The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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William Norman Grigg

The Peacemaker and the Psychopath

Sunday June 12, 2016

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Dave Bundy was working at his home in Delta, Utah, when a caravan of at least 20 federal vehicles invaded his property last March. The vehicles decanted a platoon of FBI personnel, some of them clad in a battle dress and carrying assault weapons. In what must have been a disappointment to them, Bundy – who wasn’t armed – surrendered without offering the Feds a pretext to dispose of him as they had LaVoy Finicum a few weeks earlier.

Bundy had been indicted on federal conspiracy charges for his role in de-escalating the standoff between his family and the BLM in Bunkerville, Nevada in April 2014. At that time, too, Bundy had not been carrying a gun. He was armed only with his determination to prevent bloodshed as he conducted shuttle diplomacy between the Bundys and their supporters, on the one hand, and the Feds who had stolen the Bundy family’s cattle. His conduct earned the appreciation of then-Clark County Undersheriff Joseph Lombardo, who negotiated with him.

Several days earlier, Bundy had been beaten bloody by the BLM’s khaki-clad chekists while he was standing at the side of a road video-recording their confiscation of his father’s cattle.
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Lavender Leninists and Heretic-Hunters: The Thoughtcrime Prosecution of Ruth Neely

Thursday May 19, 2016

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During her years as a Magistrate Judge in Pinedale, Wyoming, Ruth Neely performed dozens of civil marriage ceremonies. State law (Sect. 20-1-106[a]) specifies that magistrates, like “every licensed or ordained minister of the gospel, bishop, priest, or rabbi … may perform the ceremony of marriage in this state.”

Presiding at a civil wedding is a discretionary function of the magistrate’s office, not a mandatory duty. Neely had an unqualified right to decline a request to preside at a wedding, for any reason that suited her.

Prior to December 2014, she had never performed a same-sex wedding ceremony, because they were not recognized by the State of Wyoming.  Shortly before Christmas that year, Neely was interviewed by a newspaper reporter named Ned Donovan, who asked her if she was “excited” to begin officiating at same-sex wedding ceremonies.

A few weeks earlier, the US District Court in Wyoming had issued a ruling prohibiting state officials “from enforcing or applying” Wyoming’s existing marriage statute. Neely had made formal inquiries about how this would affect her responsibilities and had been counseled to refrain from public comment on the matter until official guidance was given.
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Road Pirates: Assemble! 'Desert Snow' is Coming to Idaho

Friday June 19, 2015

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It isn’t often that honest people receive detailed intelligence about a planned gathering of violent men who steal for a living and kill with impunity. An event of that kind will occur from August 10-12th here in Idaho. In fact, I can provide the specific address of the armed robbers’ summit — 700 South Stratford Drive in Meridian. The location is conspicuously marked and easy to find: It is the Idaho Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) Academy, which will host a two-day session of Desert Snow’s “Phase 2015” asset forfeiture workshop.

“Civil asset forfeiture,” for the mercifully uninitiated, is a procedure in which police officers and the agencies that employ them steal money and property from people who have never been convicted of a crime, and quite often never face criminal charges. The agency designates the desired property as “proceeds” of illicit activity and then files an “in rem” civil lawsuit against it – not the owner of the property, but the property itself. In this process, the burden of proof is placed on the victim, rather than the perpetrator.

Fighting an act of state-licensed larceny of this kind is prohibitively expensive and frequently futile, which means that the privileged plunderers generally make out like the bandits they unfailingly prove themselves to be.
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Whether in the USSR or USSA, Politicians Come and Go — But the Security Organs Remain

Friday May 29, 2015

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“Hey, guys, we’ll be here long after you are gone,” gloated a high-ranking CIA official during a hearing of the US Senate’s “Church Committee” investigation of illegal domestic intelligence operations forty years ago. What this meant, according to Peter Fenn, Senator Church’s Chief of Staff, “was, `we’ll wait you out.'”

Church, an Idaho Democrat who briefly ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 1976, had served in Army Intelligence during World War II and had supported the disastrous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965. As today’s Idaho Statesman recounts, Church took the initiative in creating the Senate panel — formally known as the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — after reading Seymour Hersh’s December 1974 revelations regarding the CIA’s criminal conduct on the domestic front.

Rod Gramer, author of a biography of Church, points out that the senator was outraged to see the US government “engaging in tactics he associated with the Soviet KGB.
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Pity the Poor Stormtroopers: Baby Bou-Bou Ambushed Them

Wednesday May 20, 2015

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It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib.

Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed.

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.
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Protecting the Vicious, Punishing the Virtuous: Marijuana Prohibition and Idaho's Prison-Industrial Complex

Tuesday April 21, 2015

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Josh Tewalt has a drug problem that led to several arrests. Like many others afflicted with that weakness, Tewalt eventually wound up in prison. Unlike most of them, however, he landed on the right side of the bars in the very lucrative position of Deputy Chief of Corrections for the State of Idaho. 

Without the dubious benefit of a college degree or substantial experience in law enforcement apart from his own time in jail, Tewalt receives a base salary of at least $83,000 a year to manage the human inventory of Idaho’s prison-industrial complex. 

Under Idaho’s state code, Tewalt’s repeated DUIs constituted an aggregate felony. Many – perhaps most – of the people whose lives he now controls committed offenses less serious than his. More than a few of them were convicted of felonies under Idaho’s pre-medieval laws against marijuana possession. The inmate population over which Tewalt presides may soon include desperate parents of children suffering from conditions for which non-intoxicating cannabis oil (CBD) is the only effective treatment. 
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Cold War II: This Time, The Commies Are In Washington

Saturday March 21, 2015

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The Regime in Washington is the only government asserting the supposed right to carry out summary executions anywhere on the face of the globe, so we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it also claims the right to impose “sanctions” on foreign citizens who publicly criticize it. On March 11, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Russian academic Alexander Dugin to its roster of “individuals and entities to be sanctioned over Russia’s interference in Ukraine.”

This decree means that any property belonging to Dugin that is within reach of the Soyuz (aka the country formerly known as the United States of America) is subject to forfeiture, and US citizens who do business with the professor will face criminal prosecution under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

What did Dugin – a so-called “mad professor” who will inevitably be portrayed on film by Russell Crowe — do that merits this designation? He holds no government position, nor is he the chieftain of a private criminal syndicate. Dugin, an outspoken Russian nationalist, has been depicted as a species of terrorist – the intellectual leader of a “revisionist” movement in Russia.

It is his use of the written and spoken word that provoked the outrage of the Trotskyites controlling Washington’s war-making apparatus. Dugin’s heretical rejection of Washington’s imperial rule-set made him “one of the most dangerous people on the planet,” according to noted geostrategic analyst Glenn Beck.
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Without 'Qualified Immunity,' Would Cops Be So Quick to Kill?

Thursday January 1, 2015

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The story had a familiar beginning, but took an unexpected detour en route to an unanticipated conclusion.

Dante Price, a young black man, was trying to visit his girlfriend and infant son at the Summit Square apartment complex in Dayton, Ohio. Price was confronted by two uniformed, armed officers who told him he had been banned from the property as a trespasser.

As the encounter grew heated, the officers drew their guns and ordered Price from his car. After the driver refused to comply, one of the officers contacted the Dayton PD to request backup; on the recording, his partner can be heard screaming at Price, “Get out of the car,now!” Instead of exiting his vehicle and prostrating himself at the feet of the officers, Price hit the gas and attempted to flee.

The officers unloaded seventeen shots at Price, three of which struck him. The 25-year-old plowed his Cadillac into a parked car. He was dead before the paramedics arrived.

“We got a guy trying to assault us with his vehicle,” one of the officers reported to Dayton PD headquarters immediately after the shooting. “We had to fire at him. He charged us.”
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Darren Wilson and the Reality of 'Blue Privilege'

Friday November 28, 2014

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“Any time I’m involved in an officer-involved shooting, be it a fatal one or non-fatal, it is always during my initial investigation listed as an assault on law enforcement,” explained the St. Louis County Police Detective who inaugurated the investigation of the Michael Brown shooting. “Officer Wilson … was the victim of the assault we were investigating.”

Once it had been established that the living, armed individual was the “victim” and the dead, bullet-ridden body had belonged to the “assailant,” continued the detective in his September 3 grand jury testimony, “One of the sergeants with Ferguson [gave] me a brief walk-through to start my investigation so I [could] have a logical starting point from where I would start my video, photographs, and looking for evidence.”

That unnamed sergeant, most likely, was the supervisor who had told Darren Wilson to leave the scene after the shooter told him that Brown had tried to take his gun.

From its inception, the shooting of Michael Brown was not investigated as a potential criminal homicide, and the inquiry was an exercise in validating the killer’s story, rather than testing it against the available evidence. The assumption was that killing was part of his job description – or, as Wilson has subsequently told George Stephanopoulos, “I did what I was paid to do.”
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A 'Final Solution' to the 'Muslim Problem'?

Saturday October 11, 2014

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We have reached a point in our nation’s descent into psychotic tribalist fear where people of stature and apparent sobriety unabashedly use the expression “final solution” when discussing the existence of Muslims.

For ISIS “and those similarly motivated,” insists retired Marine Lt. Col. James G. Zumwalt in an essay published by Family Security Matters, “a rational world should recognize but one `final solution’ exists – their extinction.”

For Zumwalt. “those similarly motivated” is an expansive category, which includes not only “al­Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran, Somalia’s Shababb, [and the] Khorasan group,” but also their Muslim victims. On the basis of murkily sourced atrocity accounts and propaganda videos of dubious provenance, Zumwalt concludes that the victims of ISIS exhibit a “Muslim death wish” by supposedly allowing themselves to be killed without seeking “to overpower their captors.”

“The message to take from Muslim victims unwilling to save themselves to pursue their promised afterlife should be clear: their murderers will never be convinced to stop killing,” asserts Zumwalt. An unspoken but undeniable corollary of his view is that wholesale annihilation of Muslim populations is strategically necessary and morally justifiable, because Muslim victims of terrorism are infected with the same “ideology” as their captors.
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