482 - Help Save Ross Ulbricht & Internet Freedom

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

http://freeross.org/Today’s podcast comes in two parts. We begin with the Palenque Norte Lecture that Grover Norquist gave at the 2015 Burning Man Festival. This talk was actually in the form of a question and answer session in which the somewhat liberal audience found several areas in which they held goals in common with the more conservative Mr. Norquist. Following that are two clips dealing with the government’s persecution of Ross Ulbrich, who is now a political prisoner serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for the crime of operating a Website based in Iceland.

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And if you’re wondering why I’ve decided to combine a speech by Grover Norquist with another plea for you to become involved with freeing the political prisoner, Ross Ulbrich,

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I’ll tell you, because as my dear departed mother often said,

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I suspect that there’s a method to your madness.

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Well, here it is.

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In just a moment, I’ll get into the

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controversy that my last year’s podcast of Grover Norquist’s Planque Norte lecture at Burning Man

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caused. But as you’ll soon hear, Grover Norquist has many of the same goals as you and I do when

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it comes to individual freedom. And he has a very large libertarian and republican following. So the

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odds are that this podcast will attract a few listeners who normally wouldn’t be interested in

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learning about what went down when the government broke into a highly encrypted internet server in

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Iceland, changed data, stole money, and framed a young man named Ross Ulbrich. At least that’s my take on what went down.

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Ulbrich’s case was intended to be a warning shot across the bow of those of us who believe in

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individual rights and a free and open internet. Hopefully you will stick with me for a bit right

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now because whether or not you think drugs should be legal, my hunch is that you do value your right

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to use the internet without fearing that you might cross some kind of a line that ends up giving you two life sentences without the possibility of parole.

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So, after listening to last week’s podcast, have you watched the Deep Web movie yet? And have you visited FreeRoss.org?

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visited freeross.org? If not, then you may not have clearly understood the message in my previous podcast. You see, if you just sit on the sidelines while the U.S. security state is doing its best

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to spy on you, it will eventually be too late for you to discover all of the tools that you’re going

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to need to continue using the net as you please. Now, this isn’t the podcast that’s going to explain how to use Tor and the

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other software necessary for private communications, but it is a place for you to learn a little more

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about what is really going on behind the scenes in Washington and in some other places where

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government goons are working to turn out the lights of free speech and assembly. And so the

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first talk that I’m going to play for you today is

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by a true Washington insider. Unlike you and me, who don’t have enough stroke to even get a private

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meeting with our own congressman or congresswoman, the man that we’re about to listen to can get a

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face-to-face meeting with almost anyone in Congress. He’s got that much influence. And the

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talk that I’m about to play is one that he gave a few months ago at the Burning Man Festival.

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As you know, I’m talking about Grover Norquist,

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who returned to Burning Man this year and delivered another Planque Norte lecture,

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this time in the form of a question and answer session that was moderated by John Gilmore,

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a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.

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by John Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.

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I found it interesting when I podcast last year’s Planque Norte talk by Grover Norquist that it, well, it actually caused some of our fellow slaughters to quit listening to

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these podcasts altogether.

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One guy wrote to tell me that he was against everything that Grover Norquist stood for.

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I ignored him, but had I decided to engage him in a conversation about it,

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I would have asked how he knew that he was against everything that Norquist stood for

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if he wasn’t even going to listen to what he had to say.

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Many years ago, when I was hosting a TV show titled Big Brother’s Latest Lies,

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I took my lead from a journalist that I greatly admired, I.F. Stone.

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And one of the things that I learned from Stone

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was that he never read the liberal press.

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He only read things that came from the side he was opposed to.

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After all, he said, I already know what I’m thinking.

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What I want to know is what those other guys are thinking.

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And I found that advice to serve me quite well over the years.

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In the early 1970s, just after I left active duty with the Navy,

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I practiced law in Houston, Texas.

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And during that time, I attended the Democratic State Convention

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and helped Lloyd Benson defeat George H.W. Bush for the Senate.

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By the mid-1990s, I was living in Dallas, Texas, and had become a Republican businessman.

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Then my views began shifting once again, and I spent some time thinking that I was a libertarian.

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By the end of the 1990s, I had, well, I’d become an anarchist, and I was living in South Florida.

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I tell you this only to let you know that over time I have changed

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my political views substantially. In fact, they’re constantly in flux. But what hasn’t changed are

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the fundamental things that I believe in. Simple things like less interference in my life by the

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government, keeping more of the money that I earn and giving less to a government that mainly uses it to create more wars. And from time to time, one political party or another

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seemed to best answer those issues for me. But at long last, I’ve come to understand that

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it isn’t the people involved or the party involved, it’s the system itself that’s completely broken.

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So what am I doing about it?

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Well, over the years, I’ve produced over 100 television shows and given hundreds of speeches about these issues.

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And today I do podcasts because this way I can reach more people using fewer resources than any other way that I’ve tried.

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Fortunately, of course, there are people like Grover Norquist who also sees quite clearly that the system itself is the root cause of a good number of our problems.

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And while I, like many of our fellow Saloners, don’t always agree with the means that Mr. Norquist has used to force some changes on a broken system,

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I still feel that on many issues we are on the same side. Our tactics may be different, as well as our strategies,

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but our long-term goals are more in sync than you might imagine.

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So I hope that you can listen to this without letting any preconceived prejudice enter into your thoughts,

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and see if you can find some common ground here that us 99%ers all share.

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Unfortunately, the recorder wasn’t turned on for the first few minutes of this talk,

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but we’ll pick up with a question from someone who had heard Norquist talk last year

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at the Planque Norte lectures,

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and it’s a talk that you can also hear in my podcast number 420, ironically enough.

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I saw you talk last year, and there are two things that I thought about a lot the entire year.

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One was about, like, that your organization is an organization, like a coalition of people who agree on one thing and disagree on other things.

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I started my own organization this year in San Francisco, a zoning liberalization, basically, because we have a lot of problems, too much rules.

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We’re undersupplied with housing.

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It hurts everybody.

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Wait, one more thing.

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Speak to this guy’s question.

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What I’m finding is that I have a lot of members who are high wage but have very little free time.

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And at a local level, that is catastrophic because money doesn’t vote.

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Like, at a local level, money is not nearly as influential as people might think.

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Okay, sorry.

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money is not nearly as influential as people might think okay sorry um the other thing is is now that i organized a pack i’m realizing that a lot of uh laws that are there to encourage transparency

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wind up being very well they’re expensive for me personally in time um they’re expensive for

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the local governments because they have to keep a lot of records, and they act as barriers to entry. And I would never have really thought of sort of transparency

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laws as barriers to entry to new political groups, but it certainly does. I’m nervous that I’ve done

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it wrong. Last year, though, you talked a lot about wanting a lot of transparency, which is,

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like I said, expensive.

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So can you talk about how you decide what you do want government to spend money on?

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Because transparency is something that it sounded like you did want, you know, government to spend money on.

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Yeah.

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By transparency, there are several – you mentioned two different things.

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I would like all government spending to be transparent. There’s now a couple of good websites which have pretty much all of federal spending and a lot of state spending.

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Pretty soon they’ll have all state spending online.

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And you can find out who’s getting money from – well, remember the Veterans Affairs crisis in in Veterans Hospitals crisis in Arizona?

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This transparency thing was able to find out that X percentage of the people who managed those failing, problematic hospitals had all been given bonuses because they were superstars, according to the federal government in how they did it.

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So the idea that these were the idiots, this was the A team, according to the federal government.

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And that level of transparency, I think, is very helpful. It really started with Governor Perry in Texas, who did it

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with his own office and then with all the executive offices, and then they got legislation for the

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whole thing. So if a check gets written in Texas, you can find it. I think that doesn’t necessarily lead to small government, but it leads to significantly more honest government.

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I tend to think that if people saw how the government spent their money, they might be less excited about the total amount being spent,

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but also maybe more excited about some of the things that are being supported.

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You mentioned transparency on campaign

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contributions. Early on, the NAACP fought successfully to keep their donations private

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because they thought that people in particular states that were on a list of NAACP supporters

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would be given a hard time. And the Supreme Court gave them protection.

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Lynched, I think, was the issue.

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Pardon?

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That they would be lynched if it was discovered that they were NAACP members.

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They would be discomforted, yes.

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It would not be good.

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And then the other one was the Communist Party, USPCA,

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the Communist Party of the United States, got an exemption from those transparency rules in the 70s when the FEC said any contributions above $200 has to be released.

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And they said, well, people will be mean to us if they knew we were giving money to the Communist Party.

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And the FEC ruled, okay, you’re not in.

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giving money to the Communist Party, and the FEC rolled, okay, you’re not in.

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So there was a recognition that politicians or others can use your giving patterns to go after you.

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This is a big problem in cities where, remember,

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Trump talked about how he gives money to Democrats and Republicans and everybody because he wants his permits to be done.

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It facilitates corruption.

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If they know who’s giving to who, it’s easy to decide,

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we will give you a permit, we won’t give you a permit. So there’s some real challenges where

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what you generally think of as transparency, it’s good to know who’s writing the checks in

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politics. At some point, that can also be used by the state against individuals.

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by the state against individuals?

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It’s a quick two-part question.

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The first part, Bernie Sanders speaks of a new American revolution of civic engagement in which instead of corporations,

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which fund 80% of all campaign contributions,

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giving to both Democrats and Republicans equally,

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that people take power, become informed, and create this, take back the power over the donors to the campaigns.

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Do you agree with that statement?

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And the second part, if that happened, Mr. Norquist,

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what impact do you think that would have on the country

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in terms of what would most people, if they were engaged and informed, vote for?

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Two things.

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One, I think I like more people involved rather than less.

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I like the contributions to be voluntary versus not voluntary,

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and probably from people in the United States as opposed to people not in the United States.

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But other than those restrictions, I’m not particularly in favor of campaign

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contribution restrictions. Laws tend to be written by incumbents to kneecap would-be

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challengers. So when you get into that, even if the first iteration looks really nice and

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sounds good, as they work it through, they’ll use transparency when it lets them police their opponents or challengers, and it can be abused.

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It tends to be one of the bipartisan things that incumbents agree on to make difficult the lives of non-incumbents.

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I think more political engagement is kind of by definition healthy.

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And so I would be supportive of that. And obviously anybody who’s running Bernie Sanders or Rand Paul running from a sort of somewhat non-traditional base within their own parties has a hope that there are people out there who haven’t been voting.

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I mean, the people who voted are the guys who’ve been voting for the last 40 years,

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are the people who are kind of responsible

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for the present mess we’re in.

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So you’re looking for new blood

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if you’re going to change the way things are organized.

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So Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul,

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both are looking to speak to people who forgot to vote

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or forgot to make campaign contributions in the past.

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And online contributions make it a lot easier to crowdsource small contributions into a political movement.

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OK, I just have a very simple question, but I want to thank you for coming back again. I saw you last year and you’ve given me this year an opportunity to evolve from the knee jerk kind of loathing that, you know, not you personally, but your principles bother me.

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But I’ve heard a lot of really good stuff about you from some people in this camp and some John and others.

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Oh, thank you.

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And so I’m starting fresh with you.

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But I want to challenge you respectfully.

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Your tax pledge thing, you could give it up.

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And here’s why.

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And just I don’t like the way Congress works.

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And I think most of the American public in the polling is kind of with me on that.

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They don’t do a lot of work.

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They don’t care much.

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The differences between the two parties, I respectfully disagree.

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They all belong to the keep me in office party, however many parties there are.

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And I want them to go back to work and do the job that the Constitution gave them

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to do. And a fundamental part of that is taxation. And I agree with you that a lot of the tax policy

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is totally screwed up and wrong and unfair and everything. But couldn’t the pledge be turned into,

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hey, how about scrap the whole damn thing and start over and do it right this time or do something that makes sense?

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Because I don’t think you even believe that we can have a functioning system of government with no tax for nothing ever on anybody.

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Sure.

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So thank you.

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Okay.

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Thank you for both parts of the thought.

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Thank you for both parts of the thought.

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If you haven’t followed, he talked about the Taxpayer Protection Pledge,

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which is a project that I organized, and just briefly to walk through it.

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Back in 1985, President Reagan asked if I’d put together Americans for Tax Reform to help pass what became the 1986 Tax Reform Act.

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We took rates down, broadened the base, not at net tax increase.

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It was revenue neutral.

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It raised the same amount of money, but tax rates were lower, simpler,

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got rid of a lot of deductions and credits.

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A lot of the politicized direction of resources was eliminated.

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Just generally progress.

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And I came up with a pledge which did two things. We were worried that once you lowered

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the rates, they could drift up and you wouldn’t have the deductions and credits as protection

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anymore because those have been gone away. Or that somebody would say, let’s do that again,

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but it’d be a Trojan horse for a tax increase, that they’d say it’s going to be revenue neutral,

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but it wouldn’t be. And so the pledge was a simple one sentence.

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If elected, I won’t raise rates,

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and I won’t broaden the base unless it’s revenue neutral.

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So no net tax increase.

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And the presidential pledge is just that.

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I’ll oppose any net tax increase.

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I’ll vote against, oppose, and veto any net tax increase.

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And what that says is there’s a cap on taxes but not a micromanagement

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of how you raise the money or where you raise it from and since the goal is to put a limit

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on the growth of the size of the state and the state’s now about 30-plus percent, federal, state, and local governments, about 30-plus percent of total income in the United States.

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When we were a colony under the Brits, and I think I discussed a book I was writing at the time.

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It’s now out.

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End the IRS Before It Ends Us is the rather dramatic title of it.

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It’s actually a history of taxation in the United States and how it went.

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That said, we were paying 1.5%, 2% of our income in taxes in 1774.

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And we’re now paying upwards of 30%.

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So there’s been some backsliding there. The

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Brits were paying 20% when we were paying one to two. And we were the guys who said

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we’ve had it with you because you’re thinking of going to three. I think at present the

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size of government is larger than it needs to be. And the challenge now is to reform

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government to be less intrusive,

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less expensive, and less controlling of people’s lives.

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I don’t see a need for sugar subsidies or agriculture subsidies or any number of projects

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that the government engages in.

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There’s a lot of savings that can be had.

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They’ve got rid of the Davis-Bacon Act.

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All of our highways would cost 25% less.

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I think that would be a good idea.

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So there’s a lot of savings to be made, but they don’t do them if they think tax increases are an option.

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And whenever tax increases in Washington and most states are an option, instead of reform, you just get tax increases.

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increases. So the real reason to take tax increases off the table is to force a conversation of spending reform and government reform, which has actually happened in a couple of significant ways,

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like the Budget Control Act of 2011. We cut spending over the next decade by $2.5 trillion

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and put a real cap on it. And for the first time, the Pentagon is thinking about reforms that they

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should have done 30 years ago, but they never had to because nobody told them that the choice

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was reform or not get enough money because they will just raise taxes and get enough

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money without the reform. I think we finally convinced them that they’re not getting any

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more money, that the caps are staying, and we’re not going to raise taxes and bust the

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caps. So they’re going to have to do things like um the calvert bill which i commend to everybody here calvert republican congressman

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from california wants to reduce the number of civilian employees at the pentagon by about

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100 000 over the next five years saves 85 billion dollars. I called Dov Zachheim, who used to do the budgets for Reagan and then

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Bush in the Pentagon, who had been talking about this as an issue, that there were at least 200,000

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more civilian employees at the Pentagon than you need. And I said, is the Calvert bill good? I know

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that it sounds like what you’ve been talking about. And he said, well, it’s very good. I wrote it.

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sounds like what you’ve been talking about.

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And he said, well, it’s very good. I wrote it.

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And so you’re talking about $85 billion saved in a five-year period,

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double that in a 10-year period,

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and only going half as far as he thinks we can go and still maintain the military to do all the things

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that they are presently capable of doing.

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That said, there’s an awful lot of resources to be saved,

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and they just haven’t been willing to do it or even interested

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in it. I mean, during the eight years of the Bush administration, President

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Cheney never allowed any discussion

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about spending reform. It wasn’t on the list of

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things to do.

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Oh, no, no.

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We just saved

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$2.5 trillion.

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First of all…

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Oh, it’s not perfect,

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but we saved

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$2.5 trillion

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because of the pledge.

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What the other team wanted

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was $1.4 trillion

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in higher taxes

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and more spending,

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more spending.

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They actually wanted

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spending to go up

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in what was supposed

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to be a deficit reduction package. The pledge is what disallowed that. I had

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a fascinating conversation with Senator Kerry, now Secretary of State Kerry. Senator Kerry

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said, Grover, Grover, your wife and my wife, they should have coffee soon. My wife’s here

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with me. And I said, yes, Senator, that’s a great idea. They should. What do you want?

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Oh, $1.4 trillion in higher taxes. I said,

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I’ll see what I can do. There’s no point in not being polite, but this was not on our

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list of things. I have not played poker with Dennis Kucinich, but I have performed comedy

00:22:18 ►

at the Washington Improv with Dennis Kucinich. I don’t know when he was here last year.

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He is an extremely good ventriloquist.

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And we had him at the improv along with the gentleman who ran for Senate,

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Ed Gillespie, who’s also a ventriloquist, used to be head of the Republican Party nationally.

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And the two of them did one of those crossfire shows.

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So there were four of them debating, but it was each one with a dummy.

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It’s quite good.

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I told that to a politician in Ohio, and he said,

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yes, I used to be a committee man from Cincinnati,

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and I and the guy who was also mayor of Cincinnati

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and used to throw chairs at people at his TV show, Jerry Springer.

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He and Jerry Springer went up

00:23:08 ►

to meet with Dennis Kucinich

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and Dennis had a desk

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which is up several inches

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from where other people get to look at him

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and talk to him.

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And he conducted the entire discussion

00:23:18 ►

with Jerry Springer through a sock puppet.

00:23:21 ►

And Jerry Springer didn’t seem to find

00:23:22 ►

anything odd about this at all.

00:23:24 ►

So he’s a very funny, talented guy, and lots of fun.

00:23:31 ►

And very bright, and his wife is a delight.

00:23:34 ►

All that good stuff.

00:23:37 ►

Oh, yes, well, he sort of misses the point on the size of government,

00:23:40 ►

but nobody’s perfect.

00:23:41 ►

Yeah.

00:23:42 ►

Yeah.

00:23:43 ►

Part of the branding of the Republican Party

00:23:45 ►

is that it is the party of fiscal conservatism

00:23:49 ►

and balanced budgets and small government.

00:23:53 ►

All right?

00:23:54 ►

If you look at the early part of this millennium,

00:23:56 ►

you had a Republican president, a Republican House,

00:23:58 ►

and a Republican Senate,

00:24:00 ►

and what you got was bigger government and bigger deficits.

00:24:04 ►

I posed this question to a friend of mine, and he just looked at me and he said,

00:24:08 ►

the only way we will ever get smaller government is if they hire shorter people.

00:24:16 ►

Do you have a better or more hopeful answer to this?

00:24:19 ►

Sure, yeah.

00:24:21 ►

Step one is the pledge, don’t raise taxes, because that puts a certain cap there.

00:24:25 ►

But step two was focus on spending. And there are little changes that make a big deal.

00:24:34 ►

When they term limited committee chairman in the House and the Senate to six years used to be a committee chairman would be there for 20, 30 years.

00:25:05 ►

It used to be a committee chairman would be there for 20, 30 years, and therefore you could never cross him because if you wanted anything to come out of his committee, you had to give him votes for things that you didn’t agree with or were against your principles or you didn’t think were necessary. appropriations or other legislation or farm issues or military bases.

00:25:10 ►

So you didn’t have 435 members of Congress.

00:25:14 ►

You had about 12 barons who could sit across the table from the president,

00:25:17 ►

and those 13 people would make all the decisions.

00:25:25 ►

And what we decided in 1995, Gingrich showed up late to a meeting of all the freshmen.

00:25:27 ►

Don’t be late to meetings.

00:25:29 ►

And so he’s the new incoming speaker.

00:25:31 ►

And all the freshmen are there.

00:25:32 ►

They’re all like, we ought to do something.

00:25:34 ►

You know, we’re going to be here.

00:25:35 ►

We’re never going to get to be committee chairman. You know, 60 new guys who were elected that year.

00:25:40 ►

And they said, what we should do is term limit all of the committee chairs and the speaker.

00:25:44 ►

And they said, what we should do is term limit all of the committee chairs and the speaker.

00:25:50 ►

And so Gingrich walks into a room where there’s this sort of large revolution going.

00:25:52 ►

It’s like a third or more of his entire caucus.

00:25:56 ►

And immediately concedes on all the issues with one exception.

00:25:58 ►

The speaker should get eight. No, no, he should get eight years, not six, because he’s like the president.

00:26:02 ►

OK, so the best he could get out of that was two additional years.

00:26:07 ►

And that mattered.

00:26:08 ►

That mattered a lot.

00:26:09 ►

That is a mini French revolution every six years, off with all their heads and all those

00:26:13 ►

committee chairmen, and you get new guys coming up, and they compete with each other.

00:26:18 ►

It has really reduced the corruption that you can either have a lot of power right now, I’m the king,

00:26:25 ►

or you can have a lot of power over time. I’m a committee chairman. I can’t cut your head off,

00:26:30 ►

but I can do just about anything else over 30 years. You wish I cut your head off.

00:26:34 ►

So power over a long period of time, even a small amount of power, can really be dangerous just as

00:26:41 ►

a lot of absolute power in a brief, you know, in Caligula’s reign.

00:26:45 ►

Short, but, you know, lots of power in one place.

00:26:50 ►

So the other one was earmarks, which I was not against the earmark revolt when it happened,

00:26:57 ►

but I bought in at first to the idea that it’s only $40 billion and the budget’s a lot more.

00:27:03 ►

It’s not that big a deal.

00:27:04 ►

And the $40 billion doesn’t add to the top amount.

00:27:07 ►

It’s just part of what’s already in the budget.

00:27:09 ►

Except earmarks are what are used to buy the votes.

00:27:14 ►

I will give you $1 million for your district if you vote for something that you otherwise wouldn’t vote for.

00:27:21 ►

I don’t give you the $1 million for nothing.

00:27:24 ►

I don’t give it to you to do something good with.

00:27:27 ►

I do give it to you.

00:27:28 ►

It was the currency of corruption by both parties in Washington, D.C.

00:27:35 ►

When they took that away, that’s one of the reasons you have all this gridlock.

00:27:39 ►

Boehner’s the Republican guy, and he can’t make some of the Republicans do what he wants

00:27:42 ►

because the other days you bring him in.

00:27:44 ►

Do you want any bridges, you idiot? Vote with me. But now you don’t have that.

00:27:50 ►

And so you have to talk to people and give them arguments. And also a lot of stuff doesn’t get

00:27:55 ►

done, which can be good. So getting rid of earmarks was hugely, hugely helpful, as was

00:28:03 ►

term line. And that helps us move to make the other stuff possible.

00:28:08 ►

Sometimes difficult to see.

00:28:09 ►

It’s like your car’s not working.

00:28:10 ►

What’s wrong?

00:28:11 ►

The Congress isn’t doing what you’d like.

00:28:14 ►

Which are the pieces that are broken?

00:28:16 ►

Those were two.

00:28:17 ►

And there are others to find.

00:28:21 ►

So I have a question for you.

00:28:23 ►

Yes. You had talked about how pro-liberty positions tend to be winning over the last few decades.

00:28:31 ►

And I’ve been working in the drug policy reform movement for 15 years.

00:28:44 ►

the public is willing to vote for things that are somewhat more,

00:28:48 ►

give somewhat more liberty,

00:28:51 ►

but they want it to be heavily regulated.

00:28:55 ►

And they’ve confused more regulation

00:28:58 ►

with more safety.

00:29:00 ►

And so, like, they won’t just let people

00:29:03 ►

smoke marijuana anywhere they want, grow it, sell it, do whatever.

00:29:08 ►

No, it’s like you need to get permits in order to have a grow, and you can only sell to people who have other permits to, you know.

00:29:17 ►

And if you fall outside that system, you’re back in the old felonies. So, in fact, we have a larger criminal code, a larger civil code that

00:29:26 ►

talks about marijuana even after we have gotten more liberty, so to speak. I mean, how do we get

00:29:34 ►

either the public or the legislatures to realize that, you know, the way to have more liberty is

00:29:39 ►

to have fewer rules, not more? Yeah. Liberty wins as a political argument,

00:29:46 ►

but you also have to explain to people

00:29:48 ►

that more freedom for you

00:29:50 ►

and the projects you’re working on

00:29:51 ►

is not dangerous to them.

00:29:54 ►

And that’s where some of the rethinking drug prohibition comes in.

00:29:57 ►

People say, well, you may want to have more freedom,

00:29:59 ►

but I’m worried about car accidents or things like that.

00:30:02 ►

And so you can either make the case

00:30:04 ►

by having massive regulations around it so that at the

00:30:09 ►

end of the day, you can smoke marijuana in a padded room, which I guess is less constrictive

00:30:16 ►

than before, but still.

00:30:18 ►

Or you can have some examples that work.

00:30:22 ►

And I think that the Colorado effort was an improvement over Washington,

00:30:27 ►

Washington being more regulated, more like the post office running certain things.

00:30:32 ►

And once some of the fears are reduced, if Colorado can look you in the eye and say,

00:30:39 ►

here’s what didn’t happen and these things that people thought didn’t go wrong, that

00:30:44 ►

people are much more

00:30:45 ►

willing to rethink it.

00:30:47 ►

And again, the same way on the concealed carry permits, which people said, oh, there’ll be

00:30:50 ►

shootouts at the OK Corral.

00:30:51 ►

There weren’t.

00:30:52 ►

And then they started with more regulations on concealed carry permits than one might

00:30:58 ►

want if you’re starting from scratch.

00:31:00 ►

And those regulations have been relaxed over time as people said, well, it doesn’t

00:31:05 ►

cause a problem. Okay, then you can do a little bit more, but almost every two years they’ll go in and

00:31:10 ►

tweak it, and I would argue that if the movement to reduce and the prohibition on marijuana and

00:31:18 ►

other drugs continues to move forward, that’s likely to be the way to do it, and there’s,

00:31:22 ►

to move forward, that’s likely to be the way to do it.

00:31:29 ►

And there’s, I would hesitate, if some state jumped out and did it wrong in a way that caused problems, it would slow everything else down 10 years, even if, you know.

00:31:34 ►

So that’s why there’s a reason for caution in the movement against prohibition, but you’re

00:31:39 ►

going to be forced to have caution by critics of ending drug prohibition who are scared

00:31:44 ►

of something going wrong.

00:31:46 ►

That’s why you end up with overregulation.

00:31:48 ►

I guess I would work to oppose clearly destructive regulations like the stuff in the middle of the Nevada measure,

00:31:57 ►

which advantages existing wholesalers from the liquor and wine industry in marijuana distribution.

00:32:04 ►

I think that was unnecessary and problematic.

00:32:08 ►

Hey, thanks so much for being here.

00:32:10 ►

I’m just wondering, you know, you’ve been talking a lot about liberty,

00:32:13 ►

and it seems like the way that you’re using that word is liberty as in freedom from interference by government

00:32:19 ►

and allowing essentially the free market and the social order to operate in the way that it would naturally.

00:32:23 ►

allowing essentially the free market and the social order to operate in the way that it would naturally.

00:32:27 ►

Now, it strikes me that more or less since our founding,

00:32:31 ►

that free market and social order has been stacked in favor of straight white Christians,

00:32:35 ►

essentially overwhelmingly the constituency for the GOP message.

00:32:40 ►

And it’s easy for me to imagine a lot of cases in which government intervention can actually enhance liberty,

00:32:44 ►

freeing you from being bankrupted by onerous health care costs,

00:32:48 ►

freeing you from having to work three degrading jobs at poverty-level wages,

00:32:51 ►

freeing you from having your vote suppressed in the South.

00:32:56 ►

So I’m wondering if you think that there’s scope for government interventions that can increase freedom and whether this perhaps limited definition of liberty

00:33:01 ►

is a challenge for you in building your movement.

00:33:05 ►

Well, most of the examples you gave are bad things the government does that they shouldn’t.

00:33:11 ►

Southern states not letting blacks vote.

00:33:14 ►

That’s state activity to screw people.

00:33:16 ►

Getting rid of that is expanding liberty.

00:33:20 ►

And a lot of things that drive up the cost of health care,

00:33:24 ►

which make it difficult for low-income people to buy health care,

00:33:26 ►

are government-mandated rules.

00:33:29 ►

New Jersey has 48 things you have to buy insurance for,

00:33:31 ►

even if you don’t want to.

00:33:33 ►

So buying insurance costs you several thousand dollars more in New Jersey

00:33:37 ►

than in Iowa, which just has fewer mandates.

00:33:40 ►

Now, you can buy anything you want,

00:33:41 ►

but why should you be forced to buy something

00:33:43 ►

because that industry or drug has a better lobby than somebody else?

00:33:47 ►

And everybody has to insure for my product and what I want to do.

00:33:57 ►

Well, maybe they don’t want to, and so that drives up the cost

00:33:59 ►

and makes it difficult for people to buy insurance in the first place.

00:34:03 ►

Or the efforts against health savings accounts early on,

00:34:07 ►

which is another way of high deductibles versus efforts that can make it less expensive

00:34:13 ►

for people to insure against big problems as opposed to little problems.

00:34:19 ►

It is conceivable that more state authority can be helpful when you’re designing roads

00:34:26 ►

and insisting that people drive on the right-hand side of the road.

00:34:29 ►

Okay, I’m in.

00:34:31 ►

But when you decide that the Davis-Bacon Act, which was designed to keep blacks out of work,

00:34:37 ►

federal work, is going to raise the cost of federal highway construction by about 25%,

00:34:43 ►

I think getting rid of the Davis-Bacon Act would make everybody better off

00:34:46 ►

and end the discrimination that was intended when they did it and continues to exist.

00:34:52 ►

There’s a long list of things the government does that are inimical to liberty.

00:34:56 ►

Let’s get rid of those.

00:34:58 ►

And people will generally try and sell you.

00:35:00 ►

In the United States, they’ll try and sell you statism in the name of liberty

00:35:03 ►

because that’s the better

00:35:06 ►

sales pitch. But

00:35:08 ►

I think that reducing state control

00:35:10 ►

and state coercion is

00:35:11 ►

the better way to

00:35:13 ►

open that up. Do you think that there’s

00:35:16 ►

any circumstance in which the free market actually

00:35:18 ►

restricts liberty? I’m imagining a case,

00:35:20 ►

for example, of, say, some kind of rapacious

00:35:22 ►

corporate behavior in which

00:35:23 ►

some kind of food is sold without being properly tested or regulated by the FDA?

00:35:27 ►

It makes me sick.

00:35:28 ►

You know, certainly that would seem to me to be a restriction of my liberty.

00:35:31 ►

Well, it is.

00:35:32 ►

And under common law, that’s always been something that you could sue on

00:35:37 ►

if you were damaged by somebody’s good.

00:35:40 ►

The reaction we had, the overreaction I had, is the Food and Drug Administration,

00:35:43 ►

which says you can’t sell anything unless we test it and tell you how to market it,

00:35:47 ►

and we tested for 10 years for safety and effectiveness.

00:35:52 ►

And as a result, whenever the FDA comes in, we have a new drug,

00:35:55 ►

and it’s going to save $5,000 a year,

00:35:57 ►

and we spent the last 10 years deciding whether you could have it.

00:36:00 ►

Ten times five, it’s 50,000 dead people,

00:36:04 ►

and you’re bragging that you’re going to save 5 a year from now on.

00:36:08 ►

Did it have to be 10 years?

00:36:09 ►

Did it have to be 50,000 people?

00:36:12 ►

There’s a very interesting movement that I commend

00:36:14 ►

because in the whole drug prohibition,

00:36:18 ►

pharmaceuticals and other drugs issues,

00:36:22 ►

it’s called the Right to Try.

00:36:24 ►

Are people familiar with this? It started in Arizona, but I believe

00:36:28 ►

about 10 states. I know one of the bodies in California has passed it. I don’t know if both have yet.

00:36:33 ►

It’s passed in Wisconsin. It’s passed in a bunch of odd R&D

00:36:36 ►

states both. It says, the FDA in Washington

00:36:40 ►

says you can’t sell a drug unless it’s been proved

00:36:43 ►

safe and effective. So it won’t

00:36:47 ►

kill you and it will do what it says it’s going to do. He said, as far as we’re concerned in Arizona,

00:36:52 ►

as long as it’s been ruled safe, we don’t mind if people sell it here. We’re not going to make

00:36:58 ►

you take it. We’re not going to subsidize it. But it’s going to be legal in Arizona. As soon as the

00:37:03 ►

feds say it won’t kill you,

00:37:05 ►

that it’s safe, won’t make you sick or worse than you are. If you have a terminal disease,

00:37:10 ►

you can buy that because it might be effective and you don’t have time to wait for the federal

00:37:15 ►

government to spend another five, seven years to decide if it’s effective. This has passed, I think, in 16 states now. And, of course, every year now,

00:37:27 ►

people die who wanted to try a drug that was safe,

00:37:32 ►

but the FDA said wasn’t effective in their view

00:37:35 ►

because they hadn’t had the time to look at it yet.

00:37:38 ►

And it gets many headlines.

00:37:41 ►

And the FDA is now the reason why some of these people, it’s clear to them,

00:37:48 ►

Arizona says, we don’t mind if you make this available. The drug companies won’t sell it

00:37:55 ►

because it’s illegal, right? The FDA says federal crime, can’t do it unless we say so.

00:38:01 ►

The response by the FDA was to take the ability to ask to get into a trial program

00:38:06 ►

for a drug that’s not yet been approved.

00:38:11 ►

It’s gone from 340 hours to do the paperwork to 45 minutes because they can see this coming.

00:38:19 ►

And I think this is a state-up, bottom-up way of getting the FDA to be more responsive to people,

00:38:27 ►

particularly in extremists who have, they’re dying, and they need to try different things,

00:38:33 ►

and they don’t have time to work on the FDA schedule if we’ll get to it.

00:38:38 ►

So the FDA, the way it’s behaved has been a way over reaction to the need to have safe drugs and food, very important.

00:38:50 ►

But the government comes in and promises to solve a problem.

00:38:55 ►

Then they have another list of things, like BLM’s list of food they want provided for them here at Burning Man.

00:39:02 ►

What about government services, Grover?

00:39:04 ►

Why don’t you support government services,

00:39:06 ►

like a million dollars’ worth of goodies for BLM extorted from Burning Man?

00:39:10 ►

That’s not a government service.

00:39:12 ►

That’s extortion.

00:39:13 ►

And I think we could start by getting rid of extortion,

00:39:17 ►

and then we can have a conversation about how big the road should be.

00:39:21 ►

Do you want to tell us about your experience at Burning Man this year?

00:39:25 ►

I heard you came in early and did some volunteering.

00:39:27 ►

Yeah, I came in early this time because I could from schedules and so on.

00:39:35 ►

And I was interested in watching it when there aren’t 50, 60, 70,000 people here, but smaller numbers.

00:39:42 ►

And it’s been fascinating.

00:39:45 ►

It’s been interesting.

00:39:48 ►

Having come the first time, I did a number of things that I could build on that

00:39:53 ►

in terms of meeting new people.

00:39:56 ►

And I met with a guy who helped put together the Israeli burn.

00:40:00 ►

I guess we’re at 70,000.

00:40:02 ►

The Africa burn is at about 10,000, and the one in Israel is about 6,000.

00:40:08 ►

There are a bunch of others, but it’s fun to watch that roll out in other countries

00:40:14 ►

and in their own unique things that they’re doing.

00:40:18 ►

The South Africa one is evidently rocky as opposed to sandy and dusty,

00:40:22 ►

so bicycles have some difficult time there. But otherwise,

00:40:28 ►

it’s actually structured very much like Black Rock City. And I did stand-up comedy at the

00:40:35 ►

Steampunk Saloon. So that was fun. That was my art.

00:40:53 ►

That was fun. That was my art. I’ll give you the opening one. This is a glass of bourbon. Okay. Bourbon. Neat. No ice. Certainly no water. I never drink water.

00:41:06 ►

Dick Cheney tortures people with it.

00:41:08 ►

And it gives it an awkward aftertaste.

00:41:12 ►

I do wonder

00:41:13 ►

when midgets play miniature golf,

00:41:20 ►

do they know?

00:41:23 ►

So, that one takes a while sometimes. Wait a minute. Do they know?

00:41:27 ►

That one takes a while sometimes.

00:41:28 ►

Wait a minute.

00:41:34 ►

That’s fun.

00:41:37 ►

Thanks for doing this.

00:41:39 ►

And I’m sorry I missed the rest of your routine.

00:41:47 ►

I’m less interested in smaller government as i am in smarter more effective government and i think the taxpayer pledge is an interesting tool to try to push things toward

00:41:56 ►

smarter more effective government uh but it’s it is a large blunt tool. And I feel like it cuts both ways.

00:42:05 ►

And one of the ways, one thing it does is that it makes redistribution more difficult.

00:42:11 ►

It takes away government’s major tool for redistribution, from what I can tell.

00:42:17 ►

And I think we do have a pretty blatant distribution issue in this country

00:42:21 ►

where there’s people starving, people who can’t get health care, can’t can’t get food housing and then billionaires who can do whatever they want um and i’m wondering

00:42:31 ►

how you know in your your world you know with a limited government that can’t tax over x amount

00:42:40 ►

how do you deal with that issue you know and is it just the free market, hope it all works out?

00:42:46 ►

I think you take a look at the things that the government does that exacerbates inequality,

00:42:54 ►

that makes it difficult for people.

00:42:57 ►

Five percent, I’m doing some work in the criminal justice reform zone,

00:43:04 ►

and there we see massive over-criminalization,

00:43:08 ►

very long sentences, sometimes mandatory minimum sentences,

00:43:12 ►

that take people out of the workforce for many years,

00:43:15 ►

take them out of their families for many years,

00:43:16 ►

take them out of their communities for many years,

00:43:18 ►

do grave damage to them as individuals,

00:43:21 ►

to them as people who can earn an income for a family,

00:43:24 ►

to them as part, to them as people who can earn an income for a family, to them as part of their community.

00:43:27 ►

Step one, stop doing so much damage.

00:43:31 ►

The doctor who comes in and says,

00:43:33 ►

I’ve got this really great idea who hasn’t done the things he…

00:43:41 ►

If you’re doing damage, I don’t want to hear about your next good idea,

00:43:48 ►

about your next project.

00:43:49 ►

I want to hear about the ways you’re stopping

00:43:52 ►

doing the damage you’re doing.

00:43:54 ►

And then after you’ve stopped it

00:43:56 ►

down to where it’s a dull roar,

00:43:57 ►

the amount of damage you’re doing,

00:43:59 ►

then we might be interested in your conversation

00:44:00 ►

about this really fascinating idea.

00:44:02 ►

Because I looked at the last 200 years

00:44:03 ►

of really fascinating ideas you’ve had,

00:44:05 ►

and often they create more of the problems that they say they want to solve.

00:44:11 ►

I mean, the public, I’m in Washington, D.C., public school system spends a great deal of money.

00:44:17 ►

They spend it very poorly.

00:44:18 ►

They’re not helping kids out.

00:44:21 ►

One of the things I was most disappointed that Obama did was when he came in, there

00:44:25 ►

was a 4,000 student school choice efforts, and 4,000 low-income students could go to

00:44:31 ►

private schools of their choice, and there’s a waiting list many times that, and Obama

00:44:35 ►

came in, and the first thing he did was to kill it, because the teachers’ union didn’t

00:44:39 ►

like it. You know, killing kids’ opportunity to get ahead, killing parents’ opportunity to educate their kids is not the proper role of government.

00:44:48 ►

And it creates inequality and it staples people to the bottom and doesn’t let them rise up.

00:44:54 ►

And when the government quits doing that, I’m willing to listen to their really bright ideas about how to be useful.

00:45:00 ►

But step one is stop putting so much blood on the floor because those kind of decisions by government,

00:45:05 ►

screwing up the public school system, limiting people’s opportunities.

00:45:09 ►

There used to be 5% of Americans working in the 1950s who had a license,

00:45:14 ►

like a doctor’s license or a lawyer’s license to keep a job, to have a job, 5%.

00:45:19 ►

It’s 30% now.

00:45:21 ►

If you want to be an interior decorator in some states, you have to go get a license.

00:45:24 ►

What does that mean? All the present interior decorators get to vote on whether you

00:45:28 ►

can be in that business. Hair braiding, okay, was something that people were doing, and it was

00:45:34 ►

illegal because you have to have 3,000 hours of working, you know, with a beautician getting paid

00:45:43 ►

less than you might otherwise,

00:45:45 ►

and then you can get a license to do what you could already do.

00:45:49 ►

Those government licensing rules, the reason I backed into this by way of criminal justice,

00:45:53 ►

one of the things that we have a consensus on is, in right-left criminal justice work,

00:45:59 ►

is that a lot of these licensing rules start off with no felons.

00:46:04 ►

So if you’ve ever gone to jail, you don’t get to be a barber.

00:46:07 ►

What?

00:46:09 ►

Or a taxi cab driver.

00:46:11 ►

I’m all in favor of perhaps banks might want to check on tellers or something.

00:46:16 ►

But they throw that in just in order to limit the number of people who can get into the business.

00:46:23 ►

There may be times when it’s necessary, but it’s just such a blanket thing.

00:46:27 ►

If you take as much as 30% of the workforce away from somebody trying to get back on their feet,

00:46:32 ►

you’ve really done a great deal of damage.

00:46:34 ►

And I think we have a lot of work to do to get the government to stop doing those things

00:46:39 ►

that create the inequality that they now want to fix.

00:46:42 ►

First, let’s stop doing the things that create it.

00:46:47 ►

So, can we agree that eliminating 100,000 civilian jobs from the Pentagon might be a good idea?

00:46:54 ►

And what about prison reform? Wouldn’t it be good to do some work in that area as well?

00:47:00 ►

Well, Grover Norquist, the ultimate conservative government insider, is working to do something about those issues.

00:47:07 ►

And he does stand-up comedy to boot.

00:47:10 ►

Hopefully you’ve learned that we shouldn’t just ignore those whom we disagree with,

00:47:15 ►

and instead begin looking for some common ground where we can all begin working together to effect some changes in a system that has essentially taken the life of Ross Ulbricht

00:47:26 ►

as a way of threatening you and me into keeping quiet and just going along with the status quo

00:47:32 ►

that the owners of this country are trying to enforce.

00:47:36 ►

Grover Norquist is doing what he thinks best to change the system from within.

00:47:42 ►

But what does one do when the system doesn’t even follow its own rules

00:47:45 ►

and railroads a young man into a lifetime prison cell

00:47:49 ►

without even affording him a chance to defend himself

00:47:52 ►

according to their own rules of law?

00:47:55 ►

Let me bring you up to speed by first playing a short news clip

00:47:59 ►

about Ross Ulbrich and the Silk Road case.

00:48:01 ►

Ulbricht and the Silk Road case.

00:48:10 ►

It’s a secret world used by criminals to buy and sell drugs.

00:48:14 ►

The biggest criminal trial in the history of the Internet is over this morning.

00:48:17 ►

And so apparently is Ross Ulbricht’s freedom.

00:48:18 ►

So it’s life in prison.

00:48:21 ►

That’s what a judge handed down to Ross Ulbricht. I’ve never heard of such a long sentence for something someone did with a computer, essentially. A light sentence for running basically a Craigslist website. In a way,

00:48:31 ►

Ross Ulbricht is the American dream. He’s an entrepreneur. He saw a new market. He went for it.

00:48:36 ►

But Ross Ulbricht’s family is living an American nightmare, one that started the moment they heard

00:48:41 ►

he’d been arrested. In 2011, he set up Silk Road, an

00:48:46 ►

underground marketplace with a libertarian philosophy, he said, to provide privacy and

00:48:52 ►

anonymity. But it became what was later described as a massive criminal enterprise. In 2013,

00:48:59 ►

we showed how easy it was to buy drugs on the site using an encryption service and virtual currency.

00:49:07 ►

There was still a moral code.

00:49:08 ►

Guns and child pornography were banned, and it had nearly a million registered users.

00:49:14 ►

But one man was depicted as the mastermind,

00:49:17 ►

and his trial has far-reaching consequences for the digital age.

00:49:23 ►

Ross Ulbrich’s mother and sister are in New York to visit him in

00:49:27 ►

prison, a place he currently has no prospect of ever leaving. We were both in shock. Ross had never

00:49:34 ►

been in any kind of trouble. He had never been someone that was into drugs or anything and

00:49:43 ►

so we, you know, when we turned on the TV and started getting this full picture,

00:49:48 ►

we were in complete shock.

00:49:49 ►

The punishment would prove far more shocking to them.

00:49:52 ►

In May, he was found guilty of drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking

00:49:57 ►

and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

00:50:01 ►

Silk Road closed, but many black markets sprung up to replace it.

00:50:06 ►

This case highlights the growing tension between Internet freedom and law enforcement.

00:50:12 ►

The fantasy is that the Internet will not be a source for drugs or illegality because of this

00:50:18 ►

sentence. The fantasy is that this sentence is anything more than just purely punitive.

00:50:25 ►

It was an emotionally charged courtroom.

00:50:27 ►

The U.S. government said six victims of fatal overdoses bought the drugs on Silk Road.

00:50:34 ►

I feel for anyone who’s lost a loved one to drug abuse, it’s a horrifying tragedy.

00:50:38 ►

It is, and it was terribly, terribly upsetting.

00:50:41 ►

To his friends and family, he is a bright, kind and principled man. Pretty sure

00:50:47 ►

I want to start a family in the next five years. His defense team claimed he created Silk Road as

00:50:52 ►

a harmless economic experiment, but gave it up after a few months and handed it over to other

00:50:57 ►

operators who later framed him. I want to have had a substantial positive impact on the future of humanity by that time.

00:51:07 ►

The authorities portrayed him as the villain of the dark net, generating millions of dollars in

00:51:12 ►

commissions under the pseudonym of Dread Pirate Roberts. More than a million transactions took

00:51:18 ►

place, but despite the size of Silk Road, the judge dismissed claims he was the fool guy,

00:51:24 ►

lured back by the real pirates of the ship as prosecutors were closing in.

00:51:29 ►

Do you think that Ross has been unfairly targeted, used as a political tool?

00:51:37 ►

They’ve made him the poster boy of the drug war.

00:51:40 ►

And so in that way, yes.

00:51:45 ►

And they’ve given him an unprecedented draconian sentence

00:51:49 ►

that is never given to drug dealers, no matter how big.

00:51:56 ►

And so, yeah, I do.

00:51:58 ►

I think they’re using him as an example, which you could call a tool.

00:52:03 ►

A high-profile dark web conviction looked like a great coup for the FBI,

00:52:09 ►

but there was a bizarre twist.

00:52:11 ►

Two federal agents tasked with looking into Silk Road

00:52:14 ►

were themselves being investigated

00:52:16 ►

and were later charged for using it for their own gain.

00:52:20 ►

To have that not known to the jury is, to me, a big scandal.

00:52:25 ►

They could commandeer accounts, change passwords, reset PIN numbers.

00:52:29 ►

They had access to bank accounts.

00:52:32 ►

They had access to write on the forum and on the marketplace.

00:52:36 ►

I mean, they had complete unfettered access for almost a year.

00:52:42 ►

And they were covering up, I assume, their stealing.

00:52:47 ►

And so I just think a lot of the evidence has been tainted.

00:52:51 ►

The FBI has never explained how it infiltrated the hidden servers.

00:52:56 ►

It is the new reality in a world of heightened surveillance.

00:52:59 ►

But some privacy experts say it sets a dangerous precedent

00:53:03 ►

for the FBI to hack any website in the world without a warrant.

00:53:08 ►

If it were a file cabinet or a desk drawer in a physical location,

00:53:15 ►

it would be clearly unconstitutional.

00:53:18 ►

But they’re saying because it’s a laptop, they don’t need that kind of warrant.

00:53:23 ►

But a laptop is like a file cabinet on steroids.

00:53:25 ►

It’s way more than a file cabinet.

00:53:28 ►

And so this is a big question for the digital age, very important.

00:53:31 ►

There’s people who’ve said they’re using this case

00:53:34 ►

as almost like a Trojan horse to sneak in precedent

00:53:37 ►

to control the Internet and also to bypass our protections.

00:53:44 ►

I think it’s an opportunity, almost a duty,

00:53:47 ►

to talk about what I’ve seen up close and personal

00:53:51 ►

about what the government does and how they operate

00:53:54 ►

in convicting a non-violent person

00:53:56 ►

and sentencing him to basically being buried alive

00:54:00 ►

for the rest of his life for something he did when he was 26.

00:54:06 ►

Lynn and her daughter could be making this trip to see Ross for the rest of their lives.

00:54:14 ►

He begged the judge to leave a light at the end of the tunnel and leave me my old age.

00:54:20 ►

She said she wanted to deter others. The market has continued to grow as his family

00:54:27 ►

continue to fight for an appeal on the Free Ross website.

00:54:32 ►

To think of my brother never being free again is really upsetting. So in my timeline, thinking

00:54:40 ►

about Ross, I just think about the appeal. And that’s as far as I can go because we’re never going to stop fighting for him until he’s out.

00:54:48 ►

So I just can’t even think about any longer than that.

00:54:52 ►

I know if he left that building tomorrow, he wouldn’t go build another Silk Road.

00:54:58 ►

He wouldn’t be on the other side of the law at all.

00:55:02 ►

The punishment is way beyond the crime, and this is a country of second chances.

00:55:07 ►

And I’m not only raw,

00:55:09 ►

so I’d like to see a lot of people

00:55:10 ►

get a second chance.

00:55:11 ►

Thanks for listening.

00:55:14 ►

Bye-bye.

00:55:15 ►

He conceded it was a naive

00:55:17 ►

and costly idea he regrets.

00:55:19 ►

The pioneer has been prosecuted,

00:55:22 ►

but it’s uncharted waters

00:55:23 ►

with big era-defining issues to navigate.

00:55:29 ►

So why, if we are truly living in a democracy that’s governed by the rule of law, and not just on the whims of our rulers,

00:55:38 ►

why do you think that the jury in the Silk Road case wasn’t allowed to hear all of the evidence in Ross Ulbricht’s favor?

00:55:45 ►

Silk Road case, wasn’t allowed to hear all of the evidence in Ross Ulbrich’s favor. Could it be because ever since that crazy Bush kid launched this world war on terrorism that we have slipped

00:55:51 ►

almost without noticing it into neo-fascism? Well, it seems that way to me at least.

00:55:58 ►

There are some really bad guys in this story, but Ross Ulbrich isn’t one of them.

00:56:03 ►

Let’s face it, what he did was to create a website

00:56:06 ►

not all unlike eBay or Craigslist that allowed buyers and sellers to interact in a civilized,

00:56:12 ►

non-violent manner. And for that, he is now serving two consecutive terms of life in prison

00:56:18 ►

without the possibility of parole. And in her twisted mind, this nutty judge added another 40 years to the second life

00:56:26 ►

sentence, as if Ross was actually going to come back from the dead twice. Really, people? Life

00:56:32 ►

in prison for operating a website? Really? There obviously is something else going on here that the

00:56:38 ►

government is trying to sweep under the rug. Let me play another short clip for you, and it’s an interview that

00:56:45 ►

Luke Rudowski did with Ross Ulbricht’s mother at the Porcupine Freedom Festival this past summer.

00:56:52 ►

This is Luke Rudowski of WeAreChange.org here at Porkfest, and I’m joined by Lynn Ulbricht,

00:56:58 ►

the mother of Ross Ulbricht. And after the case has been over, Lynn has told me just the most

00:57:04 ►

insane information that has been coming out that wasn’t able to come out before.

00:57:08 ►

She gave us a full picture of just the insane kind of measures the federal government went to put Ross Ulbricht in jail for the rest of his life, life without parole.

00:57:20 ►

Now, this information I never heard before, and it’s very important to find out

00:57:26 ►

what happened because it sets very dangerous precedents for the Internet. And also,

00:57:31 ►

there’s a possibility that we could also help out and do something to help Ross out. Now, Lynn,

00:57:36 ►

one of the things that shocked me and surprised me is what happened to Reason Magazine. What happened?

00:57:43 ►

Well, people were very shocked at the sentence. It was draconian. It was

00:57:47 ►

over the top. And many people expressed that shock. Few of them were on Reason.com. And you

00:57:54 ►

could say they were obnoxious remarks, but they weren’t abnormal for the Internet. And the federal

00:58:01 ►

government decided that it didn’t like those. And they issued a grand jury subpoena to Reason Magazine to force them

00:58:08 ►

to reveal private information about these individuals

00:58:11 ►

so that presumably they could go after them and prosecute them

00:58:15 ►

and potentially put them in prison.

00:58:18 ►

So Reason was being forced to do that.

00:58:23 ►

And then they issued a gag order that Reason wasn’t allowed to discuss this.

00:58:27 ►

Wow. So the Reason couldn’t even describe what was happening to them

00:58:30 ►

because of this order that they were throwing at them as well.

00:58:34 ►

Now, we also know Chuck Schumer also has his fingerprints all over this case as well.

00:58:39 ►

Can you tell us how he is involved?

00:58:41 ►

Well, Chuck Schumer initially called for the closing down of the Silk Road in June of 11.

00:58:47 ►

And when Ross was arrested in California, strangely, he was brought to New York to be

00:58:53 ►

tried into Chuck Schumer’s state. The main prosecutor is Preet Bharara, who was Chuck

00:58:57 ►

Schumer’s special counsel for a couple of decades. And the judge presiding over the trial is Catherine Forrest, who was recommended by Chuck Schumer for her position.

00:59:08 ►

Chuck Schumer publicly convicted Ross before trial, congratulating DOJ,

00:59:15 ►

hey, you got your man, good work, before trial.

00:59:18 ►

This was a trampling on a very basic tenet of our law and our justice system,

00:59:25 ►

which is the presumption of innocence.

00:59:27 ►

We are innocent until proven, at trial, guilty.

00:59:32 ►

And Chuck Schumer just decided to bypass trial and convict Ross in his state

00:59:36 ►

where Ross is being tried publicly and saying he was guilty.

00:59:40 ►

We also know during the court proceedings,

00:59:42 ►

there was a lot of decisions made by the judge that didn’t let Ross defend himself fully.

00:59:47 ►

There’s a lot of evidence. There’s a lot of witnesses.

00:59:50 ►

Can you give us just some of the details about what was happening during the trial

00:59:53 ►

and why a lot of people online are saying it was rigged from the very beginning?

00:59:58 ►

Well, first of all, cross-examination was curtailed.

01:00:03 ►

Things that a government agent under oath stated were deemed irrelevant

01:00:09 ►

and the jury was told to forget they ever heard about it.

01:00:13 ►

Witnesses for the defense who wanted to challenge the federal witnesses about Bitcoin,

01:00:19 ►

about technology, were blocked from speaking at the trial.

01:00:24 ►

And basically, without witnesses and without the ability to cross-examine effectively,

01:00:28 ►

it’s hard to have a fair trial.

01:00:30 ►

In addition, there was evidence that was precluded,

01:00:34 ►

and it’s come out now that there were two corrupt agents

01:00:37 ►

who were using their access to Silk Road to steal almost a million dollars,

01:00:41 ►

and they had full keys to the kingdom.

01:00:45 ►

They could change passwords, reset P reset pin numbers commandeer accounts including the dpr’s account and it’s on and on

01:00:52 ►

private messages keys um posts on the forum and marketplace they had full access to the site for

01:00:59 ►

almost a year and um this is going to be part of the appeal because how can you trust evidence taken from the

01:01:06 ►

server and from the site when these corrupt agents had access to the whole thing? And when they were

01:01:12 ►

operating the site, the defense used families who died from drugs during the sentencing hearing as

01:01:20 ►

well. But the federal agents had control of the site as well. Is that correct? The federal government seized the site in June of 11. And after that, two of the six people that

01:01:30 ►

allegedly died from drugs sold on Silk Road died. And so the federal government had the ability to

01:01:36 ►

close it down. But I’d like to say something about that. I feel terrible for those parents

01:01:40 ►

of the people who died from drugs, however. However, to have a courtroom run by a

01:01:47 ►

motion is not what’s supposed to happen. It’s supposed to be facts and evidence. And we hired

01:01:52 ►

a forensic pathologist to go through each alleged death, and he concluded, and he’s very experienced,

01:02:00 ►

that there’s no way to scientifically, categorically say that those people died from

01:02:04 ►

drugs from Silk Road, or that those people died from drugs from Silk Road

01:02:05 ►

or that they even died of drugs or those particular drugs at all,

01:02:08 ►

or even drugs at all.

01:02:09 ►

One of them had been in the hospital with pneumonia.

01:02:11 ►

He’d just been released.

01:02:12 ►

So it was run by emotion,

01:02:15 ►

and that is, I don’t think, has a place in a courtroom.

01:02:18 ►

And it’s also very questionable how the government got into the servers

01:02:21 ►

because it’s a big mystery, isn’t it?

01:02:24 ►

Yeah, it certainly is.

01:02:25 ►

There was a declaration by ex-FBI agent Christopher Tarbell, who was the head of the investigation.

01:02:30 ►

Didn’t show up at trial, by the way.

01:02:32 ►

And so he couldn’t be cross-examined about it.

01:02:34 ►

But he declared how he found the server and experts all over the world cried foul, said that is impossible.

01:02:42 ►

It’s gibberish.

01:02:43 ►

It’s a lie, basically. And he said, well,

01:02:47 ►

I’d answer you, but I, oh, darn it, I didn’t save my work. So I can’t prove what I’m saying.

01:02:52 ►

Just trust me. And meanwhile, this is under oath. And experts are saying it doesn’t even

01:02:59 ►

jive with the FBI’s own evidence.

01:03:01 ►

Not only did they lie, but they also made sure the jury didn’t hear about the corrupt agents

01:03:06 ►

as well. Oh, correct. That was precluded.

01:03:08 ►

And really, to me, the corrupt agents

01:03:10 ►

are a scandal, but the real scandal

01:03:11 ►

is that this was precluded from trial,

01:03:14 ►

preventing the jury to hear

01:03:15 ►

this evidence. And it would

01:03:18 ►

have changed the whole trial.

01:03:19 ►

They never got the full story as well.

01:03:22 ►

And this is a very dangerous

01:03:24 ►

precedent for the Internet because, you know, technically, you know, what Ross set up or allegedly set up.

01:03:30 ►

He says he set it up. He says he created it.

01:03:33 ►

Technically, under this kind of rule, if someone orders drugs on Facebook or uses Facebook to talk to a friend and say, hey, I want to buy some drugs through the messenger,

01:03:42 ►

Facebook is facilitating that sale through the communications of it,

01:03:46 ►

and now Zuckerberg should go to jail as well if we’re playing by the same rules.

01:03:53 ►

But obviously we’re not playing by the same rules.

01:03:55 ►

Can you also just maybe expand on the dangerous precedent that was set with this case?

01:03:59 ►

Well, there actually are several.

01:04:01 ►

One of them is that they used almost all digital evidence for their evidence,

01:04:06 ►

which lowers the standard of evidence tremendously

01:04:08 ►

because it’s very easily created, edited, faked.

01:04:13 ►

And there’s other courts that have thrown it out.

01:04:16 ►

And even a mortgage company won’t take a screenshot of a bank statement

01:04:19 ►

because it’s so easily faked.

01:04:20 ►

And yet it’s used to put a man away for his life.

01:04:24 ►

And look, whether you believe

01:04:27 ►

they’re digital evidence or not, the point is, is that the potential is there to create

01:04:31 ►

digital evidence to go after people. It’s a very troubling precedent. That’s just one.

01:04:38 ►

There was also the president of the Fourth Amendment, as you mentioned, how did they

01:04:41 ►

find the server? They say, even if we hacked into it, it’s fine. We can do that. So they’re saying they can hack into a foreign server

01:04:48 ►

without a warrant. In addition, there’s a question about how they searched the laptop, Ross’s

01:04:55 ►

laptop, because now, if that had been a file cabinet, a physical file cabinet, it would be

01:05:01 ►

clearly unconstitutional to do it the way they did which was have a general warrant with no particularity

01:05:06 ►

but the 4th amendment requires

01:05:08 ►

particularity, you have to say

01:05:10 ►

I’m looking for this file in the file cabinet

01:05:12 ►

they say well if it’s a laptop that doesn’t

01:05:14 ►

apply, we can just say we’re a laptop

01:05:16 ►

and we’ll rummage around and go on a fishing

01:05:18 ►

expedition and find anything we want

01:05:20 ►

this is a very important point for the

01:05:22 ►

digital age because of course

01:05:23 ►

a laptop is like

01:05:25 ►

a file cabinet on steroids. It’s like we all keep our information on a laptop or a phone,

01:05:30 ►

and they’re saying, well, Fourth Amendment protections do not apply. And so this is very

01:05:35 ►

important. In addition, Ross has been made a poster boy for this failed drug war. And if you

01:05:42 ►

care about the drug war, this is a battle in that drug war. And you can

01:05:46 ►

help us by helping us appeal it because that’s what they’re doing. They’re making an example.

01:05:52 ►

Yeah. I remember Judge Forrest making the kind of example during sentencing saying that

01:05:58 ►

this wasn’t helping the war on drugs. This was escalating the war on drugs. But you guys,

01:06:04 ►

the defense also did a lot of research into this,

01:06:06 ►

the effect of the Silk Road on the kind of war on drugs.

01:06:09 ►

Can you tell us about some of the results?

01:06:11 ►

Yeah, well, because they brought these alleged overdose deaths

01:06:15 ►

and, you know, this emotional manipulation,

01:06:18 ►

not only did we hire a forensic pathologist,

01:06:20 ►

but we also, there were people who’d done academic research into the Silk Road

01:06:24 ►

who came to

01:06:25 ►

the conclusion that it saved lives, that it actually brought, removed violence from the drug world,

01:06:30 ►

and they were making that point, and the judge dismissed that, said that’s not true, and then

01:06:35 ►

since then, there was a global survey done in England of 100,000 people who came to exactly

01:06:43 ►

the same conclusion that Silk Road did save lives.

01:06:46 ►

So, you know, I’m not necessarily defending Silk Road and everything that was on it or anything like that,

01:06:50 ►

but that is a point, yeah.

01:06:53 ►

That is a very important point because this case is extremely complex but extremely important.

01:06:58 ►

Is there anything else that we missed that people should know that they don’t know about this trial

01:07:03 ►

that couldn’t come out during the court proceedings?

01:07:10 ►

Well, of course, a lot of it’s come out since. I think people really need to focus on the fact it’s very easily easy to be distracted. There’s a lot of sensationalism

01:07:15 ►

around this case. There’s, you know, the alleged murder for hire that, by the way, was never

01:07:18 ►

charged, never convicted, and that I don’t believe for a minute, but was used against Ross. It was used to deprive him of bail, deprive him of a witness list in time,

01:07:29 ►

used very heavily at trial, and then at the sentencing to justify life in prison.

01:07:33 ►

But it was never charged, never proven, never convicted.

01:07:36 ►

So that’s important to know because I feel like it smeared Ross’s name.

01:07:41 ►

But, oh gosh.

01:07:44 ►

I mean, that’s what’s all over the media now.

01:07:47 ►

I mean, when you look at the Silk Road case,

01:07:49 ►

when it’s covered by the mainstream media,

01:07:50 ►

the main thing that they were hammering away is,

01:07:53 ►

you know, murder for hire, murder for hire, murder for hire,

01:07:55 ►

but Ross wasn’t even officially charged with that in any way, shape, or form.

01:08:00 ►

Many people do not even know this,

01:08:01 ►

but it was thrown out there by the prosecution

01:08:04 ►

as a way to get the emotional kind of feelings, and they played on emotions of a lot of the juries.

01:08:09 ►

And a lot of the things that happened seem extremely underhanded by the federal government

01:08:14 ►

with their prosecution of Ross. And what is the next step? What can people do to help?

01:08:20 ►

Is there a chance of appeal? I mean, obviously, the information that you’re telling us now that

01:08:24 ►

came out after the court case is extremely damning of the federal government.

01:08:28 ►

What are the chances of appeal, and how can people help you and Ross out right now?

01:08:33 ►

Well, Ross is appealing, and the defense is filed, and our lawyer says we have very good points, very, very strong points for appeal.

01:08:46 ►

It’s not cheap to appeal.

01:08:47 ►

We already owe a ton from the trial.

01:08:51 ►

Trials are extremely expensive.

01:08:53 ►

And going forward, we have to fund this appeal.

01:08:55 ►

So we’re only one family, and we’re not a wealthy family.

01:08:59 ►

And, you know, there’s no hidden wallet.

01:09:01 ►

There’s no money out there.

01:09:03 ►

We’ve gotten a ton of support that’s gotten us this far.

01:09:06 ►

And, of course, with our own efforts.

01:09:09 ►

People can help by going to freeross.org and giving what you can.

01:09:13 ►

I mean, even if 1,000 people gave the price of a cup of coffee, that would help.

01:09:17 ►

You know, it needs to be grassroots.

01:09:20 ►

Because this is going to affect us all.

01:09:22 ►

It’s not just about my son, you know, my personal thing. I see it as a bigger battle as well, because these precedents, we’re at a crossroads

01:09:29 ►

in history right now, and we’ve left the 20th century. We are careening into the digital age,

01:09:34 ►

and they are making laws and precedents that are going to impact all of us going forward. And this

01:09:40 ►

is a very, very pivotal time in history, And this is a very important battle at that time against the drug war, but also against digital privacy and really freedom.

01:09:52 ►

So please help us. We need the help.

01:09:58 ►

It can’t be more clear than that.

01:10:00 ►

Ross Ulbricht’s family needs all of the support that they can get in order to file a strong appeal.

01:10:06 ►

Now, do you want your laptop to be subject to random searches without a warrant?

01:10:10 ►

Do you have a website or a blog that you think should be your private domain

01:10:14 ►

and free from government hackers who have no warrant or other legal right to break into your files?

01:10:20 ►

Or do you figure that, well, this is just somebody else’s problem?

01:10:23 ►

Or do you figure that, well, this is just somebody else’s problem?

01:10:30 ►

And what do you think actually happened that caused this pinheaded judge to do the bidding of a New York senator and make an example of a young man whose so-called crime was operating a website?

01:10:36 ►

Well, here’s my guess.

01:10:38 ►

We know for a fact that two of Obama’s secret service goons hacked into the Silk Road server and gained root access.

01:10:50 ►

They changed PIN numbers, rated accounts, sent messages using other people’s handles,

01:10:56 ►

including false messages from Dread Pirate Roberts that were used to implicate Ross Ulbrich in things that he was never even involved in.

01:10:59 ►

Then they stole several million dollars in Bitcoin from the site,

01:11:03 ►

Then they stole several million dollars in Bitcoin from the site,

01:11:09 ►

and they set up Ross so as to create a diversion that they hoped would help them get away with their crime.

01:11:16 ►

My personal belief is that the federal government, aided and abetted by Senator Schumer and Judge Forrest, along with Obama’s private Secret Service army,

01:11:20 ►

framed Ross Ulbricht so as to create some legal precedents

01:11:23 ►

that ultimately are going to have a

01:11:25 ►

very serious downside for all of us who depend on the internet being ours to use as we see fit.

01:11:32 ►

So I’m urging you, which I don’t remember ever doing before, but this time I’m urging you to go

01:11:37 ►

to www.freeross.org and at the very least sign up for their mailing list so as to let Ross know that

01:11:46 ►

another person is on his side. There are several ways that you can donate to his appellate defense

01:11:52 ►

fund, including Bitcoin. And since some of our fellow salonners had made Bitcoin donations to

01:11:58 ►

the salon during our spring pledge drive, well, I figured that this would be the best use for that Bitcoin.

01:12:09 ►

And so I passed them along to Ross’s defense fund from the salon.

01:12:16 ►

Well, I guess that this podcast is about as far from a happy holiday message as can be.

01:12:22 ►

Actually, I’ve been planning on using this holiday period to play some new talks that were recently sent to me.

01:12:23 ►

And I’ll start doing that with my next podcast.

01:12:26 ►

I haven’t previewed these talks yet, but they include tapes from Sasha Shulgin, Terrence McKenna, and Jonathan Ott, among others.

01:12:33 ►

So some entertaining mind candy will begin coming your way again next week.

01:12:38 ►

Well, thanks for sticking with me today.

01:12:41 ►

I don’t often go off on an all-podcast rant like this, and I promise to be a little more upbeat next week.

01:12:48 ►

But to be honest, I feel great

01:12:51 ►

now that I’ve gotten all this off my chest.

01:12:54 ►

In fact, you may want to bring up Ross’s situation

01:12:56 ►

at your family meals during the end-of-the-year holiday season.

01:13:00 ►

It might provide some interesting new spice

01:13:03 ►

for your family meals at this time of year.

01:13:06 ►

Now, to unwind a bit, I’m going to sign off here and go listen to my favorite Terrence McKenna tribute album.

01:13:13 ►

It’s called Journey Through the Spheres and was produced as a fundraiser to help with Terrence’s medical expenses in the months just before he died.

01:13:22 ►

And for you musicians who like to include a McKenna soundbite with your work,

01:13:26 ►

I recommend that you listen to this entire CD

01:13:29 ►

so as to get a feeling for the flow of the work

01:13:31 ►

and the ways in which Terrence’s voice

01:13:34 ►

has been integrated into the music.

01:13:36 ►

Unfortunately, there was only a very small pressing of that CD,

01:13:40 ►

and I haven’t seen it being offered anywhere

01:13:42 ►

for over a decade now.

01:13:44 ►

But never fear.

01:13:46 ►

I posted it on our Find the Others forums under the music topic,

01:13:50 ►

and you can download it there.

01:13:52 ►

As you know, you can give the forums a try for a year for free

01:13:56 ►

by signing up as a student member.

01:13:58 ►

You don’t have to be in school to be a student in the salon.

01:14:01 ►

All you have to be is a student of the new and interesting ideas we try

01:14:05 ►

to promote here. So I hope to see you there. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:14:12 ►

Cyberdelic Space. Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you. So here we are, once again,

01:14:53 ►

gathered to contemplate the forward rush

01:14:58 ►

toward the unspeakable,

01:15:00 ►

the historical ascent from the unknowable,

01:15:04 ►

and this very delicate moment of equilibrium,

01:15:09 ►

which is called the here and now.

01:15:13 ►

How are we doing?

01:15:15 ►

How are we doing in the here and now? What we all share, I think,

01:15:34 ►

is this belief that spirit is in ascent,

01:15:40 ►

that spirit is manifesting and moving toward completion.

01:16:09 ►

Now, some people don’t like the word spirit.

01:16:15 ►

They think you have to have a philosophical and theological disputation going if you talk about spirit.

01:16:17 ►

Let’s just define it here for practical purposes as consciousness.

01:16:28 ►

practical purposes as consciousness. The feeling of being conscious is the feeling of the indwelling of spirit. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

482 - Help Save Ross Ulbricht & Internet Freedom

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Program Notes

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Similar Episodes

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