All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 22, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:52
3184 What Pisses Me Off About Making A Murderer and Steven Avery
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
so i watched this documentary like i guess a good number of you did making a murderer put out december by netflix and And it is in my head now.
It's like a rabbit squirrel in an overturned aquarium racing round and round.
And I've tried six different ways from Sunday to try and approach this material.
I've written scripts.
I have a 79-slide presentation that I have abandoned because it's not getting to the core of the issues.
And so I'm not going to take the standard approach.
I'm just going to say what's on my mind and what's in my heart.
This documentary has cost me sleep.
I've been a couple of days where I've really only gotten a couple of hours sleep a night, so this is going to be unhinged.
You may not be any kind of friend of mine after I have finished unburdening myself and my thoughts, but on the other hand, we just might be closer than ever.
With regards to the spoilers and blah, blah, blah, right?
So with regards to this documentary, Making a Murderer, I can assume you've watched it.
I sympathize with everyone and I despise just about everyone in the entire scenario.
Everyone is sympathetic and everyone is horrible with very, very few exceptions.
First of all, I hate this class baiting.
I just, you know, the filmmakers are like, well, there was this rich woman and she was attacked and then there was this poor guy and everyone, the Averys were like the outcasts and they were the, no, no, no, no, no.
They weren't, well, they're poor and this and that.
No, genuinely and generally horrible people.
Horrible people.
Brendan Dassey at one point is on the phone with his mother and complains that Stephen Avery touched him inappropriately, molested him when Brendan Dassey was a little boy.
So that to me would be kind of important because the whole time I feel like I'm getting sympathy extracted out of me.
You know, like one of those horrible Mexican bathrooms where you wake up and you're missing a kidney?
I feel like I was kind of drugged with this quasi-socialist sympathies for these poor, down-and-out, good-hearted people.
And it felt wrong, but it felt demanded, like it pulled out of me.
And you dig a little bit more into this guy's history.
Oh, you know, he burned a little bit of a cat.
No, no.
He did not burn a little bit of a cat.
Okay, he robbed a bar.
And then, five months later, he doused a family cat, his family cat, in gasoline and oil and threw it in a fire to watch it burn.
That was the charge.
He says he was just there and he didn't do it, but that's what he was sent back to jail for.
Okay.
You know, three big signs of sociopathy...
Number one, bedwetting.
Don't know about that.
Number two, fascination with fire and arson.
Well, he's setting something on fire.
Number three, cruelty to animals.
So, okay, this guy is not a super great guy.
And we see, of course, in the movie, he's threatening to kill his wife.
If she doesn't do it, he raises kids right.
And his ex-wife, apparently, there was some significant intimations and police were called in for spousal abuse, beat up on his wife.
This woman who was his fiancée, she's now come forward and says, well, the only reason I talked any kind of decent stuff about the guy in the movie is because he threatened to get me if I didn't.
I was threatened.
And he was a monster.
And she says that he choked me into unconsciousness, which is a big sign of someone having the potential to kill.
The moment you put your hands on someone's throat and squeeze...
You are announcing to the world.
You might as well sky write.
I have the potential to kill someone because that's kind of what I'm doing.
It's according to a leading strangulation expert.
Yes, I found in the dusty corners of the internet, that is in fact a job.
The Avery brothers kept from the same cloth.
You see, you got this woman kind of looks like the...
Troll in one of the Lord of the Rings movies and you got this guy walking this way, kind of an old fuddy guy.
Diabetes.
And these salt of the earth, good people, whatever.
But the reality is that they raised all of these monstrous men who seemed to take great delight in beating up on women and, according to some reports or some communications, molesting children.
Okay.
Wife beaters, girlfriend beaters, sexual assaulter is one of them, not even Stephen.
And molesters of children.
This is who we are being asked to have sympathy for by the selective withholding of information from the filmmakers.
I don't like to be manipulated.
I don't like it when there are half-truths and when there's such an agenda to make me feel a certain way.
I like to be asked for honesty.
I don't like having truth serum applied rectally.
Because in this narrative, in this world, in Manitowoc, hey, thank you filmmakers, now my bucket list is simply to never go to Manitowoc County.
We want a good guy and we want a bad guy.
We want this heart done by young men whose life was stolen from him, and we want it to be about class, and then we want it to be about bad cops and police and all the standard leftist tropes.
All the clichés.
The poor are heroes, the police are agents of the nasty capitalist state, you know, all this sort of stuff.
So we all want a good guy and a bad guy.
We want this bichromatic rainbow of Manichaean opposition of good and evil.
We hunger for it and we thirst for it.
But isn't it entirely possible, and as you dig more into the facts, it seems entirely inevitable, that there ain't any good guys in this story.
You could talk maybe about the two defense lawyers who were very well paid for what they did.
They were competent workers.
But what if there were no good guys in this entire scenario?
Outside of Theresa Halbach, the victim.
Look, the Averys were a problem for the police.
And again, you can look at the rap sheets and the accusations and the cops called and the beatings and the stranglings and the sexual assaults and the potential molestations or reports of molestations.
Stephen Avery had been accused of rape on two separate occasions by two different women.
His ex-fiancee You know, that slightly befuddled, stoned, dazed, now we know, at least according to her report, traumatized woman in the movie.
She said that she met Stephen Avery, she's fixing her car, he comes over, hey, you want some help?
He moves in the next day, she can't get rid of him.
She can't get rid of him.
It's like the bad smell in a Seinfeld episode.
She can't get rid of him.
She wants to leave him.
People say, why didn't you leave him?
He was such a monster, he'd beat you up.
Strangled you?
Cops were called, told you to stay away for three days.
Why did you stay?
Well, she says, Stephen Avery said to her, if you even try to leave me, I will burn down your mother's house with your daughter inside and your mother inside.
Now, pucker up.
That's the man we're talking about.
The cops, I'm sure that everybody have sympathy for everyone and I dislike everyone.
Because I've been manipulated.
The cops probably got a little tired of the Avery's, of this revolving door of abuse and violence and molestation and abuse and assault and violence and sexual assault and molestation and red pack accusations.
Got a little tired of it.
Is that impossible to understand?
No, I can understand it.
I can understand it.
Did the cops act on the up and up?
Well, of course not.
In the first of the 85 accusation, the rape that he was sent away for, everyone says, oh, he was sent away for 18 years for a crime he didn't commit.
No!
That's not true.
Because six of those 18 years were for a crime he did commit, namely, after his cousin accused him of masturbating by the side of the road, he chased her down with a gun while she was in the car, pointed the gun at her, and then saw that she had a baby in the backseat and backed off.
And that, in violation of his parole, was six of those 18 years.
So let's get those facts straight.
So this guy, Stephen Avery, accused of rape twice, beats up his wife, beats up his girlfriend, strangles his girlfriend to the point of unconsciousness.
She wakes up, he's dragging her to his car, and a cop intervenes and stops whatever might have come next.
Brandon says, complains to his mother that Stephen Avery molested him as a child, or touched him inappropriately, whatever.
He set fire to a cat.
I mean, I set fire to a cat.
Watched it burn and mule and scream and die in a puff of hysterical feline smoke and death.
Is this where we've come to as a society?
And That these are the people that we have to feel sympathy for?
Is this where we've come to as a society?
That this is the kind of person our hearts bleed for?
I mean, not only did Stephen Avery do all these terrible things, some of which he was convicted for, Not only did he, according to Brendan Dassey, molest him, also got him involved in a horrible murder that put him away for life.
Apparently.
Is this where we have come to?
Thank you.
Is the new Rolling Stones song actually going to be sympathy for the accused pedophile?
If there's this environment where no one is innocent, everyone is understandable and everyone is horrible, of course, look, the cops have all the power.
And they have no accountability.
They have no accountability.
They send this guy to jail when masses of evidence contradict it, when there's later on somebody phones them and says, you got the wrong guy, according to a confession.
They resist fixing the problem.
Of course they do, because they're going to get sued, and their lives are going to get difficult, and they might be liable.
So, of course, they just let the guy rot in jail.
They know his history.
They know what he's been accused of.
They know what he's been doing to his girlfriends and to his ex-wife.
So they may say to themselves, well, we've got to get this guy into jail, because he keeps beating up on people.
Maybe they knew about the molestation accusations.
Maybe they didn't.
I don't know.
Maybe they knew about the rape accusations against Stephen Avery.
Maybe they didn't.
I don't know.
But they're cops.
I'm pretty sure they know quite a bit.
So maybe they're saying, okay, well, he's better off in prison because if he's not in prison, what happens?
Because everyone says, oh yes, well, you know, the guy who actually committed the rape in 1985, Richard Allen, I think his name was, the guy who actually committed the rape, he was out there for years and he raped another woman, or sexually assaulted, broke into someone and assaulted another woman.
Ah!
Well, how many girlfriends would Stephen Avery have beaten up?
How many women might he have raped if he wasn't in prison for that amount of time?
This is the problem.
This is the promise.
Oh, well, there's due process.
There's this, that, and the other.
I get that.
I understand that.
And I sympathize with that.
I really, really do.
But I also sympathize with the women that Stephen Avery victimized and with the children who complain when they're under investigation for co-conspiring a murder that he molested them when they were children.
So I have sympathy for them.
He's not choking A girlfriend or fiancé into unconsciousness if he's in prison.
This is what I mean.
I sympathize with everybody.
I dislike everybody.
And I don't like that feeling.
I'm just telling you, I don't like that feeling.
And it really, it got under my skin in a very, very deep way.
And I couldn't...
First of all, I didn't make the connection.
Oh, Mr.
Self-Knowledge.
I didn't make the connection.
But...
I finally got it.
Why?
Why Manitowoc?
Why?
Because I know that world.
I know that world.
To some degree, I grew up in a world not that dissimilar from this world.
You know, when I was six years old, I was sent to boarding school where the punishment was caning you, caning you on the ass.
Yeah, nothing weird about that, right?
Grown man hitting little boys on their bare butts with a cane.
I'm not sure if it was a boarding school or something out of Fifty Shades of Grey, but that was the reality of violence.
There was violence in my home.
When I came to Canada, first day I was in school, grade six, the game was chase the girls down and punch them in the groin.
What?
What ninth level of frozen maple-drenched hell have I landed in?
And I had a friend.
Went to his house.
He got into an argument with his mother when he was maybe 13 or 14.
He was a pretty big guy.
He threw her up against the wall and threatened to throw her down the stairs.
Another friend of mine, a Jamaican friend of mine, his mother thought he'd stolen a bike.
He got so angry he threw the bike off a balcony.
Could have been anyone below.
When we moved one place, we moved into an apartment, we moved all the time.
This instability, this nomadic lifestyle is typical to this kind of mess.
We move in, knock on the door.
This guy says, seems fairly reasonable.
Welcome to the building.
Please come over tonight for a cup of tea.
He was a cop, in fact.
Unfortunately...
We were unable to attend his little soiree out there in the neighborhood in the apartment, two apartments down, because he got angry at his wife and shot a hole in the wall.
Where am I on this planet?
Manitowoc may not be where you are, but it was not that far from where I was.
And I'm just giving you a few highlights.
This was not uncommon.
People screaming, throwing stuff, beating up on each other, cops being called.
Yeah, I get it.
I sympathize with everyone.
I had tough childhoods and tough jobs and substance abuse problems and so on.
I sympathize with everyone and I hate everyone at the same time.
And I think that's why the movie got into me.
It's one thing to have an orderly exhumation of your history.
It's another thing for a surprise airstrike to fall out of the computer and blow your history into atoms so that you can't help but taste the destruction in your mouth and your nose all at once.
So I regressed.
I couldn't sleep just like when I was a kid.
And I was surrounded by this plea for sympathy for horrible people.
And the most horrible people are the ones who extract your sympathy.
Against your will.
Against your desire.
Against your better judgment.
If you sympathize, you sympathize.
The police, of course, it's a complete and total mess.
The police, The Manitowoc Sheriff's Office was under investigation as part of a lawsuit that Stephen Avery, of course, filed against Manitowoc County for $36 million for an unlawful imprisonment and all of the mess that went on.
They'd been deposed.
Of course, they should have had nothing to do with the investigation into Teresa Halbach's death.
And they said as much very clearly and repeatedly.
Well, we want to avoid, you see, even the appearance of a conflict of interest, so we're going to have nothing to do.
Hey, I got a key here.
Do you want to put it somewhere?
So they should have had nothing to do with the investigation, as they explicitly stated.
But they were under the gun.
Not only was there a $36 million lawsuit against the county, but the insurance company seemed to be signaling that they weren't even going to cover it.
It's going to bankrupt the whole county.
They might reach through the shield, grab people's houses.
People might end up in jail if they broke the law in pursuit of a conviction against Stephen Avery in the first rape case.
So...
Let's just say they had a smidge or two of motive.
And yeah, okay.
They said, we're not going to be involved in the investigation, and they are all over that.
They are on that investigation like white on rice, like a fat kid on a smarty.
And they're not signing in, and they're like, oh, I was unattended here for a moment.
Look, I found a piece of crucial evidence.
They're not investigating anyone else.
Of course, everything should have been thrown out that the Manitowoc County officers found because they've got a direct conflict of interest in which they'd already admitted to and they shouldn't have anything to do with the investigation.
So everything they produced should have been thrown out.
But of course it wasn't.
Because the system has no self-regulation.
The system has no external accountability.
It's like judges.
How often are they found guilty of anything?
How often are they ever punished for anything?
Virtually, almost totally, completely, never.
I did an interview with the director of the movie Divorce Corps, which you should watch, and he goes into this just in family court areas.
The system has no accountability.
capability.
You know, there was an investigation into how Stephen Avery ended up in jail for this rape.
They interviewed a whole bunch of people, looked at some notes, and they went, yeah, it's fine.
It's fine.
It's fine.
Everything's fine.
People say, oh, how are we going to watch The Watchers?
You can't watch The Watchers, people.
There's no amount of self-referencing layers you can put upon a corrupt system and have it suddenly turn great.
If you start with a shit sandwich, it doesn't matter how many goddamn layers of mayo you put on it, it's still going to taste pretty shitty.
You can't solve the problem of centralized coercive power as represented by the state, as represented by the police, as agents of the state, as represented by the court, as represented by the prison industrial complex, where the costs are socialized and the profits are privatized in that good old fascistic whirlpool of economic spiral death and oblivion.
You can't solve the problem within the system.
The system won't solve itself, because everyone in the system Who's not a victim of the system is making a fortune off the system.
The judges make a fortune.
The police get 20 and you're out, long pensions, all free healthcare.
The lawyers are making a complete fortune, particularly in family court.
And the more complex and opaque the law becomes, the more you need these black-hearted evil wizards to navigate you through this dungeon of despair, which we'll get to in a second.
The system can't be...
People are like, oh, I've got to set this guy free!
You weren't in the courtroom.
You didn't see what the jury saw.
You're seeing what the filmmakers want you to see, and if you're not skeptical of that, then I sure as hell hope you're never on any trial I might be accused of.
Innocent until proven guilty?
Absolutely.
Was there bad problems for the prosecution?
Absolutely.
You know, the big reveal.
Oh, the blood and the vial and the whole...
It turns out that's how you put the blood in.
That's why it kind of got dropped.
See, that's what the filmmakers do.
They'll show you.
You see, there's a hole in the blood vial of Stephen Avery from the 80s, and that may be what they put down.
And then it'll show you that the prosecution was going to bring a witness in to say, no, that's how you fill them all.
I did that one.
I know it.
That's what you do.
Hole.
Yeah, there was contamination in the DNA. There's some...
I've read some rumblings online.
I haven't really pursued it because I'm tired of three days of no sleep.
But somebody was writing about how, you know, the sweat DNA under the hood of the car.
Sweat DNA. Bullshit.
It's just DNA. Nobody knows where it came from.
You can't.
There's no such thing as sweat DNA. Oh, I had a vial of sweat and...
It's just DNA. You can't tell where it comes from.
And...
The guy who had just been examining the Avery property, one of the investigators, was then checking her.
RAV4 apparently didn't even change his gloves.
I wonder if you could transfer some DNA that way.
I get it.
The prosecution is schizoid.
It's like a three-headed monster all attacking each other and yet somehow emerges victorious.
You've got three versions of Of the death of Theresa Hulbach.
One, she's killed in the bedroom.
Two, she's killed in the garage.
Three, well, her blood is in the car, so she must have been injured in the car.
What?
I mean, the fact that the state can put forward entirely irreconcilable theories of the murder for different trials is crazy.
One of the lawyers...
Strang, I think it was, was talking about this and saying, well, if two guys are accused of murder and only one of them had a gun and they were both in the room and they don't know who did it, the state can say in two separate trials, person A shot the gun and person B shot the gun in that trial.
Can't both have done it.
There's only one gun.
But they can totally flip it around.
Brendan Darcy!
Oh, no, we'll get to that.
It's too heartbreaking.
I can't get there yet.
I've got to build up to that one, because that's just unbelievable.
And yes, the DNA evidence is missing, and there's no evidence of the blood, and they can't find Teresa Halbach's DNA anywhere, except on one bullet in the garage from a gun they had in their possession for quite some time.
Anyway.
And which was behind a bunch of stuff and through and shoot and down and somehow it's one of these magic JFK bullets.
I don't know.
But they pull apart the concrete.
They can't find her DNA. So these men disassemble the human being inside a house, leaving no evidence.
You see, they're absolute criminal masterminds.
Who can completely scrub a garage of Teresa Hulbach's DNA while leaving all of the Avery DNA in place?
What if they lift it, scrub underneath, and then drop the DNA back down?
Those are some mighty fine tweezers for IQ 70 people to be wielding.
So they're incredible at cleaning up all the evidence of the crime.
Amazing.
Inconceivably wonderful.
It's like monk turned evil.
Ah, but...
This is...
How do you even say?
But a man whose entire job is to squish up cars thought that the best way to hide the car of the woman he supposedly murders is to leave it around and put some leaves on it.
What did he...
Do you think he was wearing Gollum's ring?
Leaves are being...
He was operating a car crusher the day before.
Where did he get rid of a body?
In a burn bin?
There's a smelter right there he knows.
Anyway...
So, on the one hand, he's a complete Stephen Avery, total genius, able to clean all traces, atomic traces of blood spatters from a hoarder's wet dream slash nightmare of a garage.
Oh, get rid of all the splatters.
Left all the dust, left all of our DNA, got rid of every single atom of Teresa Halbach's DNA. I didn't really think about squishing the car.
It's okay.
Put a leaf on it.
So it's fine.
Didn't think about smelting anything.
I just thought I'd burn it there.
Who knows?
Who knows?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I would like it if some of the theories that the state put forward about how Theresa Halbach was killed matched some of the physical evidence.
I'm not, you know, not one or two pieces of something this brutal performed by people who have an IQ of 67 to 70.
That's two standard deviations below the wide average of 100.
That is some.
That's an empty deck of cards.
It's not a few missing.
That's not working.
but there are apparently these geniuses who can do all of this stuff.
When it comes to Brendan Dassey, what happened in that interrogation room?
Well, It's literally unholy.
I mean, that's like smell of sulfur stuff, in my humble outside and amateur opinion.
Look, interrogation, I get no problem with interrogation.
Yeah, if you've got a bad guy, you can interrogate him, that's fine.
Do not take a 16-year-old kid out of class and corner him and berate him and feed him information.
In order to supposedly elicit a confession.
That is brutality.
Needs a lawyer.
Needs his mom.
Now, I haven't read all the transcripts because I'd like to sleep before April.
But reports from those who have read the transcripts are that Brandon Dassey actually volunteered more information than what they show in the film.
In the film, they show the police feeding him the information.
What did you do to her head?
Cut her hair?
No.
What did you do to your head?
Was there a gun involved?
Did you hold a gun?
Was there a gun involved?
You're lying.
Gun!
It's heartbreaking.
It's like watching Muhammad Ali kick a blind poodle repeatedly.
King of the world!
I mean, it's ghastly.
It's absolutely ghastly.
And, you know, the capacity to know right from wrong and to understand consequences is foundational to having a moral identity, to having moral agency.
And Brendan Dassey is like, well, I want to get home to watch WrestleMania.
And listen, I know I'm confessing to murder here, but I got to get back to school for like 1, 1.30, if that's okay, because I got a project.
So we wrap this up.
Is that all right?
Let me just keep it moving.
He has no clue what the hell is going on, what he's talking about.
And he says to his mother, not only, he says, well, my lawyer says something is inconsistent.
Do you know what that word means?
The mom is like, no.
Yeah.
Oh, good job, government schools.
I mean, I know you're not working with super special clay, but can't you get it up just a little bit?
And, um, heartbreaking, heartbreaking stuff.
He has no clue what is about to happen to him, what he's confessing.
And his mother says, why did you say all these things?
And Brendan Dassey says, I just ripped my heart in two.
Brendan Dassey says, I was just guessing, like I do with my homework.
Good job, everyone.
Good job shepherding this guy into a chasm of evil.
He's likely never to shoot any kind of legally assisted grappling hook to pull his way out of.
Heartbreaking.
Railroaded, cornered.
Brendan Dassey, this is how insane the system is.
This guy with a verbal IQ of something like 67 says he doesn't want his lawyer because his lawyer thinks he's guilty.
He doesn't want a lawyer who thinks he's guilty.
And the guy's first lawyer, Brendan Dassey says, my lawyer is not serving my interest, basically.
IQ, 67 or 70.
The judge is like, no, keep him!
And then his lawyer hires an investigator to berate him into confessing to the crime and drawing a diagram of how the crime occurred.
Unthinkable.
Unthinkable.
You try that as a doctor.
Cutting off the wrong leg of the wrong person.
Bye-bye license.
But, this guy's still practicing.
Because who polices the lawyers?
Hey!
I bet you it's the lawyers.
How's that working out?
I'm going to write my own paycheck.
Off infinity.
Ah, enough about the Fed.
And the judge says, no, you've got to keep your lawyer.
I know better than you.
Oh, actually, now that I've found out that your lawyer lets you be interrogated by police without a lawyer being present, or an adult, or...
A cockatoo that could peck your ear when you did something, said something stupid or wrong.
Okay, he's fired.
Does that reset anything?
Does that change anything?
No, because the system has zero accountability.
Zero accountability.
And it will never be reformed from inside.
And how the hell are you going to reform it from the outside?
You get caught in the American legal system, or most legal systems for that matter.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and imagine you get caught in something like that.
The criminal system?
You're fighting for your life, getting through it, and you can't fight it while you're getting through it.
You don't want to piss it off, and by the time you're done, you just want to put it in the rear view and sprint off to the horizon.
Nobody inside is going to fix it.
They're all profiting from it.
It's like asking a farmer to set all his livestock free.
No, actually, sorry, that's my meat and milk, so no.
Nobody's going to fix it from inside, and nobody has the incentive or will or power to fix it from the outside.
It will eventually change.
But only when the government runs out of money and fundamental reforms are needed.
And that brings me to my last point.
And this is really, really important.
And look, what is going on in this case...
It's a good story.
I'm not sure it has a lot to do with the truth.
And for God's sakes, think twice about empathizing with a man accused of rape, accused of strangling his...
Fiancé accused of molesting a child.
It's okay if you don't feel a lot of sympathy for someone like that.
It's okay.
An excess of empathy is a sin and a crime.
You can't feel sympathy for everyone.
It means you can respect no one, least of all yourself.
Bringing sympathy to sociopath is like bringing a flower to a gunfight.
You don't win the gunfight, you just kill the flower.
So, the legal system as a whole, common law, there's two rules.
Two rules that are the foundation of any decent and moral and comprehensible legal system.
You know, they say when I was a kid growing up, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Really?
You show me one person who knows all the laws, including the regulations, including the tax codes in the United States, and I'll believe you.
For that person, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Oh, did they change?
Oh, another 5,000-page bill come rolling down in Congress that nobody's read in order to bury the American public in.
Lobby-friendly regulations?
No.
Nobody knows.
The law is a viper hidden under leaves.
The law is a lightning out of a clear blue sky.
The law is not there to protect you.
The law has turned from fence to predator.
From butter knife to seppuku blade.
I mean, the law is not there to protect you.
The law is there...
To get you.
If you get out of line or piss somebody off, it's just this giant Thor's hammer that destroys lives when you cross people.
Everybody knows that.
I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.
An estimation out there from Tom Woods that we commit three felonies a day?
So...
The American legal system, legal systems as a whole, have evolved from these two basic principles.
Principle number one, keep your word.
Promise to do something, do it.
That's contract law.
If you sign it right now, I'll be there at five and you get delayed or whatever.
Contract law.
Promise you're going to do something, damn well do it.
Or face the consequences.
I send you 500 bucks, you're going to ship me an iPad, ship me the iPad or send me back my 500 bucks.
It's contract law.
Pretty simple.
And it cannot impose obligations on you that you haven't voluntarily entered into.
Contract law, number one.
Number two, non-aggression principle.
Do not initiate the use of force against others.
Keep your word.
Don't initiate force against others.
That is the sum, total, depth, power, and clarity of a competent, rational, and moral legal system.
That's it.
That's it.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Well, how long did that take you?
Now imagine I start reading the U.S. Tax Code, and the U.S. Regulations Code, and the U.S. Criminal Code, and the U.S. Family Court...
Mysticism.
How long are we going to be here for?
I will not live to complete that task should I start at the age of 18, I imagine.
So we have this system where the state has all the power.
The state has all the resources.
The state sets the agenda.
The state can apply any number of resources.
They have the power of subpoena.
They have the power of putting people under oath.
They have the power of search warrants.
They have you name it, right?
The power to punish people for perjury.
You don't get really that much power on the defense side.
And what is supposed to put the brakes on the multiplication of laws is the fact that you can't afford that many trials.
That's supposed to be the brake on the multiplicity of laws in a rational legal system.
Too many laws?
Oh, too many trials.
And what that means is you don't get your constitutionally guaranteed right to a speedy public trial.
And so, you've got to pare back the laws because we're having to turn all these people free because they can't get a speedy trial because too many people want trials.
Ah, if you're the government, how do you solve that problem?
Well, you solve that problem by bribing people with non-jail.
That's all it comes down to.
Estimates I've read, 95, 96, 97% of U.S. cases never go to trial.
Now, some of those, the evidence overwhelming, you cop a plea, but not all.
And there are lots of people who, when faced with all of that, will say, hmm, eh, I'll take the plea.
Put it behind me, move on.
Now, you can't handle, you can't hand a police officer who stops you for speeding 20 bucks to let you go, and rightly so, that's bribery.
But you can say to someone, cop a plea over basically doubling your sentence or tripling your sentence.
You can bribe someone for 5, 10, or 15 years of their own freedom, and that is perfectly moral, but you hand an officer 20 bucks, you're toast.
And there's no other way the system can work.
It has nothing to do with justice anymore.
You get caught in that machinery, and you pay to get out.
You pay with time, you pay with money.
It's a shakedown.
It's nothing to do with the law, nothing to do with justice, nothing to do with honesty.
And I am grateful to the filmmakers for exposing sometimes what goes on in the American legal system and what goes on in American investigations, what goes on in the police force.
But there's nothing left, virtually nothing left of justice, in my opinion, in particularly the American legal system, though this is common all over the place.
Because, originally, the law is supposed to be passive.
It's supposed to sit there, picking its nose, until someone has a problem.
I go, punch you in the face, you have a problem with me, you call the cops, they come talk to me, and it goes from there.
Cops sitting around, hey, nobody has any problems, let's keep playing some more euchre boys, because nothing's going down tonight.
But that's not the way it is anymore, because the government is always going to grow, and it's going to grow, and it's going to grow, and it's going to grow.
It's got OCD. Obsessive compulsion disorder.
Compulsion, compelling people.
Obsessive coercive disorder.
Now, the government is the one who has the problem for the most part in cases.
You know, one guy goes and buys drugs from another guy.
Neither of them have a problem.
It's the state who has a problem with it.
Go to a prostitute.
You, the prostitute, you don't have a problem with it.
The state has a problem.
You're going to gamble.
The state has a problem with it.
It is the state who is initiating, and once a state gets to initiate legal proceedings, why would it ever stop?
It just keeps multiplying more ways for it to shake down people for money.
And you either pay the fine, or you go to jail, in which case the government can raise taxes to pay off the people who lobby it from the prison industrial complex.
So either way, they're making money.
If you go to jail, they make money.
If you pay a fine, they make money.
If you do both, kachingo-rama.
The system will never, ever be solved.
From within.
Now, I don't know what to leave you with.
I don't.
I don't know what to leave you with.
I want to...
I want to say...
That we really, really, really need to start thinking outside the box of history to solve these problems.
These are not tweaks.
Freeing Stephen Avery will not solve this system because there are tens of millions of these cases going through the U.S. court system every year.
A lot of them, of course, traffic and so on, but a lot of them are serious.
And I'm pretty sure you can't make 12-hour documentaries or 10-hour documentaries about every single one of these and get people motivated.
It is nice to see that a certain community protests police injustice with a petition rather than by other means, but that's a topic for another time.
Thank you.
We need to start thinking way, way outside the box for how to solve these problems.
And you can go to freedomainradio.com slash books or slash free if you want to get my solutions.
I don't want to sort of peddle them here, but freeing this guy?
It's like taking a pee on the sun and thinking you've created eternal night.
It's not going to work.
It might work for him if he's innocent.
Great.
It does not look like he's got the kind of patterns of behavior that is going to render him peaceful when he comes out of prison.
So, you know, if you put people in prison long enough, you kind of can't let them out, because they've gone feral.
I mean, sorry, this is just what happens.
So, we need to start thinking way, way outside the box.
Tweaking isn't going to work.
And we need to start thinking about it now, because this system is not going to last forever.
You know, the system just in America.
1776 to George Bush Jr.
got you to five trillion dollars in debt.
Eight years of George Bush Jr.
got you from five to ten trillion dollars in debt.
Wow, that's quite a long time.
Eight years and 1776 to now.
Eight years, well, seven years at the moment, but eight when he's done of Obama, has taken you from $10 trillion to almost $20 trillion.
So there's quite an acceleration occurring here in the indebtedness, size, and power of the state.
This is not to mention $150, $160, $170 trillion of unfunded liabilities, obligations the government has, which is no money to pay for.
This cannot continue.
That which mathematically cannot continue, Will not continue.
We need to start thinking.
We need to start looking for the next thing to what is.
Because what is, is done.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
Thank you so much for letting me indulge my rant.
And if you like and share and subscribe, I would appreciate it.
If you'd like to support the show, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And if you hate it, I'll be interested in hearing about that too.
I'll look at the comments below.
▲
Export Selection