Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/11/24 Jim Bovard on IRS Election Meddling and the Trump-Harris Debate

Episode Date: September 14, 2024

Scott interviews Jim Bovard about an article he wrote on how the IRS influenced the 2020 election. They also talk about the presidential debate, the various factions of libertarianism, the assassination attempt on Trump and more. Discussed on the show: “Did the IRS Manipulate the 2020 Election?” (Libertarian Institute) Jim Bovard is a columnist and the author of Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty. Find all of his books and read his work on his website and follow him on Twitter @JimBovard. 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 Scott Horton.4. 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 Jim Bovart. I published one of his books before. It's called Last Rights, The Death of American Liberty. It's really good. It's at the Libertarian Institute.

Libertarian Institute.org where he's our senior fellow And, of course, he writes at the New York Post, the oldest newspaper in America, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, as I learned from Public Enemy. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Jim? Doing good, Scott. Thanks for having me on. Very happy to have you here. And listen, I hate the IRS, but I'm really terrified of them.

So I don't want to say too much. But I want to give you the opportunity to say. You've had good luck with them, haven't you? Do what? I'm surprised, surprised you. I hate them because I always thought that they tried. treated you well, didn't they? Oh yeah. No, man, they got me on the run. I'm not going to lie and pretend to be brave. I'm terrified of them and they're in the middle of crucifying and persecuting me

right now and I'm not trying to make it worse. On the other hand, I'm not going to deny my guy a chance to talk about his great article that he wrote at the Institute about how horrible they are. And on such a specific case, that of the president and his son and the rigging of the election of 2020. I hope that keyword doesn't get us in too much trouble, Jim, but that seems to be the case that you show here. Well, it's pretty amazing how it all went down, and it's great. There's IRS whistleblowers that would connect the dots, and the U.S. attorneys, it says that U.S. attorneys kind of said, yeah, well, it was, you know, fill in some of the blanks, and it's a very sorted story. Where do you want me to start? Well, how about how much money would,

was Hunter Biden making and from where and how much does the government say he owed them? Well, between 2014 and 2019, Hunter Biden pocketed more than $8 million from shady foreign sources and that triggered a bushel of treasury department's suspicious activity reports because a lot of this money was coming from folks that the feds knew were, uh-oh, trouble. So Hunter failed to pay more than a million dollars in taxes. He was slapped with a lien, a tax lien of $112,000 for his 2015 taxes. The IRS began formally investigating him in 2018. By early 2020, there were a dozen federal, there were a dozen IRS employees working on his case.

But the Justice Department failed to file any charges before the statute of limitation expired on his 2014 and 2015 tax violations. IRS investigators vigorously pushed to do a search, to get a search warrant and check out Biden's house and guest house there in Delaware. There was all kinds of evidence that was likely there. They had it all documented. But this assistant U.S. attorney says that optics would be bad so they did not allow a search. Now, this was a different standard.

than the Biden White House used back in August 2022 when they sent a heavily armed cadre of FBI agents to raid Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago headquarters in order to get some government documents, which they seize and then carefully arranged for photographers. Oh, you think? Yeah, no, the standard was the same. They just applied it differently.

The optics in that case would also be good, making Trump look bad. Yeah, but it was it was amazing to see part of what's good about these iris whistleblowers that have come forward, came forward last year, documented how the strings were pulled, how they were blocked from filing charges, how they were blocked from interviewing some of Biden's relatives, his granddaughter, for instance. And there was all kinds of unusual stuff going on here. You had the Justice Department tax lawyers blocking any charges.

is being filed. And then you had David Weiss, who was appointed special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. But there was all kinds of, you know, pussy footing and foot dragging. And apparently, Weiss was blocked from getting information or filing charges elsewhere in the U.S. dealing with things aside from Delaware. Jim, you are dangerously undermining my faith in the regime right now. My God. This sounds terrible.

well it's not for you to give up on decaf um listen so i thought that one really important keyword that you mentioned there that's kind of lit up in colors in my mind it was 2018 what the hell do you mean there's a criminal investigation and the guy since the hunter biden starting in 2018 why that would have been before the year 2019 and before the year 2020 by a year and two years, which seems so important when you think about all the other things that we know that were going on during that time frame. Yeah. And there was a House Committee, House Ways and Means Committee reported that IRS investigators of Hunter and Biden's finances were met with a delay, divulge, and deny campaign that basically saved the president's son until the statute of

limitation expired for several crimes that occurred when Joe Biden was vice president. Now, you might recall during the last debate with Trump in 2020, Joe Biden insisted that his son Hunter had never gotten any money from China. Well, 2013, Vice President Biden flies to China on Air Force 2 and brings along his boy, Hunter, who gets all these sweetheart deals, Thanks in part because he's hanging around with the vice president of the U.S. But it was such a completely brazen set of denials he did. And a flashback, October 2020, you had the Hunter-Bind laptop, a lot of allegations of corruption.

Most of that was swept under the table except by the New York Post prior to the 2020 election. But if there had been news come out that the IRS had carried out a, a criminal search of Biden's Delaware residence before the election, Biden probably would have lost because he had a big advantage over Trump as far as being seen as honest and trustworthy by voters in 2020. But that was a mirage. It was created by the media and by a bunch of, you know, Biden campaign lies. Yep.

Those optics that the FBI was working so hard to protect on behalf of the candidate. Yeah. And it was layer after layer of complete deception. And they were so brazen because Biden had a long history by 2000. Joe Biden had a long history of, you know, apparent bribery. If you look at how he was boasting about fixing the top prosecutor in Ukraine, threatening withhold a billion dollars in the U.S. aid. And this is, you know, it's, you know, it's, interesting you've flipped back. I was doing some news searches on this a while back. And if you go back and do a Google search for articles in 2014, top American paper sounded the alarm about Hunter Biden getting these sweetheart deals in Ukraine. At the same time,

Joe Biden was supposedly in charge of fighting corruption in Ukraine for the U.S. government. It was completely absurd. A lot of people in Ukraine recognize it. And some American journalists and mainstream papers also common of that but it got swept under their rug yeah well and worse than that i mean they came up with this absolutely cockamamie orwellian type double think where no see Biden wanted that prosecutor gone because he wasn't prosecuting barisma and these other companies that he should have been prosecuting and and it was that was the corruption that joe is so clean that in fact that was the problem that he had with the guy was that he wasn't bringing justice though the heavens fall even if it brought down his own son and you can read that

at the atlantic council which is financed by zolokovsky that owns barisma so that's how we know it's right well it's it was just amazing how brazen that was and how um it was it was It was my hunch when Biden jumped into the presidential race for 2020 is that his statements on Ukraine and his son's sweetheart deals would be a fatal compromise for him. But obviously, I had too much faith in this system. Well, and hey, look what happened at your paper, at the Post, when they published the truth about this laptop in October of 2020

and led by Clapper and Mike Morel and John Brennan and the rest of these goons, the retired intelligence community came forward and said this is Russian disinformation. It's not true. They got the entire television media to discount it as either non-existent or a damn dirty lie by the Russians, again intervening to try to help Trump at the Democrats' expense the way that they told it. And they got Twitter and Facebook to completely crush the story and prevent anyone from spreading it around. And this is almost, this is what, 10 months after the FBI knew that the laptop was real, which was in December, I mean, pardon me, in November of 19 and took possession of it in December of 19. And you'd think about how they prosecuted Trump on his supposed blackmail, or they impeached Trump, on his supposed blackmail, which wasn't really true, of the president of Ukraine trying to pressure him, which he was trying to do, to reopen the investigations into Biden.

And now, here's a guy who, and you don't have to be on his side, this is just the objective scientific truth of the situation. The FBI and Justice Department put out thousands of leaks against Trump during Russia Gate and Ukraine Gate. And yet the silence, the lack of leaks on the truthfulness behind at least some of Trump's claims about what was going on with Hunter Biden and the truth of the laptop and all of that, or that they knew this is before the laptop came out. that they knew about the stuff on the laptop to help bolster Trump's side of the story during Ukraine Gate is just deafening. It's the most blatant thing in the world that they were able to clamp down and we didn't find out that there was a grand jury against Hunter Biden until much later on, I think, until 21, right? Until it was all over. Yeah, it was long after the election. So, but it was, but if there had been, if the, if, if Hunter Biden had been charged, even with a tax misdemeanor on these millions of dollars of foreign payoffs, he, he pocketed, if he'd been charged before the 2020 election, I think that might have swung it because, again, Biden only won by 43,000 votes in three swing states.

The overall popular vote, his margin doesn't matter. I mean, the state of California is long for God. But, I mean, so it was a much closer election than what people recall. And this is the kind of thing. Biden's reputation for honesty, I mean, that was as shady as Bill Clinton's reputation for chastity. Yeah, man. And they were always partners in crime, the two of them. That's one good thing about Biden being so old.

Is that anything that you're still mad about from a long time ago? He was in on that, right? Like, he even led the cover up of the Waco masker in the Senate back then. It was unsavory. It was damned unsavory. So it's, you know. Man, all right. Wow.

So tell us about this guy Shappley. He's one of the whistleblowers. And he seems like he risked a lot to come forward with some of this stuff, huh? Yeah. He's a long-term IRS investigator, a senior agent, his whistleblower complaint stated that the investigation of Hunter's tax crimes was being blocked by, quote, preferential treatment in politics. So there was no gray area here. He's represented by two lawyers, Mark Little and Tristian Levitt. they've done a good job of pushing back against the effort to vilify

Shapley so and he's he's testified before Congress he's shown a lot of courage there are some folks the IRS have tried to do the right thing on this but I think the politics at the top was just you know it was it shut it down so it shut it down and thereby it saved Biden's presidential campaign in 2020. And what they try to do with his surprise plea bargain, pleading guilty to all the charges, first of all, it's as certain as Joe Biden's next verbal hairball

that Hunter is going to get pardoned. And then secondly, it was a way to keep the evidence from the American people because, okay, there's a guilty plea, there's no need for a trial. The trial would have had day after day of damning evidence of Biden family corruption. But we aren't going to hear that. Yeah. Well, and so I hope for your sake that you didn't watch too much of the debate last night, but I watched all of it. Oh, you poor bastard. But so they had this big fight. So proud to be an American. Oh, man. I had to quit. I got, I watched for a while, but then I gave up, but, well, it's, go ahead, it, it was unpleasant, it was rigged. I mean, it was, but, but you're just watching that and it's, it kind of made me, I mean, you know, the, it was three against one on Trump, Trump should have been better prepared. It reminded me of some of Mohamed Ali's fights in which he had all the bluster, but he didn't do enough training. So he got beaten to a poll.

twice by Joe Frazier, he got his jaw busted by Ken Norton, and he even got whipped by Leon Spinks. Man, that's terrible. It's so true, too. Is he, and, you know, part of it's because of his personal problem, right, that he doesn't have enough hope hickses around him who care about him, who can say to him, Mr. President, remember, smile. Go out there and be funny, dude. You're funny. You don't have to make her look like an idiot. She's an idiot, no matter what you do. dude so just go out there and be cool for a change and he just can't be cool he's just not cool you know in 2016 kelly ann conway saved his campaign because she came in there there was focus there was discipline he had a really bad gop convention acceptance speech it was like oh god you know let's just uh you know how long is this going to last but i mean uh it doesn't look like there's anybody doing that right now and so many of his answers like he was talking about the buys in the 2020 election. He throws out some vague reference to Wisconsin. There was a very specific

fact. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin said that the ballot drop boxes that were unmanned in the big cities in Wisconsin, they were illegal. So you put that fact on the table and you aren't sound like somebody just babbling about or cheating. I mean, it was frustrating to me that I wasn't able to clearly understand the frauds of the 2020 election until Ken Paxton filed some briefs with the Supreme Court and walked through it very clearly. So much better than what the Trump White House was doing. Yep. I never even looked at that. I don't even think I knew that they actually proved that there was some substance to that stuff because Trump's lawyers, I remember them getting laughed out of court over and over again. And I remember thinking, I mean, there must have been

something but not that people that work for him could prove in some areas on some specifics yeah what they were trying to do is saying it was all corrupt it was all rigged it wasn't but for instance you had the michigan secretary of state send absentee ballots to seven million voters everybody in the state even though that was illegal i mean this and then in the place like detroit you don't verify the mailed-in ballots yeah that could have some impact yeah for real hey guys I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the institute,

and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expandesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level. And it's all very reasonably priced.

Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Real history. Real economics. Real education. Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. I drank so much coffee I turned into some. Hey guys, check out the Scott Horton Show special blend at Moondoseartisancoffee.com. It's a blend of organically grown Ethiopian and Sumatran coffee beans. Two very different coffees combined to create a unique blend.

Ethiopia is smooth and medium-bodied. Sumatra, rich, heavy-bodied coffee. And it's got caffeine. Lots of it. Which is good for if you have to drive drunk or get up in the morning. Click through from the link in the right-hand margin at Scott Horten. Horton.org to save 10% on your order. It's the Scott Horton Show Blend from Moondos Artisan Coffee. Hey, you guys coming up this October 7th through the 11th, join Miguel Thorup,

host of the expat money podcast, the heroic Ron Paul, the great Tom Woods, Doug Casey, Mark Faber, Tom Luongo, myself, and many other great speakers for the online expat money summit, 2024. My presentation will be on the subject of my new book, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine, which is not quite out yet, and learn how you can reclaim your freedom by moving abroad, legally reduce your tax bill, and protect your assets. More than 8,000 people attended last year, and it's free.

My guy's Kyle Anzlone and Dave DeCamp from the Institute and Anti-War.com will be joining a panel discussion as well. Just go to 24.xpatmoneysummit.com for all the info. That's 2024.xpatmoneysummit.com. What did your ancestors really do all day? Beyond names, what were their lives like? With Ancestry's global historical records, you can discover incredible stories about how your ancestors lived and worked. And for a limited time, you can explore select occupation records for free.

Imagine finding your great-grandfather's RCMP records or discovering your ancestors' name in the UK and Ireland Nursing Register. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.CA for more details. Terms apply. And then there's something that we know from the Twitter files, and this is a really big deal, is that they censored shadow ban and cranked down the engagement for the most important leaders of the pro-Trumpian younger right. People like Cernovich, Charlie Kirk, and Pesobic, and, you know, a few others.

I'm sorry. I'm losing track. but a good handful, you know, 10 or a dozen of them or so who... Well, and there was a huge issue here, something that Mike Benz has made a very good point about, is that the number one issue they were trying to censor on social media was any doubts about mail-in balloting being tied to fraud. That was huge target. And it was like you go back eight years and you've got the New York Times reporting

that mail-in ballots are... a huge are like the single biggest factor in election fraud and so people knew that eight years ago but then it was you know a memory hold and and you had the federal government federal contractors pressuring social media to suppress and censor any people raising doubts about whether mail-in ballots were trustworthy yeah the other one and there are so many of them too but this one bothered me just because I hate it when they lie to me. You know, he did say, he didn't explain it very well,

but he confronted her on the lie about Charlottesville that he had said that those Nazis were good people. When he explicitly said that he was not talking about the Nazis, he was talking about other people who were there who were not Nazis, but were there just trying to preserve that statue and that kind of thing. And everybody knows,

as he said, all the fact checkers admitted that that's not true, but then they just, the Democrats, they keep using it anyway. And then, but the one he really flubes, was the bloodbath. He was like, man, man, man, that was like an economic thing. When he could have really, one, made the point again that he really made, and two, made a secondary point about what damned liars these people, especially she is. Because what he was saying was he's going to put this giant tariff on Chinese cars. Because, and if he's not elected to do so, then there's going to be a

bloodbath in the automotive industry and all of those automotive employees, all those union workers are going to lose their jobs and that's why they should all be Reagan and Trump Democrats and cross the line of vote Republican now. That's what he was telling them at the time and it's just a figure

of speech and then you turn it into and she knows that and she's just a liar because she's a Democrat and that's what Democrats do. They lie about everything and instead he didn't. He just went bloodbath, blah, blah, blah. And went on he didn't make either point really you know yeah and and another thing that caught my

ear was uh um harris was echoing the same thing that biden did totally doing a rewrite a row versus wade and she was saying that that under row versus wade you could not have a final trimester abortions and row versus wade look it's a you know it doesn't say only this in the first trimester or this second this. No, it's just, it basically prohibits any law or restriction. I mean, it's a total mess how the law is right. The policies in many states are right now. But to see first Biden and then Harris completely misrepresent the road decision, oh, it would never allow that. It would never allow that. It did. It did. Yep. And then, you know, they've also been saying, I don't know if she said this in the debate, but they've also been saying that he's sworn to sign a national

anti-abortion ban on abortion yeah which is complete bullshit it's just not true this is how the entire debate went yeah it was you know um i i was watching it and and after 97 minutes i was tottering in the edge of cynicism poor jim come back jim don't go overboard don't get upset now um well no but so one thing too that they talked about was the weaponized doj and it's just like where yeah hunter biden actually did take millions of dollars from the wife of the mayor of Moscow something Trump never did that

Trump's son and the thing is like I'm not even sure what a big deal that may or may not be in the shadow of the Russia gate hoax but just think if that was a true accusation against Trump Jr. That well he did take millions of dollars from the wife of the mayor of Moscow but otherwise

but no that's no that was the Democrats and and then so he brought up, that was the other thing. All he did was say, oh, the fake Russia, Russia, Russia. But he should have made a real statement about that. Remember how they jerked your chain for three years, accused me a treason, told you your president was a traitor, and with his finger

on the button and all this, and what liars they were? He didn't say that explicitly. If he was going to bring it up at all, he just did the Russia thing, this and that. But they always say that he's going to weaponize the DOJ, that he's going to use it against them. But they are the ones who weaponized the DOJ against him his whole presidency long and his whole post-presidency long so far. And then they threaten that he's the one he's going to do that. And I'm glad that he pushed back on that. He's like, they call it a weaponization. That's what it is. And I mean, what can you do but agree with him? It's just true. Yeah, Trump had some very good sentences last night. It was just unfortunate that his attacks and his counterattacks were not more cohesive and

sustained. Yeah. And I hate to cheer for the guy, but it's just Pull Pot over here makes him look like George Washington. I can't help it. It's not really a reflection of any good qualities of his. It's just these damn Democrats. They're all Jeff Jamar to me right now, all of them. That's a good Texas baseline. It's it's frustrating as hell. This is our choice. I mean, a choice of Trump versus Harris. It's Like, you know, because the one thing which I wasn't hearing last night was any real appeal to freedom, except for Harris, you know, wanting to have their freedom to abort. And it's like there was, there were, this is not as much of the American vocabulary as it was in 1980s. Individual freedom isn't really, is less and less of value each presidential election.

It's been 44 years since a major party candidate made individual freedom, his main. pitch yeah that's true it said they cheated ron in iowa and new hampshire and nevada and they did but i mean ron yes yes uh he was cheated he was cheated there are yes and he had no power faction behind him he was only supported by regular joes i mean if he had had just one power faction to like agribusiness or i don't know somebody the born again christians somebody to rally behind him, you know? Yeah, yep. But it was close.

But you're right that that's never been Trump's shtick. But I don't think, well, I hope you're not right that it's really up to presidential propaganda to determine what we care about. But it is a reflection of, you know, there, well, I don't know, man, you live on the East Coast. is it there is kind of this false insult me see if I care

well I'm sorry man but you know I know you in your mind it's a little different but from down here in Texas you're all a bunch of damn Yankees yeah listen but the thing is the establishment up there

they kind of do believe you hear them say this from time to time that they think that the recent past had you know the government was running under a doctrine of libertarianism. We had, you know, freer trade and, and even Bill Clinton repealed Glass Stiegel and, you know, this kind of thing, we're like, you know, maybe Cato-ish economics,

Milton Friedmanite economics were more paramount in people's mind, and that now that's gone out of fashion again. But I sort of feel like us real libertarians never really got a shot. Yeah, so this is something that brings to mind. I went to the American conservative of annual dinner in D.C. There's either 2018 or 2019. I think that they had some leftover chairs at the end. So here's a comp ticket.

But J.D. Vance was a speaker. And Vance, he was a very good speaker, but he was saying that one of the problems with Washington, D.C. is that libertarian ideas have dominated on economic policy. And I was just like, holy crap, you know.

I don't know what he's been smoking, but he needs to smoke less of it. I know. It's like in 2008, when they told you the exact same seventh grade story about the Great Depression again, that like what you see

in the W. Bush years, we had total laissez-faire Herbert Hoover economics, and that was what caused the depression. And so now we need a new deal. As though Ron Paul, not George W. Bush, had been in charge for the last eight years,

when I remembered it differently. Well, and didn't Bush in his final month in office say that he had to sacrifice the free market to save it or some kind of shit. Yeah, of course. And yet Democrats love him now, so. He was every bit as much Ron Paul as Herbert Hoover was at W. Bush. There you go. But, yeah, man. So anyway, yeah, I mean, that narrative, I understand that narrative.

And, you know, this is something I talked about with Dave Smith, that Tucker Carlson. hated libertarians because he thought of Catoites, like probably David Boaz and Tom Palmer. Oh, really? Yeah, and he just he was like, wow, you're cool. This is different. And Dave goes, yeah, well, I'm like a

Ron Paul guy. We're always been good on everything, of course, you know? It's just because you met some, you know, I don't know, there was a time when Bill Maher called himself a libertarian but don't go blaming the rest of us for that, you know? So

I think it is kind of a of if we have a chance to set them straight a little bit about what we really believe in, you know, and who speaks for us or who doesn't. Well, it's, you know, at this point, I'm not sure who us is, but that's a question I'll send to Chase Oliver. Yeah, I'm sure he's got a real good answer for that. All right. Well, listen, so last topic before I let you go here, Jim. Some guy shot Donald Trump sort of kind of in the head. Maybe that's my first part of this question. Seems like his ear is just fine But did the bullet even actually hit him

Or it was like just the air pressure Six millimeters away Caused the slightest rupture in his skin I mean his ear bled We all saw that But there ain't a hole in it And he was healed up within like a week And then so

And that's a 556 round Or a 223 that does that? I see it would be 223 wasn't it? Maybe he got grazed, I don't know. I mean, and we're talking like lowercase G, italics grazed, right? Like, I don't know. I saw, I'll tell you what it made me think of.

YouTube shorts keeps showing me pictures of this U.S. Army Special Operations Officer with the dreadlocks telling war stories. And he talks about if you miss a guy with a 50-cats, caliber, but you're within a few inches, it'll still take his arm off. Really? Yeah. And like, I don't know, I believe the guy, because what the hell? He's seen it happen a few times in practice, and he was, I guess, just the shockwave of the thing or whatever, it's enough.

And so that was what this made me think of is, like, right, a 5, 5,56, maybe missed him. Maybe it actually didn't quite touch him, but it was enough. Or if it touched him, it was, like, literally just Adam. on Adam because he had that giant patch on his ear and then it was gone and then he was fine and I haven't seen anybody ask him in an interview like hey can I get a good look at that ear? What's up

with that? I mean, I don't know. It's just the luckiest damn thing in the world. I saw actually that night Dave Smith went on at the Comedy Mothership here in Austin and he had this, he had like a whole 20 minutes on it. He was really funny and he talked about how

Trump's just like Inspector Gadget just luck in his way through life and I don't know if you ever saw that cartoon where he almost dies 50 times per episode and just happens to step out of the way in the right moment, you know. But so anyway, here's my question for you, Jim. Do you think that the Secret Service deliberately left his ads hanging out there to get shot? If I had to guess, I would say no. But I'm keying on your word deliberate.

I mean, there was gross negligence. up and down, back and forth. I mean, flipside is, government fucks up all the time. This is certainly a much higher profile up. But based in the comments by the lot of the former Secret Service folks, this is something that never should have gotten within, you know, five miles of happening. So I don't know, but I'm glad that the Senate and some other folks

who are vigorously investigating. I hope if they're, I hope they can answer those questions before the election because it is it is germane because you had um you had the uh biden and his allies were just vilifying trump and the trump gets uh shot or winged or whatever and it's like you know oh never happened never happened so we'll just march along and then amazing and it's also i don't know he think about if trump hadn't turned his head and he'd been shot and killed there live on TV and 4K for everybody okay think about how unsatisfying the answer would be that it was this lone nut kid with no friends who did it for no reason

yep yeah i mean it's um i guess we're still waiting for the final disclosures on the jfk shooting but uh hopefully we uh doesn't take as long to find out the truth that we what happened in Butler. Yeah. You know, it's funny, too. If you think about the JFK shooting in the context of Butler, that like, yeah, it was just a lone kook.

Yes, he actually had been in the Marines at a top secret U-2 base in Japan, and then he had defected to Russia for a few years, and he came back, and he was hanging out with right-winger's, but also leading groups of communists and all of this stuff. You might think that there was more, to the story than he was just a lone nut at that point.

Well, but there are some people that just don't have faith in magic bullets. No, I guess not. I'm starting to, you know? I saw a lot of people said Jesus intervened in this one, and I couldn't help but think of all the ones that Jesus didn't intervene in. I think that Jesus tends to be in that county in Pennsylvania. That was where my father learned how to milk cow. oh yeah yes true story yeah god is in this holy temple as they chanted well yeah you just keep squeezing

oh man i got a great joke about that but i have to show it to you so next time you come to austin remind me well it's what i live for good times all right jim well i should probably let you go and have a good rest of your afternoon and let the poor listeners live to fight another day. It's time to draw the curtain of mercy. All right, man. Well, I love you. Thanks for doing the show. Hey, thanks so much, Scott. Good luck. All right, you guys. That's the great Jim Bovart. He wrote a whole mess of books, but the latest is called Last Rights, the Death of American Liberty, and we published it at the Institute. It's so good. You'll love it. And read him at the Institute, where he wrote this one, wherever it went. Did the IRS manipulate the 2020?

election and of course also read them at the new york post the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scothorton dot org and libertarian institute dot org