your history, it's not enough. It's not enough that you even stay silent. You need to affirmatively sort of approve what you call her catechism on Trump, for instance. That is true. And it's interesting to see the level of personal attacks and going back, you know, you try to be reasonable on these things, but you see folks, and it's interesting, there was a couple of folks I've talked to, I said, so, you know, they've ranted an array and I say, so how's your blood pressure doing? That's, you know, of course it's up. Everybody's blood pressure is up. If you're a decent human being, you're in rage and you're staying in rage. And I said, well, is that healthy? You bastard. Yeah. Okay, you know, I tried. Well, I guess part of it is that it is your job in a sense to chronicle all this. So you can find out more about Jim at JimBovar.com. Tell us about your book, The Style and Kindle Freedom Frauds. What do people find in there? Okay, this is the book, the title is Freedom Frauds. It's a collection of articles I've done for the future of Freedom Foundation over the last seven or eight years. It has lots of fun stuff in there. This is the only political book on Amazon which combines hitchhiking, torture, Syria, shovel-leading, the Civil War police shootings. And it has a fair amount of humor and lots of dirt as well. And it's only $3, which is cheaper than the price of a good cigar. I wouldn't know. And there was a free promotion today and Friday and then goes back a full price over the weekend. But full price is $3, you know? Eh, I mean, you know, folks burn that at Starbucks. Well, I think in Auburn, Alabama, you can still get a Bud Light for $3. But with that, ladies and gentlemen, if you're not reading Jim Bovard, you need to be, please follow him on Twitter, go to JimBovard.com, check out some of his books. You won't be disappointed, especially if you like Menken, if you like somebody who casts a jaundice eye towards politics and the folly of politics. And also if you like somebody who has an entertaining writing style as opposed to a pedantic or academic writing style, I can't recommend Jim's work enough. So with that, Jim, thanks so much, ladies and gentlemen. Have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.