From the Easy Chair

Law & Disorder

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 95-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BY139

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BY139, Law & Disorder, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 249, September the ninth, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and I have with us Douglas Murray. Now Douglas is a very, very important part of everything here so I feel all of you are privileged to hear what he has to say tonight on our subject, because he has a... a very extensive background in the area of law.

Our subject is law and disorder. Now that is not the usual term. The common term is law and order. But there are many perspectives that we can bring to this title law and disorder. And one perspective that I would like to begin with is this, that one of our problems in the modern world is that law is the occasion of a great deal of disorder. As much trouble as called... as caused by bad laws as by bad men, if not more. Bad laws affect everyone. And a bad law passed by the state, the county or the federal government affects everyone so that bad laws cause more disorder than bad men do. And as nations and men have left God’s law, they have been creating disorder by means of what they do.

On today’s news, for example, there was an account of a trial held. It involved the young man whose criminal negligence had led to the death of one young person and the permanent disability, reducing another to a vegetable. The court room, we were told by the news media, was divided between two groups. On one side those for justice and on the other side those for mercy, as though the two were in conflict and of necessity were opposites.

The simple fact was that a sizable percentage of the community felt two lives had been destroyed, why destroy a third life, that of a guilty young man.

The court apparently agreed. He was given seven months in a juvenile detention home. And this is the kind of thing that is common place. We are schooled to think that if we are for justice then we are unmerciful, unkind and that, in fact, there is something criminal about the insistence on justice as against what is called mercy. But Solomon was right here when he said that the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. And we live in cruel times, cruel times that see themselves as merciful.

Well, Otto, would you like to make some general statements and then Douglas can do the same?

[ Scott ] Well, thank you, Rush. I think that is a very accurate opening note. I have just been reading some of the details of a crime bill which has been put together, is being put together in the United States Senate. And, of course, Congress is federal. The crime bill, in contrast to what you were saying, we are moving from one end of the spectrum to the other at the same time. We have these ridiculously small sentences. We also have some incredibly long sentences where for relatively trivial crimes individuals are being put away effectively for life.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So we have lost consistency and we are losing coherence. The Senate crime bill is going to have over 50 crimes, 50 capital crimes calling for the death penalty. I have not been able to get a complete list of which crimes they are talking about. One of them, however, wants to make a federal crime, Senator Dematto wants to make a federal case out of the use of any crime... use of a gun in any crime which means that roughly 11,000 crimes committed annually over the United States will wind up in federal court because a gun is used. And the argument is that that gun was obtained through interstate commerce. Now that will clog the federal courts to the choking up point.

As it is, criminal cases in federal courts take precedence over civil cases and that is one of the reasons why civil cases are backed up. Another instance of using the death penalty in this proposed crime bill would be to kill a federal chicken inspector. And inherent in the bill would be to sweep away the laws of 15 states that rule that there is to be no capital crime within their borders. So what we are talking about here is an enormous constitutional extension or expansion of federal authority. It doesn’t take any Sigmund Freud to figure out that if a bill of this sort is enacted by both houses and approved by the president—and the president is apparently behind it...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Is that it will require a federal police force to apply. We have never had a federal police force as such. We have had the federal bureau of investigation, which presumably looks into matters of interstate crime, but they are primarily investigative. We are talking now about police and the application of capital crimes. And so we have here a very weird situation. We have already seen the constitutional guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure swept aside under the guise of going after the drug people in which property is seized before an arrest is made without a charge being filed, without a trial and without conviction. And yet the property so seized is not returned.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So this is outright confiscation as long as the authorities can claim some connection with the drug traffic. And, of course, I understand that the money we carry in our pocket now is so drug tainted that a dog can sniff it out. So, therefore, every citizen in the United States is vulnerable to having his property seized. What happens to his family when that occurs, I do not know.

[ Rushdoony ] He...

[ Scott ] So at the same time that we have the sort of case that you are talking about where justice is confused as an opponent of mercy and so forth, we have coming across the shadows, across the land the beginning of what looks to be what de Tocqueville warned us about.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He said, “This could be... the United States could be the greatest tyranny the world has ever seen if it ceases to be a good a good country.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It used to be when I was young that banks laundered their money regularly. They don’t anymore. Maybe we will have to take our money to the bank, rush home and launder it to get rid of any drug taint.

[ Scott ] What is it? The Saint Francis Hotel that used to wash all the silver. Remember?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I had forgotten that. Everything was scrubbed...

[ Scott ] Spotless.

[ Rushdoony ] Spotless.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, Douglas, you have really more experience than either of us.

[ Murray ] Well, as I was listening to Otto the thought suddenly occurred to me that these 52 or so classifications of new federal crimes probably apply to 52 classifications of whatever can be done to federal employees. There has been a move in my lifetime to make serious crimes out of assaulting postal employees, assaulting any federal employee. If you sass the IRS you are in deep trouble.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Murray ] If you make any threat against any federal employee it would be a federal crime.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Murray ] Now before threats were threats.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And they were not considered serious unless an attempt was made to carry them out. Now that threat in and of itself becomes a serious federal crime.

[ Scott ] Well, it is a felony to falsify and exaggerate, I other words, your assets when applying for a loan to a bank that is a member of the FDIC. It is a felony.

[ Murray ] Well, I think that the frustration level, particularly among law enforcement people is beginning to bubble to the surface. We have seen recently the video tapings by people of law enforcement people in a fit of frustration take out their anger on a suspect that they have already arrested because they are getting scared. They are scared for themselves. They are scared for their own families. And they see the judicial judiciary as being totally out of control. It is completely inconsistent. Nothing can be counted on. The officers go through a ritual of appearing in court. They are denigrated by prosecuting attorneys, made to look ridiculous in the public where they have to serve and it is contributing to the over all break down.

[ Rushdoony ] I heard a man well placed in law enforcement say that he had lost all faith in the judicial system.

[ Scott ] This happened in Germany during the Weimar Republic.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Several things. First the role of psychiatry became equivalent to the role of the magistrate in the Weimar Republic. They didn’t call it punishment. They called it treatment of the criminal. And the judge had to receive a psychiatric report before he could announce his sentence. The other thing is that with the rise of the Nazi party and the Communist party you had what amounted to personal armies or private armies who would flock into the court and intimidate the court. So you had a division between the political opinion of justice and the statutory opinion of justice and between the two there was no telling what would happen in a court.

When Hitler was put on trial, 1924, 25, somewhere around there, he was ... he was allowed to make speeches, political speeches. And they sent him to... they didn’t send him to a prison. They sent him to a castle where he was practically a baron with all his colleagues, his secretaries, dictated Mein Kampf and every thing else. So the other half of it is that there was a tremendous increase in the type of crime, sadistic crimes became more popular, if you could use the term, just as the movies of that time became sadistic and under the Weimar Republic.

And the rise of crime, as far as I can gather, is always connected to the decline of authority. It is not connected to any rise or increase in the degeneracy of the people, because the people—to use a Calvinist phrase—are always bad. The only thing that keeps them from enacting their desires is a strong law. When the law weakens, crime increases. We have had just the same percentage of black people in the United States in 1935, 1940 as we have today, 12 percent. They did not have the same per capita quota of crimes until the courts and the police became afraid to apply the law.

[ Murray ] Well, I think the law is weakened by virtue of the fact that the people don’t know what the law is anymore. There is over 3000 laws passed in California, multiplied by the number of states every year. The people don’t know when they are breaking the law anymore. Therefore they are almost going on faith on a day to day basis hoping that nobody puts the... taps them on the shoulder. And when you don’t know what the law is, you can’t follow it.

[ Scott ] Well, that may be true in a technical sense. We don’t know what the IRS may consider a violation of the law in many instances or I don't think the average person realizes that if he inflates his assets on a bank loan that the is creating a serious crime. Generally speaking the increase in law hasn’t changed the 10 Commandments that you shouldn’t steal, murder and so forth and so on. I think really the people are breaking the law because thy know it is a crap game and that their chances of getting away with it are fairly good.

[ Rushdoony ] Then the number of laws passed by legislative bodies is small compared to bureaucratic law. In fact, for every volume of laws passed by a legislative body, there is a room full passed by regulatory agencies.

[ Scott ] Which is not published.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They are not posted or listed anywhere. They are put in the federal register.

[ Rushdoony ] Or a state.

[ Scott ] Or a state. And I will never forget in researching a book on the oil industry, the whole oil industry was indicted and brought to trial and whole banks of attorneys were hired at a cost of millions of dollars and men were convicted and fined for the violation of a regulation and it went all the way up to the Supreme Court before the judge, one of the magistrates wanted to see the regulation. And it was discovered that it had never even been listed. It was in Mr. President Roosevelt’s desk drawer. They went through a whole series of trials over the violation of a law that did not exist.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I would like to read something now from the September 16, 1991 Insight magazine. I think this is very revealing of what is happening and I get stories of this sort from people, but here it is in print, an article by Carolyn Lockheed... head.

“Big Apple, New York City takes Bite from its Own Future.” New York is on the verge of bankruptcy again and this is what they are doing. I quote. “At about nine o'clock one morning last March, Steve Di Carlo, manager of Dan’s Supreme Supermarkets of New York City watched some 20 armed sheriff’s deputies enter his store on Hillside Avenue in Queens. The deputies wore bullet proof vests with sheriff written across their backs and on their baseball caps carrying guns and radios. They blocked all store exits and stationed themselves at the cash registers. They cordoned off the shopping car corral in front of the store with yellow police tape and barred entry by customers, although they allowed shoppers to leave. They demanded 16,900 dollars immediately in cash. When Di Carlo told them he did not have access to such sum he said they threatened to force open the shop... the store safe and remove money from the registers. The store ultimately handed over the cash. Deputies sealed it in plastic bags and left. The grounds? Litter violations,” unquote.

Now to give you a little more of the kind of thing they are doing, they are ... while the infrastructure of the city is collapsing, they are going after shop keepers. If they find a paper that a passerby on the street dropped, a gum wrapper or any other piece of paper. I quote again.

“Benny Solage, who worked with the revitalization project in the Bronx said agents from the parking violations bureau came to his neighborhood ... come to his neighborhood at least four or five times a day. He testified that one sanitation agent followed a piece of paper from store to store and gave three stores tickets for the same piece of paper. It took him half an hour to wait for the piece of paper to move from store to store, but he waited.

[ Scott ] What a shame there was nobody there to arrest him for not picking it up.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But at any rate, all this was put into the spring budget message by Mayor Dinkins and it was designed to raise more money. Meanwhile, they are cutting back on sanitation services, street cleaning, a variety of things. And the infrastructure of the city is collapsing steadily.

[ Scott ] I can recall the only city that I know that has potholes in the sidewalks as well as the street.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, here is another thing that the writer says and I quote. “The city spends freely on heavily bureaucratized social programs even as it neglects vital infrastructures are maintains. Politicians get little credit for what he calls thing programs, the roads, bridges, waterlines and sewers upon which life in the city depends and which are now in a state of near collapse. It is far more rewarding, he says, for a city politician to promise cheaper apartment rents for everybody,” unquote.

And the author refers to New York as the People’s Republic of New York and goes on to document what is happening. To cite one thing, I quote again. This is what a Manhattan resident who lives in a better than average neighborhood, has to say. “The area has also become a toilet. My neighbors and I get up in the morning to see people defecating on the sidewalk and the media strips. Urine trails down the sides of buildings in tributaries, an author writes,” unquote.

And so on and on.

[ Scott ] Isn’t it a shame that we can’t expel us from the union?

[ Rushdoony ] The trouble is that one city after another is coming to the same condition from New York to Berkeley. Chicago has done better than most cities that ... although that does not mean the situation is good in Chicago.

[ Scott ] Well, I understand the mafia has been protecting the city. And I really mean that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I {?} serious about it, too.

[ Murray ] Well, San Francisco is another case in point. You go to the civic center in San Francisco and it is a public toilet. I went to a ... a computer show at the Moscone Center and... about two or three years ago and that is the last time I will ever go. I mean, the stench and the filth was worse than anything I have seen in a long, long time, derelicts in doorways, people the are obviously mentally disturbed and lying in their own filth and they just don’t think there is any thing wrong with that, that they should have the freedom to exist that way and that they shouldn’t be dealt with.

[ Scott ] This is a regression to conditions a thousand years earlier, before there were sewer systems, before there were police when everyone had to go armed. That is the reason men carried swords and had armed guards. And even earlier in Baghdad the wealthy employed whippers who went ahead of them with whips and who whipped people out of the way. This is the decline of a civilization. And it is very interesting that Toynbee, I think, said this years ago. He said the decline... the center declines ... the center declines while the peripheries remain dynamic. The American street culture is moving around the world in the rock and roll and our movies and so forth and so on. But the core is festering. Our capital is an embarrassment. I have been panhandled in front of the White House. And I can recall... this not a new thing. I remember when Penns... men were sleeping on the sidewalk in Pennsylvania Avenue in the 30s. But they didn’t do the things that are being done now.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] Now there is danger out there in the street. I think we... I remember talking about this earlier that it did a story for the Christian Herald about the bowery and young black men who were going down and killing the winos and the drunks on the bowery and stealing their clothes, their shoes and everything else. And the Christian Herald wouldn’t print the article, because they didn’t want to admit in print the circumstances. And we have the same strange prudery...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...going on in our media today. The newspapers, the television, the radio will not discuss the facts of every day American life anymore.

[ Murray ] Well, they are prevailed upon by chambers of commerce and mayors not to print the dark side. In San Francisco we heard probably a year or two ago that cars were being stopped by gangs in San Francisco. The occupants of the car were dragged out in the street. Their lives were threatened if they didn't give up their wallet and all of their jewelry. And half the time the gangs drove off with the car to a chop shop, to break it down for whatever value they could get out of it. More recently in Detroit people are being put upon at stop lights where a car stops at a stop light and the ... somebody comes up and puts a gun in your face and they will kill you just so you can’t identify them. And they will drive off with the car and all of your valuables. So it is... it is obviously out of control. Law enforcement can’t handle that kind of thing and before long we will see curfews and martial law in major cities in this country.

[ Scott ] Perhaps before that you will see what is prevalent in Latin America and has been for a long time. The police reach the point where they realize that the courts are so corrupt that there is no sense bringing the criminal into court. So he is shot on the way to the police station and they say he tried to escape {?}, the law of the flight. That is summary justice. And, of course, the ... some of the other aspects of this has been what the liberals here call the death squads where vigilante groups go out and kill agitators and criminals and so forth. They kill children, the street children who commit all kinds of atrocities and that is the reason that they are killed. They are not killed because they are kids and they are not killed because they are homeless. They are killed because they might burn somebody’s house down and in return for a carton of cigarettes.

And you have a decline, distortion of organized law and you have then street law, lynch law, vengeance law and so forth.

Our movies promote this. So does television. I mean here you see the police breaking down a door, throwing somebody against a wall, beating him. And this is the forces of law and order.

[ Murray ] Well, it is glamorized. It is exciting. They make it appear as though it is an adventure rather than a profession. And too many people are being drawn into the legal profession on the basis of television programs, how rewarding it is monetarily, the status that attorneys have in society and they are relatively free from the constraints that other people are under. And too many people are being drawn into the legal profession on the basis of television programs, how rewarding it is monetarily, the status that attorneys have in society and they are... they are relatively free from the constraints that other people are under.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the subject of law and disorder is becoming a very, very urgent one. For example, today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a story, first in a series, which begins, and I quote, “ San Francisco’s strong and diversified economy has long been the envy cities across the nation that one by one fell victim to urban blight and decay. But today numerous economists and urban experts are warning that the cities relative affluence has massed growing threats to its own prosperity. Like a Rolls Royce exposed too long to the elements, San Francisco’s rich economy is rusting at the joints and in need of immediate maintenance. The implications are ominous. Without steps to revive the economy, San Francisco could face a bleak future of stagnation, job flight, higher taxes and dwindling social services. The question isn't whether San Francisco will compete with Los Angeles, said Dina Gruen of San Francisco Urban sociologist, but whether it will be a total wipe out by New Orleans, a city whose {?} ways belie a crumbling economy and infrastructure,” unquote.

It is losing population. Businesses are beginning to leave because the taxes are too heavy and as a result the middle classes are leaving and it is becoming a city of a few rich and a great many, a growing number of poor people.

[ Scott ] Well, that is a microcosm of the macrocosm.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because we could say the same thing about the country as a whole.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, it means that not only the country, but the world, because the world has the same problems. And the cities of Europe are crumbling because of the Islamic populations that are overwhelming them.

[ Scott ] Well, I remember 20 years ago noticing that most of the waiters around London were Greek or Spanish, very few English. So this is not a recent thing. It is simply that like smog it is now discernible on the surface everywhere you look. Our cities are in bad shape, but so is our government. So is our capitol.

Disorder also is a mental and moral situation. It is not entirely a fiscal thing. We are disorderly intellectually in the United States. There is... there is an increasingly amount of name calling and bad language. It is not possible now to go to a movie without hearing things that are absolutely unutterably unspeakable.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The worst, the worst of language exposed to every... radiating to everybody. And, of course, I remember years ago, 20 odd years ago, sitting in a movie in Caracas where we had an American film. Burt Lancaster and somebody else. At the end of the film everyone in it was so degraded that the audience began to hiss. And I couldn’t help but feel ashamed and I thought, what are these people doing to this country? So that is disorder.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Let me say, by the way, that the Greeks are the ones who are blocking the further entrance of Turks into Europe. And Greece deserves credit for having the courage to say they are not our kind. They are alien to us culturally and religiously.

[ Murray ] Well, I am just listening to Otto there. I thought that one of the ... it seems like one of the inevitable results of being successful is you wind up with a society that won’t take certain jobs when you are talking about the waiter jobs. One of the reasons that the U. S. government or at least officials in the U. S. government that are in favor of open immigration to the United States is that there are a lot of jobs in a lot of industries that Americans won’t take. Therefore they have to allow this immigration so that people will start at these entry level jobs.

[ Scott ] Well, we have a curious contradiction here. Twenty five percent of the class of 1975, let us say, is no longer alive on earth because they were aborted in their mother’s wombs. We have aborted over 25 million people. Those 25 million would have had 25 million more by this time and there would have been plenty, plenty of activity and people in this country instead of which we are bringing in the relatives of immigrants and it is the relatives of the immigrants that are killing us in terms of population demographics. How much... Who is going to check on how many cousins an Asian family has? Apparently they have every one of them a thousand.

And I don’t believe that Americans will not take these jobs, because I know that young people today will take anything in order to get by. They have to. They have to. I think these rationales keep coming up that some how or another the people of the United States have made the officials take certain actions. But that is not the case. The people of the United States have no control over the officials. That is part of our problem.

[ Murray ] Well, the officials are very good at coming up with these kinds of explanations that put the... the blame back on the citizens of this country.

[ Scott ] Yes, indeed. Tell me. You have lots of friends still on the police force. What do they say? What is their... what is their attitude? How do they feel?

[ Murray ] Well, you know, the police officers go through a lot of different stages. They are very enthusiastic when they first start. There is a lot to learn, a lot of procedures that they have to learn. They are almost over trained by the time they get into the field and I know we have spoken of this before that instead of using the field training and having a rookie cop go out with an experienced officer for at least four or five years before he is allowed to go out on his own so that he can watch how an experienced officer relates to the public, how he deals with various situations and the older officer can watch the younger man to see that he doesn’t over react and doesn't lose control of himself. And that is not happening. There is such a tremendous turnover.

For instance, in this county that we live in there is something like a 50 percent turnover every year or two among the line officers. These are the fellows that go out on the street and make the calls day to day. Of course there is not as much turn over in the administrative people.

[ Scott ] Isn’t... don’t they get paid enough?

[ Murray ] Well, a lot of them don't come up in an area like this for ... for pay, necessarily. Many of them come up for the ... to get away from the pressures of law enforcement jobs that they have had in city areas where they are running anywhere from six, eight, 10 violent crimes deep. In other words, that is one officer, one radio car has six violent crimes in progress that he is supposed to respond to.

Now I used to have a business in the city of Oakland and this is some years ago. This is almost 20 years ago. And 20 years ago if you listened on a police radio scanner there would be something like 12 armed robberies by 10 o'clock in the morning. And the officers simply couldn’t get to them all. If the description from the dispatcher was that somebody was being assaulted, then they would try to get to that one first. But if somebody was simply looting a store, that was further down the priority list. Property was further down on the list. So a lot of these officers they have burn out and that is a reason for a lot of the turnover. They just... that pressure, that ... that unending incessant pressure is just too much for any human being to take.

[ Scott ] I recall in the 30s that the New York police force was considered one of the best in the country. It was a good job. They were mostly blue collar men. I don’t think they got a great deal of the sort of training they get today, not too much on the paper work and the classroom instruction. It was almost all hands on apprenticeship under older men and they were very smart, very intelligent. They did an awful lot of law enforcing without dragging anybody in. And, of course they still had beat patrolmen and they had 20,000. But my impression is—and I don’t know if it is true or not, is that police work no longer pays proportionately what it paid then. It paid a great deal better then than you could get on a blue collar job or even... or even a skilled trade job. Today I don’t think that is true. If we were to pay policemen today in a proportional way they would be getting at least 100,000 a year.

[ Murray ] Well, right now they start somewhere around 10, 10 dollars an hour.

[ Scott ] Well, that is ridiculous.

[multiple voices]

Mark: Ten dollars an hour. And... and most of them... in fact, virtually every one that I know his wife is working full time.

[ Scott ] Well, then he is... he is ... he is taking a job as a sacrifice. It amounts to a sacrifice.

[ Rushdoony ] They come up here because living conditions are better and there isn't the same degree of violence, but they find that they cannot support themselves and their wives have to work and there is still pressure on the job because they are short handed.

[ Scott ] Of course, they have women policemen now.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which is a... you know, I... I... I am fearful of them. Every so often they lose their guns and their lives. The introduction of women into the work force has had the overall effect of reducing the wages for every worker.

[ Murray ] Well, FBI statistics state that 70 percent of the 150 to 200 police officers that are killed every year are shot with their own gun and most of them simply are not physically not large enough to keep that from happening. We are sending people who are ill equipped by size. I don't care how much training you give them. They can be kung fu experts. But when you come up against some guy who is enraged or drug crazed or alcohol crazed and weighs 250 pounds he is just going to pick you up and throw you through a plate glass window. And since they eliminated the minimum size requirements so that they could allow Asians and women into law enforcement, the number of people who have been getting killed on the job has risen steadily and yet nobody makes the connection.

[ Scott ] Isn’t it strange? They used to do most of the... they... they had third degree. They had a third degree. The put real pressure on their prisoner, but not as much pressure as people may believe. The criminals that I recall when I was covering crime were anxious to confess, strange as that sounds. There is a need to confess that you have done something wrong and it is written in your heart like the knowledge of God. And most of the time the confessions are not forced and when some sort of a deal is made if they would implicate others and so forth. But, as I recall, the police in those days, they all had an awful lot of friends in the community, contacts in the community. They had bars where they could get free drinks and where they knew the bartender or the proprietor and they knew some of the habitual ways of the bar. They knew the cleaning shop, the hotel owner and this one and that one. And they could come... the community helped them solve crimes. The community wouldn’t tell them who the members of the mafia were, but they would let them know that it was a mafia deal.

Now my impression is that the police are as removed from the citizenry as the ... as the police of Spain used to be who had to live separate from everybody else. Without these community contacts and cooperation, the police are really up against a black wall. I don’t know if that is true or not.

[ Murray ] Well, it... you know, the modern day term for that is networking.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Networking is not going on. Nowadays you have got a network of stoolies where someone is picked up for some minor crime and because it is either misdemeanor or not too serious a crime they will make a deal if you will furnish information they will let him... let him go.

[ Scott ] But he has to continue his gang activities in order to be of use for them and this is that... something like the O’Connell of the czarist Russia where it had both Stalin and Bushinski worked for the police at the same time they worked of the revolution. And the police couldn’t put them away for too long because then they would no longer be revolutionary stoolies and they continued with the revolution in order to keep out of the hands of the police in order to keep their deal going. So we have here a police underworld connection that becomes permanent.

[ Murray ] Well, one of the problems nowadays is that these stoolies or stool pigeons, if you want to refer to them as that...

[ Scott ] Informants.

[ Murray ] They are informants. They are frequently burned by the court. The judges used to understand this means of gathering information in order to achieve justice.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] But nowadays they are so bound by procedural technicalities that frequently informants are placed in a position where they must be revealed. They are forced to be ... their identity is revealed by either by public prosecutors or the judge will demand it.

[ Scott ] Would you say that this is a result of our university educational professional class where the rules become more important the... the technique is more important than the substance?

[ Murray ] I would say so.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. There is a man in a fair sized city in this state who is in police work. He is under 40. He is a Christian Reconstructionist. He would like very much to come up here to be able to worship with us because he feels totally alone. Everyone around him is becoming totally cynical after so many years in the force. They feel that the courts are worthless. What they says about the judges is hardly repeatable on tape or off tape. And yet when he checked out the situation here and he thought very, very seriously of coming here, because it is getting to him. He found he couldn’t afford to make the move unless his wife went to work. And with some very small children he cannot consider that possibility.

So this is the trap that the police are in and they feel very, very isolated and embittered, especially, of course, with the kind of thing, the taping of the Rodney King arrest did to the police. Nothing was said about the fact that this man was known to be a criminal, that he was speeding at hundred miles an hour, that there was reason to believe he might be armed and dangerous and he was refusing to submit. So where they going to stand back and say, “Pretty please”? Under such circumstances they reacted the way you and I would react. They struck before something happened to them.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, there has also been other tapes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Showing other atrocities of various sorts which have not been radiated all across the country on every TV station. As we know, the media is very selective.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean there as not too many years ago an instance of a patrolman in New Jersey, I believe, who was literally pulled to pieces by the crowd. And no outcry whatever. But all bad things come to an end as well as all good things.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There is no question in my mind that tolerance and amongst some people, even, say, as passive as the American people have become, there is a limit to their ... to their tolerance. We are going not see an enormous explosion in this country unless the government recovers its brains. Now I have listened this afternoon to a CNN Crossfire program. There was a young man, a reporter on there who had a research book. The title of the book was The Minority Party. And he said he had researched this quite extensively. He said, “The Democratic party has so tied itself in with the minorities in this country that it is loosing the allegiance of the white people.” And he said, “This is not only true of the older white middle class, which voted Republican presidents in for the last four elections, but especially and particularly of the younger white people who will not hear anything more about it and that the affirmative action program is now gone into reverse as far as the democrats are concerned in their votes. And that includes Congress as well as the President, because it is a Democrat Congress that is doing this.

Both the other people on the program, one was reverend Jesse Jackson and I am telling you. I thought he was going to jump out of his starched collar. He went on a roll about how that had nothing to do with it, that... what about the deficits, said Jesse Jackson. What about all this overseas money? And the ... in one of the examiners or fellow commentators went into another roll saying that it as all part of the Republican racist propaganda. But we know it isn’t. We know it isn’t.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think one of the hopeful signs today is the fact that Howard Philips is starting a new party, the Tax Payer’s Alliance. And the response he has been getting is amazingly good, that Christians in particular disillusioned with the anti Christian stance of both the major parties are beginning to look to the Tax Payer’s Alliance.

[ Scott ] Did you read the Wanderer article?

[ Rushdoony ] No, I missed that.

[ Scott ] The Wanderer had an article about Howie’s party in which it said that he is picking up large elements of the moral majority and the conservative Catholics.

[ Rushdoony ] And Christian Reconstructionist and evangelical Protestants. He is picking up people who have become disillusioned with both parties. And I think that is one of a number of very dramatic signs on the horizon that indicate that law and disorder are not going to prevail, false law and its disorder.

[ Scott ] Well, they term limitation thing is up before the California Supreme Court. Now the court is being asked to rule that you cannot limit congressional or legislative terms without changing the constitution. Well, all that does is to lay the day of judgment, because if the court rules in that effect, of course, the constitution of California will be changed. And if you once open it up for change, the change may be a lot more sweeping than Willie Brown expects.

[ Murray ] You notice, they are all saying that they are not in favor of getting into a constitutional change. They just want to selectively pick and choose what they want to go after. I think the ... you know, regarding Howie Philips’ third party effort, we need to be made aware of how this is going to work from a practical standpoint. How can individual people in the Christian community support this effort? And will it be by write in ballots? In other words, should people be encouraged, rather than going down for the two party choices select the Tax Payer’s party by the write in ballot?

[ Scott ] Well, he has over a year left to organize and he is ... his organizational efforts, I understand have proceeded more quickly than he expected.

[ Rushdoony ] He expects to be on the ballot in every city.

[ Scott ] And he expects to have a national convention between some time... some time between now and next November or the November after this.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think there are very hopeful signs on the horizon. I think we and those who are listening to us represent a change on the American scene.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] There was nothing like this 20 years ago and 30 years ago.

[ Scott ] This conversation would not have been held...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... only a few years ago.

[ Rushdoony ] [affirmative response]

[ Scott ] We never really got down to these sort of basics earlier.

[ Murray ] Well, people always think that things are ... are ... can’t get any worse.

[ Scott ] Well, they can always get worse. They can always get better, too.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes. And people have not tied in the existing laws to disorder and this, I believe, they are beginning to do so that I think we have brought together a key factor in our current crisis that law is the basis of our disorder and we need to change the nature of our laws. We need to go back again to what was common in every classroom and in every court, the 10 Commandments. They used to be on the walls.

[ Scott ] That is what I, you know, said earlier about whether people know they are breaking the law or not.

There is also going to have to be something done about these legislative mils that we have created.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We cannot continue as a nation to have nothing but these macaroni laws drowned out every minute. There should be a decent interval before a law is changed or before a law is enacted. And these people have got better things... if they have... they don’t have to sit around her around the clock passing laws. They can go home and go to work as their forbearers did for a good part of the year.

[ Murray ] Well, we have got an enormous supply and demand problem. Seventy percent of the attorneys in the world are in the United States. So when you have got that kind of a supply they are not all good and some of them have to find work somewhere and some of the failed attorneys go into politics.

[ Scott ] I am very surprised that so few of them set out to defend people.

[ Murray ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is an awful waste of education involved there.

[ Murray ] It is the last thing in their mind. Every attorney I have ever talked to said that they are... there is not... justice is not their job. It is the procedural technicalities that they are involved with.

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] Well, if justice is not their job...

[ Rushdoony ] That is the law schools.

[ Scott ] ... we will have to change their law ... we will have to change their job requirements.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is just about up. Thank you all for listening. I think that we all need to think very, very seriously about the essential relationship between the kind of laws we now have and the disorder we are experiencing.

I began by saying that much of our trouble today is caused by bad laws rather than by bad men and that bad laws can affect more people than a bad man can. So we need to get back to God’s law and to start changing people.

Thank you all and good night.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.