The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW James Bovard: FBI Expands "Terrorist" Definition, Targets Trump Supporters

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

In the process of expanding the FBI's reach against political enemies, ancient protections against tyranny like Habeus Corpus are being jettison. Guest Host Gard Goldsmith (Liberty Conspiracy) interviews James Bovard, author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American ConservativeFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Jim Bovard is with us, folks. And so let me bring this up on the screen. Jim, you had a very, very good, you always have great pieces, but you recently put out something that sort of ties in with some of the things that people might have heard recently have been going on. Revelations about the FBI and how they, as usual, seem to be targeting people, especially people who have ideologies that they don't seem to like. And over at FFF, the Future Freedom Foundation, they might have seen one of your most recent pieces. And I think it's kind of nice because you get to tie in

contemporary stories with stories about people that can sort of enrich us and give us a little better historical perspective and appreciation, a positive that we can get out of these frustrations. And in particular, you were talking about habeas corpus and you mentioned Macaulay and the Ghosts of Tyranny Past Part Two. It's a two part piece. And I'd love for you to talk to people about what inspired you to write this two part piece. They can find this over at Future Freedom Foundation and how you felt as you started to go into it, why you went into it, and some of the key parts of what you put into this excellent two-part piece. Well, it was trying to put a handle on the things I learned over the decades, and what I learned from one of the greatest English writers,

who's a wonderful Reichsstaat and gung-ho freedom and understood the nature of government politics far better than the vast majority of historians this is Thomas Macaulay he was born in 1800 died in 1859 he was famous as one of the best essayist to ever write in English language he also did a History of England, which I found fascinating when I read it when I was about 20 years old in the late 1970s. But, I mean, and it was, what I learned from him is how the legal procedures are vital for individual liberty. It's well and good to have these broad broad

rhetoric broad declarations about rights of man this that the other but it's the nuts and bolts of the court procedures legal technicalities that make a difference as far as whether or not people are free or not and it's funny because at the time when I read it you you know uh i was i was uh charmed by his writing but uh his stuff on the nature of habeas corpus and the uh talking about how the english kings and their tools uh would abuse torture in the 1600s uh that was a historic relic it was kind of like you, it wouldn't have any relevance to me as an American.

That country just celebrated its 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There were a lot of mistakes America had made in the past, but things like torture and habeas corpus, well, those were ancient history as far as problems go. 9-11 proved me wrong.

So right, so right. The relevance of this is unbelievable. Your work, especially covering the attacks on civil liberties from things like the Patriot Act, 9-11, the mass surveillance, destruction of civil liberties in so many areas have been absolutely remarkable and Jim you might want to mention a couple of your books if people want to see the deep dives you've done into this I know that you know attention deficit democracy is a great one to start but why don't you mention

a couple of your books and I'll flash that up on on the screen for people to check out your website as well. Okay, thanks a lot. Terrorism and Purity, Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace that Rid the World of Evil. That came out in late 2003. That was my first frontal attack on the abuses of Bush's war on terror. Basically, as soon as George W. Bush promised to rid the world of evil, I knew America was screwed. Because when you have that broad claim to power, nothing's going to hold you back. And you just go, you know, everything is in the name of fighting evil. It's like you're going back to the Middle Ages and you're trying to wipe out heretics. Yeah, yeah, that's so right. And a huge part of the problem, and this is something that ties into the piece I did, I guess, Friday for New York Post, maybe Thursday, on the FBI secretly targeting people it calls extremists, is this notion of heretics is still around.

And the vast expansion of federal surveillance has meant far more Americans can be tagged as heretics or potential heretics by federal agencies. And once the agencies do that, it's kind of like, well, let's just vacuum up their email. Let's vacuum up their history on the internet. And let's maybe send an informant out to see if we can vacuum up their email. Let's vacuum up their history on the Internet. And let's maybe send an informant out to see if we can stir up some trouble. Yeah. Yeah. It's really amazing. I think the prominence of this really should not be discounted. This is a really important thing. I remember how many people were talking about it when Judge Napolitano wrote about this and he was on Fox News with his program. And you've maintained your focus on this. Let's before we get into that British history and so on, let's turn to that breaking story that you

had published over at the New York Post on October 5th. is the FBI turning Trump supporters into terrorist targets. And a lot of people were talking about this, Jim. Very, very good. You say Donald Trump supporters are now the FBI terrorist investigation in their crosshairs, according to a new report in Newsweek. The agency has created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers. And strangely enough, Hillary Clinton appeared on television to seemingly support that,

almost as if it was coordinated. Strange, isn't it, Jim? It's almost as if they have a narrative to push. Tell us a little bit more about this, the result, A-G-A-A-V-E, anti-government, anti-authority, violent extremism. Yeah, the acronym for that looks like a typo for a sugar substitute. But it's interesting. There was a guy, William Arkin, very good investigative journalist, did this piece for Newsweek. He said the great majority of the FBI's current anti-government investigations are of Trump supporters. And what the FBI has done is say that if someone is, you know, pushing, is doing something in furtherance of political and or social agendas, then that might be sufficient

for the FBI to start checking them out. And so almost, you know, lots of political activists are doing things in further political agendas. This is basically the definition of being a political activist. But now you've got the FBI saying, well, if we don't like your activism, then we're going to treat you as a practical, like a terrorist suspect. It's amazing. You say here the FBI recently vastly expanded the supposed agave peril by broadening suspicion from furtherance of ideological agendas to furtherance of political and or social agendas. Now, how any of that has anything to do with actual criminal activity, I'd like to know how this can actually

be excused under the constitutional paradigm of the founders. I'm curious. And it really is amazing. And what you brought up there is, as you mentioned, it's targeting strident Republicans with some of the same counterterrorism methods honed to fight Al Qaeda. Now, you might want to, if you have the opportunity, go back into a little bit of the Patriot Act and the so-called fight on terrorism that I think many of us knew would be directed on so-called domestic terrorism. And Jim, you have here, the FBI conducted more than 5,500 domestic terrorism assessments, as they call them, in 2021, a tenfold increase since 2017 and a 50-fold increase since 2013. And of course, by doing that, they can claim, well, we're seeing so much more domestic terror activity when they're the ones

who are engaging in whatever make-work activity they want to make. Well, and this is something that's given up talking points for President Biden's re-election campaign. Oh, yeah. You have Biden's, you know, top-stopping that the biggest threat to America is white supremacy, domestic terrorism. And it's, you know, there are so many errors in that assertion. But the FBI is trying to help out by concocting a lot of new terrorist investigations, many of which are complete BS, as a number of FBI whistleblowers have said. But this is something that the news media basically wants to echo Vine's point. And so there's been very little hard analysis of these claims by most of the media. investigate Americans over here. That was something that they exposed a couple months ago. Matt Taibbi

wrote about it. And you have here from the Newsweek piece, a top official told Newsweek last year, we've become too prone to labeling anything we don't like as extremism. And then any extremist is as a terrorist. The House weaponization of the federal government subcommittee warns that, quote, the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially supporting the administration's political narrative. That the narrative of domestic violent extremism is this belief that half the country are domestic terrorists and we can't have a conversation with them. This is a fundamental belief that unless you're voicing what we agree, you are the enemy. You're either with us or you're with the terrorists, right? I mean, to quote George Bush, right, Jim? Yeah. Yep. And just take a guess which category Garth Goldsmith listed. So right. So right. And you've got this here. This is very, very key. And you would sort of go back in history a little bit here. You say, did the Biden administration secretly want Newsweek to vindicate the fears of legions of Trump supporters? Perhaps those assessments in vast number are repeating a tactic used against Vietnam War protesters.

FBI agents were encouraged to conduct frequent interviews with anti-war activists to, quote, enhance the paranoia endemic in such circles and, quote, get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox, according to an FBI memo from that era. So it works in two ways. It gyms up fear from the people watching it from the outside saying, oh, there must be some domestic terrorist threat. You get CNN putting these people on. I mean, literally employing war criminals like John Brennan. And then you get you get the other part of it, which is people who might feel like they're being targeted are now made paranoid. So you get you get a two prong effect here, Jim.

Yeah, it just stirs up, you know, it throws rocks at so many hornets' nests. So, and, but this is what, I think this is part of the purpose, and it's out of control. There's little or no oversight by Congress or by the courts, and the FBI's shown for 100 years

it cannot be trusted with arbitrary secret power. Oh, so true. And you go at the close of it, you talk about will the FBI's interventions in the 2024 presidential election be even more brazen than its 2016 and 2020 stunts? Will the agency exploit its assessments to recruit knuckleheads to engage in another pre-election Keystone cops plot to kidnap a governor as it did in Michigan in 2020. And we saw just recently, the last three of those suspects, they were found not guilty. And the machinations of the FBI working for political purposes, not for the protection of people, are so manifest that, to me, honest FBI agents must be pulling their hair out, Jim. They must be going nuts saying, what are you doing here?

Yeah, well, there are some honest FBI agents and some of them have become whistleblowers. Yeah. And I think we'll probably see more of that as time goes on. Yeah. So and I think we'll probably see more of that as time goes on. I hope we do because, I mean, it's a frustrating thing because it's so difficult to get the, you know, there's the old saying, truth will out. It doesn't apply to inside the beltway because it's so difficult to find out what these agencies are doing. But every now and then there's a leak or this or that, whatever. And you can kind of pick up the ball and run with it if you're paying attention. Well, it's really remarkable. You know, Jim up here in New Hampshire, as some of David Knight's viewers know, a good friend of mine and a broadcaster named Ian Freeman just got sentenced.

Yeah, you know about Ian, eight years in federal prison for dealing in crypto, you know, in Bitcoin. Oh, that's so sad. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the thing that really got me and I mentioned this in an email to David when he was, you know, he read it on the air last week. It was a week ago today, actually, almost 10 years to the day that they sentenced Ross Ulbrich to life in prison. And originally, the sentencing for Ian was supposed to happen on 9-11, Jim. So I think they're clearly trying to send some signals. Yeah. And they've hated the Free State Project people. As you say, they've tried to infiltrate them with the FBI over and over and over, whether it's through trying to get them to sell drugs or do something bad. And constantly, Free State Project members, they're able to sift through these drugs or do something bad. And constantly Free State Project members,

they're able to sift through these people and wean them out. They get rid of them. But with the thing with Ian, I went up to the court, Jim, and you've got this temple to the state, this federal district court, and it's heavily modified outside, very, very well protected in ways that you wouldn't realize unless you were actually looking for it. You know, they've got flowers planted in these gigantic stone things so that you can't drive any car close to the building or anything like that. And then you get inside and, of course, you know, you can't carry your phone. You can't carry a camera. You can't do any of this stuff. So you might as well leave it in the car. They don't even take care of the phones properly. You can't put it

in a little bag with your name on it. It's out there with all of them. So anybody leaving can just pick your phone up and just walk away with it. I mean, it's just ridiculous. Yeah. You'd never see a private establishment operating that way, like a restaurant. Oh yeah. We'll just leave your phone in the, in the container with all these other ones. It's ridiculous, you know. So I get in there. And one of the things that struck me, Jim, and I'm sure you've experienced this sort of thing with some of the dark mentalities of these people. And I think many times they don't realize that they're using their room for power to engage in some very aggressive and slippery activity. What happened was I got there up in the upstairs. They have this hallway with the different courts and the court where Ian

was going to appear had someone standing, sometimes sitting in front of it. He was a federal official. And and I said, as he's he's i walked behind someone else and he turned to this person who was about to open up the doors that were closed and he said it nothing had started we're 15 minutes away from the start of the sentencing and he says oh it's all filled so this he goes you can go to the spillover room and watch the video feed so i last time i there, that's what I had to do. I had to go to the spillover room for a little while. And I thought, you know, I'm actually, I'm going in, I'm going into the main room. I don't care if this guy tries to stop me. He can try to put his arm on me or, you know, his hand on me or whatever. I just want to test this because I got a vibe that he was lying.

I said, I don't, I don't think this room is empty. So I went in and sure enough, space is all over the benches. Yeah. And so after I sat down a news reporter from the only ABC affiliate in New Hampshire, she came in after me, she got another space. There were still lots of spaces on the bench, a lot of empty space. And Ian had not come in yet with his attorney, Mark Sisti. And then someone else tried to come in and the guy comes in behind him, the official comes in behind him and says, no, there's no room. Literally, you can see the room. It was like Kafkaesque.

It was like, look, it was insane. The guy's point is like, well, there's a seat there. There's one there. People are moving over like, yeah, you can sit right here. And the guy's like, no, no, it's not going to happen. He almost arrested it. Yeah. He almost arrested a couple of people in there.

And I realized, Jim, what was going on was they wanted to make it look like the court was sparsely populated so that they would demoralize Ian. They didn't want him to think they wanted him to think that his friends hadn't shown up. I mean, it's just unbelievable. That's bad. Yeah, it's amazing the stuff they'll do to somebody. They're sending him away for eight years for doing nothing. It's crazy.

To put the positive side on this, Jim, what you did with your two-part piece about the Macaulay books was great. The first part was so interesting, talking about how you picked up this book for 75 cents just outside this library at University of Maryland. And then you go into the history, the printer from 1842, and you talk a lot about the principles that Macaulay discussed, especially coming from the British jurisprudential tradition and the Magna Carta. Would you like to express to the David Knight audience some of the things that drove you to write about this Macaulay's history of England and the Habeas Corpus Act in particular? Sure. I mean, as I mentioned, there was a sense of my being very naive when at the time I first read it, because I assumed a lot of these lessons of history were

no longer relevant to the U.S. because there are a lot of great things in Thomas Macaulay. One of the things that makes me roll my eyes is he talks about how political science is a progressive science and how folks are learning and how government is getting better, and it's almost like a trend line, almost like biological science discoveries. But the actual history is that things are forgotten or things are buried. And that was part of what inspired me to write basically a tribute to Macaulay and to his wisdom. There were so many things that were taken as self-evident truth 200 years ago that have been completely forgotten. And that was part of what I sought to do with pulling out some of his quotes, some of his best quotes.

He had a number of quotes, a number of attacks on the John Stewart, the John Stewart meal type utilitarians. And it was that's relevant, too, because he was whacking them for being people that memorized a few phrases and thought they had completely understood the nature of government because of that. And I'm not saying there's any parallels nowadays, but. Anyhow. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not saying there's any parallels nowadays, but anyhow. Yeah, yeah. Well, it is interesting, too, because to me, Jim, it all has to do with the artifice of power over people and the various excuses they will give,

whether it's Marx's claptrap that supposedly he's helping the little guy and that supposedly the state will get eliminated if you only have a dictatorship of the proletariat. Somehow the state will wither away. Or it's the corporatism slash fascism that we see rife around so many states today, thanks to the central banking and government privilege that they assume because they're going to be bringing in all their special interests. And, you know, the habeas corpus movement that we see with, and this is something that I've brought up, goes hand in hand with the concept of jury nullification. And I think that that is, these are, yeah. So let's talk about habeas corpus, what it means, and why it's really important, especially nowadays. Okay, I'm a bit of a deadline here today, so I'll throw out a few comments. Habeas corpus is basically a legal, it goes back to Magna Carta or actually much further.

It says, the literal translation is bring up the body. And so it means that governments cannot have secret arrests and, you know, seize people and hold them without filing criminal charges against them. And that was a standard in the U.S. mostly prior to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. And then there were so many exemptions to it from there. And then you had George Bush with his enemy combatants that basically said anybody he called an enemy combatant had no rights forever. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, and Jim, you know, what I will do is, since I know you have to go, I will read large portions of this piece on Macaulay and the Ghosts of Tyranny Pass Part Two to the audience now to go through and reiterate what George Bush, George W. Bush did. And also talk a little bit about jury nullification as well and sort of wrap that up.

So that allows you to do your thing. And then I'll be able to give the audience the remainder of this great piece on Macaulay and the Ghosts of Tyranny Pass Part 2. I really appreciate you being able to be on here sort of to whet the appetite. And we're going to dig into this piece now. Hey, thanks so much for having me on guard and keep up the hell raising. Thanks, Jim. I appreciate it. And I'm lucky I didn't get arrested at that court. I was so upset. I left. I was getting too angry. I left. I couldn't handle it anymore.

Well, I'm glad you didn't get arrested that day. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, Jim, thanks so much. James Bovard, you are an amazing saint, Jim. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for your kind words and encouragement. All right, buddy. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Bye.

Bye. The Common man. They created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away.

Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you'll find at thedavidknightshow.com. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. Thank you.