My old friend Ernest Hancock, Arizona’s legendary libertarian hell-raiser, and I had fun smacking around the latest Washington scandals and speculating on what the Trump administration will do. I started out by admitting that I felt guilty for the fact that Ernie did not personally receive a January 6 pardon from Donald Trump. Ernie is a talented interviewer who can deftly elbow guests to answer his durn questions.
Here’s a link to the audio and video versions of our 71 minute discussion:
I talked about one decision that could determine the fate of the second Trump presidency: “I did a piece last week for Mises saying that, you know, Trump needs to get in there to open the files ASAP. Eight years ago, I actually did basically the same piece for USA Today, saying that Trump need to open the files like Obama did when he came in office in 2009. President Obama got off to a strong start in part because one of his first actions was to open up the files in the Justice Department and show some of the secret memos from the George W. Bush administration, where Bush’s lawyers were telling him that, that he could declare a martial law at home. He could do this. He could do that. Don’t. worry about the Fourth Amendment. And oh, by the way, torture. That helped kneecap George W. Bush’s reputation and build up Obama’s. Trump failed to [open files] eight years ago. I’m hoping that he’s gonna get off to a much faster start this time.”
Ernie asked if left-wing and centrist media outlets might be seeking my “reasoned libertarian” take on Trump policies. I replied: “I think there are some places in Washington that have never forgiven me for being right about Waco and Ruby Ridge. There are other places which never forgave me for writing the book Terrorism and Tyranny 22 years ago. I was an outspoken opponent of war and terror from the start and the Iraq War and the the Afghanistan war. I think a lot of the places would be more comfortable with a libertarian who doesn’t hit [the government] as hard, that is not as hardline.”
Ernie replied: “Well, who would you call a libertarian that does that? Anybody come to mind?”
I responded: “Take a couple steps back, part of the challenge I had during the first Trump administration was this. There were a number of pieces that I wrote that were critical of his policies, but they were hard to sell because a lot of the outlets I was targeting were only interested in articles that proclaimed that Donald Trump is a fascist, he’s Hitler, and we’ve got to all be hysterical. And I was saying, well, that’s not true, but he’s doing a lot of bad policies on A, B, C, and D. And since I left out the word fascist, a lot of places just were not interested.”
Ernie replied: “Yeah, it’s self censorship. You gotta say this and not say that, you know. I would say it was censorship.”
I replied: “I would not say it was censorship. I would just say it was boneheaded editors. And it’s publications that have in large part gone to hell since then.”
Ernie said he assumed I had my finger on the pulse of what people were thinking in DC. I replied I didn’t follow it that closely: “Everybody in Washington thinks they’re the smartest person in the room, which can provide a lot of comic relief in a conversation at times.”
Ernie was nudging me to get my tail downtown and start covering the daily follies as a reporter. I replied: “For 20 years, I had a Senate press pass and that was a lot of fun because it was fun to go there and there was the Senate gallery, press gallery area just above the floor, the Senate floor. So, and they had a railing, and I could sit there looking down and and closely watch people and see their faces as they were lying. And at a certain point, it occurred to me, these folks aren’t lying. They’re just talking. This is who they are. And the whole idea of being honest or truthful or credible. It’s a category that did not exist for them. The longer they stayed in politics, the more that, it was just words. And, , lying, well, that was just a political tactic, and since we’re the good guys, lies don’t count.”
I commented on the peril: “The thing about [politicians and govt. officials] lying is it’s almost like a class entitlement. And since they’re part of the ruling class, they’re entitled to deceive people like you and I., it’s like, it’s a caste system. There’s only 1 percent of the people or so who have access to the government secrets. It’s a little bit similar to what you had in pre-Reformation England, where the Bible was not translated into the, vernacular. And so you only had I don’t know what’s percentage of people in 1400s England that read Latin, but probably less than 2%. And those are the only people that might have access to the Bible. And it’s the same now with Federal Secrets. Because you’ve got the government creating trillions of pages of secrets per year and only 1 percent of the people have access.”
I mentioned that the Washington media had perpetually disgraced itself during the Biden administration: “Anybody who was paying close attention or [had] any inside connections knew that Biden was basically mentally incapable from the start, and he became a lot worse as time went on. But the Washington media made almost zero effort to try to find out, well, who is actually running the government. It was like Biden was a figurehead, and they were okay with, you know, it being a figurehead. Because they were confident that the people running the government had values like they did.”
Ernie is apprehensive on Trump: “There’s no principle involved with him. It’s whatever his definition of make America great again is, and he has his own definition, that’s for sure. Someone with that much Influence and power can take us a direction that is not constitutional, not in our best interest, not, freedom down to the individual, and he thinks collectively. This nationalistic thing is what libertarians have always been warning against, …nationalism is the same collective kind of thing, and we’re going to do it for the homeland kind of deal. ”
We talked about the astounding failure of Congress to leash the FBI when it renewed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year.
And here is where the transcript of the show gets spooky.
Every time I mentioned FISA, the transcript shows “Pfizer.”
What does the software know that I don’t?!?
https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Media/374449-2025-01-30-2025-01-30-ernest-interviews-james-bovard-mp3-4.htm
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