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April 22, 2025 - The David Knight Show
55:41
Rebels, Redcoats, and Revolution: How Americans Understood British Tyranny
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Joining us now is James Bovard, and you can find his writing and links to where he writes, because he's published all over the place.
He's got a piece on Mises.org that we're going to talk about here that's excellent in historical context.
I think you're going to find it fascinating.
But you can find him at jimbovard.com, because like I said, he's published in all different places all the time.
Great to have you on, Jim.
Thank you so much.
David, thanks for having me back on.
It's always very entertaining to talk to you, and I covered this a little bit yesterday about the 250th anniversary of Concord and Lexington and Paul Revere's riot and everything that happened this last weekend.
But you put this in an excellent historical context, and so I wanted to go through some of that.
And you talk about, you begin by talking about Arthur Schlesinger.
I remember this guy.
He's like the prototypical fighting whitey guy.
I remember him.
We got rascals.
Yeah, yeah.
And he was, you know, he'd always have that pipe there, you know, and he was like the Mr. Wasp guy of the CIA or whatever out there.
What was his attitude towards 1776, the American Revolution?
Well, I mean, he had the same attitude that King George III had, so basically a bunch of uppity peasants.
There was a line that he had a few, I guess, 20 years ago before he pegged out.
He said, historians today conclude that the colonists were driven to revolt in 1776 because of a false conviction that they faced a British conspiracy to destroy their freedom.
And you have to get rid of so much evidence in order to say it was a false conviction.
It's kind of like, yeah, like the government was shooting blanks at Waco, you know, whatever.
I saw somebody that had an op-ed piece, Jim, that said tariffs are what American freedom is based on.
It's like, what?
I think tariffs are kind of what they were fighting, don't you, at that point in time?
I mean, it was just taxes, right?
When they said, you know, no taxation without representation, they were talking about tariffs, weren't they?
Well, I mean, tariffs were part of it.
Tariffs were a major, you know, it wasn't just a tariff, it was a blockade.
Yeah. I mean, because it wasn't like that they had to pay 10% more for the shoes that they imported from India.
It was more like that the Brits were prohibiting them from making any kind of iron-type goods, nails and stuff like that.
And they were just completely subjugated on the trade issue.
That was a major issue in the Declaration of Independence.
A lot of people, that's not too convenient to remember at this moment, but it was.
But there were so many ways that the British were so abusive and contemptuous of Americans.
And it took a lot to get those farmers to get up early in the morning, get their gun, and go out and start shooting the British soldiers as they were running back from Concord to Boston.
And as you point out, there were pretty good shots, too.
Unlike the British soldiers.
I mean, the British soldiers, there was a wonderful line from his story almost 100 years ago.
He said the British soldiers were the worst shots in the world, and they would not be able to hit a horse at 10 yards.
Well, you know, that's something.
I imagine in those days there were...
You know, not everybody had, they were shooting muskets and things like that and not necessarily accurate rifles.
I mean, we even saw that in the Civil War.
You know, these people would line up and, you know, once the first volley went off, there was nothing but a white cloud anyway.
You couldn't see anything to even try to target anybody for the most part.
And so, you know, it's just like, you know, load and fire as rapidly as you can and hope that you hit something, you know.
They did have sharpshooters that were operative both in the Civil War and in the Revolutionary War.
Yeah, it was Daniel Morgan's men from the Winchester, Virginia area were famous for that.
I think at Saratoga they shot down a lot of the British officers.
But there was a whole mindset, okay, a lot of the Americans did have muskets like the British, but I mean...
It's a different incentive system.
If you're a government soldier, then you need to shoot close enough for government work.
Whereas if you're a farmer and you're counting on your hunting and you need to be able to hit the damn deer you shoot at, you need to hit it.
And the same, you've got a guy with a red coat there marching down the street, you know, okay, it's not too hard to hit.
That's right.
Yeah, their ammunition is deer, and when they're going out to try to get the deer, they've got to make every shot count.
I've had a lot of practice of that.
As you point out, he had a great quote here.
He said, the colonists revolted because they were being bayoneted down the road to serfdom, you know, going back to Hayek.
And that's exactly what was happening.
As you point out, it was the taxes, it was the tariffs.
And I've come across a lot of people like Arthur Schlesinger who used to take the kids when they were younger.
Oh, really?
No taxation without representation, I would say.
Because taxation is theft!
And they would go, well, no, not really.
And it's like, well, no, really it is.
And they would give you their pat answer about what they want to do.
But yeah, they'd kind of try to downplay it and they would try to rework the image of the British a little bit there as well without pushing down the Americans too much.
It's been a long time since they've been there.
I imagine it's probably pretty bad.
Pretty bad now.
That was back in the 90s.
Yeah, that was in the 90s.
Yeah, it's probably gotten a lot worse.
Same as Monticello.
Yeah. I mean, that's a social justice tour at this point.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we took them once.
One year, we were up in...
Plymouth Rock for Thanksgiving.
And I couldn't believe how politically correct all of that stuff was.
We did that about a decade after we'd been going to Colonial Williamsburg, and it's like, oh, this is crazy.
It's just this self-flagellating parade of beating themselves up.
It was crazy.
But still, we could go and we could see the ships.
I guess it was worth it for that, maybe.
Yeah, I mean, it's the same trouble with historical narratives in general.
When I was up in Boston two summers ago, and I was curious because I had not been knocked around Boston for quite a while.
I used to live there.
And I wanted to see how they were portraying the history, especially of the American Revolution.
And it was almost a myopic focus on the plight of the slaves.
And the slaves are, of course, badly treated.
And Massachusetts was one of the first states to get rid of slavery.
But it was the same puzzlement I had when I went to Richmond a few years ago.
And I'd gone to Richmond quite a bit as a boy.
I was a big enthusiast for the Civil War.
And they had Civil War museums then and now, but nowadays the museums seem to focus mostly on the plight of women and slaves during the Civil War.
And I was thinking, well, you know, actually there were also some battles.
You know, I'm archaic.
What can I say?
Yeah, that's right.
That's what up at Plymouth Rock, you know, it's all about the Indians.
And what they really kind of sloughed over was the fact that the Indians and the pogroms got along pretty well for a couple of decades or a couple of generations until they started having a King Philip's war and that type of thing.
But they wanted to ignore that.
But getting back to your op-ed piece here and the lead-up to what caused all this, you talked about the Sugar Act.
Okay, so basically what the British did with the trade laws and regulations was make it clear that Americans were completely inferior to the British.
And the Sugar Act of 1764 resulted in British officials confiscating hundreds of American ships based on mere allegations that the ship owners or captains were involved in smuggling.
Once a British official made that charge, it was up to the ship owner to somehow prove his ship had never been involved in smuggling.
It was very difficult to prove a negative.
I mean, this is kind of the same thing we have now with asset forfeiture laws.
They've been sort of vexatious for the last 40 years.
But the philosophical, I mean, what so many of the histories of the American Revolution do is ignore The philosophical aspects.
And the Americans back then could see the broader picture better than they do now.
There was an act that Parliament passed in 1766, the Declaratory Act of 1766.
It said Parliament had, hath, and a right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes...of sufficient force to bind the colonies and people of America subject of the crown of Britain in all cases whatsoever.
That meant Britain could never violate the rights of Americans because Americans had no right.
And something I'd not realized until I was digging into this, writing the story, was it was modeled after an act of the same...
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
It's somehow inferior, subhuman.
They're not really human.
You know, you look at this and you can see this being repeated in Gaza or wherever, but also, you know, when, as you point out, it's very much like civil asset forfeiture.
You know, I think that this ship was involved in smuggling.
And you just take it.
You don't have to, I guess, I don't know if they would charge the people a crime or they'd just steal the ship.
That's what they do today with civil asset forfeiture.
They just take your property.
They never even charge you with a crime, let alone convict you of that.
It saves paperwork.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, it kind of reminded me, too, when I saw that.
I thought it was funny.
You know, we had the Declaration of Independence came exactly...
Ten years later.
And it was a real response to this declaratory act, I guess, because the declaratory act is saying you don't have any rights.
And they said, no, we do.
And our rights don't come from government.
They come from God.
We have them innately as a human being.
And so it was a direct response a decade later to this declaratory act.
And I thought back, you know, to one of the movies that I'd watched as a kid that I really liked because I like Patrick McGowan.
I love The Prisoner.
And I remember the Scarecrow thing that was done by Disney at the time.
Because Walt Disney used to take a positive view of American history and of Americans.
It's a long time ago.
That was a long time ago.
Things have really changed, haven't they?
And so in that one, he's got this cleric.
Their pastor, whatever his title was, and he moonlights as the scarecrow that's doing smuggling.
And so these guys are smuggling, and it's all presented as justified, and the British are the villains and everything.
And it's kind of interesting because they also show the press gangs.
They were going around and kidnapping people and putting them into service.
And, of course, that was a big part of what was happening at this time as well.
They had press gangs that were coming.
Yeah, and that was part of what sparked the War of 1812, decades later.
No, I mean, there was an attitude of complete contempt for anybody who wasn't part of the aristocracy, or didn't have this title, or was friends of this person.
And that was part of the novelty of the mindset of the government that was created in 1787.
It did not have that.
aristocracy it did not have those legal privileges i mean the federal government claimed them pretty quick made a mockery of a lot of the ideas but still at the start it was good so yeah yeah you mentioned too and it was pretty much a universal attitude of contempt by the
british there were some exceptions like william pitt you've got a quote here it is forbidden to make even a nail for a
He was liked by Americans because he kind of leaned toward the American side.
I was talking about it yesterday in North Carolina.
One of the oldest towns there is named after him, Pittsburgh, and it's in the community Chatham County, which is, you know, he was Lord Chatham and everything.
So he seemed like he was held in high esteem by them, but he did push back against King George to some degree, I guess, perhaps.
I mean, not enough, but he did.
Yeah, and the same with Edmund Burke, a member of parliament who later became a well-known philosopher and writer.
I mean, there were a lot of radical Whigs in England who recognized that it was important to stand up to stop oppression in the colonies because the same precedents would echo back home eventually.
Yes, yes.
And, you know, we look at all this, and at the time, you know, of course, the slave trade was still going.
And that did not, that was not ended.
You know, Wilberforce, I forget what time he started deposing it, but eventually he stopped the slave trade, and then he stopped, you know, freed the slaves.
They paid off the plantation owners and the Caribbean that were under them.
But, you know, they had that attitude, as you point out, you know, this attitude they had about slavery.
That wasn't just about Africa.
Yep. Yep.
Yeah, and this is something that's hard for a lot of contemporary Americans to understand because they have this notion they are looking backward and not recognizing how profoundly different the legal and moral atmosphere was back in those times and the absolute swagger of the British.
I mean, in my dealings with government agents, I've often come across ones that had vast swagger, and I can understand how that would breed hatred.
And eventually, if they rubbed too many noses in the dirt, it would lead to a violent revolt.
And that's happened throughout history.
There wasn't so much racism based on skin color, they just equally hated everybody, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, it was people who were inferior, and Americans were inferior to British, especially to the British officials appointed by the Crown, or the British military officers,
or even the British customs officials who had a right to go into anybody's house and search to see if they had any property that they had not paid a tariff on.
Maybe, you know, I don't know.
Hopefully this doesn't give anybody in Washington ideas right now.
But this is, I mean, it was the writs of assistance which the government would give its soldiers or others and entitle them to break into anybody's house, search all their papers, search this, search that.
I mean, it was almost as bad as the NSA.
Yeah, that's right, because that's what they're doing all the time, whether you realize it or not.
They're breaking into your house, and they're looking through your papers and your private effects by going into your computer.
I've talked about that.
People say, we don't have a violation of the Third Amendment.
It's like, do you realize what the government is doing with your computer?
They're actually living in your house, whether you realize it or not.
They're living there with you.
You just don't see them.
They're there virtually, which perhaps is even worse, I guess.
Yeah, which is, I mean, but it's just good that they're there to protect us from ourselves.
Isn't that great?
Yeah, I feel so much safer knowing that they're in my house watching everything that I'm doing.
You talk a little bit about John Locke and, of course, his second treatise on...
Government predated this stuff by about a century.
But that really was a big part of the philosophical foundation.
You know, these are people who are not watching Gilligan's Island.
They were reading books.
They were talking to other people who had read books.
And they're debating these ideas and forming these ideas.
There was a full century of Lockean philosophy that was underlying their pushback, right?
Yeah, and there were some wonderful lines from Locke here, one of which resonated with the colonists was, he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power does thereby put himself into a state of war with him.
Yes. And if you look at that 1776 Act by Parliament, that's, you know, basically proclaiming it's an act of war, that you're just, that since you have no rights...
And another one of my favorite John Locke quotes, I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty would not, when he had me in his power, take away everything else.
Was he around?
It sounds like he's describing 2020.
Well, yeah.
Lockdown, I mean, yeah.
He saw into the future like Mastradamus.
You know, you could see 2020 in the lockdown.
But what we're talking about here is human nature.
And that's one of the reasons why it's important to go back and to look at the understanding of the nature of tyranny and the zero-sum game here about who's going to make decisions about my life.
It's important for us to understand that because all of these attitudes, as you point out, you run into a vicious.
Arrogant bureaucrats all the time.
We all do.
And so it's important to understand how human nature plays into this.
And it's important to understand that we have these same types of problems.
I run into people all the time who say, well, you know, that was back then.
We're not at all like them.
We're so much more advanced.
I had one guy saying, Thomas Jefferson, he didn't know anything.
He wouldn't even be able to drive a car.
I was like, are you kidding me?
You know, so there's that kind of an attitude.
They don't know anything because they didn't have televisions.
Maybe they know a lot more because they didn't have televisions.
The people in the past didn't know anything, but human nature doesn't change.
And that's why it's so timeless to see the types of things that Locke said, the way the government was trying to impose its authority on the Americans and how they pushed back against it.
Yeah, and what people don't realize, okay, so Thomas Jefferson was not able to drive a Corvette, and he didn't have a television, but there has not been that much change in the nature of politicians and the nature of tyranny.
And so you still have, I mean...
Folks who are saying, well, things are different now.
Okay, how would you judge the moral and intellectual caliber of the average member of Congress right now?
Okay, versus 200 years ago.
I mean, I don't see much improvement.
Okay, they might get a little better.
They might have some, okay, they got a law degree, they got this, they got that, but they're still weasels.
And it's kind of like, okay, so, and they're still untrustworthy.
And that was one of the wonderful things the founding fathers recognized.
Thomas Jefferson was very eloquent on that.
Don't trust any man with power.
I mean, it goes back to the...
1798, was it the Kentucky Resolution?
Yeah. I think you might have the key quotes on that closer to your memory than I do.
Yeah, because I was just talking about, you know, I see all this stuff that Trump is doing in terms of shutting down free speech on campus and about kicking people out summarily and everything.
I say, this is like a reenactment of the Alien and Sedition Act.
You know, this is history repeating itself, a rhyming, you know, at the very least, isn't it?
Yeah, and part of the lucid and eloquent nature of Jefferson's resolutions, and the same with Madison, was that they recognized how danger of power was once it's off a leash.
And it's frustrating to me because, hell, I've been arguing that my whole damn career.
And I was talking to a foreign gentleman a couple days ago, and he said, well, it looks like America's had some trouble the last couple years.
I said, yeah, well, actually, things especially got worse after 9-11.
Because, I mean, that was, you know...
9-11 turned into a grant of power to the ruling class.
Yes. And they've never given that back.
That's right.
Yeah. Forget about declaring wars anymore.
We have this authorization for the use of military forces.
Gives us a blank check to do anything that we wish.
And, of course, we can do anything we wish domestically as well as they're rolling out the TSA and the real ID and all the rest of this stuff.
You know, we're going to start enforcing that next month.
But, you know, one of the things, too, I think, that is really key is the fact that...
You know, the people in Washington now are sitting on such an amazing pot of gold, or actually a giant stack of fiat currency.
Yeah, I was wondering where this was going to go.
That is such a corrupting thing.
When you look at the amount of money that is there, and I always talk about the astronomical amounts.
That are being contributed to all of these campaigns.
I mean, even a congressman, you know, the amount of money that they're getting.
I said, that is a direct metric of the level of corruption.
And that is the amount of money that these people from presidents to congressmen and even local officials are getting when they run for office.
I said, you know, this is not a charitable thing.
People are making investments in these guys.
So that is a direct metric of corruption when you look at the amount of money that's donated in these political campaigns.
Well, yeah, and it's funny, if you go back 200 years, 1700s, I guess, a lot in Britain, there was a lot of concern there about the ministers and the government giving so many bribes to members of parliament to buy their support.
And, you know, the same thing is happening now with federal grants to a certain district to get that congressman's vote, this promise, that promise.
The whole idea that government can become that big and that out of control and you can somehow keep it honest, yeah, that's the real triumph of hope over experience.
Yeah, oh yeah.
Getting back to the tea and getting back to the tariffs on it, you know, the fact that you mentioned to this, the fact that, you know, not only would they confiscate ships, but they would also invade people's homes and use this arbitrary power to search everything that they had there.
When you look at the response to it, one of the things I thought was interesting...
And I wanted to ask you about this because I didn't have time to look it up.
You say Vermont Patriots marched in 1775 against the British Army under a flag depicting a pine tree.
Is that the appeal to heaven flag that we see all the time?
Or is that different?
I think it is.
I'm not sure.
I mean, I had not made that connection, but I think you're right.
But what you say is, tell people why it was about the pine tree and why that was such a sticking point.
Yeah, so pine was an excellent material for building ships, and Parliament banned cutting down any white pine trees, claiming every pine tree in the colonies for the British crown without compensation.
in 1846 historian Jonathan Sewell wrote that the conflict with Britain began in the forest of Maine in the contest of her lumbermen with the king's surveyor as to the right to cut in the property in white pine trees back
in 1926 historian Robert Albion said the royal interpretation of private property practically rendered that term nugatory so the pines were virtually being commandeered by the navy
Hmm. Hmm.
Well, you know, it's kind of interesting because we keep seeing these same types of themes coming around.
I remember when Brexit was circulating around.
One of the big griefs that the British had who wanted to leave the EU was they said, we've been fishing these waters for millennia, and now the EU is telling us how many fish we can take out of our own waters here.
You know, so it kind of came back to the British there.
But it's always about, isn't about Britain versus every other country.
It's about the nature of power.
And so it's always going to come back that way.
But I see parallels in that to a lot of this environmental, you know, this aspect of the globalist and the environmentalism where we're going to tell you how much resources you can consume.
We're going to track your carbon footprint.
You're not going to own anything.
We're going to, the C40 coalition says, well, we're going to measure all the meat that you have and the dairy that you have until we just completely cut it off.
It's amazing to see this kind of stuff.
And yet, you know, we see this throughout history.
This is always, again, going back to what we just said, it's always a condition of the human nature.
It's always a condition of power, how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts.
Absolutely. We keep seeing this repeated over and over again.
People today don't seem to get the picture.
They're so focused on, you know, the pines.
Today they would just focus on the trees, and they wouldn't understand the general principle that was there.
But the people in America understood the general principle.
Yeah, well, I mean, those pine trees were such a powerful symbol, basically, because it did capture the total expropriation of property rights.
Those pine trees were some of the most valuable properties up in New England.
But, you know, if you had them, you were out of luck.
And that's a long tradition in Britain where they would say, you know, going back to the Robin Hood stories and stuff, you can't go hunting unless we tell you that you can go hunting.
Oh, my God.
And we'll tell you what you can have.
You will own nothing and you'll be happier.
England has a long history of that and that's part of the reason that my ancestors and your ancestors probably came in this direction centuries ago.
Mine were kicked out of France first, but that's a different story.
Thank God they were kicked out of France, but that's another story.
Well, I'd love to hear that, but if you want to tell us anything, why were they kicked out of France?
Because they were Protestants.
Oh, okay, the Huguenots.
Yeah, my ancestors, according to family lore, a number of them were living in Paris in 1572, and like about half of them were killed in the St. Bartholomew Day's Massacre when the king and the pope tried to kill all the Protestants,
and the survivors fled over to England and get their feet on the ground there.
It's funny, I've been watching Wolf Hall, the PBS BBC series on Thomas Cromwell, and Cromwell...
I was a hell of a rascal, but thanks to him, perhaps, my ancestors could find refuge in England.
Yeah, interesting.
I had not heard of that program.
I have to look it up and see that.
That might be interesting.
Yeah, it is.
And when you look at liberty, religious liberty was so intertwined with everything, and we see it in our First Amendment.
If you tell people, if you're going to try to control what people believe and control them at a very, very...
Fundamental level.
That's controlling their speech, and it's policing their beliefs and all the rest of the stuff.
And, of course, that had been done quite a bit, and it had been done because, you know, they would have a close connection between these organized religions and the organized government.
And so if you started to move in a different direction, that was a threat to them politically as well.
So we see that's why they're intertwined, I think, in the First Amendment.
That had been the long history that people had seen that, that, uh, kind of symbiotic relationship there between established church and, and, uh, a government that was there.
But, um, uh, it is, um, that was really the impetus for so many people coming here.
I don't know my background exactly.
I had, um, my uncle looked it up at one point in time, but yeah, I came from England and, uh, been here longer than, um, than I can imagine.
I've never looked it up myself to get the information, but yeah.
Yeah, there's a simple thumbnail which I use to explain how my family moved eventually got here.
I mean, my family was kicked out of France because the French were biased against Protestants, and they were kicked out of Ireland because the Irish were prejudiced against horse thieves.
That's good.
Talk a little bit about firearms, of course, because the Second Amendment is a big part of this as well.
Yeah, well, I mean, here again, this is something which so many people try to Downplay, but the major shooting started when the British tried to seize the gunpowder and cannons and firearms there in Concord.
And, of course, the British screwed it up.
And there was a funny detail.
A friend sent me some details on Concord that I wasn't aware of.
So the first shooting was in Lexington.
The British shot down a number of militiamen.
It's unclear who shot first, but the British fired a volley and left eight or ten dead on the field there.
And then the British came to Concord, and the British soldiers were just so damn ornery that they were grabbing people in the town and forcing them to fix them breakfast.
Really? It's like, oh, this is a great PR gesture, you know?
And as I said to my friend, you know, British soldiers didn't realize it was their last supper.
Hundreds of them got shot down as they flood back to the Boston.
because what happened was that the British had overwhelmed, greatly outnumbered the Minutemen who showed up in Lexington.
By the time they got to Concord, they were burning some various things around town.
A lot of the local militia
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
They almost got captured, so I'm sorry, go ahead.
That was an early example of asymmetric warfare, wasn't it?
And we never learned the lesson.
As Americans, you would think we learned the lesson of asymmetric warfare, yet we have enacted the role of the British over and over again in my lifetime, haven't we?
That is true.
And it's, I mean, you know, part of the lesson is don't piss off farmers with guns.
Yeah, that's right.
But the British weren't that smart.
And then it was interesting how it played out because Two months later, a bunch of militia folks had come together, and they seized Bunker Hill and Breeds Hill, and the British decided to teach them a lesson by putting their bright red coats,
some of their finest troops, and marching them up the hill.
And the American soldiers just rose up and fired repeated volleys into that and broke the British assault twice, and then they finally ran out of ammunition, mostly, and retreated.
But the American sharpshooters shot down, killed or wounded, badly wounded, every British officer on the field, as well as a third of the British troops.
And that was a devastating blow against the British.
They had a pirate victory, as their generals said, but that they could not afford any more such victories.
And my understanding is that the British Army at that point was that the soldiers were basically, the enlisted men were, Maybe a little bit better than dogs, maybe treated worse than dogs, but they were very subservient to the officers, and once the officers got shot,
they were kind of like, you know, what do we do next?
Is that your impression?
I read an interesting book.
I actually took a course on British history when I transferred.
I changed majors.
I transferred to a different college and changed majors, and they made me take a bunch of core curriculum over and over again.
So I said, all right, I'm going to take a course on British history.
And one of the most interesting books I read was The Reason Why.
And it was about Lord Cardigan.
What a pompous idiot he was.
But he became the hero of the poem, right?
The thin red line, and ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die, and all the rest is.
And it was just this comedy of errors.
And, you know, I don't know whether the people that were with him knew what to do, but he certainly didn't know what to do.
But he became a war hero out of the Crimean War.
And I always remembered that, and so I thought it was pretty funny.
And as the Ukraine stuff was starting up about three years ago, and the head of the British military said, well, we beat the Russians in Crimea before, and we'll beat them again.
And I thought, okay, well, why were the Russians in Crimea when you guys fought them a couple hundred years ago?
Because that was their territory.
But anyway, that's another story.
Going back to 1854, wasn't there a famous line in the Tennyson poem that got suppressed?
Some damn fool blundered?
Maybe. It's been a while since I read it.
I read that one.
It's been, let's see, about 50 years ago since I read that book.
So that might have escaped my attention.
I don't know.
It was kind of focused on Lord Cardigan and what an idiot.
And he was so beloved that when he came back, he had this personal affectation of sweaters.
And so everybody started copying his sweaters.
And that's where the Cardigan sweater comes from, right?
Because he became a hero, but he didn't really know.
He had bought his commission because he was wealthy.
He wasn't trained.
He bought his way into that thing, and he kind of took off on his own.
So it was an interesting book.
I don't know.
I mean, I've only read the one book on it, so the guy might have skewed it to his political viewpoint, but it certainly was interesting.
No, it sounded like Cardigan deserved to be thrashed.
Exactly. Or keelhauled, you know?
Keelhauled. There you go.
That's a nice English tradition.
Drag from one end of the boat to the other.
From stern to, from bow to stern or whatever, vice versa.
Yeah, but you know we have people...
They're very much like this kind of arrogance today.
We've heard a whole string of Democrat politicians when it comes to the Second Amendment.
You think that's going to help you?
Well, you know, Swalwell and Beto O'Rourke and Joe Biden.
We've got a military.
Your guns don't mean anything.
And I've always heard that when I would talk to reporters when I was with the Libertarian Party.
They'd say, well, you think you can stop the government?
It's like, yeah.
It's like asymmetric warfare.
It's like mutually assured destruction.
You certainly don't want it, okay?
But it is a country where firearms are in the hands of the people.
It is like mutually assured destruction.
Certainly, nobody but a fool, nobody but somebody like Eric Swalwell or Beto O'Rourke or Joe Biden would ever broach that idea.
But that's what it would turn out to be.
It would be just a horrific situation.
But we don't have a good track record on asymmetric war.
No, but I mean, going back to the idea of using firearms to defend against an oppressive government, I was in the mountains of North Carolina taking a vacation with my wife at that point, just before 9-11, and I pulled up in front of this country store,
and this big old bald guy comes out and says, what part of Maryland are you from?
And I said, well, I'm from Rockville.
And he started chatting me up real much.
He was too friendly.
Something was wrong.
And then he finally said he thought I was an undercover federal agent.
And I was thinking, where in hell in life did I go wrong that people were suspecting me of being an undercover federal agent?
So I said, well, why do you think?
I said, well, you're driving a black car and you've got a Maryland license plate.
I said, ah, you don't miss a trick, do you?
I said, are there any other signs?
He said, yeah.
Federal, these undercover agents have got GPS tracking devices underneath the back of their car.
I said, do you want to take a look under my car?
Yeah, I want to do that.
So he did that.
He didn't find anything.
Then he shook my hand.
He was friendly.
The reason I mention this is because the reason he suspected me...
It was that two years earlier, the FBI had flooded that area.
There were hundreds of FBI agents going around because that was the area where Eric Rudolph was thought to be hiding.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And the FBI came in there.
The FBI announced they were sending their best and their brightest, and they would find him in no time.
The FBI would show up at motels.
They'd throw everybody out.
The FBI's taken over.
They'd throw people out of restaurants.
And pretty soon, nobody would work with the FBI.
Everybody distrusted them.
them. And the FBI didn't find anything.
And the reason I mention this is that the, you know, the FBI thinks it's got all this authority, but...
You know, you go in the mountains of western North Carolina, you piss people off, you've got no authority.
That's right.
And not only that, but if you think of something, I mean, you know, three words, the Barrett sniper rifle, two miles, two mile range, armor piercing, you know.
And what is it in North Carolina?
It's a sense of community.
Since the community, a lot of the people with the FBI who are living in an urban area where nobody knows anybody, they don't think about that.
Everybody is divided.
Nobody is connected with each other.
They're not sharing the stories of what is happening.
And so it's easier for them to go into a situation like that and to dominate everybody rather than to go into a community where everybody knows everybody else.
Well, and not only that, but you should not make mountain people angry.
I mean, this is something you guys should have learned in Afghanistan.
The point you were making was that people are still saying, Joe Biden was still saying this after August 2021 when the government in Kabul collapsed and the Americans fled.
I mean, you know, the Taliban did not have any...
You know, major artillery.
They didn't have tanks.
They just had, you know, AK-47s and other weapons.
Yeah, yeah.
You mentioned in your op-ed piece here the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.
And I see that that was in July 6, 1775.
It was about a year before the Declaration of Independence.
It wasn't Thomas Jefferson's first rodeo to write the Declaration of Independence.
He was co-author on this with a guy named John Dickinson.
I don't know anything about John Dickinson.
Do you know anything about John Dickinson?
I know a little, but he was very eloquent.
He had a very good line, you know, eight, seven years earlier, in which he said that the crucial question in colonists' mind is not what evil has actually attended specific measures, but what evil is likely to attend them.
So, seeing the British actions as warning signs.
Dickinson, I think he was from Pennsylvania.
I don't know if he supported the Declaration of Independence.
I think he might have resisted that.
But I might be mistaken on that.
But he was one of the best pamphleteers.
Okay, not in the same class as Thomas Paine, but nobody was.
But so, this is a very interesting...
To read that declaration on taking up arms a few weeks after Bunker Hill, it's fascinating stuff.
It's bracing, and it focused a lot more on Parliament issues.
Hmm. That's interesting.
So we have the...
The Declaratory Act is what's called in 1775, where they say, basically, you don't have any rights.
Ten years later, they have their Declaration of Independence, where they say, no, we do have rights.
As human beings, we have rights.
But the year before that Declaration of Independence comes out, and it's after the Bunker Hill stuff, you have the declaration of the causes and the necessity of taking up arms.
And so we see this stuff kind of rolling out.
And as you look back, it came out in kind of a logical sequence of building, didn't it?
Yeah, well, it was important to go step by step, because even as of 1775, I don't know what percentage of Americans were ready to have a clean break with Britain.
I think Thomas Paine's pamphlets helped a great deal on that cause.
And it was important to frame the issues in a philosophical way, which is part of the reason that I was using the John Locke quotes here, because...
This is the prism through which the founders were seeing British action.
And it was not everything in isolation.
It was more like, okay, you know, it's like a snowball going downhill.
How much further are we going to let the British go?
And at some point, I mean, so there was the, after the Battle of Bunker Hill, you had the British commander in Boston, General Gage, basically wanted to make a treason for anyone who failed to turn in their firearms to the British,
and just to leave the Americans in complete abject dependence on their British rulers.
You know, the British never had a chance to impose that, though they did that.
Some cities that they controlled.
But that was how much power the British wanted.
And that's why it was so important to assume the worst of people that were trying to get absolute power over you.
And that's why we see this founder saying over and over again.
No free man will ever be disbarred the use of guns and that type of thing.
They understood that that was going to be the linchpin of their freedom.
But they also understood that, you know, the pin was mightier than the sword in many respects.
They had to throw a series of...
It's good to have both.
Yeah, exactly.
You've got to have both of them in tandem.
And so they built over a period of time, they built this philosophical understanding of...
The nature of government, the nature of men, the abuse of power, and all the rest of the stuff.
So they could see where this was going.
And so you point out that, you know, you got quotes from John Dickinson that, you know, the crucial question is not what evil was actually attended to a particular measure, but what evil...
was likely to attend them in the future.
In other words, how are they going to build on this thing?
This is just the thin end of the wedge, you know, and we understand that as well.
Many times we will look at the principles involved, and I keep going back to what I consider so far to be the worst despotism I've lived under, and that is what happened in 2020.
You look at this and it's like, okay, so how else are they going to use this?
And since people in America just kind of walked away, at some point it's like, okay.
I don't really believe this pandemic is going to kill me.
I'm going to stop wearing the mask.
I'm going to stop doing this.
People just stopped complying gradually.
Now, that's great.
Some places, yeah.
Some places are still tied up in knots and wearing masks.
I still see that occasionally.
But for the most part, they just kind of stop playing the game.
But they didn't go back and say, you know, we've got to make sure that never happens again, and we've got to hold these people accountable for what they did to us.
And that's what I see missing in America today, is that sense of understanding, the sense that people are like, oh, okay, well, that was awful, now that's over with.
No, it's not over with.
It's not over with if you leave these people without any accountability, is it?
Yeah, well, it's there are so many precedents from the covid crackdowns and the lockdowns and the mandates.
And most of these precedents have not been banished or thrown out of the law books or their regulations.
And to see how to see how far that the government lies.
This is coming out a little bit with the exposing the lab leak.
The cover-up of the lab leak.
But there was a story I did, I guess, January 21st on Biden's party.
Let me give you my theory on this, Jim.
Because I even think that the stuff about the lab leak, I think that's an alibi.
I think they're putting that out there to say...
We did our best, but we were up against it.
Everybody was going to die, so we had to lock you down.
We had to vaccinate you with an untested genetic code injection.
We had to do all this kind of stuff because, hey, we had this thing out there.
And I think that that does two things.
Not only does it hold them harmless, but I think that this lab leak narrative that's being put out there, you've got to ask yourself, I think, Why?
You now have the establishment hanging on this so heavily when they wanted to suppress that.
They want everybody to believe this is an organic thing that's running wild.
Now they've got a lot of different motives for pushing that.
And I think one of the motives is that, hey, we may have to do it again.
You know, we'll come up again and the next time we'll do a little bit differently.
Maybe we'll lock you down harder next time because, you know, the first time it didn't work.
And I've already seen a lot of people talking about it.
So I'm very suspicious about that.
I'm a real I'm a real cynic when it comes to viruses and pandemics, and I'm a real cynic when it comes to government.
When you start putting these two things together, my BS alarms start ringing off the wall.
Well, that's understandable.
I mean, one key for the lab leak
to me is how it was suppressed was that if people had recognized early on that the COVID was financed by their tax dollars in a reckless way in China, and then it got out of the lab by accident
or otherwise, it would have been far more difficult for politicians to promenade as well.
saviors. Oh yeah, that's true.
That's why they had to suppress it at the beginning.
Yeah. You know, when it started in December, I remember looking
And I heard this stuff about bat soup and all this.
Wait a minute.
Then I saw that the only class bio-level safety for lab in China was in Wuhan, right there at that spot.
I thought, oh, okay, well, maybe it is something that's real.
What convinced me otherwise was...
Seeing the fake videos of people falling down the street.
I mean, you've seen those.
They need to take some lessons from some stuntmen in Hollywood if they want to take a fall.
It was the fakest looking stuff I've ever seen in my life.
And I've been in China.
And I know when they showed the crowded hospitals and everything, it's like, that's the way it is normally.
It's not necessarily a different thing.
So it's kind of crowded chaos as the standard operating procedure in most of these places in China anyway.
So I got really skeptical about it, but the thing that was a real nail in all of that narrative for me was dark winter.
And again, tied in with 9-11, just two...
Two months before 9-11 and then they have the anthrax attack a week later and then they put out the model legislation and practiced it for 20 years.
So, you know, I looked at all that stuff, and I didn't believe a bit of it, you know.
And I had talked about the danger of these biosafety-level labs and gain-of-function experiments and everything.
Back in 2014, there was an excellent series of articles that were done by USA Today.
And a reporter there, her name was Allison.
I can't remember her last name.
But she talked about how there's hundreds of these labs in the United States, typically attached to universities.
And the bad safety record that they had.
You know, they're playing with diseases, and they're playing with diseased animals, and they're getting exposed to stuff themselves, the diseased animals.
So it had credibility with me at the beginning, but I just, I got to the point where I didn't believe any of this stuff.
Well, I mean, there were so many false statements, and a lot of it was concerted.
So, I mean, I was tottering the edge of cynicism myself.
Yeah. And you look at what is happening now, you know, when you – in this case of this guy that gets sent to El Salvador.
I read your op-ed piece talking about the – The op-ed writer who just gets whisked off of the street and had done nothing other than expressing her political opinion that the government did not like her expressing.
But you know, when you look at the situation that's going on with this Garcia guy...
Yeah, there's some issues there, but they're manufacturing stuff.
And that's a key thing.
When they start manufacturing evidence, they start spinning stuff that wasn't there before when they say they made a mistake, and then they come back and they say, no, we didn't make a mistake.
And look, he's got MS-13 written on his knuckles.
And they don't annotate it.
They show you a Photoshop picture of it.
You know, they're putting stuff out there like that.
You know, it really does.
They can't help themselves.
I mean, they've got to go the extra, you know, they've got to keep adding stuff to it.
They can't just leave it at one particular thing.
And that's the key.
You know, when we look at what happened with...
You know, the tyranny of the British and everything.
It was really about executive orders, and that's really the way that Trump wants to operate.
He wants to declare an emergency, and then he's free to do whatever he wants.
And every problem that he sees, whether it's economic, whether it's about immigration, or whether it's about, you know, a so-called pandemic or anything.
It's all about, I declare an emergency, now I can do whatever I want to do, isn't it?
It certainly worked out well in the past.
Yeah. You know, I like the quote that you end up your op-ed piece with here.
You say that they understood that in defining a tyrant, it's not necessary to prove that he's a cannibal.
Yes, I love that line.
That was from a Virginia Senator, John Taylor, who was a cavalry officer for...
George Washington during the revolution and he actually wrote several books of political philosophy.
He did a wonderful book On trade and protectionism called Tyranny Unmasked.
I think that's where that quote came from.
But there were just, I mean, it's a different writing style that people had back then.
And I saw that line and I was just infinitely charmed by it.
Wasn't it great?
Yeah, I love that.
Because it is, you know, somebody doesn't have to be thoroughly bad.
In other words, a cannibal.
It's just, you know, this one aspect here.
They can go down that road, and that's why we have to look at what people do that are in power.
We look at it as a case-by-case basis, and yet that isn't the case today.
The case today is that people who are caught up in this left-right paradigm, the Democrats, Republicans, they will have to make a cannibal out of their enemy, right?
It can be nothing good than that person, right?
Yeah, and it ties into what Thomas Macaulay said about how people in the early 1800s were viewing Charles I, the king, Stuart King, who was very oppressive.
But Thomas Macaulay said that people in his time were viewing him well because he had a really nice beard.
Must have been better than yours or mine.
I don't know.
Exonerate a tyrant.
I remember when I saw that line, what came to mind about it, it doesn't have to prove that he's a cannibal.
It made me think of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.
A policeman's lot is not a happy one.
They said when a felon's not engaged in his employment, when he's not otherwise engaged in crime or whatever.
He loves his little innocent enjoyment, just as great as any honest man, that type of thing.
So it's like, yeah, these guys, it's difficult as a cop because we see that these These guys, they're human, after all.
And so we have to hammer these guys.
Even though we see their humanity, they don't have to be a cannibal in order for the police to be able to pull them up, I guess, but it still bothered them somewhat, and their conscience are in the imagination of Gilbert and Sullivan, I guess.
They were kind of outside the establishment themselves.
I don't want to say the imagination.
I mean, most of the police I've known, you know, they didn't lose too much sleep over that.
That's right.
Yeah, that was the police as Gilbert and Sullivan would like to see them, you know?
A kinder, gentler police force that was there.
Of course, it was also...
That's right.
Yeah, where are you?
It's always great talking to you, Jim.
Thank you so much.
And the website is jimbovard.com where people can find your latest...
Thanks so much for having me on.
Thanks for...
It was great to share some insights and some laughs here on Tuesday morning in these dire political times.
That's right.
And it's always great to go back and look at history.
And see how things have really not changed all that much.
Thank you so much, Jim.
Have a good day.
Thanks. You too.
Thank you, folks.
Thank you for joining us.
So you have a good day as well.
The common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common paths to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation.
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