Conflicting information over what happened after Robert ‘LaVoy’ Finicum, a well-known member of the Oregon Rancher Standoff group, died in a shooting involving federal agents. In a statement, Ammon Bundy described Finicum as his "beloved friend" and one of "the greatest men and greatest patriots." At a press conference, federal and local law enforcement officials placed responsibility for the confrontation with the occupiers. FBI Special Agent Greg Bretzing blamed the “actions and choices of the armed occupiers” for the situation, commenting that “actions are not without consequences.”Eight members of the Oregon Rancher Standoff were arrested on Tuesday and charged with “conspiracy to impede officers of the US from discharging official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.” Three more men were arrested on Wednesday night after Ammon Bundy released a statement urging protesters to leave the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So, on Tuesday, a fellow named Robert, nicknamed Lavoie Finnegan, was killed.
In a shootout while he was traveling from the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to a place called John Day for a public meeting.
And we'll put sources to all this below.
It was one day before his 56th birthday.
His wife traveled from Arizona to help him celebrate.
Now, you may have recognized him.
He actually gave reporters their first tours of the Occupied Grounds at the Wildlife Refuge and he represented often Ammon Bundy, the occupation's most public-facing member at news conferences.
He has 11 children with his wife and he's also had more than 50 boys stay with him at one time or another at his family's ranch, mostly from mental hospitals Drug hospitals and drug rehabs.
This is through the Catholic Charities Community Service.
So, it's done some fairly decent things.
Now, the rebellion, if we can call it that, is beginning to dissolve.
The last members are beginning to Give up their ground and leave.
Calls from supporters, from Congress, and even the leader who's been arrested, they say we should end the takeover, which has been going on for a little bit under a month.
Now, what happened is under dispute, and that really is the point of what it is I want to talk about today.
There's a woman who's an eyewitness who says that the police started shooting, and then he got out, he had his hands up, and he was saying basically, what are you going to do, shoot me, shoot me?
And then they shot him, and then they shot him again when he was down on the ground.
That's one woman saying what happened.
Another man claims that...
The man who was shot was rushing the police, charging the police, and that, of course, is a bit of a different situation now.
According to what I've read, the police in Oregon do wear cams, and so hopefully those will be released and some facts will come out.
So there's a couple of things that I wanted to talk about with regards to this.
And first, when I first put out the two videos on this Oregon Ranch's occupation situation, I can't even tell you how many emails and messages I got saying basically, well, if it was a black guy, they'd already be dead.
Well, How do your words taste, friends?
Because this is a white guy and he's dead.
Now, whether the shooting was justified according to police procedures or not, time will tell.
We don't know anything for sure and we won't know until the cams are released.
The longer it takes to release the cam footage, the more suspicious, I believe, things become.
So it's not a race thing.
But it's almost impossible to avoid some racial angles, some ethnic angles to this situation.
Regardless of what you think of the occupation, the ranchers had a cause that they believed in.
They had a stand that they wanted to take to secure their lands from encroaching federal government power to help secure the release of their fellow ranchers who were serving a second round of sentences for something they'd been found guilty for, which to me seems fairly innocuous, but you can have a look at the videos I've done on that to see more about that.
So they had a cause, they had a purpose, and they believed that they were acting according to the Constitution.
And where is...
Any sympathy for the man who's been shot.
Another man, Ammon Bundy, was also shot in the shoulder, though not wounded, critically.
So compare this to something like what happened with Michael Brown and Darren Wilson.
Michael Brown was the 18-year-old young man who had strong-armed, robbed a convenience store, was resisting arrest, grabbed for an officer's gun and charged the officer and was shot.
Now, compare that, and basically he was buying these cigars which apparently are used for helping people to roll joints.
Compare that to a man acting on his convictions in accordance with his interpretation of the Constitution, who's also a good family man, a hard worker, and somebody who has taken in a lot of stray boys and tried to help them.
He did get paid for that, but nonetheless, that is still a quite remarkable thing to be doing.
Now we have differing eyewitness accounts of the situation.
I've had a look in the media and the mainstream media is only putting forward the guy who says he charged the cops.
The woman who said that he was shot with his hands up, she's not being reported.
Now contrast that one-sided Presentation of the information, compare that with what happened after the Michael Brown shooting.
And Michael Brown had a friend named Dorian Johnson who said he was shot like an animal, execution style, on his knees, hands up.
And the media endlessly replayed that eyewitness testimony, which was proven to be completely false by the autopsy.
He was not shot in the back and so on.
Oh, and he also said, of course, that it just came out of nowhere and they were running.
So this one-sided account, which turned out to be completely false, was endlessly played by the media.
The media now is only putting forward the eyewitness who says that the man who was shot was charging the cops, not the woman who was in the car who had a different story.
This is not even remotely balanced.
As I said before, the media is not interested in informing you.
They're interested in controlling you.
And that is really, really important to understand.
So when you think of some of the racially charged shootings that have occurred in America over the last couple of years, of course, we've got Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, and I've got videos on all of these down below.
Trayvon Martin versus George Zimmerman, Walter Scott versus Michael Slager, Freddie Gray and the six officers charged with his death, Eric Garner versus Daniel Pantaleo and Justin D'Amico.
These were all portrayed as horrendous, unjust, poor boys, off to college, didn't do anything, innocent victims, and murderous, racist, thug cops, and so on.
And here we have people standing up for what they believe to be right, who are shot in questionable The media is entirely one-sided and this sort of siding against white people and siding for minorities is something that you really need to keep your eye on.
It is a very dangerous narrative in the long run.
Now there's two points I want to make.
First of all, this is what law is.
This is what government does.
This is basically one thing that defines government as compared to every other social institution.
In that the government has the legal right to initiate force against you and to escalate that force until you do one of two things.
You either comply Or you die.
That's all the government is.
It differentiates itself from Walmart, which can advertise and try and get you into the store.
It differentiates from sports, where you can voluntarily go.
It differentiates itself from dating, where you can voluntarily go.
The government, whenever you say, oh, the government should do this, the government ought to be a law, we've got to have regulations, we've got to do this, that, and the other, what you're saying is the government should be given the legal right The legal insistence to escalate violence against you until you either comply or you're dead.
All laws are death threats.
All government is a murder threat.
And this is why people comply with it.
It's not voluntary.
It's not a social contract.
You sign up for a visa.
You spend money on the visa.
You're responsible for paying the government.
All tax increases, all regulations, all government programs, all foreign arms sales, everything.
It's founded on the gun in the room, as I've called it for many years.
This is really, really important to understand what happened in Oregon to this rancher is the essence of government power.
We all know it.
We all comply with it because the alternative to compliance with government edicts, with government laws, with government regulations, with government taxation, the alternative is submission or death.
And this stark reality of what the government is should not be lost on anyone.
Regardless of what you think about the government, you might as well at least know what it actually is.
It is an agency with a monopoly on the initiation of force in a given geographical area.
Now, unjust killings.
I don't know whether, according to police procedure or not, this was a just or an unjust killing.
Time will tell.
Innocent until proven guilty.
But I do have to ask, where are the protesters who were so concerned with all the people being shot by supposed white cops, or in the case of Freddie Gray, there are officers charged of both black and white racists in his death, where are all these protesters complaining about police brutality when a white person gets shot?
And I'll just give you a couple of examples of things you probably haven't heard about, except perhaps through this channel.
So in Louisiana recently, two black cops opened fire on an unarmed white man in a car, wounded him critically, and killed his six-year-old son, who happened to be autistic.
This is Marksville, Louisiana.
Two officers briefly chased a vehicle.
They didn't say why.
They wanted to pull him over.
They say that they briefly pursued him.
They opened fire on the vehicle.
They filled it with 18 rounds of bullets.
The father was hit twice, has bullet fragments in his head and lungs.
He was in critical condition.
His young son was hit twice.
Five times in the head and chest he died in his car seat.
There was no weapon.
Completely unarmed people in the vehicle.
Now a third officer who was called in for backup recorded the shooting with his body camera.
And the officer has stated that the man in the car was not threatening towards the police, obviously did not have a weapon, was not acting in a non-compliant way.
There was no warrant for his arrest, despite what the cops said.
There was no weapon found in the vehicle.
And law enforcement officers have confirmed to CBS News they're actually investigating whether one of the officers arrested for this double murder has a personal grudge against few, their father, and may have sought revenge with this pursuit and the shooting and so on.
Have you heard really anything about that?
Has anyone been protesting from any Black Lives Matter movement or anyone else about this?
And the answer, of course, is no, the significance of which I'll talk about in a moment.
We talked about this on a show once before.
Zemir Bejic, he left Bosnia as a result of the Civil War, came over to America as a teenager.
He got a job and he was engaged to be married.
And his girlfriend, I think, was pregnant.
And then shortly after the riots in Ferguson, and about 20 miles from Ferguson, there were a pack of thugs, blacks and some Hispanics, and they were roaming down the street armed with hammers, chanting, fuck the white people, kill the white people.
And then they surrounded his car, started beating on his car with hammers.
He got out to confront them, and they attacked him with a hammer.
He tried to save his pregnant fiancé's life, which he did successfully do, but they bludgeoned him to death with their hammers.
And have you heard about anything to do with this, a specifically racially motivated attack?
It would seem this is not really gaining any particular traction, and you probably have not heard much about this.
And this is pretty exhausting and annoying and horrifying and debilitating stuff to keep seeing over and over and over again.
I mean, and we see this over in Europe.
You know, white fraternities are accused, or largely white fraternities are accused of imaginary gang rapes, and the media is all over it, but coordinated migrant sexual attacks all across Europe on New Year's Eve are covered up, as are the Pakistani sexual predations on young white girls that went on for years and years and targeted 1,500 children in Rotherham, the United Kingdom.
These things are all covered up and swept under the rug, whereas any even remotely questionable or even not that questionable attacks from or shootings from white police on minorities are held up as symbols of infinite injustice.
I really dislike this whole situation just fundamentally.
Because the white majority has basically said, okay, we're really going to try and figure out what the minorities want, what they need, how we can sacrifice our own interests in order to keep minorities happy and help advance them in society and so on.
And white people have kind of cast aside their own interests and have focused on making minorities happy and trying to restructure society around making minorities happy.
For instance, In SAT scores in a lot of universities, black SAT scores are artificially raised relative to whites and whites are lowered a bit, Asians in fact lowered even more in an attempt to equalize things out.
It's been affirmative action, of course massive welfare spending in the black community, largely in the black community.
And Head Start, $100 billion put into attempting to largely help minority students do better and so on.
There's been a huge amount of effort and sympathy and concern And it's not heavily reciprocated.
It's not heavily reciprocated.
It seems to me like the Hispanics look after the Hispanics.
It seems to me like the blacks are looking after the blacks.
And it's really hard to see how this is going to work in the long run.
Like, and I'll leave you with this thought.
I'll leave you with this thought.
Let's say you're dating a woman.
And you really care about her happiness.
And even at the expense of your own.
You'll watch Dancing with the Stars or whatever it is she wants to do.
You'll put aside your happiness.
You'll sit down with her friends.
You'll listen to stories that you're not particularly interested.
You'll go to art galleries.
Maybe you don't want to go.
Because it makes her happy.
Makes her happy.
And maybe you pay a lot more because that makes her happy.
You surrender your own self-interest.
You transfer resources to her just to make her happy.
You care for her happiness.
Unfortunately, she mostly seems to care only for her own happiness.
She doesn't really ask you what you want.
She doesn't really ask you what would make you happy.
She doesn't really offer to help, to pay, to surrender her own self-interest, to make you happy.
Maybe you go to three ballets and then you say, hey, let's go to the ball game.
And she's like, no, that's boring.
And maybe you put up with her tantrums and keep surrendering your own self-interest.
If you're in a relationship where you care about the other person's happiness but the other person doesn't seem to care about your happiness or never really acts in that way, you are going to get exploited.
You are going to get used and you're going to get bitter and you're going to get resentful.
And so when it comes to a multicultural society, if only one particular group is sacrificing its own interests for the sake of making every other group happy, but those other groups do nothing, it seems in particular in reciprocity, then like any boyfriend exploited by his girlfriend for long enough, you know what's going to happen?
