Stefan Molyneux looks at the unfortunate situation involving Eric Garner and Officer Daniel Pantaleo which left Garner dead and sparked a mainstream media outcry about police brutality and race relations. What do the facts say? Was Garner killed by an illegal chokehold? Was this a case of a racist white police officer attacking an innocent black man? How much of the Grand Jury testimony do we know? Was Ramsey Orta – Garner’s friend who filmed the viral video – arrested as retaliation for filming the incident? What is the truth about the Eric Garner situation? Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/ericgarner
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Like most of the world, I was appalled at seeing the recent takedown of Eric Garner by members of the New York City Police Department.
Unlike the world, at least most of it, I was not terribly shocked.
For reasons we will get into in this presentation.
Just before we begin, as usual, I am not a lawyer.
I am not an expert.
I am not a doctor.
I have never been any member of any police force.
So we will put the sources to what we're going to be talking about in the description to the video and the notes for the podcast.
That having been said, let's get into the horrible truth about Eric Garner.
Let's do a little bit of background.
July 17th, 3.45pm about Eastern Standard Time, Eric Garner was approached by Officer Justin D'Amico in the Tompkinsville neighborhood of Staten Island, New York, on suspicion of selling what are called Lucy's, which are single cigarettes, from packs without tax stamps.
Why is this occurring?
Well, like most black market or illegal activity, it occurs as a result of hyper-regulation, illegality, or in this case, taxation.
So, in New York State, combined state and local taxes are $5.85 a pack.
This is the highest in the nation.
This does not even include federal excise tax on cigarettes at $1.01 per pack.
So, for instance, the tax difference between Virginia and New York State is only $4 a pack.
And more in New York City where further taxes are applied.
This creates a huge incentive, of course, to transport cigarettes from Virginia where you can buy a pack for a third of the price, sell them on the black market at a significant markup.
You can drive over to Virginia, drive back with a trunk full of cigarettes and make five figures.
Now, it's estimated that New York State, quote, loses over $1.7 billion every year due to lost cigarette taxes.
It's further estimated that close to 60% or 57% of cigarette sales in New York are of Lucy's.
At the time of the confrontation, Eric Garner was known to have had a criminal record including at least 31 arrests going back to 1980 when he was 16 on charges such as assault, resisting arrest and grand larceny.
Several of these arrests were due to the sale of unlicensed cigarettes.
So some of this tragedy of course is driven by ridiculous amounts of taxation and regulation, though of course it's not the direct cause.
There was a confrontation as Eric Garner pleaded and begged at the policeman not to arrest him, that he was tired of it.
He was swarmed.
Well, first he was reached out for and then he was swarmed.
The confrontation between Officer Daniel Pantaleo and Garner was recorded by Garner's friend, Ramsey Orta, who documented the entire incident on video.
Garner was obviously frustrated at being approached by the police, saying, quote, Get away!
Something.
For what?
Every time you see me, you want to mess with me.
I'm tired of it.
It stops today.
Why would you?
Everyone standing here will tell you I didn't do nothing.
I did not sell nothing.
Because every time you see me, you want to harass me.
You want to stop me something.
Selling cigarettes.
I'm minding my business, officer.
I'm minding my business.
Please, just leave me alone.
I told you the last time.
Please, just leave me alone.
When police attempted to arrest Garner, he didn't cooperate, but wasn't combative.
He was then put in what has been described as a chokehold from behind by Officer Daniel Pantalea and quickly taken to the ground.
So, why was this happening?
Well, according to some reports, a lot of this stuff is not that easy to verify, so again, the sources are below.
According to some reports, The storekeepers along the street had called the police saying that this guy was bothering customers or trying to sell and so on.
And, of course, these may be people who were selling cigarettes legally who couldn't compete with somebody who was selling them illegally, so he was taking away business from them.
This is one of the tragedies when you get these kinds of ridiculous laws in place where law-abiding citizens then are set against non-law-abiding citizens because they can't compete.
Of course, this is a huge...
A tiny mirror of a huge problem, which is, of course, the war on drugs.
In this case, the war on drugs happened to be nicotine, and the ban was through taxation, through raising the price, thus creating a black market rather than outright illegalization.
But there is, of course, this idea, the broken window idea of policing, which is that if there's a broken window, that encourages more crime.
It's not been very well established, but there is this idea, if you get the low-lying public offenders off the streets, then the neighborhood tends to improve, criminals move elsewhere, and so on.
Garner was taken down, surrounded by four officers, quickly handcuffed, and had his head pushed towards the sidewalk.
He was heard repeatedly saying, I can't breathe.
In total, he said, I can't breathe 11 times, and the, quote, chokehold appeared to be applied for approximately 13 seconds.
Gardner then appeared to lose consciousness and lay handcuffed for an extended period of time before emergency medical services personnel arrived.
The police were asked, why aren't you doing CPR? Apparently CPR was not attempted by police on the scene.
It was reported that Gardner was still breathing while unconscious.
An ambulance was called to transport Garner to Richmond University Medical Center, but Garner went into cardiac arrest while in transit.
According to reports, he was pronounced dead approximately one hour later at the hospital.
Now, pronounced dead, of course, doesn't mean that he died one hour later.
It simply means that a doctor pronounced him dead once he arrived at the hospital.
So, according to reports again, he went into cardiac arrest while in transit, so he did not die at the scene.
He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, at some point between the scene and the hospital, pronounced dead one hour later.
Reports from the medical examiner ruled Garner's death a homicide and noted that Garner was killed by, quote, compression of neck, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.
Some sites and news agencies have taken out compression of neck, I guess depending on their sympathies to the police.
It was also mentioned that asthma, heart disease, and obesity were contributing factors to the death of the 43-year-old man, a 6'3", 350-pound father of six.
Okay.
The word homicide has been largely misinterpreted by a large number of people.
So, August 1, 2014, New York City medical examiner, the cause of death in the Gardner case was homicide.
So homicide is one of five categories that medical examiners use to label causes of death.
And it only indicates that, quote, someone's intentional actions led to the death of another person.
This is Gregory G. Davis, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.
Homicide does not mean murder.
They're very different categories.
Obviously, murder is a subset of homicide, but they are not synonyms at all.
So if a guy comes running at me with a chainsaw and I shoot and kill him, that is a homicide.
It was unquestionably a homicide...
When Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown multiple times, killing him, that was a homicide, which means that someone's intentional actions led to the death of another person.
That is not the same as murder, as we'll get into, which is essential for understanding what happened with the grand jury.
So the other four categories to determine cause of death include suicide, accident, natural causes, and undetermined.
So again, in a medical examiner's report, homicide simply means one person intentionally did something that led to the death of someone else.
It doesn't mean that the death was intentional, and it certainly doesn't mean that a crime was committed.
Criminally negligent homicide is a Class E felony in New York State, but that is not determined simply by a medical examiner's report.
So, according to New York State law, Officer Pantaleo would be found criminally negligent if he failed, quote, to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk that Garner would die from his actions.
And that failure was, quote, a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the situation.
So, clearly, if he'd said, I want to arrest you, and Garner had said, don't bother me, I don't want to be arrested, leave me alone, and he'd shot him, then that would be, I would imagine, a crime.
So, these are subtleties that are really important to understand as we sort of grind through these details.
Okay, so chokeholds.
Chokeholds have been discouraged in many police forces, New York City Police Force.
Let's look at the number of chokehold complaints received from 2001 to 2013.
I'm not going to read all of these off.
You can see that they range from 82 in 2001.
They got a peak in the mid-2000s and then 179 in 2013.
Between June 2013 and July 2014, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city agency that examines accusations of police misconduct, received more than 200 chokehold complaints.
Nearly 200 complaints have been filed on average each year since 2001, with some variation, of course, as you can see.
Approximately half of the claims have been found by the Review Board to be unsubstantiated.
Only around 2% have been substantiated, and the rest are neither fully proven nor disproven.
The New York Police Department Patrol Guide says, quote, members of the New York City Police Department will not use chokeholds.
A chokehold shall include, but is not limited to, any pressure to the throat or windpipe which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air.
NYPD officers have been warned about the dangers of using chokeholds for close to 30 years.
According to the New York Law Journal in 1985, then Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward mandated that they not be used, quote, routinely, and disallowed their use unless, unquote, officer's life is in danger or some other person's life in danger, and the chokehold is the least dangerous alternative method of restraint available to the police officer.
There are significant grey areas here, as you can see.
And we'll get into the different kinds of chokeholds here, so we can understand the differences.
According to a study by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, while the rule exists on paper, it is stringently enforced through disciplinary action by the NYPD, and thus, the use of the hold continues.
This is all a bit more complicated by other factors which we'll get into in a moment.
Daniel Pantaleo's lawyer, Stu London, said the officer, quote, indicated he used a takedown method that was taught in the academy.
He was concerned about going through the plate glass window.
He indicated any contact his arm had with the neck was incidental.
He never applied any pressure to the neck, nor did he intend to.
However many grains of salt you want to take that is up to you, of course, with the reminder that this is his lawyer, of course, the officer's lawyer.
Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, said,"...it is clear that the officer's intention was to do nothing more than take Mr.
Garner into custody as instructed, and that he used the takedown techniques that he learned in the academy when Mr.
Garner refused." A policeman doesn't have to see you committing a crime in order to arrest you.
He has to have more than a hunch.
He has to have a reasonable suspicion that you are committing a crime.
Complaints from the store owners apparently that he was selling illegal cigarettes, a history of having been arrested for selling illegal cigarettes and so on, is enough, I believe, to arrest you.
And when the officer comes up to arrest you, the law says that you have to submit, that you can't just sort of play street lawyer and attempt to talk yourself out of being arrested.
Of course, the place to contest your arrest, if you believe it to be unjustified, is in the court of law, is in the legal system itself.
So does that mean that the police are being trained to use a move?
A chokehold that is barred by their own patrol guide?
Well, Further complications, the medical examiner noted that there was no physical damage to Garner's neck or windpipe.
This damage would be typical in the use of a chokehold under the police definition of pressure to the throat or windpipe.
So if it's enough to kill you, it would likely, I would imagine, leave bruises, marks, and so on, and internal damage to the throat.
So here is the challenge.
There are different kinds of choke holds, and this has led to a lot of confusion on the part of a lot of people.
So here are some explanations of the differences.
So we have an air choke or tracheal choke.
This specifically refers to a true choke that compresses the upper airway.
So this is the trachea, the larynx, or laryngopharynx.
This interferes with breathing and leading to asphyxia, which is, you know, the general air.
You can't breathe.
And human beings can survive usually, you know, two, three, four or more minutes, depending on your level of health, without air.
You go scuba diving, figure it out for yourself.
So that's an air choke.
And that seems to be specifically, well, they say it shouldn't be used routinely.
It shouldn't be used at all.
But they seem to train for it in the academy.
So it's hard to know what the facts are in that.
So it's less effective at rendering someone unconscious than the vascular counterpart.
So the air choke causes excruciating pain and air hunger.
And in combat sports, a fighter will usually submit to such a submission hold.
So once when I was doing a show with Joe Rogan, he said, come down and see an MMA fight.
And I saw a choking out, which was a vascular hold.
And it was an oddly gentle kind of thing.
Air chokes have been associated with fractures of the larynx or hyoid bone are considered less safe than blood chokes to practice.
The common law enforcement arm bar choke is an air choke done by placing the forearm across the front of the neck from behind.
The free hand grabs the wrist and pulls back the forearm, hence driving the forearm, usually the radius bone, into the front of the neck.
I believe leaving significant damage and evidence.
Okay, so that's something called a blood choke.
This is carotid restraint or sleeper hold.
It's a form of strangulation that compresses one or both carotid arteries and or the jugular veins without compressing the airway.
And what that does is it causes cerebral ischemia and a temporary hypoxic condition in the brain.
Hypoxic means without air.
So your brain is obviously our most expensive organ in terms of resource consumption and any cutoff of blood flow to the brain Puts you out, puts you to sleep very quickly.
It doesn't take long at all.
Choking out, if you've got a good lungful of air, can be minutes.
This can be much, much shorter.
A well-applied blood choke may lead to unconsciousness in a matter of seconds.
Compared to strangulation with the hands, properly applied blood chokes require little physical strength.
The lateral vascular neck restraint is still a widely taught and utilized blood restriction hold in law enforcement and can be performed from behind the suspect or from the front when the officer is on top of the suspect by putting an arm around the neck of the suspect with the crook of the elbow over the midline of the neck.
So the difference between the air choke and the blood choke is significant.
The air choke is discouraged.
The blood choke appears to not be discouraged and is still used.
So, it's different from the choke hold where the larynx is blocked by the arm by pinching the arm together while assisting with the free hand.
The carotid arteries and jugular veins are compressed on both sides of the neck.
This hold does not put any pressure on the airway, but an improperly applied hold could quickly turn into an air choke if the person being restrained resists the hold by attempting to turn around.
So, If there was a blood choke, then it would not restrict the airway.
The eye can't breathe would not resolve from the blood choke.
The air choke, since it seemed to be only applied for about 13 seconds, would not seem to be enough to cause unconsciousness and a heart attack and so on.
Let's look at Daniel Pantaleo.
Police history.
This is not the first case where Daniel Pantaleo, an eight-year police veteran, has been accused of misconduct.
In total, the officer has been sued three times for various incidents relating to his police duties.
In a 2013 federal lawsuit complainants, Darren Collins and Tommy Rice allege that Pantaleo and approximately four other officers subjected them to, quote, humiliating and unlawful strip searches in public view following a March 2012 arrest.
The complaint alleges that the officers involved, quote, pulled down the plaintiff's pants and underwear and touched and searched their genital areas or stood by while this was done in their presence.
The charges against Collins and Rice, who claimed no wrongdoing, were dismissed slash sealed and court records show the lawsuit was settled in 2013.
In a federal lawsuit, Rylon Walker alleged that he was falsely arrested in February 2012 by Pantaleo and other police for marijuana possession.
The marijuana charges against Walker were also dismissed slash sealed, but the lawsuit is pending.
In the third lawsuit, Kenneth Collins alleged that Pantaleo and other officers violated his rights during a false marijuana arrest in February 2012.
Collins claims that he was, quote,"...subjected to a degrading search of his private parts and genitals by the defendants." The drug charges themselves were once again dismissed slash sealed and the city attorneys have yet to file a response to the given lawsuit.
It's worth noting that according to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, misconduct allegations against city police officers dropped to 11,501 in 2013, which was the lowest total in the last 10 years.
The Review Board received 2,739 complaints during the first half of 2014 which was a 7% increase from the same period of 2013.
Ramsey Orta, the friend who videoed the incident, it went viral online, of course, was viewed millions of times and prompted a massive wave of mainstream and alternative news coverage.
August 2nd, 2014, three weeks after recording his friend's arrest on his cell phone, Ramsey Orta was arrested on weapon possession charges.
Police allege that Orta had slipped a.25 caliber handgun into an accomplice's waistband outside of a New York hotel.
Orta claimed that the charges were in retaliation for documenting Garner's death, but he was nonetheless charged with a single felony counts of third-degree criminal weapon possession and criminal firearm possession.
When retaliation claims were made, prosecutors pointed out, quote, he's only 22 years old, yet he has two felony convictions and six misdemeanor convictions as an adult.
He does have one bench warrant.
Police said Orta had a previous weapon conviction that prohibited from possessing a firearm.
According to court records, Orta was brought up on robbery charges after a May arrest and an assault charge from an arrest three days before Garner's death.
This has no bearing, obviously, on the video itself, which is the evidence that everyone can see with his or her own eyes, but it may not be purely retaliatory that he was arrested on weapon possession charges.
So, the grand jury is impaneled to determine if there was criminal liability on the part of the officer.
Not if there was negligence, not if there was deviations from standards, and not if there was civil wrongdoing.
Did he break a specific legal statute?
Did he break a law?
Is he subject to criminal liability?
It doesn't mean he didn't do anything wrong.
It doesn't mean that he's not subject to civil damages.
It can't determine civil rights violations.
There doesn't appear to be any reason to believe.
That Eric Garner was attacked or was brought down because he was black.
There was no racial epithets.
And in fact, one of the supervising sergeants on the scene was a black woman who did nothing to intervene during the takedown.
So the grand jury cannot determine civil wrongdoing.
It can't determine whether he was mean or deviated from police standards or anything like that.
All they're looking for, all they're empowered to look for, or they're allowed to look for, is did the officer or officers break the law?
To prove murder, the grand jury would have to conclude that Pantaleo had the conscious objective to kill Garner.
And since this is not a situation of claimed self-defense, as it was with Darren Wilson, It would have to be the initiation of a desire to murder a Garner, a conscious objective to kill him.
And it would seem that that standard of proof was not met.
August 19, 2014, Staten Island's DA Daniel M. Donovan Jr.
announced that a grand jury will convene to hear possible charges against officers in the Garner case.
December 3, 2014, the grand jury determined there was not probable cause that Pantaleo had committed any crime.
Following the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown-Daron Wilson case, the jury's ruling sparked outrage and continued protests across the United States.
Staten Island DA Daniel Donovan defended the grand jury's decision and noted that he was barred by law from divulging further details of the grand jury's deliberations.
However, because of the nature of this case, Donovan asked the court to unseal some of the testimony, and of course it is The information is typically restricted from public view by New York law.
So below is the information that has so far been released with regards to the grand jury.
The grand jury sat for a period of nine weeks.
The grand jury heard from a total of 50 witnesses.
22 of the witnesses were civilians.
The remaining witnesses were police officers, emergency medical personnel and doctors.
Sixty exhibits were admitted into evidence.
They included four videos, records regarding NYPD policies and procedure, medical records pertaining to the treatment of deceased, photographs from the scene, autopsy photographs, and records pertaining to NYPD training.
The grand jury was instructed on relevant principles of law, including Penal Law 25.30 regarding a police officer's use of physical force in making an arrest.
It was also reported that the 23-member grand jury was comprised of 14 whites with the other 9 being black or Hispanic.
With the shooting of Michael Brown, we were...
If you can say fortunate, we were fortunate enough to get all of the documents that were examined by the grand jury, which we could then peruse for our own edification in this situation until and unless this information is released.
We don't know.
We don't know what they saw.
We don't know what arguments were made.
We don't know exactly what evidence was put into place.
And it is difficult to, I mean, when you look at something as appalling and as horrifying as the takedown that led to the death of this man, it is shocking and horrifying.
But unless you get the actual full evidence, unless you hear all of the available expert witnesses, unless you are led through the testimony, It's really, really hard to say.
So what has the reaction been?
Well, in a public comment, Officer Pantaleo said, quote, No, I don't accept his apology, said widow Esau Garner during a press conference where she was flanked by Al Sharpton, head of the National Action Network.
I could care less about his condolences.
My husband is six feet under.
The cop is still working.
He's still collecting a paycheck, and I'm looking for a way to feed my kids.
The widow compared her husband's death to a modern-day lynching.
Regarding the grand jury, she said, quote, They had to get 12 to agree, and they probably got 12 white motherfuckers to say no.
She was not the last person, of course, to play the race card in this situation.
President Barack Obama said, Some of you may have heard there was a decision that came out today by a grand jury not to indict police officers who had interacted with an individual with Eric Garner in New York City, all of which was caught on videotape and speaks to the larger issues that we've been talking about now for the last week, the last month, the last year, and sadly for decades.
and that is a concern on the part of too many minority communities that law enforcement is not working with them and dealing with them in a fair way.
So to prove murder, the grand jury would have to have concluded that Pantaleo had the conscious objective to kill Brown.
And...
To my obviously untrained eye, the video reflects a struggle and altercation, not an outright execution.
There were 225,000 misdemeanor arrests in New York in 2013.
So clearly this case was, to put it mildly, an outlier.
So this is not standard procedure.
This is not standard happening.
As mentioned before, a black police sergeant oversaw the handling, direct on-the-ground handling of the Eric Garner situation and did not see at any point fit to intervene or to correct.
And given the chain of command, to me, it would seem that it would lie with whoever had the highest ranking in this situation.
I believe that trying to transform the Garner homicide into a race issue, they are irresponsible.
It's hard to imagine that if he was a six-foot-three, 350-pound biker with a long history of 32 prior arrests and had resisted arrest before and was being complained about for engaging in criminal activity, although that has not been fully established, which he had engaged in before, you have to submit.
Like it or not, that's the law.
And he was not inexperienced in being arrested.
He knew what happens.
We all know what happens if you resist cops.
You can't win!
Cops are very good at using force and they carry lethal weapons on them.
They have backup.
They have Far greater latitude than citizens, than you and I. We can't go around arresting people who are playing their stereos too loud or who we don't like, who double park, but cops have that capacity.
And any time a cop's shadow crosses your path, you must conform or they will escalate until you conform or until you are dead.
That is the nature of police work.
As it stands, run by the government at the moment.
Let me repeat this again.
If an officer commands you to do something, Particularly if that is an arrest.
You obey or he will escalate until you obey or until you are dead.
Or unconscious or until you're incapacitated, let's say.
If some guy comes up to me and pulls a gun, I can do it in self-defense.
If an officer comes up to me and pulls a gun, I have to say, yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir.
That's the way it works.
Eric Garner knew what it was to be arrested.
He'd spent most of his life in and out of the police station in one form or another.
This is not a race issue.
Because they did not target him because he was black.
They targeted him because they'd received complaints that he was engaged in illegal activity.
The cops don't get to choose which laws to enforce and which laws not to enforce.
That is not up to their discretion.
They tried to arrest him because he was engaged in illegal activity and that's their job.
I don't know, obviously, the details and ins and outs of what kind of chokehold was used for how long.
My amateur opinion, admittedly amateur, admittedly opinion, is I don't see how you can give someone a heart attack and have them die from a 13-second chokehold.
If it was some block in the carotid artery, if it was some way of choking the Blood off to the brain, then he would have just gone unconscious.
He wouldn't have said, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe 11 times or more.
So I don't think it was that.
If it was an air choke, if they were choking off his windpipe, there would be damage and bruising and so on to his windpipe.
And it seems to me highly unlikely that 13 seconds of not being able to breathe renders him unconscious and then he has a heart attack.
In my, again, I'll be overly cautious here, but in my amateur opinion, this is a guy who was obese, who had such severe asthma that he had to give up his job.
Who was stressed, who was upset, and his system gave out.
Now, should the police have done what they did?
I don't know.
Look, I am not the right guy to ask about this for reasons that I guess I might as well get into now.
Look, the reason I said at the beginning, why am I not shocked?
Because, my friends, what you saw on that video was It's the essence of what we call the state.
This used to be known.
This used to be well known throughout Western history and really throughout the world.
I give you one George Washington of the cherry tree and first presidency.
He said, government is not reason.
It is not eloquence.
It is force.
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
Thomas Jefferson.
Either force or corruption has been the principle of every modern government.
When you call for a law, the guns come out.
Every law, every statute, every piece of legislation, every guideline, every thing that you can find that can have someone find or go to jail, every statute,
every regulation, of which there are hundreds of thousands the entire tax code that eats trees like some fiery dragon all of this relies upon giving people in blue costumes the capacity to initiate force against you until you comply or are incapacitated that is the nature of the state that is the nature of law I
have said for many years the law is an opinion with a gun.
It is an opinion because it is not philosophical, but everything that you want to do that the government does, everything you think that the government should be taking care of, that is violence.
That is force.
If you want people to pay 5% more in property taxes, they get a bill.
If they don't pay the bill, they get another bill.
They get a call.
People come and lock them out of their houses.
If they fight, if they resist, if they pull out a gun, they will be shot dead!
The state is a gun.
It is not a flag.
It is not trumpets.
It is not a song.
The state is force.
Barack Obama says it well, too.
What essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is the monopoly on violence.
It goes to Mao Zedong who said political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
If you want the welfare state, if you want Obamacare, if you want public education, these are violent actions you are willing to give a minority of people.
The monopoly of the initiation of force in a confined geographical area.
That is what you are doing.
That is what the law is.
That is what government is.
Government is not a place where we get together and resolve issues.
Government is a place where people pull out guns and make other people do what they want.
Or they shoot them.
In the final analysis, that's all it comes down to.
The law is one person's capacity and willingness to use the lead handshake of non-persuasion.
So this is an example, a tragic and very compressed example, but this is an example of what happens when you do not comply with the state.
This is a little tunnel to hell itself that we can peer down, examine, and see just how horrifying the state is.
In its incarnation, in its manifestation, it is not a little flag you wave, it is a little circle in your temple with a bullet and a gun coming out of it.
That's what the government is.
There are lots of people who say, well, you know, the government, we should keep it small, and this and that.
I want to get into my arguments about that.
You can go to freedomainradio.com slash free if you want to know all my free books about the subject and so on.
Policy.
I've been studying politics for over 30 years.
I know where I speak.
In this area, I am not an amateur.
The state is forced.
In this area, Horrifying example, which is shocking for most people only because we've lost that wisdom that the government is forced and now it's become this big uncle that we go to to get stuff and to get stuff done and to make people do stuff and to get our big pile of money.
The government counterfeits through force, it borrows through force, it inflicts through force, it imprisons through force.
That's all it does.
That's all it is.
The only thing that differentiates it from everything else in society is they got the guns and the permission and encouragement and requirement to use them.
So in this tragic example, Eric Garner had a very compressed and we all had a very compressed look at what the government really is.
The government is force.
Now, the government in this case, I believe, amateur hour again, I believe, combined with tragic medical conditions, underlying stressors, and who knows what else is going on until we get the grand jury testimony.
If we ever do, we'll never know.
But this is a lesson in politics.
The government continues to expand, both clearly in terms of its growth and unclearly in terms of its debt and unfunded liabilities, which are simply deferred violence.
If I pay my rent with a credit card that I can't pay, I've simply deferred my eviction.
Debt and unfunded liabilities are simply deferred violence.
And when you put in the $100 trillion plus of deferred liabilities and direct debts in the United States government, the amount of deferred violence, the amount of wholesale auctioning off of the unborn that has occurred, is one of the greatest criminal conspiracies the world has ever known.
