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April 4, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:47
The Death Of American Liberty, With Guest Jim Bovard

For decades, writer Jim Bovard has been a critical observer of the passing scene. His documentation of the loss of our liberties will continue to be a valuable tool for future generations. Bovard joins us today to discuss his new book, "Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty."

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Time Text
Educating Congress Members 00:15:01
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, welcome to our program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing well today, and we're excited today because we have a special guest.
That's right, we do.
We'll be introducing him in a minute, but I'll tell you what, he's been around a bit.
Yeah.
And he's been friends of ours, and he has been a friend of liberty.
Oh, yeah.
And that gets up pretty high on the podem there.
His name is James Bovar.
He wrote 11 books.
And these are real books.
Sometimes I kid myself.
Sometimes my books are fancy pamphlets.
But anyway, I write at times, but not as well as Jim Bovar does.
So he is with us today.
But Daniel, you have worked a lot with Jim.
And I would like you to say hello to our special guest.
Well, let's bring him on.
Hi, Jim.
Welcome to the program.
Daniel, thanks for having us.
It's missing you back in the D.C. area.
Yeah, I'll have to get back there.
But we see behind you your latest book, Last Rights, The Death of American Liberty.
I can't believe it's only your 11th book, though.
It seems like you've done more than that.
You've got a lot under your belt.
Well, I've had fun throwing rocks to the government, and I'm glad I can still find places to throw rocks at.
So it's fun, and it's great to be on with you and Dr. Paul.
I've been a fan of Dr. Paul since before most of his current fans were born.
I mean, if you want to turn back the clock way back, I actually applied to be a speechwriter for his office back in 1981, but I was even more rough edge then than I am now.
It would have been a good fit.
Speechwriter.
Well, tell us a little bit about your book.
I mean, I have not read the whole thing.
It is pretty chunky.
And I'll tell you what, the notes.
It's not chunky.
Okay.
The notes section is great because it's a bibliography for anyone who wants to follow up.
I have not seen a notes section that extensive, but give our viewers a feel of what the book is about, and hopefully they're going to run out and get it right away.
So Last Rights walks people through how we've lost so many of our rights and liberties, how the government has become more of a tyranny, how the checks and balances have failed, and how people have got to push back fast if they have any hope of stopping the oppression.
Folks have been, you know, Americans today have the freedom to be fleeced, injected, robbed, and maybe shot by government agents.
And it's so sad to see things like the Supreme Court signing off on most of the abuses of power, to see most members of Congress having contempt for their oath of office.
And I haven't even got started on Biden yet, but he's a target-rich environment.
But what I've tried to do in Last Rights is pull together vividly a lot of ways that the government is violating the law, the Constitution, and decency.
And it's interesting.
There are folks who are pro-freedom who I talk to who think that they don't need to have a handle on these things, but it would be helpful for libertarians to understand the policies that they oppose.
Very good.
Yes, this is a problem I often see is that folks say, well, government is bad, end of subject.
But if you're going to make converts, if you're going to explain to other folks to bring them around to the need to put a leash on politicians, severely limit government power and stop the growing tyranny, you have to be able to explain the issues.
Very good.
And, you know, your title's perfect, and we understand it.
But in my mind, I want to insert a couple words.
You say last rights, and I want to say how to avoid the death of American liberty.
And I think really that's what part of your goal is.
That's why we talk about it.
But this is catchy because I'm afraid there's so much truth to what you say.
But I wanted to see if I could get you to compare these terrible conditions that we have today that you're writing about.
And we're talking about the death of liberty and last rights.
And when you look at it, you could write a whole book on all the problems we have.
And every day, Daniel and I don't have any trouble finding something.
We say, here's another thing.
This is dumb.
But we always try to look around and say, you know, what are we doing about it?
The fact that we can still write books and get on, you know, on the internet, we are able to get a message out.
And things were worse at other times.
But I wanted you to compare, if you can, what it's like today and how we assess it with the other difficult periods we have.
You say, well, you know, we don't have to talk about the Civil War anymore.
We don't have to talk about World War II.
That looks good.
Yeah, World War II and all this.
But people would say, well, we got by.
But, of course, from my viewpoint, I think it was always with always a little less liberty, and this has been eroding it.
But how do you make this comparison?
Do you think there was a time when it was very similar and we were on the ropes?
Yeah, there were several times like that in American history.
If you look at certainly the Civil War period and the period after the war, it was a complete mess.
So much tyranny that was running rampant.
And if you look at the First World War, you've got Woodrow Wilson acting like he's the world czar to save democracy and suppressing freedom of the press and driving us into a nonsensical war.
Great Depression, you've got the Roosevelt administration creating new government agencies by the bucket full.
And the Supreme Court took a dive as far as putting, you know, mandating due process and protecting rights.
Second World War, you had the Japanese Americans rounded up for concentration camps.
You had a lot of other bad things.
There have been a lot of bad things throughout American history, off and on, that America bounced back from.
Part of my concern is that there is a spirit of liberty.
There's a love of liberty.
And that's something, Dr. Paul, which I appreciate that you've done, your speeches on college campuses, things like that.
You have reached young folks and helped awaken their minds and their spirits about the value of liberty.
But what I'm not seeing so much right now among young people is that same passion.
I mean, I've seen more passion to have federal student loans forgiven than to put a leash on the federal government.
And that's considering.
There was a poll a few months ago that showed that almost a third of people in their 20s would support mandatory government surveillance cameras inside of private homes in order to prevent domestic violence.
Now, people like that, I mean, they are beyond redemption.
I mean, let's have triads here.
If somebody wants to have mandatory surveillance cameras in your bedroom, it's like, you know, I don't think I'm going to be able to reach you.
Well, we need a revival for sure.
Yeah.
Well, you talk rightly about putting the need to put a leash on government.
But, you know, it seems like, and maybe I'm just, you know, like an older guy looking back at the better times, but it seems like we're now more than I remember, even, you know, the years I was with Dr. Paul Mahill, we're even more divided into team red versus team blue, you know.
And we see this with the Trump-Biden phenomenon.
And it's not about ideas at all.
There's no discussion of ideas.
It's, I'm on this team, I'm on this team.
You've got Conservatism Inc., which is a bunch of grifters who don't really care about anything at all.
And it doesn't seem like anyone's on team freedom.
And I remember when we were back on the Hill, I mean, our main goal was building a broader coalition, regardless of what team you were on to stop the Iraq war.
And I don't know.
I mean, I particularly paid attention to your conclusion because I was hoping to be able to, you know, after all of the, I mean, this bill of particulars, it's pretty scary to find some good purpose.
And I think somehow, I don't know, maybe you have some suggestions to break away from this idea of team red versus team blue and start thinking about team freedom.
Those are great points and great questions.
I mean, it's frustrating to me to look back even the 1990s when there was a lot more talk about freedom.
I mean, the 1990s looks like practically a golden age of freedom compared to nowadays.
And it's frustrating to see the terms of the debate for the 2024 presidential race.
Neither Biden nor Trump say much about individual freedom.
I mean, you know, I think the only freedom that Biden cares about is the freedom to terminate pregnancies.
Trump is good on the right to bear arms and some other things, but there's far more passion for political power to seize political power than there is for individual freedom.
And that's a perversion.
You know, it's been over 40 years since a major party presidential candidate spoke eloquently and sincerely about freedom.
We've got to go back to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
And this is a sign of how far the country's fallen.
But to go back to your point, Diago, I'm not completely pessimistic.
I certainly try to get a lot of comic relief in everything I write because people who laugh haven't given up hope.
But things are looking grim.
Things have looked worse elsewhere in the past.
But it's getting later and later.
And the plane is getting closer to crashing.
You know, both sides, Democrats and Republican, because they get the most attention so far in this election.
And both of them will say something very similar.
And that is, this is the most significant election in all of our history.
This is all the difference in the world.
But, you know, they usually say that unless you vote Democrat or unless you vote Republican.
And they don't see it, I'm sure, the way most of the libertarians see it because it's such a mixed bag.
You know, if you want to, both sides on occasion talk in the right manner about liberty and freedom, they'll come down, you know, maybe once out of ten times.
They'll come down on the right side of an issue.
But most of the time, I think that my point has always been they think it's going to change things for the better because they're going to get elected.
And I've always argued the case.
Well, the many elections that I, the first election I remember was 1940.
And there was a lot of excitement because my dad was interested in listening to the news.
And it was always going to be a difference back then.
It was getting rid of Roosevelt and that kind of stuff.
So it's something that they expect to come.
My argument is eventually, afterwards, nothing really changes.
I'm looking to the Fed.
I'm looking to the foreign policy that we have, personal liberty, you know, the whole thing, everything that we talk about.
So nothing changes, and that's why I don't have a lot of confidence in bipartisanship.
One word that I one word that I detest is bipartisanship.
We might sketch together.
I say, Yeah, bring all your bad eyes together and throw them in the middle and deceive the people further.
Yeah, that's yeah.
I mean, it's that's also a word that makes me cringe.
I mean, I'm, you know, I have the same reaction to that word that a vampire has to a cross because I figure something really bad is going to happen.
And it's interesting because you, I mean, to see what the conventional wisdom is in Washington, D.C., something which you experienced being here many years as a member of Congress.
I mean, if the two sides come together, the Constitution is almost always going to get shafted.
And you're going to have these victory parties.
There was a tax rise, a tax raise.
Oh, boy, we're going to fix things.
There is no learning curve because people in Washington never have to pay the price of their mistakes.
And we end up with an impunity democracy where the leaders are never held liable.
Okay, I want to have a follow-up on this.
Yeah, do you think that might relate to the fact that most people I knew in Congress were educated in the same system?
They weren't reading Austrian economics, and unfortunately, they didn't get hold of your books.
And so it was on.
So I've often blamed that, you know, in the progressive era onward, the people I knew were all educated by something almost opposite to libertarianism and our Constitution.
Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point.
It's just, there's, I mean, you'd mentioned what members of Congress read or read, and, you know, that's almost an oxymoron.
There was a survey by the House Administration Committee, I think, in 1977 or 78, that showed that the average House member spent 12 minutes a day reading.
And I think it might have gone down since then.
And just talking with most members, personal company accepted, on policy or following them word by word in a four debate or at a hearing, it's just like, you know, how in haze of these people get in charge because they don't know very much.
I mean, something which was a real, which a lot of people don't appreciate, is the efforts that you made when you were in Congress to educate your fellow members of the House.
I have memories in 2009, I came by and was talking to, I guess, about a dozen Congress members of Congress, and you had Daniel said I should talk about torture and illegal surveillance.
And it was interesting on torture because it seemed like the only members who were fiercely opposed to that were you and Roscoe Bartlett.
That's interesting.
I mean, I really like that point that you're making, Jim, about members not reading.
And I bring it up a lot in interviews because most people have the assumption that members of Congress have access to all sorts of information.
Educating Congress: A Vacuum 00:02:08
They must know this.
They're members of Congress.
The reality is they're absolutely an incurious class of people.
They just don't care.
And by and large, with the exception of Thomas Massey in the House and a few others, probably, they rely completely on having a staffer next to them.
Tell me what do I say to this group?
Tell me what do I say to them.
They have no depth of knowledge about anything.
They don't read.
They're incurious.
They might glance at a Washington Post occasionally, but they're the most uninformed people in society rather than the popular misperception that they are among the most informed members of society.
Yeah, and it's not much better with most of your staffers.
One vivid memory I have on that, in the summer of 1995, after Republicans took control of Congress, they finally had hearings on Waco.
And there were two different committees at the same time, and the GOP had a special room for their headquarters.
And I was writing about the hearings for Wall Street Journal and some other places.
And I stopped by that room, and they had all these boxes of documents which the Clinton administration had given to the committee.
And I was talking to the staff at the front desk, and I said, so how about these boxes?
They said, yeah, all these papers, we don't know what to do with them.
And I said, well, did you think about reading them?
That's what I threw somebody.
You know, this idea that they don't read is obviously a pretty accurate assessment.
They don't read, but, and we can say this generally speaking, you know, the staff and the people, and I blame the educational system, and then there creates a vacuum.
Somebody still has to pull strings.
And then I keep thinking, well, maybe somebody will come along with evil thoughts in their mind.
And maybe a George Soros comes along and influences elections to judges and the various things and have a lot more control on filling the pretend vacuum, you know, the vacuum that occurs because there's a pretense of the staffers and congressmen.
Someone Will Always Follow 00:04:52
We're here because we know everything.
So I think it's that educational system that is the most dangerous thing going on.
It's a huge problem.
And the fundamental thing is that people come to D.C. so naive about government power.
I mean, government is an engine of coercion.
I mean, there's a few good things, a few bad things that can prevent.
There's not much good it can directly achieve.
But folks come to D.C. to, you know, share the power, and they simply don't recognize the sordid history of the U.S. government on so many areas.
Well, that brings up a quote from your book, Jim.
Appropriately, I wrote it down.
How many laws must be violated before citizens recognize that a government is fundamentally lawless?
And that's such a great quip.
I mean, it's perfect for that.
You know, I went through a period of where I devoured everything I could find by H.L. Mencken, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant.
And I do consider you a modern-day Mencken, with the difference being, I mean, your ability to turn a phrase, but you don't seem to have the contempt for the average American that Mencken had, which I think is nice.
Yeah, I mean, that was a blemish on him.
And I mean, it was fine to have the contempt for the politicians, but I think he did not appreciate some of the virtues of his fellow citizens.
Flip side, he did live in Baltimore.
That's right.
Well, if we can, Dr. Let's get back to the book.
This is basically, in my opinion, the way I read it, is a series of terrific essays.
And they're so great to get up to speed on all of these assaults on our liberty.
If you had to pick one or two that you want to point out and talk about a little bit, what would those be?
Well, one would be the chapter on COVID, the COVID catastrophes.
That's something that y'all have been great on since the start, since even before Fauci became famous.
And it's a wonderful example of how politicians use fear to shackle people.
Because if you can frighten enough people, you can shackle almost everybody.
And there was never good science behind what they were doing, but instead it was political science using deceit and demagoguery to wreck liberty.
So if you go all the way back to Fauci financing the bio, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that was out of control.
And then when the virus got loose, they lied up and down and vilified anybody who said, hey, it's a Chinese government screw-up here.
And then just, you know, living in the D.C. area, I have memories of, you know, I often go out hiking on weekends.
And during the pandemic early on, I'd be hiking, walking along the CNO Canal towpath, an area that Daniel knows very well.
Oh, yeah.
And people would literally be screaming and cussing at me because I wasn't wearing a mask.
So I would just tell them, I say to them, okay, tell to your therapist, okay?
We're outside.
The sun is shining.
Folks have trouble with your blood pressure.
You know, the example of COVID being a monster and how the people went along with that.
Excuse me.
But I also think it's an example of how far can they go because it did help for people to go out in large numbers to the PTA meetings.
And all of a sudden, one leader stands up and said, this, a bunch of bologna, and get people fired.
So I thought there was a time when there are still leftovers there, but I still think that it fits that they can be changed.
And there were always some people there.
You know, if you look at the medical profession, probably 90-some percent of us said, if I make a living here, I got to do it.
They'll take my license.
And they went along with it.
But all of a sudden, they hung in there.
And now, by many people, they're seen as heroes.
Yeah, which is better late than never.
And there were a lot of smart, tough people who pushed back, men and women who had confidence in their own judgment and in their own knowledge.
And that's encouraging.
It was great to see how people have fought back on the censorship.
But another chapter I think people will enjoy in the book is the chapter on the Ministry of Truth Gone Crazy.
That was the title, something like that title.
Ministry of Truth Gone Crazy 00:06:30
But it's fascinating to see how the Supreme Court handled the oral arguments a couple of weeks ago.
Because it sounds like the Supreme Court's going to say, well, yeah, but, you know, there was disinformation.
Well, hell, there's always disinformation because it's the human race.
And the most dangerous disinformation is from the government, because it was Joe Biden telling us that if you get the injection, you won't get COVID.
And he was accurate, plus reminders, 100 million COVID cases.
That's absolutely true.
You know, one thing we have to finish up here soon, but there's time for one or two more questions.
But one thing I always like to find out, and sometimes you get a precise answer, and sometimes it's a miscellaneous answer.
I'm always fascinated by individuals like you, Jim, that have arrived at a position that makes a lot of sense.
And there's good history behind it.
Did you wake up some morning when you were eight years old and discover it?
Or did your parents have an influence?
Was there a school teacher?
And was there anybody in history that you got hold of and you read and had an influence?
Could you describe that a little bit?
I always find it very fascinating who has influenced some people.
Yeah, well, basically, my point of view is part of the terms of my parole.
So, now there are a lot of different influences.
I was a teenager in the 1970s.
It had a big impression on me when Nixon went off the gold standard.
And because I was buying gold and silver at that point, I was lucky timing, and the profits from that helped pay for some of my early years as a freelance writer with all the strikeouts.
So I was a big fan of your minority opinion on the Gold Commission in 1982.
But so, I mean, I had a lot of experiences.
I dropped out of college, hitchhiked 10,000 miles, dealing with a lot of different people, some of who have been victimized by the government.
I had a lot of run-ins with the government.
I was arrested on bogus charges of armed robbery until when I was 17, and, you know, spent a long night being interrogated.
And, you know, I didn't, you know, it was a little bit like the 1930s movie where they turn up the bright lights and make you sweat, but there was no way in hell I was going to sign a false confession, so they finally let me go.
And I was coming of age in Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War, and I realized that the government was far more devious and a much bigger rascal than what most people realized.
Plus, I was raised in the South.
I was raised in the Shenandoah Valley, and I later learned how the Northern armies had burnt that down intentionally to ravage the civilian population in 1864.
And this was a huge war crime that got swept under the rug.
But that certainly adds to my assessment of government as a moral force.
And it's also a good reason to never trust PBS historians.
Because to hear how they portray the duties of the government and the moral glory of the government, it's almost always crap.
There have been good presidents.
There have been good people in government.
They're good people now.
Not that many.
And certainly on Capitol Hill, as you said, I mean, there's Congressman Massey, there's your son Rand, there's a handful of others, but I mean, it's thin picking.
And to have any idealistic hope is mostly self-delusion.
Stop there.
I'm glad you mentioned journalism, Jim, because you have a piece out today in the New York Post, Crimea River.
DC throws a pity party for underpaid Congress.
And it's a great article.
I highly recommend it.
I was wondering if, I know we're getting close to our end, but if I can just sort of shift gears in a selfish way, because I sort of have always considered myself a journalist.
How would you say, as someone who's been a working journalist for many decades, how do you see journalism has changed now in our digital era?
There are fewer barriers to entry, which is a good thing, but the standards have fallen.
It's difficult to find editors who enjoy seeing someone vigorously beat up the government.
I mean, it was different when I was starting out in the 80s and most of the 90s.
Editors would enjoy a story that raised the ruckus and got a bunch of angry letters to the editor and maybe had the federal agency chief writing an angry response.
There are still some editors like that, but the journalism profession has become a lot more deferential.
I mean, you have a whole lot more people who have journalism degrees, but what they don't teach you in journalism school is to be a junkyard dog fighting the government when the government's lying, withholding documents, and most of the journalists are so deferential.
Most journalists are satisfied to write the government told me so stories.
And this is poison for freedom and putting a leash on government.
I'm just always amazed at how much BS politicians and the federal agencies get away with in D.C. Some days it almost makes me cynical.
Well, very good.
We're going to close up right now.
And I assume all your books are on Amazon.
Is there any other addresses or information that you want to give for getting in touch with you?
Yeah, thanks very much.
Hey, thanks so much for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
The books are on Amazon.
It's probably the easiest way to order most of them.
JimBovard.com, I've got some stuff there that would probably not be fit for Amazon.
But thanks for all that you've done, Dr. Paul.
And thanks, Daniel.
Y'all have helped.
Y'all are holding up the flag of freedom in some very difficult times.
Very nice.
And thank you very much for all your work.
But thank you for being in the program today.
I'm sure our viewers will be very impressed.
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