Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/20/24 Ken Silva on How the FBI Infiltrates Anti-Government Groups

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

Ken Silva returns to the show to talk about the work he’s doing to uncover how the FBI is going after dissident right-wing Americans. In this interview, they discuss Silva’s recent interview with David Gletty, who previously helped the FBI infiltrate the American neo-Nazi movement. Silva and Scott review what Gletty revealed and reflect on the FBI’s domestic activities more broadly. Discussed on the show: “Ex-FBI Source Reveals How He Infiltrated Anti-Gov’t Groups” (Headline USA) The Terror Factory by Trevor Aaronson “Fed Files V: DOJ Prosecutors Expose Identities of Alleged FBI Informants” (Headline USA) “The FBI’s Double Agent” (The Intercept) Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider Ken Silva has been a reporter for more than 10 years, working in places such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and the United States. Follow him on Twitter @JD_Cashless This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey guys on the line i got jd cashless well that's what they call him on the twitter there it's uh ken sylva he of course is an investigative reporter for headline usa.com and also we run him from time time to time where he's one kind of fellow or another, I forgot what we called him, at the Libertarian Institute as well. So welcome back to the show. How are you doing, sir? Oh, thank you very much.

And I'm but a humble contributor to your great site, but it's always good to be here. Well, we should name you some kind of fellow or another. I mean, I'm a poor man's version of J.D. Cash, hence the ode, the Twitter title. But. Yeah, I wasn't sure if that was a reference to just having a debit card. Well, it was the day after the Epic Times fired me, so I changed my Twitter handle both to kind of pay homage to J.D. Cash whose work, I kind of repurposed for the Epic Times as well as just a signal that I'm dead broke. But, you know, a year later, the Epic Times has had, like, getting allegations that it served as a money laundering front. So I'm feeling

pretty good about myself right now. Yeah. Well, I always just had my one good friend over there and but was always pretty skeptical of that organization i mean the full on gong is an insane flying saucer cult you know hell bent on corralling the united states of america into fighting china for them so yeah they they had big money they hired a bunch of good journalists like i'm not including myself in that but they hired away from yahoo and some other places but the the decision making was very murky i will be forever grateful they put Jesse Trenadu's picture on the front page with a big story about his case and that was in the print newspaper of 500,000 copies or sent around the country and in fact I was breaking news to

people that Jesse ran cross country with. I was talking to some of his buddies just to learn more about Jesse and you know his running career because I ran cross country too and somebody told me like hey I didn't even know Jesse was in this insane case until I saw the the Epic Times and I saw Jesse's photo on the front page. So, I mean, that, that alone was worth the whole experience for Epic. And I'll, I'll be grateful for that. I have that newspaper framed and I'll hang it when I, you know, get a house. Yeah, that's great, man. That really is cool. Imagine knowing Jesse Trenadu and not knowing about his story, but just having a whole other, you know, take on. It's like somebody who knows me from skateboarding, but they don't know I'm an

anti-government guy or something. Well, that's the thing, though. Jesse was, an all-American. I think he ran close to like a sub four mile. He's like the fastest hillbilly in the world is what I would title my book if I ever wrote a biography on him, but I'm kind of spread thin, so I don't think that's going to happen. You know what? You should start chipping away at that thing. Yeah. I think that'd be a great idea to have a biography of Jesse Tran do, you know. It needs to be done for sure. Somebody's got to do it and I'm willing to help, but I've working on another project that maybe we can discuss that's very, very closely. tied to Pat Con, and in fact, I'll make a really pretty strong statement.

And first of all, I think most of your listeners know that Pat Con's that undercover FBI operation in the 90s, closely tied to the OKC bombing, Waco, Ruby Ridge. I believe I've discovered that it, like, we say it never ended kind of as a quip when we talk about like the Whitmer Kidnap plot in 2020, but I believe I've literally discovered that It never ended, and it continued through the 2000s. And that's the story I recently published was an operative in this 2000s version of Pat Con, which is an operation dubbed primitive affliction. Interesting. All right.

So I've always been interested in this kind of thing, even, I think, before Waco or the Oklahoma City bombing. Not that the branch of Indians were the radical right, but just the radical right react. against what happened to them but I had already been interested in this I guess I had a teacher I don't know I think I'd just seen some stuff on TV about it too we're like there were pretty big

Aryan nations groups and white supremacist groups they were you know not that big of a deal but they were you know something newsworthy in the late 80s and early 90s you know that was interesting and then part of the story always is well what's the FBI doing

about them and then the idea was that, well, they infiltrate them. A lot of them are criminals, so they're easy to flip and turn into informants. And then the job of the FBI is making sure that they don't actually hurt anybody, right? And then the story with Oklahoma City is, hey, you're supposed to make sure they don't hurt anybody. And then you go and you look at the thing and you go, oh, well, the whole conspiracy was government informants top to bottom. hell is that and then it looks a lot like even if it I don't really think it was supposed to happen but it was supposed to almost happen it was provoked it was made you know worse than it otherwise

would have been by government involvement in that thing may not have happened at all and so that's the big paradox is of course it's a government program and if you got no white supremacist terrorists out there to fight then maybe you need to create some if that's your job and it's the fbi i and they're no good lying cheating honorless perjurer murderers and so they'll tell any lie they'll do anything to serve themselves only because that's how much contempt they have for the american people and the entire theory of the rule of law they just absolutely hate us and hate it and they're willing to do anything to serve themselves as has been proven over and over and over again and so uh you got this interesting story here about this group and well about

this continuation of paccon and this undercover informant you've been talking about and so i'm very interested to find out what all you found out from this guy i'm interested i guess in just the basic story of him busting actual real dangerous Nazis. But I'm also interested in whether he asked him whether his job was ever to make things worse, or especially in a way that really created a danger for regular Americans. So anyway, I don't know. I think this stuff is very interesting. And I was actually just working early this morning on the Rushdegate section of my book, which got me renewed in my absolute contempt for these very absolute worst Americans, the FBI, the Butchers of Waco, the sworn perjurers in virtually every case that they touch.

Right. And you mentioned, you know, there's no such thing. Once a government program gets enacted, it's basically permanent. And people might be wondering, like, well, if this is, if Pat Con continued into 2000s, why are we only hearing about this now? I think a lot of people have the impression that the FBI totally took its eye off the right wingers after 9-11 and only entrapped Muslims until just around the time of like the Dylan roof shooting in 2015 and the Trump presidency kind of reemerged like the early 90s atmosphere. But I believe it's the case that the FBI maintain informants and operatives in right-wing groups, but there just wasn't much action.

I think there was a lot of patriotism in the early 2000s, and like the dissident right only really geared up, maybe around 2005 or 2006, when that was kind of wearing off. And that's one of the interesting things that the subject of my interview, an informant or an operative, as he puts it, and I think that's actually there's something to that named David Gleddy said. He was actually embedded in the right-wing extremist so-called movement in 1996, right after the Oklahoma City bombing.

And I'm going to let you hear him talk about that in a little. But he didn't really make any cases until 2006 or 2007. And he explicitly told me that he didn't like the term informant because an operative is somebody that doesn't make cases. you go in there, you collect evidence without a search warrant because you're not going to make a case, and then you blackmail your target into flipping him into becoming an informant. So he explicitly told me that he flipped more informants than he busted bad guys. That's interesting. Wait, hold that clip. And this is something that was also very interesting to me from a very young age,

is that the law is really not that they, can't violate your rights. It's just that they won't be able to use that stuff in court. But if they want to spy on you, they can still spy on you. They want to infiltrate some kook even into your family to trick you into doing or saying something. Then they can do that, as you say, especially if all they want is to flip the person

that they're persecuting into themselves becoming an informant. Now you can get your probable cause and all this other stuff to make the case. But if you want to just spy on people, you know, it's just like the way that they buy up basically stolen data from these giant pseudo private firms, these contractor firms who go out and violate everybody's rights. And then the FBI is like, well, we're not the ones violating anybody's rights. We're just checking out these, you know, privately owned databases that have all this info in it and stuff that they would not be allowed to get themselves. but they just have a little bit of plausible deniability there and they can do whatever they want. Or just like how the FBI used the SPLC as an intelligence cut out and embedded informants in Elaheem City before the bombing.

One of the interesting things that David Gletty told me is that, like, so there's two operatives. He had a, he ran a fake militia. He called the A team, which is him, two other informants and two friends who, apparently they didn't know they were surrounded by feds, but they never got busted, I guess, for some reason. It's bizarre. It's in his book, which, by the way, was reported on by the late great Will Grigg, which when I was researching this, I saw that he wrote an article in 2007 about David Gleddy before a lot of the stuff about Gleddy came out, and that's just another credit to him. And, you know, what good instincts he had. He was scratching at a really big scandal,

but he just did, like, the information wasn't there for him to put the pieces together yet. But, yeah, I miss Will all the time. I think about him all the time. He comes up all the time. And, uh, David told me that, so two operatives will target their mark. And as long as you have two FBI informants or operatives, one of them can do all kinds of illegal stuff. You just need to keep one witness clean for a potential criminal case.

And that's something that I hadn't really considered. before and yeah just him actually saying that to me was shocking and i do have audio of him um so i interviewed him i tracked him down so in other words ken what you're saying is like one saw one if you had two informants you could have one guy actually really entrapped the guy like really go further than than you would think in getting someone to do something and and even breaking the law with them as long as that informant isn't the one that has to take the stand that's that's exactly right and i was a shock that he told me that but i should make sense yeah and then so in that game do the informants necessarily have to know each other and that each other are both informants

or well in that game they do but often they don't know that each other are you know they don't know all the informants in the group it could be like that meme where all the uh sheep's take off their costumes and they all turn out to be wolves that he told me that you leave like all the spider-man guys pointing at each other right right okay I'm gonna shut up and let you play audio go ahead bud okay let's start um so I let me establish this guy's credibility first of all the reason that he's telling me all these crazy things is because he was out at an open court in 2007 um And the interesting thing is that he had organized a neo-Nazi March in 2006. He lived in Orlando, and his name was on the permit because the National Socialist Movement

needed somebody to live in the city where they wanted to hold a protest. So it was like a big deal at the time that this informant organized a rally. But that's why I know that he's he is who he says he is, and that's why he's willing to talk about this stuff. But let me play you a clip. So I interviewed him privately, and he told me just about, you know, he spilled all the beans, and I said, well, shoot, the world's got to see him say this for themselves. So I had Gledy on last week on Jose Gala Sons show, No Way Jose.

He's done a bunch of OKC coverage with Richard Bruce. So that's the source of what you're about to hear. That doesn't happen? Yeah, you flood the field at this point. when something like that happens. And he's talking right after the Oklahoma City bombing and them flooding the field with informants. Oh, with talking about, I don't want to throw the FBI under the bus, even though they threw me under the bus. Most people don't know.

I was exposed in my hometown newspaper as an FBI Nazi, which I was not, but I infiltrated Nazis. And that's how it was. I was put on the gag order. I couldn't talk to media for a year. So I got exposed. I got thrown under the bus by the FBI. for the greater cause. So, but so what we're talking about after that happened,

the bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh, they flooded the field. And at that point, if you even talked about sneezing and causing damage near a courthouse or a state courthouse or a library or something, you were going down. So they flood the field. And this is where they send in people to,

help people get arrested quicker than they would have or maybe never would have. I know this is a sensitive subject and I believe you wrote about some of it. I write about it, some in my book. But yeah, so they send people in like myself and informants. They know where to go. The usual suspects, if you ever saw the movie, the usual suspects, they go around some people up and they rat some people out. Then they go to those people.

Then they go out through new members, get everyone as much. as they can in the facial recognition program, start getting tagged numbers. And they go to people that are vulnerable and get them to do things. And then you have good people that are clean that have never been in trouble before. And they help some people get arrested quicker than they would have. They might have been in trouble before. And now when you get with criminals, it's not very hard to talk to them into doing things. so yeah that's that's kind of the the basic gist of what he he he told us but the interviews

an hour and a half long and he really goes into incredible detail well now so is he entrapping people into selling drugs or he's entrapping people into arm robberies of innocent third parties or it seems to make a difference you know uh well the answer is he was entrapping Nazis and violating their constitutional rights in the process, he told me that, well, Nazis don't have rights because they violate other people's rights. And, you know, I'm not going to argue with the guy because I just consider them like a valuable. Well, but that's after the prosecution is how that's supposed to work, right? Sure, sure. And after you've been convicted of a crime, then we get to restrict your liberty, not we get to violate your rights in order to get a conviction.

but anyway I mean and look I agree with you and it is important that yes of course if Nazis rights aren't protected then everybody else's rights are in jeopardy but it's also important whether they're being entrapped into

offenses or real crimes and even then if they're if they're being entrapped into real crimes is it real crimes against say other Nazis or other criminals or whether they're hurting just regular citizens out there in the world

world. So he remained an operative for what, like seven years. And then the criminal case that where he was ultimately outed in court were against two Confederate hammerskins that were charged with robbing drug dealers. Like in the ghetto, you go, you know, you buy Coke at 8 p.m., then you go back at midnight, then you go back at 4 a.m. And that third time, they're used to you. And that's when you spring the robbery. And David Gletty told me that he did plant that. that idea in their minds and entrap them into doing that. And he told me that he witnessed these two do all kinds of like terrible actions like rape

and beat people up while he was hanging out with them. But then he bust them on this kind of weird charge. So I don't really know what to make of that. I should say that this guy is an admitted professional liar. So we can't take everything he says 100% to the bank, but we can kind of like triangulate certain, allegations with other information that we know and suss out the truth. And yeah, some of some of the stuff he says is 100% I believe true.

The Confederate Hammerskins case, why that ended the way it did? I don't know. It was kind of a bizarre way to kind of wrap up his career. Huh. Okay. So I guess how many court documents or contemporary news stories of these kinds of things do you have to verify? his claims. I have court documents.

I don't have hardly any contemporary stories because this never made the national media, but the Orlando Sentinel ran a giant story called Neo-Nazi organized, or, yeah, neo-Nazi rally organized by FBI informant. And then like 20 years or 15 years later, after January 6th, they kind of revisited Gledi and he's holding up the newspaper. and they talk about his work and how, you know, the radical right has reemerged. But the key court document is ironically his book, which that might be a weird thing to hear. So Will Grigg has a copy of his book because he bought it like right, right when it was published after he was outed.

But I believe you can't find it anywhere. I don't know if the FBI is buying up all the copies or what. But a neo-Nazi inmate named Bill White, who I've written about extensively in a series called The Fed Files, actually scan page by page the book and filed it as an exhibit arguing that he was entrapped. So that's how I was able to get the book. And the key thing in the book that establishes is credibility is a quote from his handler saying that David Gleddy worked for me and he got good results. And now his handler, his handler, Scott, is moved up. He's currently in ASAC in the Denver field office. Just throw that in there.

So, yeah, like he is who he says he is. He's definitely a credible operative, but, you know, again, a paid spook. I'm not going to just rewrite everything he says. I mean, he described to me participating in a satanic ritual, and I don't know what to make of that. So I'm not just reprinting everything what he says. Yeah. Well, you know, you talk about he was brought in after the Oklahoma bombing, which was, you know, there were so many people who thought that the purpose of the bombing was just to discredit the radical right at that time. And I mean broadly defined, including all the militias, many of whose politics were actually not that radical at all, by the way.

But, you know, that was always one interpret. of it was that the whole thing was just done to discredit them because they certainly were discredited by it and rather than touching off the revolution if that was what mcvay thought he was going to do it actually just every militia guy stayed home and shut his mouth after that and then there's just a couple of years later a few years later that w bush came and all the anti-government right of the 1990s realized that they were just against bill clinton they actually love government. They love government even more than their mama. And they stayed like that. I don't know, you said till 2005, 06. If you say so, it seemed like it wasn't until Obama came that they got

over that sentiment. Maybe it was after Katrina or something the spell kind of finally broke and they kind of went back into business there. But it would make sense to me then this is really like the bust in the boom bus cycle of anti-government, radical right-wing, especially criminal activity by, well, Klan or Aryan Nation or whatever skinhead groups of any real size, right? So this guy would have been involved during the lean years.

Did he tell you many other stories of who it was that he supposedly had infiltrated and gotten busted? I can tell you what he told me. There's not documentation for this, but he did tell the story, exactly like he told it in his book, and Will Gregg reported it from his book in an article Will Gregg wrote. So, you know, I got that leg to stand on. So he talks about infiltrating like Aryan nations type groups in the Smoky Mountain Regions in 96, and he describes a story

about meeting an Aryan nations member named Gary. He called him Gary the crazy mountain man. He didn't know the last name. And he claims that Gary, And this is really interesting, actually, was discussing, forging an alliance with al-Qaeda. And this is pre-9-11. And so Gledi reports that to the FBI. He says that the FBI wants to get a picture of this guy. They don't know who Gary is supposedly. Gary, by the way, is talking about teaming with al-Qaeda to set off dirty bombs in America.

It's likely that Gary might have been a Fed. himself but in any event Gleddy reports them they go to like a white water rafting tour tour book photos and they flip through all the pages and finally find Gary

and that's the last that Gleddy said he heard of this Gary the Mountain Man guy so that's that's kind of his initial start and then he does talk about like yeah he infiltrated the the Minutemen Border Watch group and in his book

it's interesting he actually talks about i like the minute men they're a constitutional group you know we didn't even try to make any kind of case we found out that these are good people so yeah he tells a couple bland stories in the early 2000s yeah there's this journalist that i used to respect until he was so horrible on syria 10 years ago that i hope he burns in hell but his name is Shane bower and you know he was like a mother jones type you know and he went and infiltrated undercover journalism with the border guys down there and if i remember right that was his conclusion too was oh nobody's committing crimes here or murdering anybody or doing anything like that they're actually

just desperately in need of security and the government won't provide it so yeah yeah and real quick you just mentioned also like a boom bust cycle in this period and another really really interesting thing and this is going to be the subject of a series i haven't published yet but i'm about to. I'm titling it, I'm planning on titling it, probably like the hidden history of Robert Mueller's right-wing terror factory. Because this, so when it, when the boom cycle starts to pick up in the mid-2000s, I believe this Operation Primitive Affliction, which was officially launched after Gleady's cover was blown, I think that was the first right-wing joint terrorism Task Force case in U.S. history.

If I remember correctly from Trevor Aronson's book, you know, the FBI formed these JTTFs after 9-11, Joint Terrorism Task Forces, where they kind of partner with the locals and deputize certain local cops to be feds and form various teams. And, you know, usually the task force officers are the actual ones that go undercover and pretend to be a renegade, outlaw biker, a bomb maker. And I guess the FBI agents are the ones handling the technical and legal aspects, but it's the informants, the operatives, and the undercover cops that do the dirty work. And yeah, again, I think it's really interesting that like this was like a test run of the JTTF model type of investigation against the right

wingers after using it against Muslims, primarily from like 2002 to, you know, up until this primitive affliction. It was only Muslim cases. People say to me, Scott, how do you get so much work done all the time? Coffee. It helps keep me from falling asleep. And it tastes really good because I get it from Moondose Artisan Coffee at Moondoseartisan Coffee.com. Moondose is kind of the anti-starbucks in that their coffee tastes real good. They have lots of great choices, representing all kinds of regions, blends, and flavors. I'm drinking the Ethiopian presently. Hey, wait, also, do you like saving money on good tasting coffee? Right now, you can get 10% off and help support this show if you just go to

Moondoseartisancoffee.com slash Horton. Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scott Horton.org. That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com slash horton. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them.

World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scotthorton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Yeah, you know, famously Trevor Aaron. has a great book, The Terror Factory, and I'm always jealous because I was going to write a book like that, and I had a partner, and we had done some book proposals, and we were going to cover the Liberty City 7 and the Fort Dix Pizza Plot and poor Hamid Hyatt out in Lodi, California, and there's so many of them. I could actually continue to rattle them off the top of my head, but I will spare you. But there were, I think Erinson says there's like 250 going on 300. of these cases that are, you know, varying degrees of entrapment.

As this guy was saying, some of these guys are real criminals and they're just begging to get entrapped into something and so tough for them. You know, if somebody comes and asks you to commit a crime, you're going to tell them no. So, like, you know, so there is a gray scale there. But you also have people where, like in Lodi, California, where the informant infiltrated a father and son. And just, and the kid was a kid. He was, you know, 15, 16 years old.

And this government informant is just putting words in his mouth and making him admit to completely insane and crazy untrue things that weren't even true anyway. And they put him in prison for, I don't know, I think he finally got out. But he went to the pen for like a decade over that. Oh, that's a bunch of those. Just awful. Yeah, so. And when it comes. And that goes really for anybody with radical politics.

You know what I mean? they do this to leftists as well, you know, your new friend with all the crazy ideas is not your friend, you know? Yeah. Be careful out there, people, you know? Libertarians, too. Yeah, that's exactly right. And when it comes to the right wing, it's a really tricky situation because our, like, our heritage is, is rebellion and insurrection. So when you get to these militia groups, everybody's talking this rhetoric and they all want to talk a big game and yeah it's just terrible what the FBI does and sets up these cases when they know there's no risk of danger but i mean that's just the world we live in today you got to be careful even if you're a libertarian i was uh doing some

research on a guy who flip informant a former libertarian name christopher cantwell and he was in the free state project and he was expelled for writing a story saying you know libertarian ethics dictates that we're allowed to kill federal agents and a couple years later he's outed as a fed so yeah libertarians beware as well yeah exactly and it was pretty obvious that guy was informed i think people were calling him out for a long time as being an informant before he became a nazi you know when he was still trying to say that stuff around other libertarians and whatever. Yeah, and I pretty much all but

confirmed that he's an informant. I had, so he outed himself as a Fed and then basically he was saying, oh, I'm talking to the FBI, but only about Antifa because these are our enemies and we need to use by any means necessary to crush the commies.

But then he goes to prison and this is subject of, I think, Fed Files 5 in my Fed Files series, and the neo-Nazi inmate Bill White claims that Cantwell offered him, you know, he's kind of taking a message from the DOJ that, hey, if you're a good boy, get out with me, let's start a front group, according to Bill White. That's just an allegation, but it is, it does, it does ring true

and it certainly matches the other public things we know about Cantwell. Yeah. It's an important point, what you say, too, about, you know, right-wing militia guys, their gun owners and a lot of them want to talk tough i know 25 years ago i heard all kinds of right wing militia guys say all kinds of right wing militia guy tough guy things and then none of them ever did anything and they weren't really threatening terrorism or anything like that but it was just in fact and feds should know this right there are obviously exceptions with real neo-nazies but like with the average militia guy and these kind of things the whole idea basically is is mutually assured destruction between the gun owners and the government,

that that's what the Second Amendment is for, is to make sure the government never does come for your guns because there's too many people whose guns they got to come for and that the people won't ever use their guns on the government unless they would be so bold and so tyrannical as to think that they could take them, in which case everybody grabs them out of the closet and actually finally uses them. But in other words, that day

when the national government declares war on the American people then everybody fights and that's what they're ready for it's not a matter of like oh the insurrection and the guerrilla war

insurgency is on now and so terrorism and assassination campaigns and whatever whatever all these guys are going to work in the morning they're going to work they're not terrorists

all that is for just the some day that never comes. This is a free country and our government wouldn't dare put us in that position. And so it doesn't matter. Hence the word prepper. Like that's what they call themselves prepper. And then you find like FBI reports, oh, these were worried about the rise of radical preppers.

Like, what the heck are you guys talking about? It's just insane. Yeah. Well, and it's, but it does make sense too, though, that slim pickings or sorry, easy pickings for government informants who their only job is like finding some guy who's willing to talk big for a minute and then they can just put a few more words in his mouth and they got him making a case out of nothing speaking of easy pickings it's really easy pickings when you get your target high on cocaine and so can i play you a clip about this is probably the funniest i mean it's kind

of you know he's violating people's rights but it did it really cracked me up it just how candid he was at talking about doing cocaine and the FBI tells him, you know, don't do too much, but can I play this for you real quick? Sure. Go ahead. All right. So, yeah, the FBI sees what you have, sees what you've done. Some things if you get in trouble with the FBI, because it was harder to deal with the FBI agents than it was infiltrating the criminal groups.

You know, you're, they're trusting you if you lie, and never to tell them. you lied. If you manipulated a situation, never tell them. Once you tell a story, you stick to your story. Never, never, ever change your story because you're done. Your word has to be gold. So no one really knows because the agent's not here. Your handler's not there. They might hear things from other people, but if my word, if something happens and like, oh my God, David did 10 lines of cocaine last night at Kobe's house. And there was a rule, you know, Don't overindulge. That was like, you know, what's over in three lines and that's about it.

So they're like, oh, my God, David did 10 lines. But it's my word against some guys that were in prison. Yeah, yeah, I kind of just look at your crossline, like, just keep your story. Because they won't results. So, yeah, that's pretty much the gist. And my mic is muted in that interview, but like, I've almost got tears streaming down my face and just like. Yeah, I saw that clip of you laughing. Yeah.

It's just, and he talks about getting mad at the FBI for disrespecting him when he does stuff like that. It's just hilarious. Yeah. Man, all right. So you got any more clips you want to play? Yeah, I've got one more big one that comes right after he talks about doing cocaine, about manipulating recordings. And the reason I think this is important is because in the Whitmer case, Trevor Aronson just published a big piece about an audio interview. of an FBI agent handler with his informant Steve Robson,

who's one of the more notorious informants in the Whitmer case, child molester, did all kinds of terrible things, provocative statements. Like, definitely entrapped them. But the audio of the inside the field office interview is very, you know, he's kind of getting dressed down where an FBI agent asks him, like, you had all these Whitmer guys to your property for a trade, field training exercise and militia exercise and like were you actually work in this case or were you training the people we're trying like are you an fbi informant training our targets like what's going

on here and it sounded like the fbi was scolding him for bad behavior but i think they might have told him something else off record uh because yeah listen listen to what david letty says about those kind of situations you go to the fbi office i'm getting stirred up now When you go to the FBI office, I get walked in the back door with a couple of agents. You kind of get disrespected. That's the part I hated. Like, you're just, you know, they're out there. Like, oh, man, you're doing such good work.

But when you come to the office, it's all all these guys in suits and ties. And they're all talking legal language. Not like what they talk to you. Like, oh, bro, man, everything's cool. And then they're talking to their buddies, the agent. So you get into the office. There's audio recordings, video recordings. They have to tell you, straight up, we need everything to be done by the rules.

We can't do this. We can't do that. We need some results. But then when they walk me out in the parking lot to my car, there's no video or audio recordings out in the parking lot. And that's when they tell you, look, we need results. We need to send shockwaves. We need you to do this.

I don't care what it takes. And then there's certain things about recording devices you're taught that can be record manipulated a recording device they don't I in I don't transmit so there's not a GPS on any recording device I ever wore so it's not going to transmit so it does not know where it's at it's lying on me to tell the recording device that's going to be used as intelligence or evidence against the subject in the future the recording devices that rely on me to tell at what time it is to date where I'm going and who I'm going to be with.

Then I can let the thing run entirely if it's going to be used as evidence. Entirely, then when I'm leaving five minutes later after I'm clear of everything skip the time and date and da-da-da-da-da. But I can actually

you can tell a different time and date. There's no... So there you have it from the horse's mouth. Yeah. hey listen we're cops we can break the law whenever we feel like it that's the law get results is what he was told uh mr gleddy do you want to be on the winning team or the losing team is is what he is what he was told according to him yeah yeah believably sounds

like um listen i wanted to ask you uh didn't you write something this is a pretty lousy way to run an interview but if i remember right uh i saw a headline on an article that you wrote that i never got a chance to read because i forgot about it but i'm remembering it now and it was about how the federal reserve had created a generation of radical right wingers back in the late 80s and early 90s and that's a story that i know a bit about and I'm very interested in, and I was wondering if you could talk about that. Oh, yeah, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity. I think I might have emailed you privately.

We were trying to get you out here to speak at a MESIS event coming up in August in North Carolina, and I'll be presenting a little thesis I've been toying around with is like the Federal Reserve policy of the 70s and 80s led to this rise in right-wing extremism. So hopefully people can come out to that. I think you could find that through the Mises' main page. So I'm not a big economics guy, but I've got kind of a fundamental understanding of the boom-bust cycle. And obviously, we know that the 70s was inflationary, and the common story is that Paul Volker became chairman. Reagan got in office, and they jacked up interest rates to defeat inflation, and this was a good thing.

And, of course, it was, but it wasn't without severe disastrous consequences. and that came in the form of a farm crisis this time. It wasn't a mortgage crisis or some savings and loans. It was farms had loaded up in the 70s, partly due to ag policy, buying heavy machinery. So I can't explain the Austrian-Hiaquian triangle, but like it's, you know, your plans get put out further and further. Your investments become more complicated. I guess something about a time horizon. I don't know.

Probably sounded stupid to the economist. But they pretty much bought all this capital machinery. And then when interest rates rose, the bus happened. And they were left with all this debt. I think it was inflationary, but the prices of crops weren't rising that much because the market was so competitive. So, you know, the cost of all their inputs are rising. but their product is staying the same.

And so in the early 80s, you had an average of like one farm a day shutting down for at least a couple years. And the farmers would be a lot of the guys who would become militia people. And the key person that I contend that sparked this all off was a guy named Gordon Cole,

who he was a North Dakota farmer, World War II vet. I would consider him a patriot. He was like, he was a racist, but he never really talked about that, like, you know, as a real issue. He was more anti-communism. He came back. He didn't like his taxpayer funding abortion. And so he stages like a tax protest.

He gets thrown in jail, gets out. He's on probation. He vows never go back to jail again because he had two heart attacks in jail. you know, I don't know. I think he actually believed the government was trying to kill him, whether that's true or not. I'm just trying to set, give you an idea of this guy's mentality. So the marshals try to take him down and they get into a shootout. He kills two marshals, goes on the run, a fugitive for a couple months,

becomes a real cult hero in the underground dissident right in the early 80s. The FBI eventually tracks him down. and waco's him, burns his house alive, his body's deformed. It really looks like the FBI murdered him on purpose in revenge. Regardless if that's true, that's definitely what the right-winger's thought. And that, I think the next month was the Aryan Nations World Congress. Lewis Beams talking about how they murdered Gordon Call, this is a declaration of war, we're going to war, and it was out of that meeting that the neo-noughts,

bank robber gang, the order starts. And they end up robbing $2.5 million from banks to fund right-wing terrorism in the 80s. These guys were real right-wing terrorists. And the FBI has to take them down. They do a pretty decent case against the order. But then they get a little overzealous and they want to take down the entire white-wing network in the late 80s. there's a sedition trial in 87, and the government is humiliated and defeated. And out of that, I think like a year later, Strassmeyer comes to the country, Pat Con gets started, and the rest we've already pretty much discussed in this show. So that's kind of like the chain of events.

I hopefully that wasn't too long. Were you able to follow that, all right? Yes, absolutely. You're right. And, I mean, I already know that you're right about all that stuff. And you're way better on the details of Gordon Call and all of that. But as far as that whole generation of guys losing their great-grandfather's farm and the resentment that that caused.

And it wasn't, you know, the market. It wasn't just, well, time's going on and technology has advanced and economies of scale dictate that bigger companies are going to have an advantage. All those kind of things would happen over time or where, but that wasn't what it was. It was, just as you say, monetary policy by a bunch of appointed goons who inflated and inflated and inflated such a disaster. Essentially, not deliberately, but essentially tricked all those people into buy new tractors, right? I think they even had a government propaganda campaign that was like, you've got to get competitive.

And that means you need new equipment for the new way you need to computerize your, farm. And you need all this stuff. And they were like, okay. And then they go, oh, by the way, we got you on the variable interest rate, which is now 25% or whatever, and just bankrupted an entire generation of people. And I don't know if you have this for your research, but really great resource for this is William Greider's book Secrets of the Temple, which is sort of the Washington Post version of the creature from Jekyll Island in a way, which I don't think Griffin talks about this at all in Jekyll Island but in Greeter's book

it's all about you know again it's like a Democrat writing it so his problem isn't the boom it's the bust he's just mad what Volker did because he was so severe in just fighting inflation no matter at what

other cost and as I recall although it was probably 25 years ago I read that book but as I recall in there he has quite a bit about the farms and then of course so who got to buy up all the farmland was cargill and

Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland and these gigantic agro-business firms with access to unlimited capital from the banks themselves to come and buy up all this land at the expense of people and you know it's just like with offshoring

like there's a certain amount of factories that are going to go to Mexico and China but our government seems to make it as difficult as they can for companies to stay here. You know what I mean? It's like they're trying to shoe them away. And it's that kind of interference in the market. And then, yeah, I mean, it wasn't just one McVeigh.

There's a lot of angry young men came out of that generation for exactly those reasons, you know? And we're living through it again, unfortunately. And, you know, I'm kind of scared of that because this primitive affliction, JTTF case, A lot of the characters are still around because, I mean, we're getting, this primitive affliction ends in 2012 is when they busted everybody. It was initially billed as the largest domestic terrorism case in Florida's history. And then it fell apart with barely any prosecutions, and I don't think any significant prosecutions, which is why, again, why nobody knows about this, why I'm like almost the first besides the late great Will Gris. to really dig into some of this stuff. But, yeah, sorry, I forgot exactly where I was going with that.

But of the Secrets of the Temple book, I will read that. I'll try to read that ahead of the Mises event this August, because that sounds like a great resource. Yeah. So, by the way, speaking of the guy's book, you said that it was a court exhibit. Does that mean we can all get our hands on it now? Do you link to it in your article?

Yeah, I do. It's linked in the article, and it's great. I know I threw it up on Twitter. If anybody wants it, just shoot me a message, email, whatever. Okay, great. I got too many tabs that start with FBI here. Oh, here we go, exclusive. Ex-FBI source reveals how he infiltrated anti-government groups at headline USA.com.

Good stuff. And I am going to, I'm paging down now looking for that book. Here we go. undercover Nazi in my two read someday pile oh it's it's out of print

but wait no you linked to the the PDF file in here too or not oh yeah sorry the link I guess is to Amazon but I do have it on scribed let's see undercover Nazi okay well just look it up there

okay I'll send you a link if you'd like Okay. And it's something it's, uh, as Will Grigg describes accurately, it's very poorly written, but highly informative about 120 pages. You could, you could pretty much get it done in one or one or two sittings, just like a couple hours. And it, it is worth reading for, for students and fans of these kind of subjects. Yeah, absolutely. There's another book, uh, while I'm on your show, maybe I'll put out the call.

There's another book called Primitive Affliction that was written by an undercover cop in the case, and that's totally out of print, and I can't find it anywhere. The publisher's defunct that was run by some conman lawyer. I reached out to him to see if he still has a copy. He never responded, and I can't really, it was like a pseudonym, so I don't know who exactly wrote it. I can't track it down. But if anybody knows how to get the book, Primitive Affliction by Chuck Arlaw, that's pretty

much what this series is about. And I would love to have that resource because there is like a Chicago connection to all this that isn't revealed in court documents. And I, you know, the show is going on pretty long so I won't try to get into that here. But it really is like a multi-state GTF giant PatCon sting operation dropping the series soon. And yeah, I'm pretty excited because I've written a lot about OKC and PatCon. I've broken some new stuff, but I'm largely standing on the backs of giants like Roger Charles, J.D. Cash, yourself, Richard Booth, Wendy Painting. This primitive affliction stuff is I'm kind of standing on my own work and hopefully creating something that important that bridges the gap between Pat Con

and like Charlottesville and the reemergence of modern times. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you when I just Googled primitive affliction and Chuck something because i missed the last name there it pulled up a foia log at the fbi website so i'll trade you links oh great yeah i was thinking that might be one way to get some of the contents is trying to foyer it yeah you know google is so horrible now it's awful and the fbi i will probably just if you foyer it they'll just redact the whole thing so yeah uh well that's why we got us bring Julian Assange from prison. Yeah, Fri Assange for sure.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, thank you, man. You do great work, and you're always fun to talk to. Learned a lot. Yeah, thanks again so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely.

All right, you guys. That is Ken Silva. He is at headline USA.com exclusive FBI source reveals how he infiltrated anti-government groups. Watch your back. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio. can be heard on K-P-FK 90.7 FM in LA.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.