Now, for something completely different, here is your host, former New York City radio star, now relegated to third-tier podcasting, Brian Wilson.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and people of all sexes, including everyone attending the annual Agoraphobics Picnic, welcome to this Celebrate Prozac episode of The Two and Only, a weekly slide down the razor blade of life into the logic-free zones, polluted politics, and media mayhem.

filling in today for your regular host will be Brian Wilson with our celebrity guest, the relentless investigative journalist for the New York Post, bestselling author, primary defendant in this season’s Santa’s beard plagiarism suit and progenitor of the new arrival, Last Rites, the death of American liberty.

Let’s have a sitting ovation for James Bovard.

James.

Brian, thanks for your kind words.

Prozac picnic.

I forgot to include something on my schedule today, but it’s never too late for Prozac.

I won’t keep you too long.

Let me just say right off the bat, I’m sorry to interrupt your days of mourning for the passing of Henry Kissinger.

I thought about putting off today’s discussion and give you a little bit more time to get over the trauma.

It’s sad because I was just finally starting to get over Kissinger’s passing and then the news came today that Kevin McCarthy is resigning from Congress.

Right.

And so it was, I mean, it’s such a double whammy for me.

I know.

Like I said, I’ll be merciful and short.

So probably getting over to the picnic will probably be restructuring in a number of different ways.

But along with everything else, the good news is the scoring of the best publicity ever with the New York Post publishing the entire first chapter of Last Rites.

Last Rites tyranny comes to Main Street.

I kind of sort of think I know how you did that, but I think it’s a great move.

I think it’s superb.

Really great.

The entire chapter.

Thanks very much.

It was very kind of the New York Post editorial page to

to run a big chunk of the book and it’s always a challenge when you’ve got a new book coming out to make people aware of it to put it on somehow try to get it at least on the tiny corner of the radar screen uh so and this is a big help so I mean it’s uh there’s just so much else going on I mean it’s just it’s really hard for me to compete with Taylor Swift

Well, yeah, and all the books she’s written.

But I was thinking back in the day, which wasn’t so terribly long ago in talk radio, if you had any sort of a reputation and ratings, publishers would send you copies of new releases as they came out.

And like when I was at WABC, prior to Lost Rites coming out in 94, I mean, I

Well, I’ve given a whole bunch of them away.

But I mean, there were I think that Timothy Leary’s book was one of the ones sent to me by by the publisher, and we subsequently had them on.

It was a fascinating conversation.

But I don’t know how much of that still goes on today.

But that was that was something that happened on a regular basis.

Now, I guess you got to fight for

any sort of exposure publicity that you can possibly get.

First of all, for listeners for whom this is bulletin news, you would have been among the earliest of heads-ups if they had a subscription to my Brian Wilson Writes at Substack column.

Everyone there got the good word as soon as Jim raised the Gadsden flag here a few days ago.

So there.

But from a professional perspective, I’m just wondering, is it safe to assume along this same line that talk show hosts and their guest invitations are pouring in to your humble abode?

Or do I need to plant an encouraging foot in the creative butts of my former colleagues?

Well, I’ve always had great faith in your foot.

Ah, yes, certainly one of the more effective parts of my anatomy.

I’ll, well, I’ll do that.

I’ll do that.

I got that.

There’s a number of folks out there.

I’m sure Mark Davis down in Dallas and Raleigh James up in Chicago and folks like that.

But if they haven’t heard, and I’d be kind of surprised if they hadn’t, but I’ll certainly get that out.

I do want to go through a couple of things because now that everyone’s had a chance to actually see and read

uh the the first chapter there the main street chapter i bet we mentioned this last week each sentence in my opinion each sentence in every paragraph of chapter one uh is an indictment of government whether it’s all the way from perfidious presidents and politicians and policies and programs and of course all the pejoratives they so richly deserve there’s some recent headlines that i think uh underline the point now the kevin mccarthy thing

I think that was great.

He’d taken his blow-dried hair and quitting Congress.

He’s not getting his way, so it’s the highway.

And all that that involves in that story and what he’s doing and what representation has come to mean in Congress.

Do you see that there’s a lot of retirements going on?

I mean, are these people leaving because it’s time to start cashing in on those spiffy pensions they’ve got?

Or are they getting altruistically fed up

at what a cesspool that whole operation is.

You are the idealist for that last possibility.

I think a lot of them are not leaving Congress to

Cash In On Your Pension, it’s more to cash in as a lobbyist, because a huge percentage of former members of Congress become lobbyists, though they’re often, there’s some misleading labels and bait and switch, so they don’t have to formally declare to be a lobbyist, but that’s what they’re doing.

Brian Wilson Speaks

Kevin McCarthy Heading Out

Take My Name Plate and Go Home.

But there are other things just cruising through the different news headlines around.

Peter Schiff wrote an article about U.S.

debt crisis going parabolic, and your points about the spendthrift ways of Congress, and they’re essentially flat-out ignoring the bankrupt state that the country is in and what they’re going to do about it.

The one that really caught my eye, though, was one of our favorites, Chris Wray.

He was he was testifying.

Well, I think it was yesterday in response to a question from the dove of the Senate Lindsey Graham asked him to To give an assessment of the terrorism.

What do you call it?

Terrorism matrix something like that that he’s seen at this point and and Ray testified he’s seeing blinking lights Blinking red lights of terrorism like he’s never seen before.

Do you think in light especially since October the 7th?

So I’m wondering if you thought

But that’s mostly true or mostly a setup using the reliable fear porn that government always uses.

Well, it’s very important not to have the FBI budget cut.

So, I mean, there’s been so many either wrong or misleading or false statements by FBI chiefs in the last 30 years, starting especially in 30 years ago, 1993.

There was a budget ploy that Louis Freeh used, but FBI Chief Louis Freeh, he was trying to get the media all upset with the Clinton administration for not giving him a bigger budget than the FBI.

So he was out there complaining that the FBI was so strapped for money that it could not even afford to pay for ammo for FBI agents to go target practice.

And of course, oh my God, that’s so terrible.

That just proves Clinton hates America.

And it’s, you know, there’s so many different debates and switches.

At the same time, the FBI was expanding overseas a lot, making the DEA and other agencies very nervous.

It’s hard to tell because the FBI does a very poor job of processing the information that it gets.

There are some smart FBI agents out there.

There’s some FBI agents who are, you know, trying to do the right thing.

But my impression, if you look at the history of the FBI, during the Trump administration, and the late Obama presidency, you had a lot of rascals rising to the top.

Yes, the name James Comey comes to mind immediately.

But, you know, speaking of Judge Louis Freeh, during his days at the FBI, at that time, and this was right about the time that you and I first got together, this was 1993, I was living north of DC, just outside of Columbia, Maryland.

Across the street, two very nice people, who I’ll discreetly not name, she was one of Louis Freeh’s three secretaries.

He was in what he jovially called

The Wires and Pliers Division of the FBI.

He set the miniature cameras and the miniature microphones and things along that order everywhere they wanted to have eyes and ears.

And what’s interesting about it in this particular case with respect to your story about Louis Free complaining about lack of ammo.

And so Bill, of course, and sorry, my neighbor had to qualify, you know, as every every month at the range, and he would bring back

all of the surplus ammo that did not get fired that day at the range for me to give them to me because I was I was shooting a lot back then I had my FFL back at that time I had my my M16 at the time you know and shooting full auto eats up a lot of ammo not nine millimeter but 220 with but the point is is that

I wasn’t aware of it at the time that Free was complaining about a lack of ammo.

All he had to do was come over to my place.

A bunch of stuff that had been left behind at least once a month during the qualifying day that my neighbor had to go out.

That’s an interesting comparison between Louis Free and me about how they couldn’t practice when you’re built, damn it.

here’s my neighbor bringing back a uh well he’s retired now so it doesn’t matter all that much but uh it was a funny story and of course you can’t talk about either Christopher Wray or Judge Louis or the budgets or anything else without giving a nod to the article you’ve got up on on your website jimbovar.com about the dearly departed Janet Reno and all of her uh fun things not the least of which of course was Waco and all the

Great Writing Work you’ve done on that.

Yeah, I had some fun with that.

There’s a book review for Reason magazine.

Yeah, there’s a new biography out about a very fawning biography.

And as I said in the review, I don’t know why someone would write a 200 page love letter to a dead politician.

Yeah.

I don’t know, maybe it really had to go to the owner of a red truck.

I don’t know, maybe that was where it went.

What good things could you possibly say about someone who had direct oversight of the slaughter of women and children and men?

It’s just unbelievable.

One of the things that I came across that I did also want to run up against before we ran out of time was that

There is, uh, there’ve been a couple, not a couple, but several articles in the WAPO and, um, the Atlantic and so on.

Uh, even Zero Hedge picked up on it about the green light, uh, green lighting assassination of the, uh, presidents, according to Gates, the Florida Congressman, about, uh, these different outlets publishing articles warning what a second Trump term, uh, that it would turn America into a dictatorship.

And the interesting quote that I want to call to your attention, assuming you hadn’t seen it, was written by Robert Kagan.

He’s married to Victoria Nuland, who was really big in shoving the Steele dossier.

And his article, Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.

We should stop pretending.

and he goes on to talk about you know Trump’s going to be the Republican nominee and what are we going to do about it if we thought there was a 50% this is a marvelous thing he says if there was a 50% chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try and stop it including many things that might not work but that given the magnitude of the crisis must be tried quote unquote

The Gaslighting of Assassination comes into play at that particular point.

And I just wonder if, first of all, whether you’ve seen it or not.

I mean, it’s in the air.

It’s being bandied about.

The meatball from Maryland was on MSNBC and pretty much chattering the same thing.

I was just wondering if you had any early reaction to the way this dialogue is going.

Well, it’s it’s funny that a number of the folks who are trying to maximize the hysteria about Trump being a dictator, don’t have any concerns about arbitrary power, if it’s being used by Biden, or if it was used by Obama or Bill Clinton.

It’s a very selective fear of dictatorship.

I can understand why folks would be apprehensive about Trump because some of the things he said have been appalling.

But on the other hand, this whole notion that President Biden should have veto power over who’s who’s permitted to challenge him next year.

That’s, that’s a death of democracy as well.

So, you know, the, the entire political system is in a bad way at this point.

And it’s a hell of a thing that looks like voters next year might have to choose between Biden and Trump.

It’s like, where the hell did this nation go wrong?

Well,

Yeah, there is that question, although I think there’s an awful lot of people on the Trump side that are looking at it from the standpoint of, you know, that they want their at-bats.

You know, that their guy and their beliefs and their principles and their ideals have been beaten up, batted down, investigated, and punished, you know, for all these years.

You know, they endured Obama, they got Trump, saw a little light at the end of the tunnel, then all the scurrilous activities about the election, and we get this guy and all of the

uh the Merrick Garland uh ignorance uh and and blindsiding and so on it’s it’s uh I really think that’s where a lot of the frustration and anger is coming from this is there and say okay we’ll go back to those good old American ideals and become the shining city on the hill whatever we get our turn about to go out there and beat the crap out of these people and I think that’s the

That’s why some of the things that Trump is saying, while it’s driving the left up the wall, everybody with the red hats is saying, yeah baby, oh boy, howdy.

One final thing, Greg Gutfeld over at Fox, once upon a time a few weeks ago, was talking about this line of talk and how it was

It was kind of a conditioning process aimed at getting the average American, you know, the Joe six-pack family of average Americans to accept the concept that this kind of violence, this kind of, you know, something like an assassination was really the best thing for the country.

His point was that if you go around consistently calling somebody Hitler reincarnate, what could that do to motivate a conscientious person but to kill him?

I mean, that was the ultimate goal of the World War, got to get Hitler.

and as whacked out as too many people are today, who would doubt that possibility?

Considering the diligence and direction of law enforcement under the impeccable AG Merrick Garland, it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine the leniency that would be afforded somebody acting it out.

I think that’s where the real danger in all this is, is these types of things getting into common parlance on, even on something like MSNBC, which is not common, nor is it parlance, but nevertheless, somebody’s watching it.

CNN picks up on it here and there and so on.

So it’s, I’m just kind of concerned that, oh, and I’m just now remembering,

Well, this is not surprising with the way the rhetoric has been cranked up.

I mean, Trump

did a lot of cranking up the rhetoric from 2015 onwards as well.

But the but the latest rhetoric is probably harsher than harsher than what Trump was pushing.

So I don’t know.

It’s unsavory.

100 years ago, Henry Adams said politics has always been a systematic organization of hatreds.

And that’s a lot of what we’re seeing right now.

It’s unsavory.

And sometimes I almost lose faith in the system.

Yeah, I know you’re teetering on the edge and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to, you know, create any sort of a zephyr that might push you over.

So I’ll, unless it’ll get you to the picnic, you know, a little few minutes early.

Never too late for Prozac, like I said.

Well, regretfully, the time has come, the Walrus said, to get your butts out of here.

And so, once again, the two and only have run out of road and I’ve got to bring down the holiday decorated Bovard Curtain of Mercy.

But the good news is you can finish all your Christmas shopping in one place.

Punch up jimbovard.com for a link to the Amazon order page and get yourself your last rights.

That’s the book, not your last.

Well, you get the point.

For the dynamic duo of A Christmas Gift, I was thinking you could get Lost Rites, 1994, and Last Rites, just out, and be a strong witness to Jim’s prescience on current events then

And now, of course, for the grand slam of Christmas Tingle, you can get Jim’s Lost Rites and Last Rites and then add in my 50 stories and watercolor memories.

And there’s more than enough good time reading material to help you avoid family and in-laws for the entire holiday weekend.

Assuming we avoid any mushroom clouds, we’ll be back with another Barely Legal episode at the two and only same time next week with more scathing analysis, rivaled commentary, and soporific observations on swamp creatures and our crumbling empire.

For James Bovard, I’m Brian Wilson subsidizing the adult section of the local apothecary.

We’ll see you next time.