Drew, The Clean Libertarian, joins me again. This time Drew has received a pardon and is working on legislation at the state level, so I wanted to catch up and have a more positive episode for y’all.
As noted, AFPC’s study shows farmers are currently facing nitrogen costs 80% higher than last year. That’s as Anhydrous Ammonia prices reached 2008 levels in October at over 1,000 dollars per ton. And those prices have been steadily rising ever since. “You’re talking fertilizer price that have gone up somewhere close to $200 an acre for this next year for some producers, and the revenue being generated is not offsetting that. And that’s just the fertilizer industry,” says Edgington. “That’s not even talking about the chemistry industry or land values or equipment that people can’t get. There is a big, big cash flow crunch coming. And the banking industry is nervous about it as well, as they watch what has been a pretty good year for agriculture could absolutely go completely backwards in this next growing season in a big way.”
Attorny Robert Barnes and Eric Hunley are covering this live. Robert Barnes is covering the Supreme Court arguments Today at SCOTUS: The court hears arguments on two major Biden administration vaccine policies as a surge in COVID cases sweeps America. The policies at stake: a vaccine-or-test requirement for workers at large employers, and a vaccine mandate for workers at health care centers.
I just wanted to say that I am amazed by your COI podcast; I never found any other podcast as informative as yours without political or social instrumentalization. Thank you so much for your work. I wish I could be involved one day.
I was in Tigray last summer, and I listened to your podcast, which was the most accurate for people who were not on the ground, and I was impressed. I am now heading to Sana’a in a week, and I am grateful for all your updates about Yemen. If you have other trustworthy sources of information that you could share with me about Yemen, please let me know.
Kind thoughts to all your team and best wishes for 2022,
…the conspiracy theorist asks himself the question cui bono? Who benefits from this measure? If he finds that Measure A benefits X and Y, his next step is to investigate the hypothesis: did X and Y in fact lobby or exert pressure for the passage of Measure A? In short, did X and Y realize that they would benefit and act accordingly? Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals.
Murray N. Rothbard, Ph.D., The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited (Reason, April 1977, pp. 39–40.)
Scott interviews activist Basir Bita about the economic calamity that’s hit Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrawal this past summer. With the U.S. and IMF freezing Afghan government funds as well as widespread market corrections after the fall of the previous regime, Afghanistan has been thrown into turmoil. Food prices have tripled since the summer and many Afghans face issues with food security. Bita argues that the Biden Administration and others should get over their hesitation to work with the new government of Afghanistan. And that a refusal to do so reveals how little they truly care for the Afghan people, despite their rhetoric.
Basir Bita is a civil society activist now based out of Canada. He is an advisor for Afghan Peace Volunteers, a youth group in Kabul, Afghanistan that advocates for nonviolent conflict resolution. Follow him on Twitter @BasirBita
On the final COI of 2021, Kyle Anzalone discusses Biden’s phone call with Putin, the 2022 NDAA, and recent news about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Scott is joined by Antiwar.com contributing editor Daniel Larison to discuss his most recent piece. Larison argues that the period following the peaceful breakup of the USSR was the best moment for the U.S. to shed the militaristic blob it had built up in the name of fighting communism. Instead, the military-industrial-congressional complex scrambled to find a new enemy. And the next thirty years of meddling in the Middle East and Eastern Europe have resulted in today’s messy geopolitical status quo.
Discussed on the show:
“US Militarism Should Have Died With the Soviet Union” (Antiwar.com)
“The Looming Threat of a Nuclear Crisis with Iran” (The New Yorker)
How about we do something novel in the new year? Let’s stop worrying about the stuff most politicians, pundits, and activists want us to worry about and instead think about ourselves, our families, our friends, and whatever communities we choose to be part of. Let’s forget about “the country” and the rest of the world. Let’s individually pursue happiness.
All I’m saying is that it’s finally time for the politicians, bureaucrats, and know-it-all intelligentsia, left or right, to get out of the way and let us set our own agendas.
Too self-centered? Well, too bad. Much evil results from people failing to mind their own business. But what I have in mind does not involve wishing other people ill or seeing life as a zero-sum game in which you can win only if others lose. On the contrary, we benefit from other people’s, including distant strangers’, good fortune because at the very least it opens up opportunities for mutual gains from trade. (“The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market,” the wise Adam Smith pointed out some time ago.) In reality, it opens up so much more.
There’s little chance this sort of world would result in what is often stigmatized as “selfishness.” The vast majority of us understand that truly caring about oneself necessarily means caring about other people in a variety of proper ways. In fact, the person who claims to care only about himself actually cares little even about himself. That’s why mutually beneficial social arrangements have been bottom-up affairs. As Thomas Paine recognized in The Rights of Man:
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.
Yet the policy elite and much of the ideological left and right don’t want us to understand this. They have other plans for us. They always do, don’t they? So they can’t let us get it into our heads that their agendas are illiberal impositions.
The ruling establishment and its mouthpiece media try to keep us agitated by a variety of threats. As Ted Galen Carpenter notes,
In recent years, U.S. executive branch officials and members of Congress from both political parties have routinely portrayed Russia or China (and frequently both countries) as existential threats to the United States. It also is becoming increasingly common to find news articles or opinion pieces that adopt the same theme. Moreover, a significant number of politicians and analysts put smaller powers, especially Iran and North Korea, and even non-state actors, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, in that category. The concerted campaign on the part of opinion-shaping elites to hype the danger from such sources is leaving an indelible mark on public attitudes. Many Americans now believe that their country faces multiple, horrifying threats.
More sober reflection should cause the public to conclude that the dangers are greatly exaggerated, and that the individuals, agencies, and organizations that foster such hysteria are not doing the country any favors. (“Paranoid Superpower: Threat Inflation is the American Way.”)
Do the real or imagined threats to Ukraine or Taiwan really represent existential threats to the world including the American people?
Then there’s the so-called climate emergency, which doesn’t exist. After more than 40 years of the most ridiculously bad predictions of the imminent catastrophe, it’s time for those who still take the doomsday scenarios seriously to realize that “Wolf!” has been cried too many times. The same goes for other “crises,” like the ones supposedly presented by immigrants, global free trade, and the allegedly rampant racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and the assortment of imagined phobias.
We can also tell the “woke” left and the national conservative right that we have our own lives to live, thank you very much. And, no, we don’t have too much freedom, no matter what they may think. They can include us out of their culture wars.
The point of freedom is to be left unimpeded in our own individual and voluntary cooperative pursuits. It will forever be remarkable that the Declaration of Independence specified “the pursuit of happiness” in its examples of unalienable rights. Let’s never forget it.
In June of 2020, family and friends of Hannah Fizer, 25, were shocked to learn that their beloved daughter and friend had been killed during a stop over an alleged speeding violation. Then, four months later, they learned there would be no justice and the officer who killed the unarmed woman as she sat in her vehicle—was back on the job.
Since then, Fizer’s father, John Fizer, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Pettis County seeking damages against Pettis County Deputy Jordan Schutte. The lawsuit argues the shooting was an unjustified, an excessive use of force and that Schutte did not follow several standard law enforcement protocols during the stop. When watching the video, it is entirely clear.
This week, PBS aired a minidocumentary (which you can watch below) detailing Fizer’s tragic shooting and it backs up what TFTP has been reporting since her death. As the documentary shows, the department remains unapologetic about killing Fizer.
In October 2020, the Pettis County prosecutor claimed that the officer shooting an unarmed woman during a traffic stop—dumping five rounds into her as she sat in her car — did not violate any policies. The officer “feared for his life.”
“Schutte had the ability and responsibility to prevent the use of deadly force against Ms. Fizer but failed to do so,” the lawsuit reads. “His actions contributed to Ms. Fizer’s avoidable death.”
As the documentary points out, on that fateful night on June 13, 2020, Fizer was on her way to work when she was targeted for extortion by the deputy. Just six minutes after the stop began, Fizer would have five bullet holes in her, still sitting in her car.
After killing Fizer, the deputy would claim the woman—who never made a violent threat in her life—had a gun and threatened to kill him. However, investigators found no such gun and it appears the only thing she was holding was her cellphone after letting the officer know that she was filming the stop.
Fizer’s family disputes the claims of their daughter threatening to shoot the deputy and their dispute is held up by the fact that Fizer was unarmed. Another ominous detail to the killing of Fizer was the fact that she was filming the stop and her phone was found on the floorboard of her Hyundai, according to a search warrant, but no video has ever been released.
Several months after her death, surveillance footage from a nearby business was released, showing the deputy attempt to open her car door before positioning himself in front of her car and dumping 5 rounds into her. Had he really believed she had a gun, he would have likely taken cover or moved out of the way. Instead, he stayed standing straight up and calmly began shooting into Fizer’s car.
The attorney’s for the family agree, noting in the lawsuit that Schutte drew his firearm and fired repeated shots at Hannah Fizer at point blank range without first moving or attempting to move to a position of better safety or cover while giving her commands or calling for support and backup.
“There is no objectively reasonable basis on which to conclude it was acceptable, lawful, and not excessive for Schutte to purposefully position himself toward the front of Hannah Fizer’s vehicle and discharge his firearm at her only minutes into a traffic stop without ever attempting to move to a place of greater safety or follow de-escalation techniques,” the lawsuit states.
Fizer’s father believes Fizer was simply holding her cell phone and dropped it, which caused the coward cop to dump five rounds into his daughter. As the cellphone was the only thing found in the car, this is the most likely scenario.
In his statement after the shooting, Schutte claimed Fizer refused to identify herself and that, because she refused to, he told her to step out of the car because he was going to arrest her for not identifying herself.
However, as FOX 4 pointed out, at the time of the incident, nowhere in the record of the radio traffic did Schutte report to radio dispatch that he was going to arrest her for refusing to identify herself. Instead, he can be heard on the radio telling dispatch she was more worried about recording him than giving him her identification.
Furthermore, the radio traffic reveals Hannah Fizer did in fact identify herself, as she can be heard on the audio recording clearly saying her name, “Hannah Fizer,” at a volume the Pettis County deputy would have been able to hear.
Despite prosecutors admitting the shooting was “avoidable” they cleared Schutte in Fizer’s death.
Special prosecutor Sephen P. Sokoloff wrote in his conclusion that “the shooting, albeit possibly avoidable, was justifiable under current Missouri criminal law” after claiming surveillance footage from the restaurant showed Fizer reach down to the floorboard. Apparently, reaching down is a crime punishable by summary execution on the spot.
“The evidence indicates that the deceased, who had been stopped for multiple traffic violations and who had refused to provide any information to the officer, had advised him that she was recording him, and then shortly thereafter, that she had a gun and was going to shoot him,” Sokoloff wrote in his statement. “At the time the officer discharged his weapon, she had reached down into the floorboard of the car and raised up towards him. Based on the information and circumstances available to the officer during the event, it cannot be said that the officer did not have a reasonable belief that he was in danger of serious physical injury or death from the actions of the deceased at the time he fired.”
This statement rings hollow given the facts of the case, and the new sheriff as well as the old have expressed their concerns over Fizer’s death. As of Dec. 31, 2020, Shutte is no longer employed by the department.
Adding to the tragic nature of this summary execution over a speeding allegation is the fact that Fizer actually attended the Sedalia Police Department’s academy in 2016, according to the NY Times. So she was well trained in how to handle a stop, likely the reason she began filming in the first place. According to friends and family, after attending the academy, she quickly decided that she did not want to be a cop, but would often talk about becoming a parole officer to help people get back on their feet.
Before Fizer left for work that evening, the Times reports that she had spent the last day of her life splashing around in a kiddie pool with her best friend, Taylor Browder, and Browder’s young children, talking about life and her future in Sedalia—a future, thanks to an unidentified deputy, that no longer exists…
This article was originally featured at The Free Thought Project and is republished with permission.
On COI #207, Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman update the JCPOA talks’ recent developments and the Russians’ security proposals presented to Washington.
Kyle discusses the Russians pulling 10,000 troops off the border with Ukraine and sending them back to their bases. This is potentially a show of goodwill before the upcoming talks with the U.S. next month. Kyle and Connor then cover some recent escalations that do not necessarily bode well for substantive diplomacy like the Americans flying spy planes over Ukraine not far from the separatist Donbas region. There is also talk of a U.S.-Ukraine intelligence partnership eyeing Moscow.
Kyle also covers the latest news on the new Cold War with China. It turns out that the Americans’ diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics is a “farce.” Also, using the Taiwan issue as a pretext, the U.S. and Japan are reportedly planning for war with China. Connor then talks about where things stand with the Iran deal.
Connor argues that the Iranians have the upper hand and have been largely successful by not making concessions, remaining steadfast, and demanding the lifting of all sanctions as well as the JCPOA’s full implementation. For all the tough talk and empty rhetoric from Tel Aviv, Washington, the Europeans, etc. it seems based on news reports and statements from the EU coordinator, the Iranian diplomats, and the Russian lead negotiator that Tehran’s demands and proposals have been accepted and, on their terms, things are moving forward. Connor and Kyle then talk American domestic politics, Middle East politics, and what Israel would demand in the case of a U.S. return to the Iran deal.
Covid The Navy has now removed 45 sailors for failing to take the covid vaccine. [Link] The US donates 900,000 Pfizer covid vaccine doses to Laos. [Link] The US will send two million Pfizer covid vaccine doses to Kenya and Morocco. [Link] US News In the first half of...
Various evidence presented in studies I have authored, which has been echoed by many other Western scholars who research these issues, show that both of these narratives are inaccurate. Indeed, the question of which side carried out the “snipers’ massacre” is central...
Remember when Congress at least pretended to discuss policy? Remember it was a battle of ideas and not changing the system just to win? More comics at the Webcomic Factory.
“It’s my understanding that a guy can go out there and I mean, he can fall into a black hole,” Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr said of drivers getting entangled financially. “You know, we’ve had a lot of issues with Brookside.” Jefferson County Sheriff...
Courageously protecting the world from people who drive white Toyota Corollas and move stuff around town. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/military-releases-videos-august-drone-strike-killed-civilians/index.html
Scott is joined by Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute to discuss Yemen. Sheline wrote an article recently about the shifting balance of the war. One year after Biden announced an end to U.S. support for offensive Saudi operations, the bombing campaign remains as...
Scott interviews Richard Hanania of Defense Priorities. They discuss the reality of how the American military’s presence impacts global events. Hanania argues that, if it were true that the U.S. was out there defending its allies, you’d expect those countries to want...
Scott is joined by Clint Ehrlich who recently went viral after his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show struck the nerve of a handful of foreign policy “experts.” So Scott invited him on the show to dive deeper into his arguments. They discuss why Ehrlich is nervous...
Scott interviews Zaher Wahab of the Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education about the economic catastrophe taking place in Afghanistan. Although the U.S. Government claimed it was working to develop Afghanistan, Wahab explains that what it really did was prop...
On COI #222, Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman cover the hawks advocating the killing of Russians, the ongoing Cold War with China, and recent violence in Syria. Connor reviews his latest column discussing the Washington imperial elite’s calls for Russian blood during...
On COI #221, Kyle Anzalone discusses the Ukraine crisis. Biden has overextended American commitments and now must make concessions to defuse the crisis. Even if it leads to war, the Blob will demand that Biden hold firm against Putin. While the US continues to take...
On COI #220, Kyle Anzalone discusses the recent talks between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. While no deal was reached, the two diplomats were able to make progress on limited issues. However, after the talks ended,...
On COI #219, Kyle Anzalone is joined by Dave DeCamp - News Editor at Antiwar.com - to review Biden’s first year as president. Dave breaks down Biden’s Ukraine policy. At a recent press conference, Biden suggested, if there is a small Russian invasion of Ukraine, the...
https://youtu.be/jjzTu_joO1A ... universal education has in fact led to a general degradation of cultural and educational standards. Murray N. Rothbard, Ph.D., Economic Controversies, p. 566 Jason Bedrick is the director of policy at EdChoice and was a policy analyst...
https://youtu.be/fqbxcDjs15k In politics, whenever I hear the word “unity,” to paraphrase the famous words of a German politico of the 1930’s, “I reach for my revolver.” For almost always, “unity” is a scam, a call to abandon principle and follow the leader into some...
https://youtu.be/Nl1XqsSI_MI ... interventionism is not only immoral and aggressive; it doesn’t work. We must regain liberty at home, end all interventions in other countries, and return to the historic, forgotten “foreign policy” of serving as an example and a...
https://youtu.be/AJCUX3FwWkU One of the most vital struggles in the writing and publishing of history is the conflict between the government’s propaganda myths, enshrined in “official history,” and historical reality brought forward by “revisionism.” Murray N....
https://youtu.be/ffkZukAL2Rk Indeed, international establishment has long drooled over the prospect of a "Cyber 9/11." It would be a single catalyzing event to usher in the pre-planned response: a "Digital Patriot Act." If successful, this event could forever change...
https://youtu.be/bE8SGCFsYXk In December, the UN met in its second-ever "Special Session" to discuss what they are calling a "Global Pandemic Treaty." In this session, it adopted a road map called "The World Together." This road map sets deadlines for the production...
https://youtu.be/QfgZLNj31xY In this episode, I analyze the truth of the Vietnam war as it is covered up by Ken Burns' Vietnam PBS series. Episode 197 of the Liberty Weekly Podcast is Brought to you by: Join Liberty Weekly and tons of your favorite creators on Rokfin...
https://youtu.be/p9ycCASQohU In this episode, I uncover Wisconsin's leading role in the eugenics movement by exploring the "Wisconsin Home for the Feebleminded," a correctional institution that I rode by on the school bus every day growing up. Episode 197 of the...
Drew, The Clean Libertarian, joins me again. This time Drew has received a pardon and is working on legislation at the state level, so I wanted to catch up and have a more positive episode for y’all. Drew Twitter The Clean Libertarian Discord Libertarian Institute 19...
Brett Hawes joined me to discuss the history of South Africa, how it was the testing ground for the tyranny being rolled out today, the WEF corporate governance agenda, and how COVID has been taken advantage of to empower the parasite class and destroy the middle...
Michael Harris is back. In this episode we discuss COVID, the SCOTUS decision on the OSHA mandate, the mandate on healthcare workers, and Hoppe. Libertarian Institute 19 Skills Pdf Autonomy Course Critical Thinking Course Donate Patreon...
Patrick joined me again to discuss MK Ultra, CIA operations, and eugenics and how these programs may have been instrumental in educating the elites in the psychology of the masses. Patrick Twitter Liberty Weekly Libertarian Institute 19 Skills Pdf Autonomy Course...
