The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Mission Creep(s)

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Author JamesBovard, jimbovard.com. Now the focus is on biometrics as TSA, IRS and other bureaucracies expand endlesslyOUTLINE of today's show with TIMECODESTSA pushing people to give up biometric data3:09 Media panic, including FOX, over the delay in choosing House Speaker 10:48In midst of Biden's explosive expansion of IRS, media goes to bat for IRS15:04There’s no protection against excessive fines from the bureaucracy.18:21How federal censors made mail-in ballots sacred.20:35Julian Assange26:07Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If 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 through Mail: 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/silverBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie. All right, I think we have James Bovard joining us now. I think we've been able to make connection. Can you hear me, Mr. Bovard? Yeah, I can hear you.

Sorry for the delay on my side. No problem, no problem. Things happen? Yeah, I can hear you. Sorry for the delay on my side. No problem. No problem. Things happen. It's great to have you on. James Bovard is introduction. In case you don't know James, he's been around for quite a while and writing many, many books. How many books have you written? I talked to him about 10, 10, 10 so far, and you're still working on them.

I love the one I talked about earlier. Attention deficit democracy. I love the one I talked about earlier, Attention Deficit Democracy. I love that title. And of course, you're always writing for various publications, the Mises Institute, a libertarian. You write on all things political and economic. And so it's great to have you on. And I wanted to talk, earlier in the show, I talked about biometrics. And you just recently had an article about facial recognition and things like that. I talked about a case where someone was arrested and jailed simply on that. They always talk about how biometric surveillance and identification is just going to be a starter into their process. But, of course, we've seen that it's worked out very differently.

It's extending in so many different ways. I think your article was about TSA, wasn't it? Yeah, I've smacked TSA around a lot over the last 20 years. They deserve it. They've smacked us around a lot. That's true. I mean, hey, it's payback, you know. I'm just trying to settle my debts from those AirPoint checkpoints.

Yeah, so this is on the TSA facial surveillance. TSA is starting to set up all these. They have set up a bunch of places and airports where people check in by having their face scanned. And it's on a trial basis now. But the TSA is probably going to try to mandate that nationwide sometime later this year. Yeah. It's always this, uh, mission creep, isn't it? And the creeps who are patting us down and all the rest of this stuff. When I was in Texas, they, uh, they had the house, uh,

put in and passed it unanimous said, you're not going to have these body scanners and you're not going to pat kids down when that first rolled out. And I don't know if you recall, but they said, well, if you don't allow us to do this, we're going to make Texas a no fly zone. And they got that, uh, shut down when it went to the Texas Senate, the Lieutenant governor there at the time, uh, pushed back on that. But we subsequently found out that was in 2011, uh, that, um, they had said, and some

TSA documents, because one guy who pushed back against the machines and the violation of privacy in a lawsuit, he got discovery and they mistakenly put up that in 2011, the TSA said in their own documents, there's no threats to airports or airplanes. And that's the same time they're telling everybody we've got to roll these things out and we've got to, uh, uh, we've got to do all these things. So they're constantly pushing this, but it seems like the biometric database and biometric collection is really what they're focusing on right now, because they're rolling out in every way possible, uh, a digital ID for everyone worldwide. That seems to be what the focus is right now. Major thrust. Yeah.

I mean, this is, um is it's interesting is that's a nice bit a good example from 11 years 12 years ago people should not forget back when these whole body scanners that take nude photos of you were first in first introduced TSA said that would be voluntary then it became mandatory and tsa used punitive enhanced pat downs on people who did not voluntarily go through those whole body scanners i had some memorable experiences with that that uh made some lively articles every time i fly i refuse to go through it i want to make it difficult for them and they tried to make it difficult for me they make me go stand by the x-ray machine i refuse to stand by the x-ray machine so i get

the enhanced bat down all the rest of the stuff but it's it's gotten to the point now with all the covid and mask and everything i've just decided i'm not going to fly i'm not going anywhere they went yeah it's um it's it's a frustrating business i mean it's it's and it's increased a fatality rate because you've had a lot of people have the same reaction that you do. They are driving instead of flying. And the accident rate for driving is much higher than flying. There's less aggravation from TSA. So that's had an adverse effect on public safety, there was a lawsuit by the Competitive Enterprise Institute that tried to challenge the TSA mandate for the whole body scanners based on the increased accident

rate from autos that people would be shifted over to driving to avoid the scanners. And the federal court found some reason to dismiss that lawsuit. But no, I mean, it's just, TSA is, it's exasperating in so many different levels, but it is very secretive. It's very difficult to get information complaint, but then TSA makes it very difficult for journalists to get copies of those complaints. So it's like, okay, so you're just throwing your complaint into a black hole. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. They should have to, we should have to prove to them that we are no threat. We shouldn't have to prove to them that there's going to be more accidents on the road.

They should have to prove to us that they have a constitutional authority to do something like this. That's the real issue. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point of the constitutional authority. And here again, it's one of those Washington, D.C. shell games, because the thing TSA has said in court is that there is no fourth amendment issue uh as far as warrantless searches because people have voluntarily submitted to be searched at those checkpoints however tsa also says that if you aren't searched you can't fly that's right so i mean and if we allow those types of things to happen that's the same kind of prevarications that they were using saying you know i'm not mandating any vaccines for you i'm just telling you you know you you got a choice

you know you can have a job you can have a life uh you know if you take the vaccine and if you don't uh you won't have any of those things but it's not a mandate i'm not forcing you to do anything i'm not coercing you it's like oh court yeah you are you know yeah and and it's funny to see how the history is being rewritten as far as the COVID policies. There was a piece of New York Times a day or two ago claiming that there had been no lockdowns here in the U.S. And I mean, this is like, you know, how much further is this fantasy Orwellian stuff going to go? It's like, you know, we never shut down those schools. The kids could have come.

You know, this is, I love it. I love the quote that you had. You said that shutting down entire States with COVID lockdowns was the equivalent of burning witches or sacrificing virgins to appease angry viral gods. And I think we know who those angry viral gods are. They're there in the NIH and the FDA, right? Well, yeah. I mean, uh, it's very important to keep mr fauci happy so and fauci won lockdown so voila you know we were locked down and and it you know

it helped his uh you know bonuses for his books or whatever i don't know yeah yeah exactly i was Yeah, exactly. I was talking earlier about Trump's rediscovery of the war on drugs. Oh, that sounds very uplifting. Yes, yes. I said, okay, boomer, you know, this is something that's failed for over 51 years and somehow he's going to make it work, even though he didn't do anything with it in his four years. But again, that's another one of these things. Where's your constitutional authority for that? I think it's very interesting to see how this war on drugs just continues to go on. And this is what concerns me about COVID and all of these legal prevarications that they use to establish this.

I keep a running total from, you know, and there's other things that were done in the buildup to this pandemic lockdown, but I focus it back on the day that he declared the executive emergency, declaring a state of emergency so he could slather money all over everybody to do all these nasty things, March the 13th of 2020. We're now 1,030 days into this, and of course, Biden has piggybacked his own tyranny on top of that executive order. And nobody is talking about getting rid of that. Now, there's a few states that are talking about, well, we need to start looking at executive orders, but really nothing is being done about that. What do you think? There have been some challenges in court.

I mean, I don't know how far they've gone and what exactly they've managed to get struck down at state level. It's, you know, it's amazing how docile most people have been to the federal power grabs on this pandemic. And you have Biden, you know, pulling one rabbit out of the hat after another. And Biden's claimed the thanks to the pandemic he's got to forgive a trillion dollars in student loans i mean this is the kind of thing that you know should not have passed the laugh test in the white house but maybe the white house is so accustomed to getting away with so much nonsense this is like well sure let's just you know let's take this and run up the flagpole and see if we get away with it in federal court.

Yeah, there's been so many grabs. You've got the CDC saying we're going to suspend all evictions and foreclosures because of this. And the way that that continued to go on and on and on. And again, it was a bipartisan thing. They initiated that under Trump. They extended it under Trump. And you had, you know, Trump appointee at the Supreme Court said, well, you can continue this even though you don't have any authority for it. Then finally, they said, well, we're going to have to stop this because they extended it past their deadline that they promised to stop it. But

I guess when we look at this, the overall trend that we see is that there just absolutely is no more attention whatsoever paid to the Constitution or even the rule of law. You've got now the precedent of doing gun control by executive order. I mean, how do we pull this back? Do you think that there's – I'm looking at this political theater that's going on right now in the House as they're having the votes on the Speaker, and it's going on and on and on. But they have talked about a real issue, and that is that the Congress is totally dysfunctional, even compared to the dysfunctional Congresses of history. They've always been locked.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think it was Congressman Chip Roy who was saying that it's been like four or five years since they had to vote on the House floor to amend any of the bills because everything is just jammed through. It's a total facade of a representative government. What's interesting is to see the panic of a lot of the mainstream media over the delay and choosing a new speaker. And it's kind of funny because Biden is going to make his speech today

at two o'clock as his second anniversary of January 6th. And he's going to basically paint everyone who was there as a terrorist or as a terrorist supporter or whatever. I mean, that's a label the FBI has used for everybody they've charged on for January 6th for parading inside the Capitol. It's a strange form of terrorism. Parading without guns, yeah. Yeah, part of what fascinates me is that the media has bought into the Biden line that there was some grave damage done to America because there was a five or six hour delay in confirming the results of the 2020 election.

And I'm thinking, well, if that somehow hurt America, then OK, so we've had like three or four days going trying to choose a speaker. And I don't see how it's done any harm at all to america but i mean you have uh brian brian kill me at fox news calling them insurrectionist i mean an insurrection yeah well he called them insurrectionists and and uh his co-host said well i don't think they would want that i think we should call them saboteurs or something it's like like i don't know if that's any better than insurrectionist, but that's what's happening now, two years later. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football.

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I mean, Congress has done a miserable job of oversight for almost forever, but certainly since 9-11. Oh, yeah. And I don't see how it makes any difference if there's a speaker. And I mean, it's probably going to work out. No, I shouldn't say that. I got to respect the defamation laws. Um, no, I, you know, I don't understand. I don't understand how folks are willing to be comforted by the selection of a,

um, by having some politicians vote for another politician and that's somehow going to keep us safe and you know somehow make the government's going to serve us you know it's it's bizarre i'd like to see them go the full two months like they did in 1855 without we could at least keep the government shut down for two months that'd be one way to do it but you know when you look at what chip roy was saying he was saying we've been completely shut out of the process this is something that's being done by you know four or five people at the top or whatever and uh we've seen and people have talked about this is something that you know we first saw under pelosi with obamacare where they

bring in this several thousand page bill and they say okay yeah we're gonna have a vote on this in 24 hours it's like what you know how can you do this but the reality is is that that's just the tip of the iceberg, that absurdity. The other part of it is, is that even if they found something in there that they didn't like, they've shut them out of the process on the floor to make any changes to it. So it's completely dysfunctional and they have shipped everything over to the bureaucracy anyway.

Yep. And it's, it's interesting that there's a little recognition of that by the press corps or else the press corps doesn't say anything because it basically supports the idea of putting government on a pedestal and average citizens don't really need to know what the government's doing. will skewer taxpayers. This is one of the issues that has been sticking with everybody that's growing the IRS by what, eightfold or something at 87,000 new agents. And Kevin McCarthy trying to get support says it's going to be the first thing I do is get rid of this. He doesn't say how he intends to get rid of that. But you point out the media has gone to bat for the IRS. How'd they do that? Well, it was fascinating to see how the controversy over the IRS funding bill, Biden made a big push to have this bill to hire 87,000 new IRS agents and employees to sharply increase the amount of audits that are carried out. There's almost no focus on customer service, improving customer service, even though I

think in the last year, the IRS answered fewer than 10% of the calls from taxpayers seeking help or insights on how to pay their taxes. But it was fascinating to see how the Washington Post, for instance, was just terrified of any criticism of the IRS. This is back when Biden was pushing the bill back this past summer. Dana Milbank, a Post columnist, said that the GOP anti-IRS rhetoric is one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism. So you criticize the IRS and you're an authoritarian. Where did I go wrong? Well, you know, it's been said, I forget who said it, but they said a law that is sufficiently complex is the same as having no law at all.

The IRS code is so complex that so complex that a disgruntled agent can do whatever they want to to you in an audit that's that's the thing that strikes fear into people's hearts and i'm sure it scares the washington post as well but they don't have the courage to oppose that kind of authoritarian system and that's the true authoritarianism as we all know right yeah and you know part of what people don't realize with these IRS audits is that in tax court, any allegation the IRS makes is presumed correct. Yeah. The IRS doesn't need to put evidence on the table to prove that someone had this income, which they failed to report. It's simply presumed correct. And the burden of proof shifts to the taxpayer. I mean,

it's not like in a federal criminal court where the burden of proof is supposedly on the prosecutors. But so the entire system for tax administration is just profoundly biased against what's normally considered to be due process. And of course, that is the issue with government by bureaucracy, where we don't, you know, we have taxation without representation, but we have regulation without representation. They say that if it's a rule coming from the bureaucracy, that it is not a law. And so you don't get any due process. That's the basis of civil asset forfeiture. And that's been the basis of the IRS.

The IRS was infamous for a long time because they were the only agency that's doing that. But now we've got all kinds of agencies that do that for all kinds of reasons. It became a central sticking point of the war on drugs. But you've seen the FAA come out and say, well, if you don't get a $5 license from us or whatever it was when they started wanting to license, uh, light drones, uh, above a certain, uh, weight limit. If you don't get that license and it's a minimal fee, uh, and we find you flying without a license, we'll find you hit you with $25,000, you know, and then they walk that back after, after complaints, but look at what has happened as people were upset about having to be forced to wear masks on airplanes. And they were hitting people with tens of thousands of dollar fines left and right because there's no protection against excessive fines.

Just like there's no due process and no presumption of innocence when it's the bureaucracy that's coming after you. Yeah. And there's been nothing to curtail the bureaucracies from pulling new rules out of their hat and slapping them on. One of my favorite examples is back a few years after it was created, TSA created a secret system of attitude fines. True story, true story. People can be fined up to $1,500 for showing a bad attitude towards TSA agents who were patting them down or, you know, sticking their hands anywhere. I mean, hey, it was impossible to penalize the TSA agents because the federal courts gave them a, you know, a, um, you know, gave them a pass, but there were all these, all these citizens would, would, uh, get hit with fines sometimes weeks after they flew, they took a flight and all of a sudden, well, you know, the TSA says

that you showed a bad attitude or you said this or that, the other, I mean, geez, I mean, you talk about making fly expensive, but I didn't realize just how I had skated through. I've had i could have had a long list of those things because like i said every time i go through there i say nope you're gonna pat me down and uh i don't have a good attitude about it either yeah and and something else is that the tsa has the secret watch list uh which which basically uh you know tell the screeners to target certain travelers.

And there are all these criteria, and one of which was people who are publicly notorious. So that's all it takes to trigger the TSA alarm on the secret watch list. And since you've criticized the TSA many times i don't know maybe you'd be on that list i'm probably on so many different government lists it would be really entertaining for me to do a four-year request someday uh uh good luck in your response i'd have to sue him i guess to get any information uh talk about this because you know we're here on the anniversary of january the 6th and um i got fired for opposing Trump and Stop the Steal and all the rest of this stuff. So when we look at it, I've said for the longest time, I said mail-in ballots, which Trump helped to establish, were the key in terms of the election.

You've got an article that's on the New York Post. Twitter files reveal how federal censors made mail-in ballots sacred. How did they make it sacred? Well, what happened was the DHS had a branch that was pushing Twitter, Facebook, and other social media and Internet companies to suppress criticism of mail-in ballots. There's a group, a new think tank called the Foundation for Freedom Online, which has done some great work. It showed how some of the federal grantees were pulling strings and basically getting millions of tweets and Facebook posts

and other things which criticize mail-in ballots, getting those suppressed. Yeah, that was the key thing, I thought. You know, I said, people who were going to go to January 6th, I said, you know, look, Trump helped to establish this. He didn't do anything to oppose it. That is the new wrinkle that's been added to it. And, of course, we know that elections have been corrupt in so many different ways for so long, and it begins even with ballot access, debates, uh, debate access, gerrymandering.

You got so many different ways that they have manipulated it. But, um, you know, the, the ability to, uh, rig electronic machines and the ability to have these, uh, mail-in ballots and all the rest of the stuff I said, it's just taking it to, uh, an astronomically high and new level. And yet nobody wants to talk about that. And nobody wants to talk about Trump's complicity in that as well. It seems to me like everybody was complicit in that and they have really established that as a new precedent.

I don't think that's going to go away. Well, I don't know if everybody was complicit and there were some people who tried to push back and give warnings, especially the mail-in ballots and things like ballot harvesting. I mean, where you've got a total loss of chain of custody of the ballot and you just have someone show up with this basket of ballots and said, yep, yep, people gave these to me. How do we know?

Hey, you know, it's the, you know, it's fascinating how Biden has tried to make any kind of any type of verification of voters identity a civil rights violation. It's like it's so bizarre. But no, I mean, this is something which which both parties have screwed up on. It's interesting how poorly that the GOP did to push back against some of the provisions that were done in the, that helped, you know, help determine who won the 2020 election. Biden is giving a presidential service medal today in the White House to the Michigan Secretary of State who mailed 7 million absentee ballots to the everybody in Michigan, even though that wasn't allowed under state laws, I understand Michigan law.

So that was a violation of the U S constitution clause for elections. But, uh, you know, it worked out well for Biden. So she gets a medal. Yeah. I've called it the,

uh, mail out election instead of a mail in election, you know, people have always mailed in ballots, absentee ballots. Yeah, I've called it the mail-out election instead of a mail-in election. Mail-out election, that's a good term. People have always mailed in ballots, absentee ballots, if they've got a legitimate issue. They can't be there because they're sick or they're going to be out of town or something. But that was always a very small thing. What changed with all this was that they made it this massive scale, as you were just saying saying mailing it out to everybody and we've got a lot of cases where people were getting ballots sent to them by multiple jurisdictions because they were close to a dividing line or something like that and it's you know it's a bit confusing the way they

gerrymander the places so i guess even the people mailing the ballots out couldn't figure out uh if it was overlapping stuff there but it's just total fraud anymore yeah and and it was you know people uh experts knew four or five years ago that the mail-in ballots were probably uh if not the biggest one of the biggest sources of fraud in elections yes the something the New York Times pointed out a decade ago but for some you know but there were all this string pulling in 2020. Well, it's a pandemic. It's an emergency. So, therefore, we don't need to verify ballots anymore. And then once they get it in, they're never going to take it out.

You know, I mean, I know they want to keep the pandemic going and they're trying to bring it back with masks and all the rest of the stuff. But everybody knows. And Biden kind of slipped up and said, yeah, it's over. And we know that it's over. You don't see the public of this stuff, but everybody knows. And Biden kind of slipped up and said, yeah, it's over. And we know that it's over. You don't see the public believing this. They're not wearing the mask in China. Once they got the jackboot off of them, uh, and they're still trying to panic everybody about what's going on in China, but traffic is soaring there. The people who live there are not worried about it.

Uh, but yet they're pretending that this thing is never going to go away. Then once they got that little bit of authority, they're going to hang on to it forever aren't they yeah it's it's frustrating it's frustrating but uh maybe there'll be more effective pushback i don't know well let's talk a little bit because you've been a real champion about julian assange uh you pointed out four years ago i wrote in the usa today column calling for assange to receive a presidential medal of freedom. Well, instead of that, he got stabbed in the back, right? Uh, the guy that he helped, uh, what is going on with Julian Assange at this point? Is there any hope at this point?

Well, maybe there's hope on the signs. I don't know. There are the New York times and some other media outlets, uh, called in late November to drop the charges against him. It's interesting, back when WikiLeaks made their biggest disclosures on Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration looked at it and said that there was no basis for charging him with a violation of U.S. law. But the Trump administration came in and filed charges against him, and the Biden administration is pursuing those.

And the ACLU and some other groups have been very outspoken that this is a grave danger to the First Amendment because you're going after publishers. That's right. um yeah while they while they lionize and and talk about the pentagon papers they lionize the washington post and new york times and articles and in movies uh they change it completely change the narrative of course they're saying that uh in order to get around that precedent they're saying that julian assange participated in pilfering the documents but but that's the basis for the attack. But you talk about how everything is, you know, this happened under the Trump administration, and the administrations don't really seem to mean that much.

What we see is a gradual increase in tyranny. I remember interviewing Thomas Drake, and he said throughout the Bush administration, you know, the guy who's pushing the Patriot Act and all this other stuff, he said, they never came after me. It was during the Obama administration that they did. And then Julian Assange, who is of great assistance to Trump, just by telling the truth about Hillary Clinton, then they come after him. This is the bureaucracy, I think, that is gradually expanding its reach each time. Don't you agree? Yeah. Thomas Drake was a hero. It's great that he stood up against the feds and whipped them in federal court.

Yes. Yeah. It's, it's, it's sad to see that it's not more controversial what the government is doing. I mean, I've been amazed that there wasn't more mainstream support for Julian Assange. There was a protest to support freedom for him back in october um and it was held at the you know there was a protest in london that

got 7 000 people they had one in dc which i spoke at which might have gotten 200 uh so i mean it was as good that they did it but i mean it, it just, it just has not had traction. I don't, you know, I don't know. The interesting thing about it is it's a dangerous precedent. All these things are precedents and we need to start setting some precedents for liberty and for the rule of law. We've got to somehow reverse this thing. And that's what's so troubling to see this is that all the precedents that are being

set are to take us deeper down into tyranny. Thank you so much for joining us, Mr. Bovard. Where can people find you? Jimbovard.com. I do quite a bit for New York Post, doing stuff for the Brownstone Institute, Libertarian Institute, FFF, lots of places. And so far, I haven't been indicted. That's something in this environment.

Thank you so much for joining us always a pleasure talking to you and thank you thanks for having me on thank you and thank you to nn and to william gardanis thank you for the tips i appreciate that 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.

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