All right, and joining us now is James Bouvard, and you can find his writing his links to where he writes, because he's published all over the place. He's got a piece on mesas dot org that we're going to talk about here that's excellent and historical context. I think you're going to find it fascinating. And but you can find him at Jimbouvard dot com because like I said, he's published in all different places all the time. Great to have you on, Jim. Thank you so much, Dana, thanks
for having me back on. It's always always very entertaining to talk to you. And I covered this a little bit yesterday about the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Concord and Lexington and Paul River's ride and everything that happened this last weekend. But you put this in an excellent historical context, and so I wanted to go through some of that and you talk about you begin by talking about Arthur Schlessinger. I remember this guy. He's like
the phototypical fighting guy. I remember him, Yeah, yeah, and he was you know, he'd always have that pipe there, you know, and he's like the you know, the mister wasp guy of the Cia or whatever out there. What was it? What was his attitude towards seventeen seventy six the American Revolution?
Well, I mean he had the same attitude that King George the Third had, so basically a bunch of upity peasants. There was there was a line that he had a few I guess twenty years ago before he pegged out, he said. Historians today conclude that the colonists were driven to revolt in seventeen seventy six because of a false conviction that they faced a British conspiracy to destroy their freedom. And you have to get rid of so much evidence
in order to say it was a false conviction. It's kind of like, yeah, like the government was shooting blanks at Waco, you know whatever.
I saw somebody that had an op ed piece Jim that said tariffs are what American freedom is based on. It's like what I think. Terriffs were kind of what they were fighting, don't you at that point in time. I mean, it was just taxes right when they said, you know, no taxation of that representation. They were talking about terrafs, weren't they, Well, I mean terrafs, we're part of it. Tarts were a major you know, it wasn't
just a teriff, it was a blockade. Yeah, I mean because the because it wasn't like that they had to pay ten percent.
More for their shoes that they imported from India. It was more like that the Brits were prohibiting them from making any kind of iron type goods, nails and stuff like that.
Uh.
And they were just completely subjugated on the trade issue. That was a major issue in the Declaration of Independence a lot of people. That's not too convenient to remember at this moment, but it was. But there were so many ways that the British were so abusive and contemptuous of Americans. And it took a lot to get those farmers to get off early in the morning and get their gun, to go out and start shooting the British soldiers as they were running back from Concor to Boston.
And as you point out, there were pretty good shots too.
The British soldier. Yeah, I mean the British soldiers. There was a wonderful line from a history almost one hundred years ago. You said the British soldiers were there were shots in the world and they would not be able to hit a horse at ten yards.
Well, you know that's something imagined. In those days, there were you know, not everybody had They were shooting muskets and things like that, and not necessarily accurate rifles. I mean we saw that in the Civil War. You know, these people line up and you know, once the first volley went off, there was nothing but a white cloud anyway, You couldn't see anything to even try to target anybody for the most part, and so you know it's just like you know, load and fire as rapidly as you
can and hope that you hit something. You know, they did have sharpshooters that were operative both in the Civil War and in the Revolutionary War, and it was those sharpshooters that really took a toll on the British.
Right, Yeah, it was the Daniel Morgan's men from the Winch to Virginia area. We're famous for that. I think it's Sarahtoga. They shot down a lot of their British officers. But there was there was a whole mindset. Okay, a lot of the Americans that have muscats like the British. But I mean it's a different incentive system if you're a government and if you're a government soldier, then you
need to shoot close enough for government work. Whereas if you're a farmer and you're counting on your hunting and you need to be able to hit the damn deer you shoot at, you need to hit it. And the same you got a guy with a red coat there marching down the street. You know, Okay, it's not too hard to hit. So that's right.
Yeah, their ammunition is deer, and when they're going out to try to get the deer, say, they've got to make every shot count. They've had a lot of practice of that. As you point out, he had a great quote here he said, the calmist revolted because they're being bayoneted down the road to surf them, you know, is going back the hyak. And that's exactly what was happening. You point out it was it was a taxes, it
was a terrace. And I've come across a lot of people like Arthur Schlessenger used to take the kids when they were younger to Colonial Williamsburg, which is a Rockefeller things. So they'd hire a lot of people try to downplay the American Revolution, you know, and they would always say, so why why did they why did they push back against this, you know, and they wanted me to say,
no taxation without representation. I would say, because taxation is theft, and they would go, well, well, no, not really, and it's like, well no, really it is, you know, and then they give you their pat answer about what they want to do. But yeah, they'd kind of try to downplay it, and they would try to, you know, try to rework the image of the British a little bit there as well, without being without pushing down the Americans too much. It's been a long time since I've been there.
I mentioned it. It's probably pretty bad, pretty bad now. That was back in the nineties. Yeah, that was in the nineties.
Yeah, it's probably gotten a lot worse. Like same as Mono Cello. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's you know, that's a social justice tour at this point.
Oh yeah, yeah. We took him on one year. We went we were up in Plymouth, rock uh for for Thanksgiving, and I couldn't believe how politically correct all of that stuff was. That was we did that about a decade after we'd been going to Colonel Williamsburg and it's like, this is crazy, you know, it's just this this self flagellating parade, you know, of beating themselves up. It was. It was crazy, but you know, still we could go
and we could see the ships. I guess it was worth it for that, maybe, you know.
Yeah, I mean it's a same trouble with historical narratives in general. When I was I was up in Boston two summers ago, and I was curious because I've not been not knocked around Boston for quite a while. I used to live there, and I wanted to see how they were portraying the the the history, especially the American Revolution, and it was very much it's almost a myopic focus on the flight of the slaves, and the slaves were
wars badly treated. Uh and in Massachusetts was one of the states, well the first states to get rid of slavery, but it was you know, it was the same puzzlement I had when I went to Richmond a few years ago. And I'd gone to Richmond quite a bit as a boy. I was a big enthusiast for the Civil War, and they had Civil War museums then and now, but nowadays the museums seemed to focus mostly on the plight of
women and slaves during the Civil War. Yeah, and I was thinking, well, you know, actually there were also some battles you know when I what can I say?
Yeah, that's right, that's what the up at Plymouth Rock. And it was all about the Indians. And what they really kind of sloughed over was the fact that the Indians and the Pograms got along pretty well for a couple of decades or a couple of generations until they started having a King Phillips War and that type of thing. But they wanted to ignore that. But getting back to your op ed piece here and the lead up to what caused all this, you talked about the Sugar Act
of seventeen sixty four. Tell us a little bit about that and what that was involved in.
Okay, So, the basically what the British did with the trade laws and regulations was making it clear that Americans were completely inferior to the British and the Sugar Act of seventeen sixty four resulted in British officials confiscating hundreds of American ships based on mere allegations that the ship owners and captains were involved in smuggling. Once the British officials made that charge, it was up to the ship owned to somehow proved his ship had never been involved
in smuggling. It was very difficult to prove a negative. I mean, this is kind of the same thing we have now at asset forfeiture laws. They've been so vexatious for the last forty years. But the philosophical I mean, what so many of the histories of the American Revolution do is ignore the philosophical aspects. And the Americans back then and could see the broader picture better than they
do now. There was a act that Parliament passed in seventeen sixty six, the Declaratory Act of seventeen sixty six. It said Parliament had had, and of right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statues of sufficient force to bind the qualities, colonies and people of America subject of the Crown of Britain in all cases whatsoever. That meant Britain could never violate the rights
of Americans, because Americans had no right. And something I'd not realized until I was digating this right and the story was it was modeled after an Act of the same title that they the Brits had used on Ireland fifty years earlier really, and the British were notorious for treating the Irish as bad or worse than slaves.
Yeah, oh yeah, Well, you know what you do is you start out by saying that this class of people is somehow inferior, some human, and they're not really human. You know. You look at this and you can see this being repeated in Gaza or wherever. But also you know when, as you point out, it's very much like civil asset forfeiture. You know, I think that this ship was involved in smuggling and you just take it. You
don't have to. I guess. I don't know if they would charge the people a crime or they just steal the ship. That's what they do today with civil asset forfeiture. They just take your property there and never even charge you with a crime, let alone convict you of that.
Yeah, it says paperwork.
Yeah, absolutely, you know it kind of It reminded me too when I saw that. I thought it was funny. You know, we had the Decoration of Independence came exactly ten years later, and it was a real response to this declaratory Act. I guess because the declaratory Act is saying you don't have any rights and they said, no, we do. And our rights don't come from government, they come from God. We have them innately as a human being. And so it was a direct response a decade later
to this Declaratory Act. And I thought back, you know, to one of the movies that I watched as a kid that I really like because I like Patrick mcgow and I love The Prisoner, and I remember the Scarecrow thing that was done by done by Disney at the time, because Disney used to Walt Disney used to take a positive view of American history and of Americans and so.
A long time ago, that was a long time ago.
Things that really changed, haven't they. And so it was in that one the uh, he's got this this cleric, their pastor or whatever his title was, and he moonlights as the scarecrow that's doing smuggling. And so these guys are smuggling and it's all presented as justified in the British are the villains and everything, and the it's kind
of interesting because they also show the press gangs. They were going around and kidnapping people and putting them into service, and of course that was a big part of what was happening at at this time as well. They had press gangs that were coming after Americans, not just after British.
Yeah, and that was part of what sparked the War of eighteen twelve decades later. No, I mean there was an attitude of complete contempt for anybody who wasn't part of the aristocracy, or didn't have this title, or or was friends of this person. So and that was part of the novelty of the mindset of the government that was created in seventeen In I guess seventeen eighty seven, it did not have that aristocracy. It did not have those legal privileges. I mean, the federal government claimed them
pretty quick. It made a mockery of a lot of the ideas, but still at the start it was good.
So yeah, yeah, you mentioned too. And it was pretty much a universal attitude of contempt by the British. There were some exceptions, like William Pitt. You've got a quote here it is forbidden to make even a nail for a horseshoe. He was liked by Americans because he kind of leaned toward the American side. I was talking about it yesterday. In North Carolina. One of the oldest towns there is named after him Pittsburgh and they it's in the community Chatham County, which is you know, he was
Lord Chatham and everything. So it seemed like he was held in UH in high esteem by them. But he did push back against King George to some degree, I guess, perhaps not enough.
But there were yeah, and the same with Edmund Burke, one of the UH, a member of Parliament who later became a well known philosopher and writer. I mean there there were there were a lot of radical Whigs in England who recognized that that it was important to stand up to stop their stop oppression in the in the colonies, because the same precedents would echo back home eventually.
Yes, yes, and you know we look at all this and at the time, you know, of course the slave trade was still going and that did not that was not ended, you know, Wilberforce, I don't forget what time he started deposing it, but eventually he stopped the slave trade and then he stopped, you know, freed the slaves that they paid off the plantation owners and in the Caribbean that were under them. But you know, they had that attitude, as you point out, you know, this attitude
they had about slavery. That wasn't just about African slaves. That was the attitude they had towards irishman. That was the attitude that they had towards Americans at that time as well.
Yep, yeah, yeah, and it was I mean, this is something that's hard for a lot of contemporary Americans to understand because they have, you know, they have this notion they they are looking backward and not recognizing how profoundly different the legal and moral atmosphere was back in those times.
And the absolute swagger of the British I mean, I mean, in my dealings with government agents, I've often come across ones that had vast swagger, and I can understand how that would breed hatred and eventually, but if they rubbed too many noses in the dirt, it would lead to a violent revolt, and that's happened throughout history.
But it wasn't so much racism based on skin color. They just equally hated everybody, right, well, yeah, dominate everybody. It was.
I mean, it was people who were inferior, and the Americans were inferior to British and especially to the British officials appointed by the Crown or the British military officers or even the the British customs officials who had a right to go into anybody's house and search to see if they had any property that they had not paid a terif on maybe you know, I don't hopefully this doesn't give anybody in Washington ideas right now, but this is this is I mean, it was the writs of
Assistance which the government would give its soldiers or others and title them to break into anybody's house, search all their papers, search this search that. I mean, it was almost as bad as a NSA.
Yeah, that's right, because that's what they're doing all the time, whether you realize it or not. They're breaking into your house and they're looking through your papers and your private effects by going into your computer. That's I've talked about that people people say, we don't have a violation of the Third Amendment. It's like, do you realize what the government is doing with your computer? They're actually living in your house, whether you realize it or not, they're living
there with you. You just don't see them. They're they're virtually which perhaps is even worse, I guess.
But yeah, which is I mean, but it's just good that they're there to protect us from ourselves.
Isn't it great?
Yeah?
I feel so much safer knowing that they're in my house watching everything that I'm doing. You talk a little bit about John Locke, and of course his Second Treatise on Government predated this stuff by about a century, but that really was a big part of the philosophical foundation. You know, these are people who are not watching Gilligan's Island. They were reading books, they were talking to other people who had read books, and they're debating these ideas and
forming these ideas. There was a full century of you know, locking in philosophy that was underlying their pushback, right, yeah.
Yeah, And there were some wonderful lines for lock here, one of which resume with a colonists was he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power does thereby put himself into a state of war with him? Yes, And if you look at that seventeen seventy six Act by Parliament, that's you know, basically proclaiming it's an act of war, that you're just that since you have no rights.
And another one of my favorite John Locke quotes, I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty, would not when he had me in his power take away everything else.
Was he around It sounds like he's describing twenty twenty.
Well yeah, I.
Mean yeah, but he saw into the future like Master Damas. You know, he could see twenty twenty in the lockdown. But what we're talking about here is human nature. And that's one of the reasons why it's important to go back and to look at, you know, the the understanding of the nature of tyranny and the zero sum game here about who's going to make decisions about my life. You know, it's important for us to understand that because all these attitudes, as you point out, you run into officious,
arrogant bureaucrats all the time. We all do, and and so it's important to understand how human nature plays into this, and it's important to understand that we have these same types of problems. I run into people all the time who say, well, you know that was back then. We're not at all like them, We're so much more advanced. I had one guy saying, what Thomas Jefferson, he didn't know anything. He wouldn't even be able to drive a car.
It's like, are you kidding me, you know. So there's that kind of an attitude towards you know, they don't know anything because they didn't have televisions, you know, and it's like maybe they know a lot more because they didn't have televisions. So you know, there's this kind of the people in the past didn't know anything. But human nature doesn't change. And that's why it's so timeless to
see the types of things. Is that Locke said, the way the government was trying to impose its authority on the Americans and how they pushed back against it.
Yeah, and what people don't realize. Okay, so Thomas Jefferson was not able to drive a corvette and he didn't have a television. But there has not been that much change in the nature of politicians and the nature of tyranny. And so you still have I mean, folks who are saying, well, things are different now, Okay, how would you judge the moral and intellectual caliber of the average member of Congress right now, okay versus two hundred years ago. I mean,
I don't see much improvement. Okay, they might get a little better they you know, they might have some you Okay, they got a law degree, they got this, they got that, but there's still weasels and it's kind of like, okay, so and they're still untrustworthy. And that was one of the wonderful things the Founding Fathers recognized. I mus, Jefferson was very eloquent on that don't trust any man with power. I mean, it goes back to the seventeen ninety eight
was it the Kentucky resolution? Yeah. I think you might have that the key quotes on that closer to your memory than I do.
But yeah, because I was just talking about the you know, the I see all this stuff that Trump was doing in terms of shutting down free speech on campus and about kicking people out summarily and everything. I say, this is like a reenactment of the Alien ins Edition Act. You know, this is history repeating itself, a rhyming, you know, at the very least, isn't it.
Yeah? And you know, there were good you know, part of the lucid and eloquent nature of Jefferson's resolutions and the same with Madison, was that they that they recognized how danger of power was once it's awful leash. Yeah, And it's frustrating to me because hell, I've been arguing that my whole damn career. And I was talking to a foreign gentleman a couple of days go, and he said, well, it looks like America's have some trouble the last couple
of years. I said, yeah, well, actually, things especially got worse after nine to eleven, because I mean that was you know, nine to eleven turned into a grant of power to the ruling class. Yes, and they'd never and they'd never given that back. That's right.
Yeah, forget about declaring wars anymore. We have this authorization for the Use of military forces, gives us a blank check to do anything that we wish, and of course we can do anything we wish domestically as well. As they're rolling out the TSA and the real ID and all the rest of this stuff. You know, I'm going
to start enforcing that next month. But you know, one of the things too, I think that is really key is the fact that, you know, the people in Washington now are setting on such an amazing pot of gold or actually a giant stack of Fiat currency.
But that is, Yes, I was wondering where this was going to get.
That is such a corrupting thing when you look at the amount of money that is there. And I always talk about the astronomical amounts that are being contributed to all of these campaigns. I mean, and even a congressman. You know, the amount of money that they're getting. I said, that is a direct metric of the level of corruption. And that is the amount of money that these people, from presidents to congressmen and even local officials are getting when they run for office. I said, you know, this
is this is not a charitable thing. People are making investments in these guys. So that is a direct metric of corruption when you look at the amount of money that's donating these political campaigns.
Well, yeah, and it's it's funny if you go back two hundred years, seventeen hundreds, I guess a lot in Britain, there was a lot of concern there about the about the ministers and the government getting somebody bribes some members of parliament to buy their support. And you know the same thing is happening now with federal grants to a
certain district to get the congressman's vote. This promise, that promise, and the whole idea that the government could become that big in that out of control, and you can somehow keep it honest. Yeah, that's a real triumph of hope over experience. Yeah.
Oh yeah, getting back to the tee and getting back to the tariffs on it. You know, the fact you mentioned to this, the fact that you know, not only would they confiscate ships, but they would also invade people's homes and use this arbitrary power to search everything that they had there. When you look at the response to it, one of the things I thought was interesting was, and I wanted to ask you about this because I didn't
have time to look it up. You say, Vermont patriots marched in seventeen seventy five against the British Army under a flag depicting a pine tree? Is that the appeal to Heaven flag that we see all the time?
It is? I'm not sure. I mean I had not made that connection, but I think you're right. Yeah.
But what you say is tell people why you know it was about the pine tree and why that was such a sticking point.
Yeah. So pine was an excellent material for building ships, and Parliament band cutting down any white pine trees, claiming every pine tree in the colonies for the British Crown without compensation. In eighteen forty six, historian Jonathan Seawall wrote that the conflict with Britain began in the forests of Maine and the contests of her lumbermen with the King Surveyor as to the right to cut in the property
in white pine trees. Back in nineteen twenty six, history Robert Albion said the royal interpretation of private property practically rendered that term nugatory. So the pines were virtually being commandeered by the navy. They were especially good for the ship's mass.
Well, you know, it's kind of interesting because we keep seeing these same types of themes coming around. I remember when Brexit was circulating around. One of the big griefs that the British had who wanted to leave the EU was they said, We've been fishing these waters for millennia, and now the EU is telling us how many fish we can take out of our own waters here, you know, So it kind of came back to the British. But because it's always about isn't about Britain versus every other country.
It's about the nature of power, and so it's always going to come back that way. But I see parallels in that to a lot of this environmental you know, this aspect of the globalist and the environmentalism where we're going to tell you how much, you know, resources you can consume, We're going to track your carbon footprint, you're not going to own anything. We're going to the C forty Coalition says, well, we're going to measure all the meat that you have and the dairy that you have
until we just completely cut it off. It's amazing to see this kind of stuff. And yet, you know, we see this throughout history. This is always again going back to what we just said, it's always a condition of the human nature. It's always a condition of power. How power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. We keep seeing this repeated over and over again. And yet people today don't seem to get the picture. They're so focused on,
you know, the pines. Today, they would just focus on the trees and they wouldn't understand the general principle that was there. But the people in America understood the general principle.
Yeah. Well, I mean, the those pine trees were such a powerful symbol basically because it did capture the total expropriation of property rights. Those pine trees were some of the most valuable properties up in New England. So but you know, if you had them, you were out of luck.
So that's a long tradition in Britain where they would say, you know, going back to the robin and stories and stuff, you can't go hunting unless we tell you that you can go hunting. Everything belongs to us, right and we'll tell you what you can have. You will own nothing and you'll be happier.
Well, yeah, I mean Britain has got England has a long history of that, and that's part of the reason that that my ancestors and your ancestors probably came in this direction centuries ago. So mine were kicked out of France first, but that's a different story. They were kicked out of France, but that's another story.
Well I'd love to hear that, but yeah, what it tells you that why were they kicked out.
Of France Because they were Protestants.
Okay, you know.
My ancestors, according to family lore, a number of them were living in Paris in fifteen seventy two and like about half of them were killed in the Saint Bartholomew Days massacre when the King and the Pope tried to kill all the Protestants, and the survivors fled over to England and get their feet on the ground there. It's funny. I've been watching wolf Hall, the PBS BBC series on
Thomas Cromwell and Cromwell's hell of a Rascal. But you know, thanks to him, perhaps my ancestors could find refuge in England.
So yeah, yeah, interesting, interesting. I had not heard of that program. I have to look at it and see that that might be interesting. Yeah, it is. And when you look at liberty, you know, religious liberty was so intertwined with everything, and we see it in our First Amendment.
You if you tell people if we're going to try to control what people believe and control them at a very very fundamental level, that's controlling their speech, and it's policing their beliefs and all the rest of this stuff. And of course that had been done quite a bit, and it would had been done because you know, they would have a close connection between these organized religions and the organized government, and so if you started to move in a different direction, that was a threat to them
politically as well. So we see that's why they're intertwined. I think in the First Amendment, that had been the long history that people had seen, that kind of symbiotic relationship there between established church and a government that was there. But it is that was really the impetus for so many people coming here. I don't know my background exactly. I had my uncle looked it up at one point in time, but yeah, it came from England and been
here longer than I can imagine. But I've never looked at myself to get the information.
But yeah, yeah, there's there's a simple thumbnail which I used to explain how my family moved eventually got here. I mean, my family was kicked out of France because the French were biased against Protestants, and they were kicked out of Ireland because the Irish were prejudiced against horse thies.
That's good, that's good. Talk a little bit about firearms, of course, because the Second Amendment is a big part of this as well.
Yeah, well, I mean this here again, this is something which so many people try to downplay. But the you know, the the major shooting started when the British tried to seize the uh you know, gunpowder and cannons and firearms there in Concord and of course the British screwed it up and it was there was a funny detail and sent me some you know, details on Concord that I wasn't aware of April, you know. So the first shooting was in Lexington. British shot down a number of paid militiamen.
It's unclear who shot first, but the British fire and the Vallian left eight or ten dead on the on the field there. And then the British came to Concord, and the British soldiers were just so damn ornery that they were grabbing people in the town and forcing them to fix them breakfast. Really like, oh this is this
is a great pr yesure, you know. And as I said to my friend, you know, British soldiers didn't realize it was their last supper because hundreds of them got shot down as they fled back to back to the Boston. Because what happened was that that the British had overwhelmed greatly outnumbered the minute men who showed up in Lexington. But by the time they got to Concord, they were burning some various things around town. A lot of the the the local militiamen had had retreated outside of town.
Then they came back to the North Bridge. There was a firefight there. The British took off running and then the the British eventually started to retreat back to Boston, but they had a lot of company along the way that was just picking them off almost every step of the road. Yeah. It kind of just got captured. So I'm sorry, go ahead.
An early example of asymmetric warfare, wasn't it. Well, we never learned the lesson. As Americans, you would think we had learned the lesson of asymmetric warfare. Yet we have ennighted the role of the British over and over again in my lifetime, haven't we.
That is true, and it's I mean, you know, part of the lesson is don't piss off farmers with guns. Yeah,
but the Britdige weren't that smart. And it was interesting how it played out because two months later the the a bunch of militia folks had come together and they seized Bunker Hill and Breed's Hill, and the British decided to teach them a lesson by putting their bright red coats some of their finest troops and marching them up the hill, and the American soldiers rose up and fired repeated volleys into that and broke the British assault twice.
And then they finally ran out of ammunition mostly and retreated. But the American sharpshooters shot down, killed or wounded badly, wounded every British officer on the field, as well as the throne of the British troops. And that was a devastating blow against the British. They had a pirate victory, as their generals said, but that they could not afford
any more such victories. And minor saying is that the British army at that point was that the soldiers were basically the enlisted men were maybe a little bit better than dogs, maybe treated worse than dogs, but they were very subservient to the officers, and once the officers got shot, they were kind of like, you know, what do we do next? Is that your oppression?
I read an interesting book. I actually took a course on British history. When I transferred that they changed majors. I transferred different college and changed majors, and they made me take a bunch of core curriculum over and over again. So I said, all right, I'm going to take a course on British history and it's one of the most interesting books I read was The Reason Why, and it
was about Lord Cardigan. What a pompous idiot he was, but he became the hero of the poem, right, the thin red line and ours is not the reason why. Ours is about to do or die and all the rest of and it was just this comedy of errors. And you know, I don't know whether the people that were with him knew what to do, but he certainly didn't know what to do. But he became a war hero out of the Crimean War and I always remembered that,
and so I thought it was pretty funny. And as the Ukraine stuff was starting up about three years ago, and the head of the British military out of the British military, said, well, we beat the Russians in Crimeraa before and we'll beat them again. Okay, Well, why were the Russians in Crimea when you guys fought him a couple hundred years ago?
Right?
Because that was their territory. But anyway, that's another story.
It's going back to the eighteen fifty four. Wasn't there a famous line in the Tennis on poem that got suppressed some damn full blundered.
Maybe it's been a while since I read I read that when I was it's been let's see, about fifty years ago since I read that book, so that might have escaped my attention. I don't know. It was kind of focused on Lord Cardigan and what an idiot and he was. He was so beloved that when he came back, he had this this personal affectation of sweaters, and so everybody started copying his sweaters. And that's where the Cardigan sweater comes from, right, because he became a hero, but
he didn't really know what he was doing. He had bought his commission because he was wealthy. He wasn't trained, you know, he was just he bought his way into into that thing, and he kind of took off on his own. So it was got an interesting book. I don't know. I mean, I've only read the one book on it, so the guy might have skewed it to his political viewpoint, but it certainly was interesting.
No, it's not like Cardigan deserved to be thrashed.
Yeah exactly, or key hauled, you know at the hall.
There you go, that's a nice English tradition.
Yeah, drag from one end of the vote to the others, from stern to from batistern or whatever, vice versa. Yeah, but you know, we have people that are very much like this kind of arrogance today. We have We've heard a whole string of Democrat politicians when it comes to the second medment. You think that's going to help you, well,
you know Swallowell and Beato or Warke and Joe Biden. Also, we've got a military and we can You know, your guns don't mean anything, you know, And I've always heard that when I would talk to reporters when I was with a libertarian party, they'd say, well, you think you can stop the government. It's like, yeah, I mean, it's like asymmetric war. It's like mutually assured destruction. You certainly don't want it, okay, but it is a country where firearms are in the hands of the people. It is
like mutually assured destruction. Certainly know, nobody but a fool nobody, but somebody like Eric Swallwell or Beato or Urick or Joe Biden would ever broach that idea. But that's what it would turn out to be. It would be just a horrific situation. But we don't have a good crack record on asymmetric war.
No, but I mean going back the idea of using firearms who defend against an oppressive government. I was in the mountains of North Carolina taking a vacation with my wife at that point, just before nine to eleven, and I pulled up in front of this country store and this big old ball god comes out. He says, well part of Maryland, you froom? And I said, well, I'm from Rockville. And he started chatting me up real much. He was too friendly if something was wrong, and then
he finally said he thought I was an undercover federal agent. Oh, And I was thinking, where in hell in life did I go wrong?
That people were suspecting.
Me of being an undercover federal agent. But so I said, well, why do you think? I said, well, you're driving a black car and you've got a Maryland license plate. I said, ah, you don't miss a trick, do you. I said, are there any other signs? He said yeah, These federal these undercover agents have got GPS tracking devices underneath the back of their car. I said, do you want to take a look under my car? Yeah? I want to do that. So he did that, he didn't find it, and then
he shook my hand. He was from the reason I mentioned this is it because the reason he suspected me was that two years earlier, the FBI had flooded that area. There were hundreds of FBI agents going around because that was the area where Eric Rudolph was thought to be. Yeah, yeah, and the and the FBI came in there. The FBI announced they were setting their best, the brightest, and they would find him in no time. FBI would show up at motels, they throw everybody out. FBI has taken over.
They'd throw people out of restaurants, and pretty soon nobody would work with the FBI. Everybody distrusted them. And the FBI didn't find anything. And the reason I mentioned this is that the you know, the FBI thinks has got all this authority, but you know, you go into the mountains the west western North Carolina, you kiss people off,
you've got no authority. That's right. Not only that, but if you think of something, I mean, you know, three words, the Barrett sniper rifle, two miles armor, two mile range, armor piercing, you know, you know.
And what is it in there? In North Carolina. It's a sense of community, a sense of the community that a lot of the people with the FBI, who are living in an urban area where nobody knows anybody, right, they don't think about that. You know, everybody is divided,
nobody is connected with each other. They're not sharing the stories of whiy water is happening, and so it's easier for them to go into a situation like that and to dominate everybody rather than to go into a community where everybody knows everybody else well.
And not only that, but you should not make mountain people angry. I mean, this is something you I should have learned in Afghanistan. The point you were making was that people were people were people are still saying that. Joe Biden was still saying this after August twenty twenty one, when the government in Kabul collapsed and the Americans fled. I mean, you know yet, you know they you know, the Taliban did not have any you know, major artillery.
They didn't have tanks. They just had you know, AK forty sevens and other weapons.
So yeah, yeah, you mentioned in your op ed piece here the decoration of the causes and necessity of taking up arms. And I see that that was in July sixth, seventeen seventy five, is about a year before the Declaration of Independence. Thomas. It wasn't Thomas Jefferson's first rodeo to right the Declaration of Independence. He was co author on this. So the guy named John Dickinson. I don't know anything about John Dickinson a little bit of Do you know anything about John Dickinson?
I know a little, but he was very eloquent. He had he had a very good line uh you know, eight uh seven years earlier and in which he said that the crucial question in Colinist's mind is not what evil has actually attended specific majors, but what evil is likely to attend them, So seeing the British actions as warning signs. Uh Dickinson. I think he was from Pennsylvania. I don't know if he supported the Declaration of Independence. I think he might have resisted that. But but I
might be mistaken on that. But he was he was one of the best pamphleteers. Okay, not in the same class as Thomas Paine, but nobody was. But so, uh, this this is a very interesting you know to read that declaration on taking up arms a few weeks after Bunker Hill. It's fascinating stuff. It's it's bracing, and it focused a lot more on Parliament as a source of evil then on King George.
That's interesting.
So we have the.
Declaratory Act as it was seventeen seventy five, where they say basically, you don't have any rights. Ten years later they have their Declaration of Independence say no, we do have rights as human beings. We have rights. But the year before that Declaration of Independence comes out, and it's after the Mincer Hill slid that you have the decoration of the causes and the necessity of taking up arms.
And so we see this stuff kind of rolling out, and as you look back, it's came out kind of a logical sequence of building, didn't it.
Yeah, Well, it was important to go step by step because even as of seventeen seventy five, I don't know what percentage of Americans were ready to have a clean break with Britain. I think Thomas Paine's pamphlets helped a
great deal on that cause. And it was important to frame the issues in a philosophical way, which is part of the reason that I was using the John Locke quotes here because this uh uh, this is the prism through which the Founders were seeing British action, and it was not everything in uh in isolation, it was more like, okay, you know, there's it's sort of like a snowball going downhill. How much further are we going to let the British go?
And at some point, I mean so there was there was the after the Battle of Bunker Hill, you had the British commander in Boston, General Gage, basically wanted to make it treason for anyone who failed to turn in their firearms to the British and just to leave the Americans a complete abject dependence on their British rulers. You know, the British never had a chance to impose that, though
they did that in some cities that they controlled. But that was how much power the British wanted, and that was that's why it was so important to to assume the worst of people that were trying to get absolute power over you.
Yeah, and that's why we say this Founder is saying over and over again, no free men will ever be disbarred the use of guns and that type that they understood that was going to be the lynch pin of their freedom. But they also understood that, you know, the pen was mightier than the stored in many respects. They had to through a series they have both, yeah, exactly,
They've got to have both of them in tandem. And so they built over a period of time, they built this philosophical understanding of the nature of government, the nature of men, the abuse of power, and all the rest of the stuff. So they could see where this is going. And so you point out that, you know, you got quotes from John Dickinson that you know, it's the crucial question is not what evil was actually attended to a particular measure, but what evil was likely to attend them
in the future. In other words, how they're going to build on this thing. This is just the thin end of the wedge, you know, and we understand that as well. You know, many times we will look at the principles involved and I keep going back to what I consider so far to be the worst despotism I've lived under, And that is what happened in twenty twenty. You look at this and it's like, okay, so how else are they going to use this? And since people in America
just kind of walked away. You know, at some point it's like, Okay, I don't really believe this pandemic is going to kill me. What I'm going to stop wearing the mask and stop doing this, and that people just stopped complying gradually. Now that's great some places, Yeah, In some places, yeah, some places are still they're still tied up in knots on wearing masks. I still see that occasionally, but you know, for the most part, they just kind
of stopped playing the game. But they didn't come back and say, you know, we've got to make sure that never happens again, and we got to hold these people accountable for what they did to us. And that's what I see missing in America today is that sense of understanding, the sense people are like, oh, okay, well that was awful. Now that's over with. No, it's not over with. It's not over with if you leave these people without any accountability, is it.
Yeah, well it's There are so many precedents from the COVID crackdowns and the lockdowns and the mandates, and most of these precedents have not been banished for throwing out the law books for their regulations and to see how far to see how far that the government lied. This is coming out a little bit with the exposing the lab leak, the cover up of the lab leak, But there was a story I did. I guess January twenty first on see.
I even think let me let me give you my theory on this, Jim, because I even think that the stuff about the lab leak, I think that's an alibi. I think they're putting that out there to say we did our best, but when we were up again and say, everybody was going to die, so we had to lock you down, We had to vaccinate you with an untested genetic code injection, and we had to do all this kind of stuff because hey, we had this thing out there.
And I think that that does two things. Not only does it hold them harmless, but I think that this this lab leak narrative that's being put out there are you got to ask yourself. I think why you now have the establishment hanging on this so heavily when they wanted to suppress that. They want everybody to believe this is an organic thing that's running wild. And now they've got a lot of different motives for pushing that. And I think one of the motives is that, hey, we
may have to do it again. You know, we'll come up again, and this time the next time we'll do a little bit differently. Maybe we'll lock you down harder next time, because you know, the first time it didn't work. And I've already seen a lot of people talking about it, so I'm very suspicious about that. I'm a real cynic when it comes to viruses and pandemics, and I'm a real cynic when it comes to government. When you start putting these two things together, my BS alarms start ringing off the wall.
Well, that's that's understandable. I mean, the one key for the lab laque theory to me isn't how it was suppressed. Was that if people had recognized early on that the that the COVID was financed by their tax dollars in a reckless way in China and then it got out of the lab by accident or otherwise, it would have been far more difficult for politicians to promenade as saviors.
Oh yeah, that's why they had to suppress it at the beginning. Yeah, you know, when it started in December, I remember looking it up and I heard this stuff about bats soup, and wait a minute, and then I saw that the only Class bio level safety four lab and China was in Wuhan. Right there at that spot. I thought, oh, okay, well maybe it is something that's real. What convinced me otherwise was seeing the fake videos of people falling down the street. I mean, you've seen those.
It was just I've they need to take some lessons from some stuntmen in Hollywood if they want to take a fall. It was the fakest looking stuff I've ever seen in my life. And I've been in China, and I know when they showed the crowded hospitals and everything, it's like, that's the way it is normally, it's necessarily a different thing. Well so it's just kind of crowded chaos as the standard operating procedure and most of these places in China anyway, So I got really skeptical about it.
But the thing that was real nail in all of that narrative from me was Dark Winter, you know, and again tied in with nine to eleven, you know, just two months before nine to eleven, and then they have the anthrax attack a week later, and then they put out the model legislation and practiced it for twenty years. So you know, I looked at all that stuff and I didn't believe a bit of it, you know. And I had talked about the danger of these biosafety level
labs and gain A function experiments and everything. Back in twenty fourteen. There was an excellent series of articles that were done by USA Today and a reporter there, her name was Alison. I can't remember her last name, but she talked about how there's hundreds of these labs in the United States, typically attached to universities, and the bad safety record that they had. You know, they're playing with diseases, and they're playing with diseased animals, and they're getting exposed
to stuff themselves. The disease animals are escaping the lab and all this other kind of stuff. So it had credibility with me at the beginning, but I just I got to the point where I didn't believe any of this stuff.
Well, I mean there were so many false statements, yeah, and it was a lot of that was concerted. So, I mean I was tiring the edge of cynicism myself.
Yeah, and you look at what is happening now, you know, when you and this case of this guy that gets sent to El Salvador. I read your op ed piece talking about the the op ed writer who just gets whisked off of the street and had done nothing other than expressing her political opinion. That was not that the government did not like her expressing. But you know, when you look at the situation that's going on with this Garcia guy, yeah, there's some issues there, but they're manufacturing stuff,
you know, and that's a key thing. When they start manufacturing evidence, they start spinning stuff that wasn't there before. When they say they made a mistake, and then the come back and they say, no, he didn't make a mistaken. Look he's got MS thirteen written on his knuckles, and they don't they don't annotate it. They show you a photoshop picture of it. You know, they're putting stuff out there like that. You know, it really does undermine it.
They they can't help themselves. I mean, they've got to go the extra you know, they've got to keep adding stuff to it. They can't just leave it at one particular thing. And that's the key, you know, when we look at what happened with you know, the the tyranny of the British and everything. It was really about executive orders. And that's really the way that the Trump wants to operate.
He wants to declare an emergency and then he's free to do whatever he wants and every problem that he sees, whether it's economic, whether it's about immigration, or whether it's about you know, so called pandemic or any the rest, it's all about I declare an emergency. Now it can do whatever I want to do, isn't it.
It certainly worked out well in the past.
Yeah. You know, I'd like the quote that you end up your op ed piece with here you say that they understood that in defining a tyrant, it's not necessary to prove that he's a cannibal.
Yes, I love that line. That was from a Virginia senator John Taylor, who was a cavalry officer for George Washington during the revolution. Uh and uh. He actually wrote several books of a political philosophy. He did a wonderful book on UH, on trade and protectionism called Tyranny Unmasked. I think that's why that that book came that quote came from. But there were just I mean, it's it's
a different writing style that people had back then. Yeah, and I saw that line and I was just infantely charmed by it.
It was a great Yeah. I love that because it is you know, somebody doesn't have to be thoroughly bad, in other words, a cannibal. Yeah right, it's just you know that you can this this one aspect here, they can go down that road. And that's why we have to look at what people do that are in power. We look at it at as a case by case basis,
and yet that isn't the case today. The case today is that people who are caught up in this left right paradigm, the Democrats, Republicans, they will have to make a cannibal out of their enemy.
Right.
There can be nothing good than that person, right, Yeah.
And it ties into what Thomas McCauley said about how people at his in the early eighteen hundreds were viewing Charles, the Charles the First the King of Steward King, who was very oppressive. But Thomas McCauley said that that people in his time were viewing him well because he had a really nice beard.
Must have been better than.
Your yours, A ryne generate, a tyrant.
I remember whatever, When I saw that line what came to mind about it doesn't have to prove that he's a cannibal made me think of Gilbert and Sullivan's pirates at Penzance, and there's a policeman lot is not a happy when they said, when a felon's not engaged in his employment, when he's not engaged otherwise in Asian crime or whatever, he loves his little innocent enjoyment just as great as any honest man, that type of thing. You know.
So it's like, yeah, these guys, it's kind of as difficult as a cop because you know, we see that these guys they are they're human after all, and uh so we have to, uh, we have to hammer these guys even though we see their humanity. They don't have to be a cannibal in order for the police to be able to pull them up, I guess. But it still bothered them at somewhat and their conscience, or in the imagination of Gilbert and Sullivan, I guess they were they were kind of outside the establishment.
I mean, most of you know over that that's.
Right, Yeah, that was that was the police as Gilbert and Sullivan would like to see them, you know, a kind of Gitler Police Force that was there.
Of course it was also fifty four police.
That's right, yeah, yeah, or are you? It's always great talking to you, Jim. Thank you so much, and the website is Jimbouvard dot com where people can find your.
Thank you so much for having on. Thanks for its great to share some insights and some laughs here on Tuesday morning in these dire political times.
That's right, and it's always great to go back and look at history and see how things are really not changed all that much. Thank you so much, Jim. Have a good day, thanks to Thank you folks, thank you for joining us. You have a good day as well. The common man, they created common Core and dumbed down our children. They created common past track and control us their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple,
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