Does Anyone Really Care That The NSA Is Spying On Absolutely Everyone?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – The government can see your ass in court, can cause you to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend yourself against things you haven’t even done, can defame you to the end of the Earth, can cause you employment, can cause you to lose things like insurance, can cause you to lose your eligibility to do things like vote.  The government has an awesome power.  They can basically snuff out all of what you call your civic life.  They can do it and they can pretend that they are obeying the law.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  What’s wrong and what you want to be able to put your finger on is that the accountability that used to exist just doesn’t exist in the way it did once.  When Alexis de Tocqueville came here in the 1820s and ‘30s and toured America, he marveled at what he saw.  You have to recall that de Tocqueville had intimate knowledge of what had happened during the French Revolution, of the 15,000 or so people who quite practically lost their heads to the guillotine and all the rest of those that were drowned and burned.  The French were inventing new ways to martyr and kill Catholics, priests, parishioners, members of the Bourbon family.  This was their great and grand revolution.  They were restrained by absolutely nothing.  The fact that there was no restraint on society and on their civilization, this is what led to the breakdown.   It got so bad to the point that this is what presaged the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.  Napoleon comes in and says: I think you guys need a king, and since you killed the Bourbon king, I have some military experience, so I’ll volunteer for the job.  The people of France were so desperate to stop the killing, they went: Okay, dude, you can have the job.  Of course, eight years later, there he was locked up in the Bastille.  The point was, there was no moral framework.  There was no tradition.  There was no past to draw from that could restrain the actions of a Robespierre and the other murderers of the great terror in the French Revolution.

Folks, you think we’re immune to this because [mocking] “We’re Americans.  We’ve got Facebook and Twitter.  We’d alert people that this is happening.”  Really?  What would they do about it?  We alerted the Congress that the NSA is spying on every living soul in the known universe and they can’t even pass with a majority in an allegedly conservative House of Representin’, they can’t even pass a restraint on that agency.  That’s really what I came to talk to you people about today, my disgust, absolute disgust with the Republican-controlled Congress.  Representative Justin Amash, one of the good guys, one of the few, gets his bill to the floor that will seriously curtail the NSA and its illicit, unconstitutional, and illegal surveillance of American citizens.  I don’t know if there’s international law the prohibits the spying on of every living soul that has an electronic connection.  If there isn’t, there ought to be.  The National Security Agency, which is a joke, an absolute joke when you consider what it is that this agency does and the abuses of power that we know they have engaged in, yet the Congress of the United States cannot find within itself while it’s controlled by the alleged conservative party, cannot find a simple 218-vote bare majority to curtail the agency’s activities.  Are you kidding me?  That’s how the vote went down yesterday.  It was 217-205….

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The U.S. House on Wednesday narrowly defeated a proposal to sharply restrict the National Security Agency’s phone surveillance program that was exposed by Edward Snowden.

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Mike:  Ultimately, at the end of the day, what is the net effect that Edward Snowden, the whistleblower, the guy that leaked the documents about what the NSA is really up to, what your federal government is really doing, what is the net result of this?  Absolutely nothing.  It’s energized some of us.  It’s legitimized many people’s claims that they have been making for decades about what the federal government.  It has no effect.  The sheeple seem not to care.  [mocking] “As long as my DirecTV comes on tonight, as long as I got baseball tonight on ESPN, I don’t care.  You can spy on me all you want.  You go ahead and spy on me all you want, government.  I don’t care.”  It doesn’t matter.  It does not seem to matter.  Very discouraging.  Especially if you are of the paleoconservative or of the traditional conservative or of the libertarian stripe.  You have to be thinking: What has to happen?  What actually has to happen for the American sheeple to demand of their representatives that they stop this?  Don’t curtail it, stop it.  Just stop it.  You identify some lunatics overseas.  You identify with human intelligence actual threats, yes, go ahead and deal with that.  Ma and Pa Kettle down at the end of Old Plank Road who just happen to be in the Verizon Wireless wire sweep . . . what in the wide, wide world of sports is happening in this Union?

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Don’t worry, though, folks, we have Boehner.  [mocking] “You just wait and see, Mitter Church, Boehner’s gonna be in there and he’s gonna do it, him and Scott Brown and Eric Cantor.  These guys are conservatives.  They are conservative as anyone I’ve ever seen.”  You know what I’d like to know?  I think I’m on every tea party mailing list, major tea parties anyways.  You know what I’d like to know?  I’d like to know where the tea party outrage is here.  Congress had a chance to make an affirmative statement to the planet and to say: The United States does not spy on the known universe.  We may have but we’ve turned over a new leaf and we’re not gonna do it anymore.  If we are, it’s only going to be because we actually think you’re coming here to nuke us, or we actually think you’re coming here with an expeditionary land force to invade San Diego, California.  You can invade San Francisco, we really don’t care, but not San Diego.

Congress had a chance to make a statement and could not find 218 votes to do so.  I can sit here and blame Dumbocrats all day long and bash the Democrat Party.  That’s great sport, especially on these talk radio airwaves these days.  I used to do it for quite a number of years, but I don’t think that’s going to change anything.  The fact of the matter is that the Grand Old Party, the alleged conservative party, the Republicans, control the House.  They have an unbeatable majority.  They don’t have a veto-proof majority, but they do have a majority of votes.  If you’re going to marshal things together and if you’re going to do them under the pretense that one party votes one way and the other party votes the other way, there was a vote and an opportunity to actually change course and actually, I think.  If you’re really out after that youth vote, if the youth vote is really important to you, then the GOP yesterday, Andrew don’t you think, squandered a major opportunity.  I think young people don’t want to be surveilled, do they?  You’re what is it, millennial generation.  They don’t want to be surveilled.  The older you get, the more you seem to not care.  [mocking] “Look, we gotta have national security, Church.  You just shut up.  As long as they’re not breaking down your door in the middle of the night like that Goldsberry woman in Sarasota, Florida, what are you worried about?”

AG:  But do you also think people my age, so the under 30 crowd, also just accepts with all this cool technology, the ability to hack and identify thieves and all that, it’s almost accepted.  We may not like it, but I think the younger generation understands that there’s a little bit of give and take with it’s great I have this new Galaxy Note or iPhone 5, but at the same time you understand, I know kids that are 15 that can hack into all these systems, so it’s probably going to happen anyway.  In a sense, apathetic towards that.  As much as we may not like it, we just understand that with all this cool technology, let’s face it if you’re under 25 and know anything about computers, you can probably steal someone’s identity.  Thinking that the government is able to tap into emails and things like that is not that crazy.  I just don’t know if the — I might say the older you are, the more angry you get about it because it’s not something you grew up with, whereas people my age, we’ve grown up with email, the internet.  Every single radio commercial spot is protect your identity.  That’s common for us.

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Mike:  But people are concerned about it.  It is of grave concern to protect your identity.  No one wants their identity stolen.  People don’t like to think or know that your intimate secrets have been discovered by someone else.

AG:  I think there’s a difference, though, over the idea that the younger you are, the more accepting of that as being a part of the reality we live in.  You kind of accept that that’s the case now.  Everything is digital, therefore the ability to have things listened into or your email hacked or whatever is kind of accepted.  The older generation actually gets angry about that sort of thing.  I think the younger generation doesn’t like it but they understand it’s pretty easy to do that sort of thing so it’s going to happen.  I just wonder if there’s a slight difference in the generations.  We all may not like it, but I don’t know if there’s anger necessarily versus apathy in terms of the generation gap.

Mike:  Maybe we geezers haven’t done a good enough job of explaining exactly what’s at stake.  The person that’s going to steal your identity is going to be in contravention of a law.  There is a very real chance that that person can ultimately be or can eventually be captured or caught and punished for what they have done so that they can’t continue to do it.  There is a mechanism to deal with the private theft of identity, the private-sector fraud that can be done.  Yes, you can be materially damaged by it, but again, you do have access to the law and civil code and municipal code to deal with this.

When the government does it, you don’t have any of those things, and the government has far more power than the guy that LifeLock wants to protect you from.  The government can see your ass in court, can cause you to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend yourself against things you haven’t even done, can defame you to the end of the Earth, can cause you employment, can cause you to lose things like insurance, can cause you to lose your eligibility to do things like vote.  The government has an awesome power.  They can basically snuff out all of what you call your civic life.  They can do it and they can pretend that they are obeying the law.  They can go, [mocking] “We’re doing it for national security.  We had to do it because we had to protect ourselves.  Yes, he was a threat.  He was a mortal threat.”

As Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner has written, anyone who thinks they have nothing to worry about, haven’t done anything wrong, oh yes you have.  You wanna bet?  There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t break laws and we cannot find ourselves subject to all manner of federal, state, or local tyranny.  That’s the difference between the government doing it and the guy who does the LifeLock commercial, who he wants to protect you from.  That’s a vast difference.  I don’t think that has been explained well enough.  Maybe I’ve got to do a better job of explaining that.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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