The Thin Blue Whine, Pt. I: Petulant Police Demand Impunity

Stand up for thuggery! Hundreds of Portland, Oregon police officers and supporters surround City Hall during a protest march on behalf of Officer Chris Humphreys, who was placed on administrative leave (that is, paid vacation) following repeated use of unnecessary force -- including the lethal beating of a terrified and helpless 145-lb. man who suffered from schizophrenia.



Violence "is unpredictable, chaotic and thoughtless" by its nature, observed Peter Taylor in a recent op-ed column published in The Oregonian. "It doesn't like to be confined and doesn't lend itself to cooperation.... It is saddening to see the effects of violence on its victims, those who witness it and, yes, also those who wield it against others."


As the final clause in that sentence suggests, Taylor's point is not to sympathize with victims of "unpredictable, chaotic and thoughtless" violence, but rather to defend those who often employ it. Taylor is an officer with the Portland Police Bureau, and his column was intended to explain why he -- along with several hundred others -- took part in a protest march and rally outside Portland's City Hall in defense of Officer Chris Humphreys.


Along with his comrades, Officer Taylor wore a customized t-shirt containing the slogan: "I am Chris Humphreys." He used the same rallying cry to wrap up his op-ed column. And like his comrades, Taylor -- either through invincible innate ignorance, or as a result blindness induced through cult-like devotion to his professional clique (these are not mutually exclusive possibilities) -- cannot understand that this description is an indictment.


Last month, Humprheys was put on administrative leave (which is a "money for nothing" proposition) after shooting a 12-year-old girl point-blank with a "less lethal" beanbag round during what we're all but required to call a "fight" or "altercation" on a MAX train platform in Portland. The 12-year-old, who was banned from traveling on the train, put up what resistance she could when Officer Aaron Dauchy tried to place her under arrest. She was down on the ground and wasn't going anywhere when Humphreys, after circling around to find the best angle, shot her with the beanbag round. A third officer was present during the incident, just in case the two tax-engorged "heroes" couldn't handle the little girl.

*** ***

Two police officers should be able to handle an unarmed 12-year-old girl, even one who weighed 150 pounds, most of it bad attitude.


"I don't care how big she is," commented retired police officer Mike Davis, a 30-year veteran of the Portland Police Bureau. "Two grown men using proper holds should be able to subdue her and get her into the police car without incident."


Davis, who now works for a fitness company, believes that episodes of this sort are the inevitable product that results from adding "less lethal" toys to the arsenal of physically unfit police officers.


"The officers are in pathetic shape, for the most part," Davis told The Oregonian. "If you don't have any confidence that you can handle something physically, you go up the ladder too quickly on the continuum of force." As a result, police "rely too much on all these little tools we've go: Taser. Mace. Beanbag gun. Asp. You can't shoot everyone. You can't Taser everyone. Well, maybe we can."


When fired at point-blank range, a beanbag round can seriously injure or even kill a victim, so the victim was lucky to escape with a bad bruise. But this is not the only reason the girl shot by Officer Humphreys could consider herself fortunate. The last time Humphreys was involved in a case of excessive force, the victim didn't survive.


Twice a victim: James Chasse, seen here before being lethally "protected and served" by three of Portland's, ahem, "Finest," was a successful musician before being stricken with schizophrenia.

On September 17 2006 (Constitution Day, ironically enough), Humphreys was one of three law enforcement officers -- two PPB officers and a Multnomah County Sheriff's Deputy -- who chased down and beat to death a 145-pound schizophrenia victim named James Chasse.


Known to many people in his neighborhood as a gentle and talented man -- a successful musician and artist before the onset of his mental illness -- Chasse was beaten so severely by the bold and valiant guardians of the public that nearly all of his ribs were fractured. Several of them had been pulverized. He was also treated to a dose from law enforcement's favorite "non-lethal" toy, the portable electro-shock torture device (more commonly called a Taser).


A coroner's report listed "blunt force trauma" as the cause of Chasse's death. The official report on Chasse's arrest described the cause of death as "broad-based .... blunt-force chest trauma" consistent with an impact in which the victim was slammed against a hard surface with a body on top of him -- in short, with being "pancaked."


Chasse weighed 142 pounds. Humphreys, a well-fed tax-feeder, outweighed him by roughly 100 pounds. Humphreys initially claimed that he didn't land on Chasse, but rather went "right over and past" him. That would mean that the fatal concussive blows that wrecked nearly all of Chasse's ribs were the result of either hands-on brutality, or an immaculate beating by unseen creatures from another realm. My money is on some combination of "pancaking" and gang violence inflicted by Humphreys and his comrades.


Witnesses at the scene describe how Humphreys and his colleagues (tax-feeders only operate in packs, remember) repeatedly punched and kicked the victim. The officers did admit -- in the highly qualified, self-justifying language of trained liars -- to using "pressure point" strikes and judiciously applied blows with fists and forearms. But by that time, according to the post-mortem, were incidental to Chasse's death; the fatal damage had already been done by the time those blows were struck. Chasse's "offense" was public urination.


The beating he endured, however, was "street justice" administered for the supposed crime of "contempt of cop," which he committed by fleeing from the armed strangers who accosted him, as would any rational person incapable of effectively defending himself against the state's designated agents of "unpredictable, chaotic and thoughtless" violence.

A life drains away while tax-feeders dither: The mortally woundedJames Chasse lies hog-tied at the feet of the police who beat him. Why weren't the EMTs -- the only people in this picture ready and inclined to do something worthwhile -- permitted to take him to the hospital?

After being beaten to within an inch of his life, Chasse was taken to jail. He slipped that final inch en route to the hospital -- not in an ambulance, mind you, but bound hand and foot in the back of a police car.


Nearly two hours had elapsed between the beating and Chasse's death, much of it wasted at the local jail. Detention officers, after taking a good look at the victim, refused to book him into the jail, demanding that he be taken to a hospital instead. Had he received immediate medical help, Chasse might still be alive. An ambulance was available on-site after the arrest. But the Droogs who murdered him -- Officer Humphreys and Kyle Nice, and Deputy Bret Burton, who has since been hired by the Portland Police Bureau -- had other priorities.


When it comes to beating and hog-tying people on the streets, the murder of James Chasse wasn't Chris Humprheys' first rodeo. An investigation conducted by the independent Wilamette Week discovered that Humphreys "has used force more often than almost all of the other 785 officers" whose arrests were cataloged in a PPB database. Only one officer had been involved in a greater number of "use of force" incidents.


Humphreys was second among 422 officers who used takedowns, restraining holds and pressure points on suspects. Among 295 officers who had used "impact" strikes -- the use of punches, kicks, batons, or flashlights -- Humphreys was at the top of the list. He was number five on the hit parade of officers who had injured suspects. Of the 17 suspects injured at his hands, only two of them were taken to a hospital.


In one episode, Humphreys struck a man 30 times with his baton before discovering -- D'oh! -- that the victim wasn't the suspect he was after. This incident led to a lawsuit against the Portland municipal government that was settled for $90,000 in taxpayer money. Under the terms of that settlement, Humphreys wasn't required to admit wrongdoing.


Last July, Multnomah County hit up the taxpayers for another $925,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by James Chasse's family. This happened after the PPB review board reportedly cleared Humphreys and his cohorts of wrongdoing. Not that there was a great deal of suspense involved in awaiting the board's ruling, of course.

Thugs in arms, unite! Sgt. Scott Westermann, chief commissar of the Portland police union.

Even if one concludes that Chasse's death was the result of a tragic mishap rather than a crime, Humphreys still has the kind of baggage that would make him, at best, a dubious representative of the police.


Yet Sgt. Scott Westermann, capo of the Portland police union, insists that Humphreys has always "exemplified everything one could imagine a police officer should be." That is to say, all cops should be Christopher Humphreys. Which would mean, of course, that there would be nothing wrong with all detainees ending up like James Chasse.


Humphreys was put on "administrative leave" -- a supposedly punitive paid vacation -- after shooting the 12-year-old with the beanbag shotgun. This decision riled up Westermann and his knuckle-draggers, who began howling that Humphreys had "suffered" enough.


Following a union no-confidence vote and the above-mentioned street march, Police Chief Rosie Sizer and Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman decided to placate the armed legions by putting Humphreys back on active duty, albeit behind a desk.


In a spectacularly perverse coda to the affair, Humphreys -- the one whose bulk inflicted the mortal injuries on an incurably sick, helpless man, the same officer who rarely considers it necessary to take the victims of his officially sanctioned violence to the hospital -- has filed a stress disability claim.


This little bit of benefit-spiking will probably pay off handsomely when it comes time for Humphreys to collect his taxpayer-provided union pension. None of his victims -- past or future -- will enjoy the same benefits, of course. And the taxpayers will continue to absorb the costs of indemnifying the "unpredictable, chaotic and thoughtless" violence carried out by police who insist that the public should see Humphreys as Chaucer's "parfait, gentil knight," rather than a marauding misfit with a government-issued license to kill.


Whole lotta Rosie: Portland Police Chief Rosie Sizer folded like a poorly manufactured deck chair in the face of the local Jackboot Union's demands. (Hey, is it just me, or does Rosie look like Sean Hannity in a Princess Di wig?)

"Portland police are all about imposing discipline, not exercising it," observes Oregonian columnist Steve Duin, who laments the culpable neglect displayed by an "aloof [police] commissioner, absentee mayor and anything-goes police chief."


That Humphreys is considered a model police officer by the police union comes as no surprise to critics of the increasingly militarized Portland Police Bureau.


As is the case elsewhere in recent years, the PPB has become increasingly aggressive even as violent crime has continued the downward trend it has followed pretty consistently for more than a decade and a half. Duin lists some particularly egregious examples:


*Eunice Crowder, a 71-year-old blind woman, was pepper-sprayed "with such enthusiasm that her glass eye popper out of its socket"; police then shot her with a Taser four times "as she lay in the dirt." None of the officers responsible for that atrocity were disciplined


*Barbara Weich, a 58-year-old art gallery owner, was convicted of "contempt of cop" when she reacted with disdain after being given a ticket by motorcycle cop Greg Adrian. After pursuing Weich for a short distance and pulling her over, Adrian hit her in the face "with enough force to leave bruising on her cheek and neck," then grabbed her arm, pulled it through the window, twisted it, put his weight on it, and fractured it. Adrian, naturally, was never disciplined.


The experience of Don Joughin's family offers a useful snapshot of the vulgar arrogance and casual violence that define Portland's police culture.


In August 2002, George W. Bush inflicted himself on Portland, which meant that the local police were deployed in riot gear to keep demonstrators caged inside "free speech zones." At one point a contingent of police unleashed a volley of pepper-spray against protesters who weren't content to be cattle-penned in a holding area blocks away from the presidential route.


Local activist Don Joughin, who had brought his wife and three children, including an eleven-month-old baby, sought to leave the area without being trampled by the protesters or baptized in pepper spray by the Jackboots. He turned to a police officer obstructing an exit and asked how he and his family could leave the embattled intersection. "He pointed and said to exit to the [northeast], into the spraying police opposite him," Joughin recalled.


With the crowd pressing down on him and his children, Joughin pleaded with the officer to let him and his family through. "He looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip and sprayed directly at me," Joughin recalled. Joughin didn't bear the brunt of that criminal assault, but his three-year-old caught some of the blast. The assailant then turned on Joughin's wife and the infant "and doused both of their heads entirely from a distance of less than 3 feet," Joughin recalled.




















Pure, unadulterated viciousness: Don Joughin comforts his eleven-month-old son after the infant was doused in pepper spray by one of Portland's "Finest."


For several panicked minutes, Joughin tried to flee the area and find help for his family. The police -- you know, those helpful people who, according to official propaganda, are supposed to protect innocent people from criminal violence -- reacted by closing ranks and blocking the Joughin family's escape. They didn't relent until someone in "authority" gave them permission to let the anxious man and his family leave.


The last thing Joughin heard from the heroes in blue as he departed was the derisive comment, "That's why you shouldn't bring kids to protests."


Indeed: If you do, there's a good chance they'll be victims of a criminal assault -- one that would be described as an act of terrorism involving a WMD (a chemical weapon) if carried out against a government official -- at the hands of the police.


We are constantly told that the increasingly frequent episodes of criminal violence by police are aberrations, and that "most" police are good, decent, honorable people. Like many others, I know people in that line of work who meet that description.


My question is this: Just where the hell are those good, decent, honorable police officers when their comrades are committing crimes of the kind committed against Don Joughin's children? How can a police officer direct a weaponized stream of caustic solution into the face of a terrified eleven-month-old baby in the serene knowledge that nobody among his peers would object? What does it say about the police culture in Portland that the reaction of the officers on-site was to rebuke the father of that infant, rather than grabbing the assailant and beating some decency into him?


Well, thanks to the Portland police union, we have our answer. This kind of thing is to be expected of police officers in that city, because each of them is Christopher Humphreys.


Please be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight at 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 Central) on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Prefabricated Fascists: The FBI's Assembly-Line Provocateurs (UPDATED, 12/8)

"Valhalla" at work: FBI undercover asset Hal Turner, who was tasked to infiltrate and radicalize the "far right," speaks at a rally sponsored by the FBI-controlled National Socialist Movement (left); below, left, Turner holds forth at an event in Washington, D.C.; below, right, Turner with his attorney following his September 2008 arrest.









We'll be fighting in the streets with our children at our feet

and the morals that they worship will be gone.

And the men who spurred us on sit in judgment of all wrong

they decide, and the shotgun sings the song.


-- Pete Townsend



It's difficult not to experience a faint pang of sympathy for Hal Turner, albeit an ephemeral one deeply buried beneath multiple layers of well-earned disgust.


For at least five years, and probably more, Turner was a paid informant and provocateur in the employ of the world's largest sponsor of terrorism, the Federal Government. His assignment was to bait easily influenced people with incendiary rhetoric about race and other resentments, and reel in anyone who bit a little too lustily on the bait. The Bureau credits Turner with personally bringing more than 100 "extremists" to their attention, many of whom (the Bureau won't specify how many) were arrested.


There's every likelihood that at least some of Turner's victims were offered the same deal offered to Randy Weaver after he was set up on trivial and spurious firearms charges by an undercover snitch for the ATF: Become an informant/provocateur, and you'll stay out of jail.


Weaver rejected the deal, and the FBI eventually retaliated by attacking his home and murdering his wife and son. Jose Padilla, a rougher customer than Weaver, rejected the same deal; he was declared an "enemy combatant," subjected to prolonged torture intended to destroy his mental equilibrium and break his will, and eventually convicted on exceptionally dubious terrorism-related charges.


Before he was outed as a stukach in early 2007, Turner was the host of a web-based talk radio program and a freelance speaker who specialized in "incitement-and-indictment" entrapment of "right-wing extremists." Hackers discovered a cache of e-mail correspondence between Turner and William Haug, an agent working for a Joint Terrorism Task Force who acted as the informant's handler. Turner closed down his radio program while emitting great gusts of affected outrage over what he insisted were spurious accusations that he had collaborated with the Feds.


In a message posted to Pro Libertate after he was identified as an agent provocateur -- along with federal assets tasked to carry out similar agent provocateur missions within Muslim sub-populations in the U.S. -- Turner insisted that only "PARANOID FREAKS (like this blog)" would suspect him of collaboration.




By way of establishing his neo-Nazi bona fides, Turner boasted that "my [white supremacist] rallies in Kingston NY and Kalamazoo, MI cost those cities $60,000 and $120,000 respectively in police overtime and that there's no way the FBI would have approved anything like that by an informant because the cities would have demanded the money back!"


Actually, as we'll see anon, the FBI has no problem staging white supremacist rallies and protest marches that help "local" police departments rack up overtime.


Certainly, the police don't mind making a little extra money by swanning about in riot gear. Events of the sort Turner organized are an intelligence bonanza for the Regime: They give the FBI (and, most likely, other Homeland Security assets) an opportunity to harvest detailed information for federal databases about both "right-wing extremists" and their opposition.


We know this is the case through first-person testimony from an FBI undercover asset who spent nearly a decade worming his way through the "radical right" -- including the National Socialist Movement (NSM).


The NSM's adherents doubtless see themselves as the finely honed blade of a resurgent "white power" movement, a description promoted with similar zeal by professional hate-hucksters like Morris Dees' artfully misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center and the so-called Anti-Defamation League.


Actually, the NSM is "all show, no go" -- it's more of a federally controlled traveling roadshow, sort of a Third Reich tribute band. Its cadres exude all of the raw menace of the hapless Illinois Nazis from The Blues Brothers, and possess all of the street-fighting chops of the bumbling Black Widow biker gang from Clinton Eastwood's Philo Beddoe films.


But I digress.


We were discussing Hal Turner's career as an FBI informant/provocateur code-named "Valhalla," details about which have been pried from the Bureau by reporters for the Bergen (New Jersey) Record.


Beginning in 2003 (or, as Turner claims, 2002), Turner was a paid informant "who spied on his own controversial followers," reports the Record, citing "government documents, e-mails, court records, and almost 20 hours of jailhouse interviews" with the snitch. Turner "received thousands of dollars from the FBI to report on such groups as the Aryan Nations and the white supremacist National Alliance, and even a member of the Blue Eyed Devils skinhead punk band."


"I was not some street snitch," insists Turner. "I was a deep undercover intelligence operative." He demands recognition of that distinction with the same desperate desire for dignity displayed by any other whore who seeks to upgrade his or her job description with a more refined title.



The FBI budgeted at least $100,000 to pay for Turner's performances, both on his radio program and in public speeches. He now insists that he was merely role-playing on behalf of his pimps -- both the FBI's Special Agent Haug and New Jersey State Police Detective Leonard Nerbetski, who also served on the Newark Joint Terrorism Task Force.



As he tells the story, Turner was required to feign passion for various unsavory causes: In interviews with the Record, Turner maintained that "the FBI coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements and new now feels double-crossed by the Bureau after his arrest."


"The audience loves the rip-roaring radio psycho," Turner boasted in an e-mail to the FBI. "They literally throw money at it. Just be confident that the personality you hear (or hear about) on radio is not real life. I have zero intention of doing anything stupid."


In the guise of the "radio psycho," Turner -- with the FBI's help -- was pulling down about $15,000 a month to express such edifying sentiments as the following: "A full day of violence against blacks would be a really nice thing.... [L]ynchings, church burnings, drive-by shootings and bombings [would] put these subhuman animals back in their place."


Turner materialized at various white power gatherings in several states. He also traveled to Brazil on the FBI's dime to spy on suspected white supremacists in that country, as well as to investigate an alleged plot by white supremacists and Brazilian Arabs to send "consumer goods" to resistance fighters in Iraq. It's difficult to believe that the CIA remained entirely aloof from that aspect of Turner's career.


While the FBI was willing to abet Turner's efforts to incite violence against innocent people, the Feds moved against him shortly after he published comments on his blog interpreted as death threats against three judges in Chicago. He was arrested shortly before the 2008 election and is scheduled to stand trial this week.


As the song says, "some men like the fishin', some men like the fowlin', and some men like to hear the cannonball a-roarin." Turner likes nothing more than hearing the sound of his own voice. Yet "here I am in prison, betrayed," he laments, arrested by the same FBI Special Agent who recruited him and -- he plaintively maintains -- fed him his lines.


"I was given specific instructions," Turner declares, and he played the role of racist agitator out of his duty as "a loyal, patriotic decent American citizen."

Provocateur as auteur: FBI undercover informant David Gletty (back to the camera, wearing a baseball cap) helped direct and stage-manage a 2007 neo-Nazi march in Orlando. He also collected a huge volume of intelligence on other groups, including white power outfits and legitimate immigration reform and constitutionalist organizations.


Turner may be telling the truth. His experiences are eerily similar to those recounted by former FBI "deep cover" operative (and one-time Roller Derby star -- no, I'm not kidding) David Gletty in his ineptly written but highly useful memoir Undercover Nazi: The FBI Infiltration of Extremist Groups in America.


In what strikes me as a transparent effort to cultivate a marketable mystique, Gletty says that many details of his work as a paid FBI snitch remain "classified." He claims to have been recruited in 2000 when, as the leader of a constitutional militia, he came across a plot by an Appalachian white supremacist to set off a string of radiological bombs in collaboration with al-Qaeda.


Recruited as a "deep cover" operative, Gletty spent several years cultivating ties with "extremist" groups, including elements of the KKK, the Hammerskins, and eventually the National Socialist Movement. He was careful to get his "ticket punched" by working with legitimate dissident groups such as the League of the South, and various immigration reform groups, such as at least one element of the Minuteman volunteer border watch movement.


Gletty's most notable achievement was to infiltrate and become leader of a National Socialist Movement chapter in Florida and organize a 2006 NSM march in Orlando that was intended to sow fear and anger in a predominantly black neighborhood.


To prepare for that role, Gletty behaved much as Hal Turner had, fulminating in public about the supposed inferiority of non-white people and befouling the air with exhortations to collectivist violence. This not only legitimized Gletty in the eyes of his comrades in the NSM, it also helped to rile up the group's enemies, thereby ensuring a large turnout of counter-protesters for the February 2006 march in Orlando -- which was exactly what the Bureau desired.


He's like that "John 3:16 Guy," except, you know, a Nazi: Neo-Nazi agitator J.T. Ready, an uninvited guest during a recent immigration control event in Arizona, holds up a portrait of his Fuhrer.

During his years as an informant/provocateur, Gletty was usually accompanied by a fellow asset he identifies only as "Joe." During the Orlando protest, Gletty recalls, Joe carried a concealed digital camera "for taking all the photos he could of protesters and counter-protesters. Then the images would be fed into the FBI face recognition computer. At least 1000 faces for the computer to digest."


In addition to producing a bounty of biometric intelligence for the FBI, the Orlando rally offered a good dry run for a future Homeland Security crack-down. Gletty points out that his FBI handler was "actually pumped up" about the Orlando march, "because the protest would be a great training exercise for the Orlando Police Department, Orange County Sheriff's Department, the FBI, and MBI [the Central Florida Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation] as they would all be in attendance."


As a leader in the white supremacist underground, Gletty held many "surveillance parties" -- not only public events, but private functions used to gather intelligence and, where possible, set up various low-level thugs to become informant/provocateurs themselves.


For three years, "Joe and I ... traveled from state to state, rally to rally, and party to party, infiltrating the White Power Movement in America," Gletty recalls. "Thousands of miles, hundreds of photographed faces, and a myriad of tape recordings were contributing to the eradication of racial and religious prejudice in America."


Playing their role: NSM poseurs take refuge behind riot police during a recent anti-Mexican demonstration in Riverside, California.

Really? To judge from recent attention earned by the NSM, Gletty's mission was not to help "eradicate" prejudice (as if this could be accomplished through government intervention), but rather to bring the group more completely under the FBI's control.


The NSM is a remnant of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP). According to Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, the ANP was thoroughly compromised through the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO operation; by the time of his murder in 1967, Rockwell was widely believed to be a "patsy" for the FBI or some other intelligence agency.


One objective of the anti-ANP COINTELPRO operation was to create a rift between Rockwell's Nazi outfit and the United Klans of America. By the late 1970s, the Klan was thoroughly honeycombed with FBI assets. In fact the Bureau boasted that it had enough Klansmen on its payroll in North Carolina to elect that state's Grand Dragon: At one point, 7 of the 8 members of a Charlotte Klan chapter reportedly were FBI assets informing on the klavern's sole non-federal employee.


Edward Dawson, an informant/provocateur on the payroll of the Greensboro police department and under the supervision of the FBI, helped orchestrate a November 3, 1979 street clash between white supremacists and Communists that left five people dead. The "White Power" contingent included elements of both the Klan and the American Nazi Party, whose FBI-engineered rift had apparently healed sufficiently to permit joint action.

A sitcom-worthy simulacrum of streetfighting: NSM members square off against the equally ludicrous "Brown Berets de Aztlan" in Riverside, California.


The National Socialist Movement's current strategy is to provoke tumult and violence, rather than participating in it directly. In recent weeks the group has achieved a relatively high profile by staging anti-immigration rallies in Riverside, California and Phoenix, Arizona.


In California, a small knot of NSM denizens faced off with members of "Los Brown Berets de Aztlan," a foundation-funded militant Chicano group, with riot police clad in body armor on hand to maintain "order." A few weeks later the group inflicted itself on an immigration- reform protest in Arizona during which the group's most visible spokesperson, J.T. Ready, unfurled a portrait of Adolf Hitler.


Ready -- a dishonorably discharged ex-Marine -- is a pretty good candidate to be the next NSM figure outed as an asset of the Feds. An ambulatory wad of cholesterol and bile, Ready looks like the unfortunate result of a genetic experiment combining the most unpleasant traits of Ernst Roehm and Chris Farley.


While certainly not telegenic, Ready has achieved a certain media prominence as a result of his candor in reciting the Nazi party line.


The sudden prominence of the NSM has been noted -- with a detectable hint of gratitude -- by left-collectivists eager to shoehorn resistance to the Obama Regime into a pre-determined narrative: Critics of the Blessed One and his administration are animated by concealed bigotry, according to this reading, whether they know it or not, and their rhetoric is creating an "atmosphere" of incipient violence that will engender domestic terrorism.


It should be remembered that the same tropes were put into play early in the last Democratic administration, just before the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing -- a terrorist act for which disenchanted former federal employee Timothy McVeigh was executed, but was actually carried out with the help of "others unknown," including several federal assets connected to a bizarre little white supremacist commune known as Elohim City.


The Regime has gone to a great deal of trouble to keep the otherwise moribund White Power movement on life support. It's simply too useful as a political foil -- and, occasionally, as an instrument of politically useful violence -- for the Regime to let it die.

UPDATE: Mistrial for Turner

Judge Donald Walter declared a mistrial in Hal Turner's federal trial in Brooklyn yesterday as the jury deadlocked 9-3 in favor of acquittal. Turner faces a possible ten-year prison sentence on charges that he threatened to kill three federal judges in remarks posted to his blog while he was on the FBI's payroll as a provocateur.


Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan, who is heading the prosecution, called Turner a "domestic terrorist." His case against the erstwhile federal informant relied entirely on the testimony of six federal agents. If Hogan were serious about his description of Turner, his next act should be to seek an indictment against at least some of his witnesses, given that they were materially aiding and abetting terrorism.


For the record, it is my view that the case against Turner (who, significantly, remains under a federal gag order) is bollocks. His "crime" consisted of quoting Thomas Jefferson's observation that "The Tree of liberty must be replenished from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots" and applying those words to three federal judges whose crimes against liberty and decency were much graver than those of anyone connected to King George III.


Note well that Turner was not reined in, much less arrested and jailed, for openly urging criminal violence against innocent people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds, as his handlers (per his account) instructed him to do. Instead, he was slapped in irons and put behind bars for the purported crime of using Revolutionary War-style invective when decrying the crimes of the sanctified personages who occupy the federal bench.


The last full measure of usefulness the Feds could wring from Turner would be to convict him for using political speech in a case that could be used to criminalize emphatic, effective criticism of our rulers. If Turner actually ends up being convicted and sent to prison, his career would essay a remarkable trajectory: He began as an asset of the Security Organs, and might wind up as a political prisoner.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Judicial Terrorism: The State vs. Robert and Danille Kahre

Judicial tyrants, now as then: U.S. Federal Judge David Erza (left); German National Socialist Judge Roland Freisler (below, right). Any resemblance to the legendary gangsta accountant Herbert Kornfeld (further below, right) is ... somehow oddly appropriate.

German dissidents Hans and Sophie Scholl were half-way through their show trial before the notorious Judge Roland Freisler when their parents Robert and Magdalene arrived at the courtroom.


The outcome of the trial wasn't in doubt; Hans and Sophie -- who were on trial along with their compatriot in the White Rose resistance, a young father named Christoph Probst -- had admitted to composing and distributing seditious leaflets urging opposition to Hitler's war and domestic tyranny.


As Christians the Scholls understood their duty to the truth; as German patriots they understood the necessity of bringing down the regime that was destroying their homeland. Hans and Sophie had learned their values from their parents, but the intrepidity with which they defended them was their own.



Denied entrance to the courtroom, Magdalene pleaded with a guard: "I'm the mother of two of the accused." "You should have raised them better," sneered the guard in an act of malice that was both deliberate and gratuitous.


The circumstances were different, and the sentence imposed on the victim much less severe than execution via guillotine, but there was more than a hint of the same cruel statist sanctimony in the lecture given by U.S. District Judge David Ezra when he sentenced Danille Kahre to five years' probation earlier this month.



At the time he pronounced sentence on Danille, Ezra -- who was less histrionic than Roland Freisler, but just as contemptible in his dogmatic collectivism as that Communist-turned-Nazi jurist -- had already sentenced her husband, Robert Kahre, to fifteen years in prison. Turning to the subject of the four Kahre children, Erza insisted it was Danille's duty to teach the children to serve and worship the government that is tearing their family apart.


Danille must not allow her children to experience "hatred for government or for people who participate in government," Ezra pontificated: "If, as a result of that trauma [of seeing their parents unjustly imprisoned], that turns them [the children] against their own country and leads along a path of hate and retribution, they will have lost their promise."


This man is not a criminal: Robert Kahre (in blue button-down shirt) following the federal jury's verdict.



Like the sibling freedom fighters Hans and Sophie Scholl, Robert and Danille Kahre understand that the government ruling us is our country's deadliest enemy. This authentic patriotism is as inscrutable to David Ezra was it was to Roland Freisler, and for the same reason: Each of those judges was a creature of the regime he served, and both of them defined "justice" as vindicating the power of the state in any and all circumstances.


After being acquitted on the basis of the same facts in a previous trial, Robert and Danille Kahre were found guilty by a federal jury of "tax crimes" -- a charge that describes the efforts of productive people to avoid having their honestly earned wealth stolen from them by the world's most vicious criminal syndicate. In this particular case, the method used by the Kahres -- owners and operators of a large and successful construction company -- protected their earnings, as well as those of the people with whom they worked, and underscored the pervasive criminal fraud practiced by the regime.



In operating their construction business, the Kahres paid workers as independent contractors, rather than "employees," in gold and silver coins minted by the U.S. government. The employees were able to sell those coins -- which were assigned a face value by the government, not by the Kahres -- at the much higher market value. The contractors then claimed a tax liability based on the government-assigned face value of the coins, not their value in Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs).


This is, if you will, the obverse of the government's claim that gold and silver minted currency are "legal tender" only for their face value. The Kahres simply reverse-engineered the logic of the legal tender laws in an entirely defensible application of the commandment to render unto Caesar only that which is Caesar's: If the government is content to perpetuate the fraud that a Gold Eagle fifty-dollar coin is worth only that amount, and not the $1171 and change it presently commands on the market, then the tax liability of that coin should reflect its fraudulent face value.


The Constitution has never authorized the federal government to create "money" in any fashion, let alone that of printing tastelessly decorated rectangles of rag paper it calls "dollars." The Constitution permits only the use of gold and silver as legal tender. Contrary to popular assumption, the function of "coining" gold and silver does not mean that the government was authorized to "issue" money of any kind.

Free Market defender and aerospace engineer Bill Denman cues up a lecture, recorded on reel-to-reel audiotape, by economist Dean Russell of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Among Dr. Russell's numerous invaluable contributions was his translation of Frederic Bastiat's irreplaceable treatise The Law from French into English.



Financial analyst and monetary historian Bill Denman points out that "coining" money "is simply a metal stamping process and regulating the value thereof is determining the size, weight, and firmness of the coin and stamping that information on its face."


Section 14 of the 1792 United States Coinage Act specifies that "it shall be lawful for any person or persons to bring to the mint gold and silver bullion, in order to their being coined.... And as soon as the said bullion shall have been coined, the person or persons by whom the same shall have been delivered, shall upon demand receive in lieu thereof coins of the same species of bullion which shall have been so delivered, weight for weight, of the pure gold or pure silver therein contained...."


"In other words," summarizes Denman, "anyone who owns gold and silver bullion (not just the mining companies) can take it to the mint and have it converted into certified coins and then spend them into circulation. It is not necessary to have government, or banks, `issue' currency" -- that is, it is not necessary under the terms of the Constitution and the 1792 Coinage Act, which is still in effect.


Under the existing "legal tender" laws, and the system of inflatable fiat money inflicted on our nation in 1913, spending constitutional money at the government's artificial face value would be suicidally stupid. But the very existence of government-minted gold and silver coins is usefully subversive of the official fictions on which the Regime's fraudulent monetary system depends.


In 1985, Congress passed the Gold Bullion Coin Act, which instructed the government to mint and circulate gold coins in denominations of $50, $25, $10, and $5. This produced an anomalous result: The same government that was issuing worthless Federal Reserve Note scrip was actually circulating constitutional currency as well (albeit in a fashion far removed from that authorized by the Constitution). This created a de facto dual monetary system, a fact not lost on the Kahres and a few others who understood the implications.


As Liberty Watch magazine pointed out more than a year ago, the supposedly criminal "tax fraud" practiced by the Kahres was actually perfectly legal under the dual system created by the feds: Given that there were two systems with two wildly different standards of value, which one was the correct standard for measuring taxable income? Nothing in any law or precedent dictated that it was necessary to use inflated FRNs for that purpose.


Accordingly, the Kahres paid their contractors in real money, thereby effectively wiping out their tax liability under the rules that the government itself had established. Nothing in federal law (including the "laws" dealing with the income tax, or federal court precedents) prohibits what the Kahres did in opting to paying those who did work for them in real money, and then turning the Regime's fraud against itself.

Stormtroopers strike: A joint state-federal goon squad attacks the Kahre family business, May 29, 2009.

It must not be forgotten, however, that government is a criminal enterprise that enjoys an effective monopoly on interpreting the laws that supposedly restrain it.


Tax "evasion" is a supposed crime that injures nobody but the parasite class, but that is the class that operates the state's apparatus of coercion, extraction, and propaganda.


This is why on May 29, 2003, a platoon-sized (or larger) paramilitary force, exhibiting the boldness such people display only when they're serenely confident that their targets are unarmed and helpless, assaulted the Kahre family's Las Vegas business office.


Acting on a warrant subsequently found to be legally defective, the strike team, a pack of militarized mouth-breathers from the FBI and several local SWAT teams, busted down an unlocked chain-link gate in an APC before swarming the property.


Computers were seized; helpless senior citizens and women were brutalized and held for a prolonged period in 109 degree weather, forbidden to get a drink or use the bathroom. One of the victims (Kahre's sister) was so severely abused that she required medical treatment. Security cameras were disabled in an unsuccessful effort to suppress the details of the criminal assault. Kahre himself was arrested by a separate task force while conducting business at his bank.


All of this was done, remember, to someone who was not accused of a violent crime. Had Kahre been a criminal kingpin accused of victimizing others through violence and fraud, he would have been treated with much greater deference by the Feds -- perhaps as a gesture of "professional courtesy."


The same Regime that has lavished trillions of dollars on politically connected swindlers at Goldman Sachs has no moral standing -- or legal authority -- to punish the Kahres. But when has any criminal oligarchy -- be it Nazi, Soviet, or US-federal -- required actual authority to carry out its crimes?


Like Roland Freisler, David Erza is a sycophant in robes, a servant of a dying Regime.


"You know the war is lost," Sophie Scholl chided Freisler during her trial. "Why don't you have the courage to face it?"


Ezra is intelligent enough to recognize the truth about the system whose bidding he did in sending Robert Kahre: The monetary regime created in 1913 -- a system of institutionalized fraud, expropriation, and deceit in the service of war and tyranny -- simply cannot endure. What eventually replaces it may be something even worse, but its trajectory is set, and its destruction is inevitable.


Teach your children well: Danille Kahre comforts her two-year-old son Landon, whose father was sentenced to serve fifteen years as a political prisoner.


I earnestly hope that Danille Kahre spends every day until the Regime's overdue and well-deserved demise tirelessly cultivating within her children a righteous and proper hatred for it and all its works and pomps, as well as a principled contempt for the invertebrate and despicable specimens who serve it, of whom David Erza is a suitably wretched example.


May each of us blessed with the responsibility of raising children do likewise.

A Quick Note --

Please forgive the long hiatus. Yes, Thanksgiving occupied a great deal of my time and attention. But I've also been job-hunting, which is a time- and labor-intensive undertaking even in a good job market.


At the bottom of this edition of Pro Libertate you will notice a PayPal widget. After three years and hundreds of essays, I'm finally putting out a tip jar. I earnestly hope that those of you who find my work worthwhile can arrange to send small but regular donations. In any case, I remain very grateful for the help and support many of you sent to my family during my recent health crisis. Thank you so much, and God bless.




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Dum spiro, pugno!