Art Bell dissects the Freeman standoff in Jordan, Montana—59 days long with nine indicted men using women and children as shields while flying the flag upside down, signaling distress. Supporters like Bob defend their refusal to pay debts or taxes, citing the Federal Reserve’s private control and constitutional fraud, but critics like Steve warn of chaos and moral decay. Bell slams their tactics as dishonorable, comparing them to violent separatists exploiting patriotism, while callers debate sovereignty, accountability, and potential escalation, including nerve gas threats. The episode highlights how extremist rhetoric—rooted in historical distortions like Calhoun’s nullification—risks destabilizing legal norms, with Bell urging restraint to avoid civil war amid militia tensions and unproven claims of government overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning.
Across all these many, many, many time zones, stretching from the Hawaiian and Tahitian Islands, straight over flyover country to the Caribbean, the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, and north to the Pole.
Well, I've got a very pleasing announcement that I can make here at the beginning of the show.
Beginning on the 28th, or in about five days or so, we're to be joined by one of the nation's great radio stations, signing on as affiliate for what's called 3EEE.
Affectionately, WWWE AM in Cleveland, Ohio.
50,000 non-directional watts covering 38 states.
I told you there was one coming, and that's the one.
So it's going to fill in a lot of gaps for us, and I think you're going to enjoy its coverage.
You'll be able to hear them in about five days, and there are 1,100 on the dial.
And I rather imagine they just sort of carve out a whole bunch of the country, 38 states.
That's a bunch.
All right.
The Freeman standoff near Jordan, Montana.
Now 59 days old, and if I had to guess, about to probably come to a head.
Nine of the people inside the farmhouses are under federal indictment.
They seem more than ready, more now than ever, to provoke some sort of confrontation.
They have broken off talks with the FBI, breaking good faith negotiated solutions with Colorado Senator Charles Duke acting as middleman.
They're not talking any longer with the FBI.
Duke and others say that the FBI has gone the extra mile with them.
And frankly, these are just, in my opinion, dishonorable men.
That's what I've been telling you right along.
In the beginning of this whole thing, we talked about the Freemen.
There was at that time a very great deal of support for them.
That has slipped significantly.
I took a lot of heat for that.
A lot of letters, a lot of email calling me a traitor, calling me not a patriot at best and a traitor at worse.
Worse because I was coming to the conclusion that these were not honorable people.
These were not honorable people.
These were people hiding behind all sorts of veneers.
The veneer of the Constitution as they were using it.
The veneer of federal courts that they wanted convened in their own behalf.
Demands they continually made and then were in many cases met, and these so-called honorable men turned right around and broke their agreement.
To me, since the beginning, I'm looking at criminals who are trying to hold themselves up as some sort of David Koresh, some sort of martyrs.
These are people that Beaugrites and others believe are holding, among others, women and children as virtual hostages.
Even Senator Duke said he was unable to talk to about 10 members inside.
Beaugright said he thought it was indeed possible some were being held against their will.
This is no way, though.
These people are hiding behind the word patriot, misusing the term a militia.
These are criminals, as far as I'm concerned, now hiding behind skirts and the bodies of children.
So I've about had it, and my guess would be the FBI has about had it too.
The Freeman so-called earlier today flew the flag, American flag, upside down, an indication of distress, as you well know, and probably a sign that they figure the FBI has just about had it with them.
So when talks broke off earlier today, they dispatched heavily armed patrols around the perimeter of the property.
They've got 50-caliber ammunition inside.
It's armor-piercing, so any FBI agent that would approach on foot is in peril of his life.
It would go right through the armor they might wear.
There is, as I said, a convoy moving toward the ranches.
Actually, late news is that convoy, whatever it contains, has now arrived in the area.
And I'm betting in the next 24 to 48 hours, I'm betting that this thing is going to come to a head one way or the other.
Earlier in the day, one Freeman, an ex-Marine, raised his rifle, aiming it toward the FBI at the perimeter of the property.
Didn't fire, but pointed.
Leroy Schweitzer and others from jail urged those remaining to hold on in there, said, quote, the federal government has no jurisdiction.
Hang in there.
Don't give up.
Don't change the plan.
Whatever the plan is.
Well, the FBI is still allowing running water, and the electricity is on.
And according to Senator Duke, they've got it too soft in there, and I quite agree.
It's now pastime, in my opinion, that the electricity was terminated, that the running water was stopped.
There's an eight and a ten-year-old actually, the pair, eight and ten-year-old children inside.
Virtual hostages, as nearly as I can see.
In the last two hours of the program yesterday, we did a number of debates on the Freeman.
I'm sure we'll do some more of that tonight as we get into it.
There may be breaking news during the night tonight, in the morning, or perhaps tomorrow, but I don't think it's going to go on very much longer.
If there's anything that really gets to me, really gets me angry, it's people who preach ethics and honor and constitutionality and use the whole thing as a veneer and are themselves dishonest and not honorable at all.
Reports from Seoul say a North Korean MiG-19 with a single pilot at the controls flew to South Korea on Thursday, and I'm sure they're glad to see him.
President Clinton is trying to shoot down a Republican plan for a costly anti-missile defense system to protect U.S. cities from foreign attack by 2003.
Here, the President is totally out to lunch that our nation has no defense against a ballistic missile, smart or dumb, and you can fire a ballistic missile just means a ballistic trajectory.
You fire an arrow into the air, and it has a trajectory, ballistic trajectory, and we have no protection, you know.
And if you're talking about nuclear devices, why you only have to get close.
So, whether a ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear device would hit one of our cities, in the case of the more refined weapons, they would come down pretty much on target Russian weapons, or lesser countries who are developing or buying from China systems capable of delivery of this kind of thing, that we would have no plan,
no plan to stop something headed our way is absolutely insane.
And I would urge the President to carefully reconsider.
I can almost see the Senate hearing room, can't you?
After one of our cities has gone up in nuclear smoke, the chain of witnesses who would try to explain why we had no ballistic defense whatsoever for America.
I can almost see the senator questioning somebody from the administration about why this national security Difficulty was allowed to arise and why the administration did nothing, as a matter of fact, fought it the whole way.
That is for those ears left alive to hear the explanation.
So I have no idea why we're not doing that.
Do you?
All right, some updated information.
Boris Yeltsin is, in fact, doing better now and has begun to increase his lead over the communist in the race.
And that's great news.
That is great news, and I wanted you to know it because the likelihood, of course, was that Russians who are depressed by a country that is literally disintegrating around them still may vote for a man who will ostensibly bring some continuing reforms, and that's the only way.
It's going to take time.
You can't take a country in which the slogan was, we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us, you know, communism.
You can't take that and convert it immediately.
They have so many problems.
Industrial pollution at a rate we cannot understand.
One out of every three children with something wrong with it, born with something wrong from pollution, from poverty, from horrible conditions that would have long ago caused a revolution in this country.
The American people certainly would not put up with the kind of conditions the Russians have.
They are, in fact, a very patient people and hopefully prepared to go on toward the path of reform and capitalism, painful as it may be.
I am indeed looking forward to seeing a Moscow.
For those of you that don't know it, we obtained yesterday what is purported to be a picture of Chupacabra.
Art just took a look at the picture of the Chupacabra.
All I can say is that if all the women in Texas were as ugly as Chupacabra, the Lone Ranger is going to be lonely for a long time.
Yes, this thing is ugly.
No reflection on any Texas Rose.
Those are nice women down there.
And it goes on and on and on.
This horrible creature, whatever it is, I can certainly not tell you it is a chupacabra.
I sent a copy of the photograph to Linda Howe earlier in the day, and she called me back very excited, saying, would I ship a copy to her right away, which, you know, a printer copy.
She doesn't have a printer that'll do a good color copy.
So I knocked one out and sent it to Linda Howe.
She will speak with a veterinarian, and we will try and get a report for you Sunday on Dreamland.
In the meantime, it's the damnedest thing you ever saw.
So if you can get up to the internet and download a photograph, the photograph we've got there, take a look.
It is awesome.
Whatever it is, it's awful.
I don't know whether it's the, quote, goatsucker, end quote, or not, but it's awful, and it's nothing I recognize.
So I think you will The wrong word might be enjoy.
I think you'll be amazed at that photograph.
I've got a copy here, and my wife won't look at it.
And a lot of people are reacting the same way when they see it.
It's absolutely shocking.
So I'll tell you what, here in a moment, we'll go and we'll do open line talk radio.
Oh, I do have one other little item.
Remember, I told you, well, you may have seen the 60 Minutes program this last week, an incredible, incredible piece that we talked about regarding the Turner diaries, authored by Dr. Pierce.
Well, guess what, folks?
I have booked Dr. Pierce on the show.
He'll be here Friday night in the first hour of the show, or Saturday morning, I guess, depending on when and where you get it.
And they had sent me a facts back saying the doctor would like to know what you feel about his book.
And I told him what I felt about his book.
But I said, Doctor, what I will do for you is I will give you a fair interview.
I will not come after you.
I will allow you to say what you want to say, which is, I presume, what you believe, without climbing all over you, because I frankly want to get to hear what you have to say.
And so that's exactly what I'm going to do.
And under those conditions, which is no special condition for the doctor, it is exactly the way I treat my guests.
We'll get an opportunity to hear what this man has to say.
Why he feels the way he does about the government, about why he wrote the diaries.
I really want to know.
And I suspect you do too.
So we will have him on Friday night or Saturday morning, as you will, and we will probe.
I have, to recap, you know, the Freeman thing is looking now like it's going to come to a conclusion, violent or otherwise.
Maybe they'll give up, throw up their hands, lower the American flag upside down, put up a white flag, and give up.
I believe at this point that these so-called honorable, constitutional, paralegal blowhards, blowhards are using them as shields and using the word patriot as a shield and trying to engender the sympathies of the patriot community.
Well, I've said it day after day after day, and I'm going to say it again.
You better be careful how you pick your fights and who you pick them with and what kind of cause you decide you're going to lay down your life for.
And you better look damn carefully at the so-called free men before you pick up arms in their defense.
Because what they are people hiding behind the word patriot.
Dishonorable people who claim honor.
Dishonorable men who hide behind women and children.
Real men, if they were going to have a fight, would send those women and children out first.
That's what real men would do.
unidentified
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
We're listening to Art Bell,
Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM from May 22nd, 1996.
There are several things we're going to be doing through the night.
This is kind of a ride-on-the-money fax, I thought.
It's from somebody with the initials EF.
I guess by now you've learned of the latest insult by our president, the armed forces.
President's legal people, and this is true, have filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court advising that he, the president, is claiming immunity from civil suit as provided in the UCMJ for persons in the armed services.
Do you understand what this man is doing?
Paula Jones is suing him, and they are going to claim the president of being commander-in-chief is in the armed services and deserves immunity.
Immunity under the UCMJ.
That's very interesting.
I wonder if even the U.S. Supreme Court can swallow that one.
The faxes continue to roll in on the Chupacabra picture.
People think it's absolutely terrifying.
It is.
It's a terrifying picture.
If you want to get a copy of it, you go up to my website at www.artbell.com.
That's www.artbell.com.
And then there's one last little item here, which I may decide to do.
Hey, comrade Art Bell, you blankety-blankety-blankety, typical of what I get here on the Freeman.
You could at least have a real debate on the Freeman issue, not a one-side against two non-debate.
He's referring yesterday, I guess, to the debates I had.
And frankly, I thought, and you listeners can be the ones to decide, but I thought I stayed out of the debates and rather let the people go at it.
That was late in the show.
Not everybody heard it.
So I might do one here shortly.
He goes on: Why don't you find your most talented government agent?
Government agent.
Anybody who would argue that the Freemen are a bunch of no honor thugs would, according to this man, no doubt, be according to this man, would be a government agent.
So I don't need a government agent to argue against the Freeman's cause, which you apparently want to argue for.
And you provide a telephone number for that purpose, and I may just well take you up on it.
So, Bob, wherever you are down there in Southern California, stand by.
I may take you up on your offer and call you, and we'll have a debate on the subject because it seems as though it's going to come to a head very shortly.
So there you've got it.
Let us begin.
We do not screen calls.
We don't ask you what you want to talk about.
Before we put you on the air, we just put you on, as we now do.
I just wanted you to know that I have listened to many and many of Popsos, and I do believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you are number one outside of Bruce Williams, who does his financial thing.
You know, I approach him and I talk to him for a long, long time softly, and I look in his little terror-filled eyes.
And I show him my hand, the front of my hand and the back of my hand, and I slowly approach his flank, and I softly pet him.
Well, the first two or three days that I did that, he would sit there and shake like a leaf and hiss at me occasionally.
Yesterday, for the first time, I was able to reach out and pet him on his flank, and he put his little paws down, you know, the way a cat will crawl them under him, and relaxed and said, hmm, this petting does not appear to be killing me.
It even possibly arouses me a little.
You know, it's a beginning anyway, and it's day by day by day, for those of you who don't know.
Comet is a feral cat, a totally wild cat who never even saw a human being before, who, when I say this cat, this animal is wild, that is a gross understatement.
Gross understatement.
This thing is as wild as they come.
But there's a day-by-day change, and that I can pet him without having my flesh ripped from my body is a distinct move forward.
So there's a Comet report.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Oh, good evening, Art.
Wonderful program.
And my cat sends his kind regards to your cat from Canada.
A lot of people think you can't grow things in the desert.
Wrong.
We have wonderful water, groundwater, for growing.
We have wonderful temperatures and a great deal of sun so that during a large portion of the year you can grow things and believe me we are doing Well, I should say my wife is.
Well, what I said, sir, was that if the militias, the regular militias in the country, or even the fringe guys, you know, who aren't really in militias but are kind of in sympathy with them, or the patriot so-called community, decides this is a cause to stand and fight for, then you're damn right.
And my advice to them is to study what it is they're fighting for before they pick up arms.
Study whether these so-called freemen are really patriots or whether they're simply dishonorable people.
unidentified
Where the real problem comes is when ordinary people that are so fed up with the way all governments are doing get to taking sides with people like that.
In this country right now, you take right here where we live, you can't do nothing without some government regulating it, telling you what you can do and what you can't do.
Put briefly, Bogritz and now State Senator Charles Duke from Colorado have both tried and failed to get anywhere with Freeman, both thinking they had agreements that the Freeman then violated with more demands.
Nine people in there are under federal indictment.
They've now been holding out for 59 days.
They're heavily armed.
They're at the perimeter of the property.
They're beginning to, on occasion, raise rifles toward the FBI now.
Leroy Schweitzer from jails urging those remaining to hold on, saying the federal government has no jurisdiction there, even though these are, by the way, federal indictments.
He says, hang in there, don't give up, don't change the plan, whatever the plan is.
The Freemen still enjoying running water, electricity, that sort of thing.
There's an eight and ten-year-old child or two children that I think are virtually being held hostage.
The Freeman will not allow many who are in there, at least 10, to be seen or interviewed, leading to at least strong speculation.
There may be some held against their will in the ranch or the compound or whatever you want to call it.
In fact, Bog Wright's suggested as much.
Here's a fact, Art.
Your comments regarding the Freeman are right on the mark.
If there is another Waco-style slaughter of innocents in Montana, the blame is going to lie solely with the fanatical, incoherent, intransigent Freeman, whose high-minded philosophy allows both the writing of bad checks and the use of their own precious children as human shields.
Sean in Yucca Valley.
But prior to the hour, I got a fax from a Freeman supporter which says, hey, Comrade Art Bell, you blankety blankety blankety blank, you could at least have a real debate on the Freeman issue, not a one-sided against two non-debate.
He's referring to what we did last night.
And I will say again, as I said to him in person on the phone, because I have now called him, he supplied me with a phone number, that the debates last night were as I always hold debates.
And other than trying to keep the two sides from talking over each other so nobody can understand what's going on, as you know, I try to stay out of these debates and turn the air over to you.
He finished the facts by saying, I will debate and defeat anyone you can put on the air with my hands tied behind my back.
Bob, down in Southern California, and then he supplied me with a phone number.
So anybody calling any of my phone lines right now, stop.
What I want is somebody who feels, in essence, the way I feel.
And it's very strongly.
I feel these so-called men hiding behind children and women who they ought to get the hell out of there.
You know, if they've decided they're going to fight it out and they're going to get into a lead-throwing war with the FBI, if that's the way they're going to end this, then if they were men of any kind, free or whatever, they'd get the women and children out of there first.
I think these are a bunch of dishonorable non-good faith negotiators, check kiters, people who are using the Constitution, the word patriot, the militia movement, to hold in front of them as they do the women and children.
So if you feel that way and you want to debate with Bob here, who says he can defeat you with his hands tied behind his back, then call me now and I'll be screening calls for somebody who would like to debate Bob.
So that's all we're going to be taking calls for, and I'll screen those calls here shortly.
First of all, let's introduce those who are going to be debating.
First, there is Bob from Southern California, the author of this fax to me.
And I think that there have been a long train of events that have led to this point.
And gradually over the years, our government has changed the definitions of words, the definition of terms, and have basically usurped our Constitution.
They've utilized executive orders and various amendments to the Constitution, such as the 14th Amendment, to put citizens in a position of slavery.
And what I mean by that is that a person born in the United States is born and has rights that are inherent at the time of birth.
A person that immigrates to the United States comes here and gets a privilege to live here.
The United States government grants that privilege, and those people take an oath.
And at that time, they swear an allegiance because they're being granted a privilege.
Those of us born here have our rights because of our birthright.
Now we have the Freeman incident, and we've witnessed Waco, and we've witnessed the lies, such as the meth lab that never existed, to get a warrant to get tanks and helicopters to shoot at Americans.
We've seen Ruby Ridge, where Randy Weaver was entrapped, and the government lied, the FBI lied.
unidentified
And now we're looking at, well, we've seen the Oklahoma bombing.
And we're being asked at this point, after we listened to all of the news media vilify these people, to allow the FBI to just charge on in there and do it one more time.
What I feel is that you mentioned that we have unalienable rights.
However, if you allow any crackpot group, and I think these guys are crackpots, if you allow any group to just say that they disagree with the laws as they are established in this land, to steadfastly just say, I don't think I have to pay my bills.
I don't think I have to pay taxes and declare their own nation.
You are setting a precedent where any group like that is going to completely emasculate whatever semblance of law and order we have in this country.
Number two, if you allow them to declare their own nation, their own sovereign nation, to me, that's not a whole lot different than if you allow the Japanese to come over and bomb Pearl Harbor.
I consider that an act of war against the United States.
And if that precedent is allowed to continue, who will have any rights?
We'll have chaos in this country.
Those are two pretty big rebuttals I have right there.
Well, you know, you mentioned taxes, and taxation started out on corporations.
Corporations were artificial entities created by the government.
Those artificial entities were granted a privilege of existence.
That privilege of existence was granted by the federal government.
Therefore, they were liable to pay the federal government a tax for that privilege.
Okay, government, you've mentioned the word government several times.
I'm suggesting that if you allow any person that disagrees with the laws of this country to just act whatever way they wish, and that's what the freemen are obviously doing, that there will be no law.
There will be no government.
There will be nothing to hold this country together.
It will devolve into chaos.
Well, you know, we have a Constitution, and the Constitution is the law of the land.
What good is the Constitution if every person decides they want to do whatever the hell they please?
Let's say I have a car loan or a mortgage, and I decide that, well, I just don't like I'm halfway into my debt.
I'm halfway with my payments, and I decide that I just don't like sending these checks in anymore.
So I'm going to declare myself a sovereign nation.
What if every person in this country takes that attitude?
There will be not nearly enough people who enforce whatever laws we have.
Furthermore, I debate you on the fact that this has been a peaceful impasse.
As far as I'm concerned, as a common law-abiding citizen, I feel like I'm being robbed from every day.
My tax dollars are paying the FBI and all of the law enforcement officials to sit around and have a barbecue at my expense, and I feel like I'm being stolen from.
I don't think that's peaceful.
Do you think robbery is peaceful?
I agree, and the federal government's been doing it to you for years.
I'm saying, is allowing the Freemen to steal from us every day, is that peaceful?
Is it right or is it wrong?
I think it's wrong.
I don't believe that they're stealing from you because they have legitimate liens that have been ordered into a bank by a federal judge, Norwest Bank of Montana, that was seized by the comptroller of the currency, taken to Washington, D.C., and now sit and reside as the Secretary of Deed.
Are you happy to pay your tax dollars to let the FBI engage in a 60-day standoff and probably who knows indefinitely how much longer they're going to be able to do it?
Either the legislature has to convene and they have to legislate an act calling for the federal government to intervene, and they can only do that in the event of an act of domestic violence, an uprising, insurrection.
And if you're paying it, it's because on your ⁇ what they call an individual master file, they have registered you as a resident of the Virgin Islands or of Guam or someplace.
No, it's because we have a free market society and society values my service and I make income from that service, gainful income.
I don't think continuing to steal is going to solve the problem.
Now, I do feel stolen from because I pay taxes into that general fund, and we don't have funds to waste on some Mamby-Pamby stakeout like they're having there for some crackpot group that decides that they don't want to pay their mortgage or whatever else.
What if I say, I don't want to pay my credit card?
I'm just tired of it, so I'm going to say I am a one-man sovereign nation.
unidentified
That's called bankruptcy.
You can file bankruptcy if you don't want to pay it.
When I mentioned that I felt that I'd been robbed from every day that this passes by, every day we spend more money out of our already impoverished coffers to perpetuate this standoff, this pointless standoff.
I submit also that not only do I feel robbed, I really feel sorry for the people of Los Angeles County.
As I remember, last year it was national news that this health care president, and that's what he ran on, I'm the health care president, Bill Clinton, and the administration cut enough funding that Los Angeles County had to shut down over 40 regional health care centers.
And not only that, but they were threatening to shut down County USC Medical Center.
And the reason I'm bringing this up is I think a lot of people that want to have their children immunized and get health care and preventative treatment or perhaps emergency care, I think they would feel very robbed from too.
We don't have money to provide you those services, but we have money to spend to FBI agents to stand around and eat donuts all night waiting for the Freemen to make up their mind when these guys don't even want to come out and talk it over in a court of law in the United States.
Well, once they passed this act, they had a blank check that Congress could borrow as much money as they could get us to pay later.
And we became the co-signers of this fraud.
So our children and us were obligated to these debts.
And when you pay your taxes, you talked about when you send in your check, if you get your canceled check back, you'll see on the back of it that it says pay any Federal Reserve Bank branch or general depository for credit, U.S. Treasury.
Our federal government, according to the Constitution, is supposed to operate off of impost excises and duties collected on trade.
Yeah, that's a key point.
Our country, and my point is that when the three men declare themselves their own sovereign nation, then who knows what their rules are anymore?
I still consider it not only an act of war against the United States, but if that president holds and it's allowed to continue.
Well, do you think there will be so many groups?
You might as well let every person in all 50 states just decide they want to do whatever the hell they want to do, and there will be no federal controls of any kind.
Well, you know, Steve, our congressmen, they were writing a bunch of bad checks against the Congressional Bank.
And, you know, just the other night, Jerry Spence was on CNN or one of those cable stations, and he said, these people haven't done anything that the bankers and the Wall Street investors haven't been doing for years.
And yet they have never been surrounded by the FBI and threatened with death.
So what I'm saying here is we're a nation of rational people most of the time.
But sometimes what happens is we let the mass media get us worked up into a frenzy where we're all out here screaming, attack, attack.
And Article 7 of our Constitution says, in suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed $20, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States than according to the rules of common law.
All right, well, then why aren't these guys willing to come out and have their day in court?
If the Constitution is going to be irrelevant if you let every group that wants to have its own way have its own way, there will be no point in having a Constitution.
It will emasculate the entire system of whatever code of laws and justice and ethics we want.
It will be chaos, pandemonium.
I don't feel like I'm being protected if that precedent is allowed to continue.
And it seems like that's just the direction these freemen want to move in.
That's what scares me.
I don't blame you for being scared, but we need to put the blame where the blame goes.
And the blame belongs on the officials in our government who violate the Constitution set up by our founders to protect us.
And that's why this country is on the brink of a major disaster is because they refuse to honor their oath of office.
And whenever they take a public position, they swear to uphold and defend this Constitution.
And so they free men come out and vote for constitutional amendments or urge their legislators to reform the laws if they don't like the way the laws are then.
unidentified
Can I tell you something, Steve, that you probably don't know?
All right, well, I'm still not comfortable with the idea of the freemen just being able to say they want to declare themselves a sovereign nation and just decide that, well, Fully, I don't want to pay my mortgage.
I'm not comfortable with that precedent.
I don't think every person should just willy-nilly decide that the law is whatever they say the law is.
And we have that money available to borrow because we have a Federal Reserve and a reserve requirement in the banks that allows loan funds to be available for borrowers.
Who died and made the bank the middleman between our government and us?
Our government has the authority to print the money and issue the money.
But what they've done is they've put a middleman in there to siphon off his little portion of it.
Okay, well, the freemen should have been issued an ultimatum.
You can come out.
You can have your day in court.
You can make whatever claim you want.
You can have legal representation.
If you can't afford, an attorney will be appointed for you.
You'll be fairly represented in a state or federal court if need be.
Would you believe our federal government, after the Oklahoma bombing, they're allowed to just stay in there and the rest of the United States, then I don't think that our federal organizations are controlling us either.
As soon as we give the government supreme authority in this country, then they will tell us what rights we have and don't have.
But as long as God rules this country, our rights come from God, and the government is subservient to us.
God helps those who help themselves, too, and people who help themselves establish a system of rules so that chaos does not abound and that our personal safety and the integrity of this country does not be compromised the way the freemen will surely compromise it if this president holds true and other people follow their lead backwards into chaos.
And you may wish to comment on what you drew from it.
At this hour, the word is there is a convoy that has reached the Freeman location near Jordan.
We don't know what's in it.
The Freemen are flying the flag upside down.
Indications are something is apparently about to happen.
The last word is there are two children.
There is a woman inside, if not more.
There are ten people that are unaccounted for in the sense that none of the negotiators have been able to talk with them, leading to speculation they're being held against their will.
That's the situation.
You heard the debate.
I think that guy kind of represented what the Freemen are saying.
And if they did and came to your house with a legitimate warrant and you broke a window, stuck a rifle through the window, and said, get off my property.
You know, now there's this great body of militia out there and people who are on the edge, ready to grab a gun, Johnny get his gun, and they're going to go rushing off and have been ready to sort of a hair-trigger a situation for the next situation like Waco that would develop.
Somehow we've got to get the word out to these groups.
Gentlemen, pick your fight.
This one isn't the one you ought to be putting your life up for.
These people are not the kind of people that were at Waco.
Those of you just joining us at this hour, it's been a lot of Freeman talk tonight.
Looks as though that situation may be coming to a head.
Latest to give up on it all and walk away.
Senator Charles Duke, who, after negotiating in what he thought was good faith for a number of days, finally was disgusted, said the Freemen don't keep any agreements they make.
He's gone home to Colorado.
He was preceded by Bog Reitz, who made many similar comments after trying to have good faith negotiations with these less than honorable people who hide behind children and women near Jordan, Montana.
So that's been a subject.
I've got a lady on hold talking about it and a debate we had on that subject in the last half hour, and we'll get back to her in a moment.
Welcoming to our network in about five days the Midwest Monster 3EE AM radio, 50,000 watts, non-directional, 38 state coverage.
That's been the one I've been holding back.
Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, and from there, 38 states of coverage, 3EEE, 1,100 on the dial begins in five days.
All right.
In a moment, we'll get back to a lady in Palo Alto, California.
Look, you and I have not been at the compound, the farmhouse.
We haven't talked to the Freeman.
But Charles Duke, senator from Colorado, who was the power behind the Tenth Amendment movement in Colorado and is arguably himself sympathetic to these kinds of issues, legitimate issues, went and talked with the Freeman.
He came out and said, these people aren't patriots.
These people are not mainline anything, militia or anything else, and they're hiding behind the patriot movement.
But what I'm saying is that the talk they are using, the arguments they are using, however, no, they're designed to appeal to that exact group and engender support for the unsupportable otherwise.
But what I'm saying is the arguments that they are making are the same arguments you'll find with people who actually believe this stuff and do not write bad checks.
But anyway, it has certainly some violent potential anyway.
Now, okay, I don't know how much time you want to allot me.
Now, there was the so-called tariff of abominations.
You know, there was these economic struggles going on between wool and textile and what have you and the cotton crowd and all this.
And slavery also played a role as an issue.
Now, every so often some of these rather arrogant, touchy types.
And I recall that Jefferson's description of your typical southern aristocrat being very touchy and at the same time kind of lascivious but lazy and very concerned for their own rights and disregarding of others sounds very much like some of our self-righteous type criminals in California, but never mind.
unidentified
Anyway, these people, some of them started talking secession.
Now, Calhoun couldn't afford this because he wanted to protect his federal level career.
And so he cooked up a theory which, though it allowed secession, put it at a later stage of a process that begins with the states have the right to nullify a federal law of any sort by simply ignoring it.
And then there's a sequence that everybody's to go through, geeing and hawing, and then they get to secession far enough down the line that he hoped it wouldn't happen so he wouldn't have to make a choice.
Nonetheless, it was his line of arguments that eventually were used to justify the secessionist movement that did finally get going into the Confederacy.
Now, for example, we'll find nowadays people whose origin of this concern is really the segregation issue.
They did not want to segregate, so they complained about the 14th Amendment, and they say the 14th Amendment, for the first time, applied to the states that they had to obey within their borders, how they acted.
Their whole behavior showed, and their demand for a Bill of Rights showed that they knew they were surrendering a great deal of sovereignty.
Madison, who was the remaining, I think it was Madison, who was the last remaining living signer of this when Calhoun's theories, which are basically sovereign states, came up, he denounced this as totally beyond what was the original intent, legislative intent, you would call it an illegal wrangle in an appellate court now.
And he considered, as Daniel Webster said, this was not an agency contract with everybody being involved still independent of each other, but an executed contract creating a new entity.
And as far as it says very clearly in one of the early parts of the Constitution that this Constitution is the supreme law of the land, anything in any state constitution or local laws that are in conflict with it are superseded by it.
All right, thank you very much, and a very good morning to you, dear Art.
The Freemen have violated our constitutional rights.
They have denied us the right to free travel since we cannot pass on certain roads.
They are denying us the normal protections of the FBI agents who would otherwise be assigned elsewhere.
They're observing our tax dollars for their illegal actions.
I wonder if somebody might file claim against the Freemen for their infringement of our constitutional rights.
Steve in Santa Barbara or from Edward in Salt Lake City, what I'm hearing over and over is a sense of powerlessness and frustration.
I fear things may get worse in this country because most of these groups cannot even clearly define their own positions.
They're overwhelmed with endless regulations, the nonsense of political correctness, and the constant agitation of liberal psycho-babble.
They can't define any clear solution, so they talk in circles around what is their frustration with the society we live in.
Well, I listened to their arguments about the Federal Reserve and the money system and what they perceive to be illegal taxation and all the rest of it, and they completely ignore the fact that we have the Constitution in place that allows us to address all of these issues.
Instead, they're going to address them by not paying their mortgage, issuing liens, writing hot checks, and holding guns on the people who come to serve them with legal warrants.
I don't think so.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hello, Mr. Bell.
Hello.
Very interesting conversation debate there.
Yes.
Matter of fact, if you don't mind changing the subject, getting back to a program, something you spoke on air about a few days ago, about each individual person.
We are each individual granted these freedoms that I too believe come from God and even beyond the Constitution.
But we also should act in a responsible way in return, individually.
unidentified
Correct, yeah.
It has to do with man has just gotten well.
I do believe in God and he's done wonderful things and continues to do so in my life and others, is that we are getting to a point now to where we're getting to a higher, well, some of us that is, are getting to a certain higher consciousness level to where we can certainly see beyond what is presently, present day going on.
People call it, oh, I guess it's quickening, etc.
Yeah, matter of fact, anything, somebody asked you if you had any information.
I asked you one time about this new movie, Independence Day, and you said you actually have a script.
I wanted to make a couple of really quick points, and one of which is that the things that they're saying about the Freeman, the problem is that a lot of people are having with it is the exact same things they said about Randy Weaver and the Weaver family and Ruby Ridge and about the Branch Davidians in Waco.
I know they're not the same thing, but they're saying the things that they're saying about the Freeman are found remarkably similar to the same things they said about the Weaver Family.
And that is that if you listen to the people of Montana in and around the Freeman, they're saying these things.
Now, do you go back to Waco?
Those things weren't being said.
Oh, a few people were.
But basically, the people in and around Waco said they don't bother anybody.
unidentified
Well, the point I'm trying to make is I can understand why some of the people are having a hard time believing what's being said about what's being said about the Freeman because the same kind of propaganda was used against the Branch Davidians and the Weaver family.
So the point of the Republic of Texas people, whether it's valid or not, is that technically even under U.S. law, that the bringing Texas into the Union was illegal.
The question now is whether Texas wants to leave the Union.
And while there is a special provision within the Constitution of the state of Texas, my bet is that aside from a small, relatively small group of people, the majority of Texans are quite pleased to be part of the USA.
So I don't look for their picking up their Texas sticks and leaving any time soon.
Yeah, this Freeman thing is getting kind of ridiculous.
This sovereignty, the citizenship of Washington that he talked about in your debate, that is a mess.
I know.
I'm one that would feel like the FBI and the ATF ought to just maybe lob in some nerve gas, carry them all out, put them in a hospital, and say you're under arrest.
I determined pretty early on with regard to Freeman what I thought about them.
And I did some looking into it before I opened my mouth.
And when I did, early on, I got the vitriolic letters that I got you can't believe.
Calling me a traitor, calling me not a patriot, that I had no idea what the word means.
And then the American public slowly began to find out.
In fact, in response to that, for two days, two days, I opened these lines to people in Montana, right in the area there.
And without exception, they all called and said these people, these so-called free men, have been terrorizing us and our community.
And the vitriolic letters didn't come from Montana.
They came from other areas where this so-called patriot community was being fraudulently drawn into the sympathetic sounding arguments made by the so-called free men to cover up what they've been doing, which is nothing more or less than the big bully on the block used to do when you were a kid.
It's like, you know, you heard the guy in the debate arguing about he went from mortgages to the Federal Reserve determining the interest rate and telling the bank, which is a slave in the middle, collecting and usury and your money and all the rest.
What a bunch of total unadulterated crap.
The fact of the matter is, nobody's arm is twisted to go sign a mortgage agreement.
unidentified
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
I was hoping the other guy would say that he was saying, you know, well, you know, when you pay the mortgage by line, the other guy should have told him right away, then don't go sign the mortgage.
And then, too, even if everything that all of the reasons that they cite were accurate, there is nothing Christian, and there was no moral reason that they can give for holding women and children.
I was thinking, even here in Texas, we sort of romanticized the Alamo, which was sort of a standoff type situation.
But it's interesting that even the men in the Alamo allowed the women and the children to leave before it got bad.
The only woman, the only white woman, that is, that stayed was Emily Dickinson.
And she, not Emily Dickinson, I forget her first name, Dickinson, Dickinson's wife.
And she only stayed because she wanted to stay with her husband.
But they allowed all of those people to leave.
And so these men are nothing more than, and I know this is weird, and a lot of people that are sympathetic to them just sometimes happen to be people who would, as you said, the guy, I forget his name, but the guy they wishes that all blacks and Jews would leave.
I thank you, my friend, and I hope you make it through.
Yeah, we're going to have, let me promo this again because it is important.
He was on 60 Minutes this last Sunday.
It was actually, all things considered, with Kvorkian, with the story on Russia, and the story on the man who wrote the Turner Diaries, one of the best 60 Minutes programs in probably the last year or two.
I'm going to read you something, and this will be a test.
If it makes you angry, then you're in one camp.
If you agree with it, then you're in another.
Art, the more articulate Freeman supporters invariably obfuscate the fundamental issues surrounding the Montana standoff with a mind-numbing flurry of pseudo-historical revisionism and paranoia, conspiratorial fear-mongering regarding what they see as the evil monolithic federal government.
The real issue in this unfortunate situation is grown men hiding behind helpless children in defense of a poorly defined, morally indefensible, crackpot political philosophy whose first principle seems to be that the federal government does something wrong and dishonorable, then so can I.
And now you're on the air, coast to coast, AM with Art Bell.
So he told me that the day before in their major, it's either Dallas or Houston newspaper, the front page has an article and a drawing of the chupacabra.
Look, if there is a monster around, anybody who's watched any monster movie knows, whether it's the basement or the wooded grove, and you want to bait a monster, all you do is get a good-looking woman in a low-cut blouse and either send her into the woods or send her into the basement, monster bait, and if there's a monster there, it's guaranteed.
He will immediately regard her as a potato chip.
Well, moving back now to the subject of the Freeman from Mark in Michigan.
Mark in Michigan.
Art, thanks to Mr. Duke, referring here to Senator State Senator Duke of Colorado, thanks to Mr. Duke, the blood of these Americans will be on his hands because of the words he chose to use.
Do you and Mr. Duke and Bulk Reitz know something the rest of us don't?
P.S. Wake up, Art.
Yes, I think we do know something that people like you, Mark, don't.
And that is that these people in Montana are using the kinds of words that get the blood of your type, Mark, going in order to engender support for illegal activities in order to be able to hold the FBI off at the point of a gun.
Mark, yes, I think we've realized that.
It's too bad you haven't, because if a lot of people like you, Mark, go marching off as to war to protect these thugs in Montana, then there's really going to be trouble.
And that, Mark, is going to be blood on your hands.
she was also out of it too she got that the freeman actually thought they were i think they know that what they're doing is wrong all right thank you um...
On February 26th, an interracial intercultural grand jury was seated to hear testimony and view evidence for the people of the Republic of Texas versus the agents of their oppression, the United States Incorporated.
You mean this president who is, in effect, claiming, in order to put off the Paula Jones lawsuit, claiming that he is in the U.S. military by virtue of the fact that he is commander-in-chief and therefore exempt or should be exempt, that's his pleading to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Well, I think the U.S. Supreme Court will decide that case.
At least in the President's case, he is making a pleading, though ridiculous on the face of it, in my opinion, that I believe the U.S. Supreme Court will reject, but I could be wrong about that.
You never know what a court is going to do.
At least in the president's case, he is dealing within the system and taking it as far as he can.
Ridiculous on the face of it as it may seem, he is working within the system, something those people in Montana apparently have chosen not to do.
If you look at the 24th chapter of Matthew and 24 Ezekiel, the entire book of Amos, 14 Isaiah, they all talk about the beginning of sorrows being a time when whole Palestinia art dissolved.
And there are many, many other vector points that come into play here, not the least of which is, oh, going back to 1607, 390 years forward, that was Jamestown, and all these other prophecies that are mentioned in scripture.
But what I would like to do, I'm about 99% certain that it will happen, and probably about 50% certain that it'll happen before the end of the century.
If you look at the condition of Russia, and by the way, late word is, thank goodness, Boris Yeltsin seems to be doing better now in the polls.
So my comment would be, thank goodness, and I hope he carries the day because the alternative is a return to communism, and they've still got their strategic nuclear weapons.
Even if Yeltsin succeeds in winning the election, the odds are very much against success with regard to holding Russia, even Russia, together.
And if you've got a Russia that is out of control or involved in civil strife and war, you recall the day of the tanks punching holes in the parliament.
You know, if that kind of thing were to begin again and the armed forces were to split, the possibility of nuclear conflict, the Mideast situation aside, is, I'm sorry to say, great and dangerous.
And in a lot of ways, today, though we think we're safe, thank God the nuclear threat is over.
Sorry, folks, it's not.
And on the heels of all that, our president is fighting any research and development at all into the protection of this country from ballistic missiles.
You might want to look really carefully at that one.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi, I'm not going to tell you who I am, but I am calling from Hawaii.
All right.
I just heard you talking about the president setting up something with ballistic missiles.
I just have inside information that we have some Russians coming over in correlation with a couple of aerospace corporations and the United States military to do war games between the United States and Russia with ballistic missiles.
Do you think it's a good idea or not a good idea for the U.S. to have some kind of defense against somebody, anybody, not just the Russians, anybody who would fire a ballistic missile at our country?
unidentified
Oh, I fully believe that we should be armed and ready, but I don't think we should be bringing the enemy over here.
Mr. State Senator, Colorado State Senator Duke just came out, and he said that they had reached an agreement that the demands the Freemen had made, whatever they were, and it wasn't detailed, had all been met and agreed to by all parties concerned.
Including that?
Well, if that is part of it, I wasn't there, sir, so I don't know.
And that they had then reneged Welsh on the agreement at the last minute, simply uttering over and over again, we want due process.
This was after the agreement.
After.
unidentified
Right.
Now, you know, what I am reminded of, and like you, I found it remarkable, when you look at what people in Montana, in particular, their neighbors, are saying, you get a good indication of whether they're willing to put their money where their mouth is.
That's right.
In fact, I listened to that one neighbor, you may recall him, who indicated that they were going to get a posse together.
Well, I think the local, it is my understanding, the local authorities requested it because they were not prepared to have.
unidentified
Oh, I'm sure of that.
I'm just saying, I would think that it may have been, maybe, would have diffused the situation had the Montana State Police been involved rather than the FBI.
But that aside, I think that the local neighbors, they are the peers that would appropriately judge them.
And you do what you do, and you get every bit of satisfaction from your hard work and your family and those things that you value in each and every day.
And when problems like this come up, it's got to be a burr under the saddle for a long time before they're prompted to the kind of reaction that these neighbors and these relatives were expressing.
They don't get nosy with their neighbors or pushy with their neighbors or get, for God's sakes, to the point where they're ready to form a posse easily.
Their sensibilities are not offended easily.
That's all correct.
In this particular case, I actually feel sorry for a lot of the FBI on the scene there because they are being restrained politically from doing what law enforcement should be doing.
The other comment I have is also in the form of a question.
Earlier in your program, you made a comment with regards to racism and the vitriolic hatred that seems to be pandemic these days.
Yes.
And you essentially stated that you thought it was due to more or less of a blame-centered orientation and a kind of collective paranoia in society, which I thought is a very good point.
I'm wondering if to regress back even further what you have in mind with regards to how you perceive this as having gotten to the serious proportions that it has, what's engendered this.
Well, there was a day in America when everything was harder, when everything required more initiative, more work, more personal responsibility, more attentiveness to being responsible for your own situation.
What has brought us to where we are?
The ideology of liberalism to a great degree.
Its effect on the educational system, our technological revolution, our dependence on government, the gimme generation, the end of the war and the forgetfulness of what it was like when times were hard, the expectation that you are owed things.
These things have contributed to a sense that we're owed.
You know, by virtue of the fact that we are born here, we are owed.
And therefore, we don't put forth the kind of effort we once did.
And so fewer of us succeed.
And when we fail, we blame it on the first available or most easily available group, whether it be the government, somebody who's got black skin or brown skin or has a particular religion or worship.
In other words, we begin infighting and like the rats chewing each other alive.
That's what I think is feeding it.
So that's the best answer to the question I can give you.
Beyond that, I'm not sure.
But I think that accounts for the increasing time spent hating, the increasing energy devoted to hating.
I think all of that contributes to it.
I'm not sure it's the totality of it, but that's the best I can do.
Well, there was some interesting testimony, thank you, regarding single-blade slashes versus dual-blade slashes and all the rest of that sort of thing.
The legacy, aside from the civil trial going on now of the whole OJ business, is going to settle into American history pretty much the way the killing of Kennedy has.
There'll be a Godzillion theories for 100 years, and nobody will ever, ever know the truth.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
This is Roy from Wisconsin, but I'm in California right now.
All right.
I'm a truck driver.
I'm calling about your new station in Cleveland you're going to be on.
Dear Art, I can sympathize with Americans who are denied their freedom.
I can sympathize with Americans who are denied their constitutional rights, but.
But I cannot sympathize with common criminals who hide like cowards behind women and children while claiming their constitutional rights and liberties have been violated.
I think for the most part, this kind of hatred is born of inadequacy, paranoia, the need to blame one's failure on anybody else, collective as in the government, or specific as in a race, or, you know, those damn Jews.
Boy, if it wasn't for those Jew bankers, I'd be making a good salary now.
If it wasn't for them blacks taking my jobs, I'd have a good job right now.
But here I am sitting at home without a job.
Them blacks, they took that job from me.
Those Jews, those Hispanics flooding across, they took my job.
They're the reason that I'm failing.
Damn bankers, Federal Reserve.
They're the reason I'm failing.
They're the reason I can't pay my mortgage.
By God, I've got a gun.
You want to come take, you want to come repossess my house just because I decided I didn't want to make my mortgage payments.
I kind of want to try to argue with you on the legality of drugs a little bit.
You see, I think all drugs are legal.
And a couple of reasons I think so is that if I'm supposed to have the right to the pursuit of happiness, and in my pursuit for happiness, I find that drugs make me happy, then I think that I have the right to do drugs.
If that is your premise, if that is your premise, then anything at all that creates happiness for you by extension of your argument should be just fine and legal.
unidentified
Well, no, it interferes with somebody else's right to their pursuit of happiness.
Well, gee, then I guess I would argue that if your your pursuit of happiness includes the use of drugs and it doesn't make your wife happy or your children happy or your family happy or your boss happy or anybody else you interact with happy and and maybe even not safe I don't know what kind of job you have.
Maybe you drive a vehicle.
Maybe you pilot an airplane.
How happy do you want to be, sir?
unidentified
Well, I don't really think my use of drugs actually interferes with anybody's safety because I use drugs rather wisely rather than ignorantly because I know that they're dangerous.
People use dynamite and dynamite's dangerous if it's used improperly.
Another reason why I think drugs are legal, because if I don't have the liberty to use drugs, I don't have freedom.
I don't think that's justice for all.
I also can like to tell you one way I think that drugs could be legalized and safer for society than we have now where drugs are just illegal.
Okay, I'll try to do it.
I think if people had a license to use drugs, where they applied for a license, if they demonstrated any antisocial behavior or dangerous use of the drug, why, then they could have their drug license revoked.
Their drug license.
And people who have drug licenses, who would like to use drugs, would cherish these things dearly and not interact with antisocial behavior and not use, you know, not try to be dangerous to society.
I think a lot of people would do that.
I know not everybody would, but you could also take their license away.
You know, the Mingales, the Christian, and that there are quite a large population researchers and scientists were the industrialists of Germany with the outlook of Nazis supporting them.
And one of the things that stood out in that report, and this is about 1974 or five, was the mutation and cross-species work that they were doing.
Now, it's not commonly known unless you're able to know this kind of thing.
But I would suspect that it's very possible with ultra-like I said something about the mutation with the chemicals.
Oh, look, I think your guess is, thank you, as good as anybody's.
She's absolutely right about a lot of Nazis having gone to South America.
That's a well-known fact.
And it could have been something like that.
There are so many possibilities of where whatever this damn thing is came from, where it could have come from.
I have no idea.
But I think that it's real.
They're now attributing about 2,000 animal attacks to chuba copper.
2,000.
Now, even if you take 50 or 60% of those and attribute them to wolves or dogs or something, swamp gas, it's obvious there's clearly, you know, with the eyewitness reports, there's some new creature out there.
We have got a picture that might be that creature.
I don't know.
It was sent to me along with an explanation of the picture, and it's up on my webpage.
As of the beginning of the show tonight, about 10,000 people had downloaded that photograph.
10,000 people in that short amount of time.
That might be it, or this might not be it, whatever it is.
I don't particularly know what we should do with them, but basically, your idea of just shutting everything off, I feel that what happens to those kids and women that are in there, because it seems like they're all together on this.
I'm sure that they could pretty much leave anytime they choose.
Okay, well, I also heard or read in the paper here in Tennessee that there are some militia groups that have stated that if the government goes in by force, I know.
That's why I'm going out of my way again and again and again to try to get these groups that would rush in with guns to think real hard and understand what it is they're ready to lay their life down for before they lay it down.
I think the government should also understand that they're not only going in and probably fighting these freemen, they're also fighting these half-crazed militia groups that are.
That's one of the reasons so much time is being spent on this.
With some good cause, the militias and the people that have decided to be the watchdogs, as is properly the case of our government.
They better look into this.
They better know.
They better talk to the people that would normally be on the side of people like this.
If there was one scentilla of good reason to be.
People like Gritz, people like Duke, people like that, who have clearly stated these are not patriots.
These are not militia.
These are people hiding behind not only women and children, but hiding behind a movement that and making claims designed to appeal to a movement that, if successful, is going to result in a U.S. Civil War.
And then, trust me on this, everybody loses.
This is not one of those times where a little rebellion or a little civil war is good for the Republic.