Elon Musk has said it in a couple of interviews toward the end of the year since Time Magazine has made him “Man of the Year,” that government has a lot of problems. He thinks that government should be a referee on the field but not a player in the game. And he has continued to say that one of the biggest problems with the government is that they have a “monopoly on violence.” I first heard these comments from him during a Wall Street Journal interview at a yearly think tank kind of thing they do in Washington D.C. Then again, shortly after that, at a surprise sit down with the Babylon Bee, the online satire website. Many of us have been saying things like that for a long time. Elon Musk is obviously having an evolution as he runs his two major companies, Tesla and SpaceX, with the challenges of government regulation and global commerce that is trying desperately to move toward Chinese communism. The difference is that Musk cannot be canceled for saying what he does because he is at the front of the train on virtually everything. Actually, at a recent Joe Biden EV Summitt, Musk wasn’t invited, even though Tesla is undoubtedly the most important player when it comes to the electric car market. But instead of it looking bad on Musk, it blew up in the face of Biden, like everything does these days. So for Musk to say things about the government that are consistent with Tea Party positions over the last decade is quite a thing and certainly an indicator of things to come. When people like Musk are critiquing government correctly, many mainstreamers want the overflow of his money who will by default see things his way.
And isn’t that the heart of the problem with the government, that government has a monopoly on violence? That is precisely why they naturally are inefficient in everything they do because they never have to worry about someone calling them out as the big bullies. Or at least, that’s what they have assumed for a long time. That is why they feel they can start riots all over the country during 2020, trying to use racism to blame the Trump supporters for the unrest they created, but their real intent was to remove President Trump from office. But then when people went to Washington, a quarter-million people, to hear Trump give one of his final speeches and the frustrations spilled over into a mob at the Capitol building, the government felt it could arrest the participants and hold them in jail for some undetermined time ignoring completely any due process along the way. They also thought they could shoot Ashley Babbitt for no real reason and that there would be no recourse for their reckless actions. They felt they could arrest the participants of the January 6th, 2021 demonstration without any real just cause because of their monopoly on violence. In that case, they could have arrested people in all the mobs previously that were incited by the government, including on Inauguration Day in 2017 when President Trump was sworn in. The damage to Washington D.C. and other places was much more severe on that day, but as we have seen over the last several years, the government picks what it wants to enforce and abandons all laws when it’s not convenient to them.
Then we have the FBI, which I have been talking about for a while now as one of the most corrupt law enforcement branches we have these days. They are obviously radical from top to bottom. They are not only corrupt at the top floor of the FBI in Washington. The revelations in the Whitmer case in Michigan prove that several FBI agents were involved in a set up of the Wolverine Watchmen, where several agents had penetrated the group and were trying to inspire them into criminal activity. Like it looks, they did on January 6th. The ideas for violence weren’t coming from the militia groups themselves, but from the FBI trying to plant ideas for violence to cause an action that they could then arrest people for entrapment. The corruption in the FBI is at the top level, the middle level, and certainly in every field office.
I know people who are in the FBI. I also know people in the Secret Service. Over the years, many people have worked for me who move off into these fields, and good for them. We always need people to do these jobs; like Elon Musk says, we do need referees to help keep the game honest. But we don’t need the government playing the game. And when it comes to law enforcement, a badge doesn’t make a good person. Many people who have left me for some federal job I wouldn’t trust with a box of rocks, it’s not that they aren’t good people or were good employees. Yes, without good leadership around them, they go corrupt quickly, almost every time. I would never permit them to arrest people on fake FISA warrants in the middle of the night. What I have heard from the FBI, especially regarding their actions against President Trump, does not surprise me. And for what they have been caught in at the highest levels, you have to logically conclude that they are doing much worse where they never thought they’d get caught.
Corruption in federal law enforcement, even localized law enforcement, comes from one common source when the government thinks that they have a right to inflict violence on you. Still, you are never allowed to give it back to them, so we have created a corrupt legal system. When power is given to anybody without some measure of regulation, that power will undoubtedly go to their heads. One of those employees I spoke about who used to work for me became a local cop. He was always good for me; he was a model employee. But without me, he spun out of control quickly, and soon he was pulling over carloads of young girls and scaring them with threats of jail and traffic tickets that they didn’t want their parents to find out about. So he and his fellow officers would force the girls to perform oral sex on them to get out of trouble. And it worked most of the time until someone finally came forward and reported what had been happening. By nature, no matter who it is, authority over others will corrupt everyone. The best measure against it is to remove any monopoly of violence. In our brilliant constitutional republic, we do have a measure of addressing that very issue, the Second Amendment. The only reason we have any sense of justice in America is because of gun rights. The government would have gone wrong beyond repair years ago without those gun rights. What’s terrible about these last few years is that the government has gone further in corruption than ever before because of the Trump election of 2016. They were so insulted that people would vote for someone like Trump that they have turned toward their monopoly on violence to commit some significant constitutional crimes, including what they have done with Covid. We will be sorting out that mess for many years to come, but the crimes were, and continue to be, reprehensible. But good things are happening, and when people like Elon Musk are where many of us have been for a long time, positive changes are on the horizon. And in this case, talking about the problem is the first step in fixing it. We no longer have the assumption that we can trust these government authorities. Left alone, they are prone to corruption at every level, and it is from there, we must take action to correct it in the future.
Rich Hoffman
