The recent biker gang shooting in Waco is in the headlines, but who are the real gangs? The recent biker gang shooting in Waco is in the headlines, but who are the real gangs? The recent biker gang shooting in Waco is in the headlines, but who are the real gangs?
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Why Motorcycle Groups Are Misunderstood
00:11:38
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| Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| With me today is Daniel McAdams, the co-host. | |
| Good to see you Daniel. | |
| Thank you, Dr. Paul. | |
| Well, today we're going to talk a little bit about what's been going on in Waco. | |
| It's been a lot in the news and, you know, sorting out truth from fiction is a big job. | |
| And that's what I'm going to be working on today and have you have some input on this. | |
| But you know, it's painted like, you know, if you're in a motorcycle group, you're in a gang and you're a very bad person. | |
| But it looks to me from a little bit more than I'm studying here is that everybody that's in a bicycle group, they're not all the same. | |
| There's some, I guess, that are violent, but most of them, I think, are rather peaceful. | |
| Who were these groups in Waco? | |
| What were they doing? | |
| What was that all about? | |
| Well, you know, the two that they name the most are the Cossacks and the Banditos, and I think that they might be leaning more toward the violence, but there were many others. | |
| I understand there is a sort of a rally, an annual type rally that was going on there. | |
| Yeah, apparently they hold it every year for many, many years, and there's not been any violence like this before, and it's not been really reported that way. | |
| But from some of the media reports, one of the groups showed up uninvited, and that's where things started. | |
| You know, and we can't ignore how violent this became. | |
| The thing of it is, is why was it violent? | |
| Who started it? | |
| What was the police responsibility? | |
| Did they help or did they hinder? | |
| Who knows, but nine people getting killed and 18 severely injured. | |
| But 170 arrested. | |
| And we do know that there were some groups there that were Christian groups and veterans groups. | |
| My immediate thought is, how many of those 170 are pretty innocent as far as committing a violent crime? | |
| Did they sort all this out? | |
| That to me is a big question that has to be answered. | |
| I can't imagine the standing, but from what I have seen earlier, everyone who is arrested will be charged with capital murder because of the largeness of the crime and what happens. | |
| So people have been arrested just for physically being there without being witnessed committing a crime. | |
| So you could have a very bizarre case where some Christian group is going to be charged for murder or something. | |
| And their bikes are gone. | |
| How many bikes did they get? | |
| A bunch, didn't they? | |
| Over 130-some bikes. | |
| Some of them are really expensive. | |
| They're very expensive, and that sort of asset forfeiture. | |
| And I bet that most of those bikes are gone. | |
| It's just this whole system of law enforcement that we have. | |
| One thing I saw on TV, this was done basically, I think the bikers were white people. | |
| But somebody found an angle to turn it into a racial thing. | |
| They say, well, nine killed, 18 injured, 170 arrested. | |
| Bond issues for each one of them at a million dollars. | |
| And they said, well, you know, this is racial because these were white people and they were treated with kid gloves. | |
| I don't know. | |
| That seems to be a little bit of a stretch. | |
| That sounds pretty harsh as well. | |
| But, you know, it's interesting that the police, just reading more into it, the police have been watching this event for two months in advance. | |
| They had a very heavy police presence in the parking lot before the event happened. | |
| Somehow they weren't able to stop this one group that was uninvited from coming. | |
| And the other thing is we don't know, we do know the police did open fire, but we don't know yet. | |
| The ballistic tests aren't back, how many may have been killed by police and how that played out. | |
| And that's going to be a job to cancel out the initial impression. | |
| Once the initial impression is out there, it's real hard to change. | |
| You know, as serious as this is, you know, if you compare it to the ongoing violence, you know, in our society today, you know, it's not that great compared to what happens in maybe an average American city if you look at Detroit and Chicago, and there's a lot of killing and shooting going on. | |
| That doesn't downplay the importance of this, but still, this is getting a lot more attention than the routine stuff that everybody seems to get used to. | |
| Yeah, that's true. | |
| So, in some ways, I was trying to compare this with Ferguson. | |
| Is it the same thing? | |
| I don't think it's the same thing. | |
| I think it's different. | |
| I think Ferguson was motivated certainly by poverty and I think police overreaction and this sort of thing and precipitated that type of a crisis. | |
| But there is one area which I think it is similar, and that is drugs are involved in both places. | |
| You know, we create poverty, and people have to resort to drugs to make a living, and that was certainly a big problem in Ferguson. | |
| But some of these more vicious gang members, how do they live? | |
| You know, it's drugs. | |
| So, this is another concept to a degree another consequence of the drug war. | |
| Sure, they manufacture methamphetamine and other drugs for sale, and that's how they make their money. | |
| Some of the more brutal ones here, I doubt maybe the Christian ones would, but the question now is: when you have the drug war as part of it, then you also have the FBI seeking to infiltrate these groups, infiltrate the gangs, and find some way of trapping them or getting, you know, getting them to. | |
| Well, let's say that infiltration is supposed to be helpful. | |
| Sometimes they're breaking the law themselves. | |
| But let's say they had information. | |
| It sounds like they didn't do a very good job. | |
| The police were there, but they were armed like a military operation, and the violence still broke out anyway. | |
| So they weren't very good at calming things if they had any hint of what was going to happen. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| So the whole principle that I look at when I see some gangs, to me, there's all kinds of gangs. | |
| Anybody who is a gang in the negative sense are using force illegally. | |
| And I think the mafia is a gang under that definition. | |
| They're white-collar gangs, but they use violence and there's all kinds. | |
| The one gang that really bothers me is the ones associated with getting and using government power. | |
| You know, that happens all the time. | |
| You know, the city reminds me of government power and abuse of government power because it was in Waco where the Davidians were killed. | |
| You know, there were 79 Davidians killed. | |
| Of course, they had retaliated as the government was acting toward them, and there was some real violence there. | |
| But did it qualify for our government, our Justice Department, to go in, kill 79 people, and many of those were probably not shooting at anybody. | |
| They were family people. | |
| There were 22 children. | |
| Does that qualify as a gang of people abusing their power? | |
| Yeah, you know, Lou Rockrow wrote on his blog this week about he made an interesting point that the last Waco, the Branch Davidians, started out as the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau going in there to show how they can handle this. | |
| And the press was there, the media was there. | |
| It was supposed to be this wonderful show. | |
| And he was speculating as to what role that might have played in this latest Waco event as well, getting people to support the police at all costs and this sort of thing. | |
| Some of the groups are elite gangs, and they don't carry guns, but they use government guns. | |
| And they use money and power and lobbying our government, and they go in and get what they want. | |
| And believe me, from my experience and your casual experience, because you spent some years on how that whole system works. | |
| So is it less moral because they get behind the scenes and they use money and they legally get tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars channeled into the banking system and into the military-industrial complex. | |
| Seems to me that morally this is just as reprehensible if not more. | |
| Doesn't it break down to the use of force, the idea of non-aggression? | |
| Yeah, and they accept this. | |
| But the big thing here is though some bicyclists are using force illegally, how many are? | |
| What percentages are? | |
| You know, I've told the story about, you know, it was always pretty neat when the veterans bicyclists came out and joined our rallies. | |
| They would usher me around at time, and they seemed to have a lot of time, but they were basically made up of veterans. | |
| So it's pretty bad to stereotype everybody. | |
| What about the Christian groups are involved too? | |
| But there are proposals now that we have to outlaw motorcycle clubs. | |
| I don't think that's going to be the solution. | |
| Yeah, it's a solution. | |
| One of them would be to outlaw the drug war. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| That's what they need to do. | |
| But I think the use of force is the basic problem that we have. | |
| And too often, the real force is controlled by a monopoly, and that is the government. | |
| And I think people from all factions of the political spectrum would agree when we see the illegal force of our militarized police. | |
| We don't have evidence of them being directly involved by precipitating this, but it deserves an investigation. | |
| I mean, when you look at their military approach to this, there's something going on. | |
| You know, in a freer society or in our republic, it would be unheard of that if it was a fight in a bar, that you had to have the feds in there and everybody else involved and the FBI involved. | |
| That just wouldn't have happened. | |
| It would have been a local matter and it would be handled quite differently. | |
| But did you see that one story where the cause was put on the owner? | |
| Yeah, this was interesting too. | |
| The police have been working with this restaurant or been following this restaurant for a couple of months beforehand. | |
| And after the event happened, the police blamed everything on the restaurant owner because he didn't cooperate more with the police. | |
| But they never said what that meant. | |
| They wanted to let police officers infiltrate the restaurant, dressed as customers. | |
| You don't know what it is. | |
| But apparently it's all the restaurant owner's fault. | |
| You know, one question I get is, it's sort of a philosophic question. | |
| Why do people join gangs? | |
| Well, since there are different types of gangs, maybe you have a Christian group like motorcycles, maybe you have a veterans group that like this. | |
| But people, when they ask, why do you join this gang? | |
| And these gangs who are fighting all the time, and quite frankly, they haven't been fighting as much as most people think they're fighting. | |
| But I think there's an explanation to some degree on why some individuals do. | |
| And like so many things in our society, it has to do with the breakdown of the family. | |
| I think it's a very natural instinct to belong to some group. | |
| And if you don't have a family at home or there's a single parent or there is drugs involved and they want to belong to something, I think we all want to belong to something. | |
| That's a natural instinct. | |
| So that becomes their family. | |
| And they join on their conditions and they feel like, well, they're my friends and I go to them. | |
| And some people join these type of gangs for protection. | |
| So some other gang might do and sort of buying protection. | |
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Societal Problems Rooted in Economic Flaws
00:01:03
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| I'll join. | |
| I'll support you if you protect me. | |
| And some of them, I think, are just plain hungry. | |
| And because they get involved in drugs, these gangs that are on the street all the time, they're able to actually feed some of these people. | |
| So it is some societal problems that we have, which so often I trace back to a government that creates an economic system which is deeply flawed. | |
| You know, the economic planning, the spending, the debt, the Federal Reserve is all part of this problem that we have today. | |
| But the most important thing is the fact that not enough people accept this principle that nobody should be allowed to use aggression against another person and governments should never be allowed to use aggression or use the power of the state. | |
| And of course, the most ruthless power of the state is to tax the people and lie to the people and lie us into war. | |
| That is a real cost that we pay for for years to come. | |
| Thank you, everybody, for tuning in today to the Liberty Report. | |