After-Action (Debrief) Report on the Judge Monforton “Confrontation”

Opportunities to directly challenge the Establishment exist, if you know where to look. Of course, it should not be ignored that doing so cedes at least some of your individual privacy, but if you are willing to accept the necessary tradeoffs, then you just need to prepare for the specific task at hand. Determine your goal ahead of time, and keep your methods in accordance with that goal; in other words, don’t allow yourself to get sidetracked.

 

 

Exactly a week ago today, I called into The Montana Republic hosted by William Wolf on BlogTalkRadio.com during his interview of Judge Matthew Monforton, who is an aspiring politician campaigning for the District 69 seat within the Montana legislature’s House of Representatives. The judge’s awfully candid remarks to the questions I posed deserve to be analyzed, and in preparation for doing just that, I have transcribed both my questions and his answers as a preparatory aid to this report. I would also recommend you first listen to the two segments within the podcast according to the transcript’s time stamps (preferably as you read along to the transcript) before you continue reading any further. The rest of this article will be based on the presumption that you have familiarized yourself with what occurred.

Judge Monforton’s honesty was not only refreshing, but also deeply disturbing to me on a number of levels. Firstly, not only does he fail to reject the party politics that the Founders warned us against, but he goes further to endorse the platform of the Republican Party (hereafter referred to as the GOP, mainly because they are the anti-thesis of both classical and American republicanism). Here are some of the more hypocritical platform positions the GOP takes:

 

• They claim to be fiscally conservative, yet they want more military spending in order to murder even more foreigners who have caused us no harm whatsoever.

• They claim to be against the welfare state, yet, there is less than one page of the 60 page document that bothers to mention the Federal Reserve, and even then, they don’t advocate for its abolishment, despite its publically acknowledged origins and culpability in causing the Great Depression.

• They claim to be on the side of entrepreneurs, yet there is literally not one word on abolishing any of the Administrative Agencies whose “regulations” are criminalizing normal business practices and killing productivity by a million cuts.

• They claim to want to defend marriage, yet they assume it’s the prerogative of government to license marriage in the first place.

• They claim to support privacy, yet they were the ones more vocal than their equally statist counterparts in continually supporting the USA PATRIOT Act and the National Security Agency’s domestic roving wiretaps.

• They claim to defend the southern border, yet they persist in outlawing certain narcotics, which creates an environment for the Mexican cartels to distribute their products at highly inflated prices to the citizenry, a growing segment of whom are eventually incarcerated in increasingly overcrowded government dungeons.

• They claim to protect the interests of taxpayers, yet they too voted for the banker bailouts of 2008.

 

As you can no doubt tell, I am certainly no fan of the GOP, or how they (or their police goons) treated grassroots activists during the 2004 Republican National Convention (specifically, at Pier 57) and the Ron Paul delegates during the 2012 RNC, so please excuse me if I am just a tad perturbed at Judge Monforton’s sober adherence to a platform drafted by a blatantly Big Government political party.

Secondly, Monforton appears to believe in the monopolization of government law. The judge admitted that most of the cases he handled within the City of Bozeman (Montana) were a combination of, as he said, “DUIs, traffic related incidents, or misdemeanor domestic violence cases.” He also said that the militarization of police throughout the country, regardless of its constitutionality, is certainly problematic, although he claims he has not seen any evidence of arrest or conviction quotas. Further, Monforton believes that some vices are crimes, and as such, the “criminal hammer” must be brought down against addicts in drug courts as some sort of rehabilitation technique. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the judge is not favorable or even interested in repealing any of Montana’s traffic statutes. To top off this soufflé of statism, Monforton is against the privatization on the production of arbitration services as a replacement for the judiciary.

Thirdly, he seems conflicted about whether to legally delegitimize or abolish either the federal or Montana governments. When I asked him about whether he’d be interested in introducing a bill in the Montana legislature (as some New Hampshire legislators did last year) that would recognize the ratification of the Titles of Nobility Amendment, Monforton plead ignorance, despite admitting earlier he was a prosecutor for several years. Upon finally asking him whether he’d be inclined to support any effort to constitutionally abolish the Montana government (as per Article II § 2 of their constitution), he prefers reform, unless that government “is completely out of control and acting in a completely lawless fashion,” but that is not the current situation, as he sees it.

Please understand, I am not insinuating that Judge Monforton is somehow duplicitous; quite the contrary, if anything. If he were accused of being overly friendly with the enemy rebel government, it would be due largely to the fact that he is very open about doing so. Whether he is, or not, is not my place to say within the context of this report. Truth be told, many of the patriots become reformists because they see it as the best strategy to take with regards to securing our Liberties. Useful idiots, perhaps, but not definitive proof of being controlled opposition. Anyone who over-generalizes by claiming that all reformists are (undercover?) government agents fails to retain any sort of credibility, and certainly deserves neither your time nor your money. The last thing any of us need is more divisive internal balkanization.

What I will say here is that, without a doubt, Judge Monforton is a reformist, and this is consistent with his bid for that District 69 seat within the Montana House of Representatives. My only goal for calling-in was not to recklessly smear the judge, but to gauge the degree to which he is willing to oppress Montanans as a legislator, for anyone who seeks such a political office in this day and age is there to either grow or shrink government. No outlandish conspiracy is needed, just an unmitigated lust for power is all that is required to turn the institutionalized coercion of police, law, and even the military against the hapless citizenry. What many patriots fail to realize is that the most pernicious abuses of power lay not in the most obtuse backdoor deals, but in the daily tyrannies routinely committed against Americans right out in the open; consider Lysander Spooner’s analogy of the highwayman (traffic stop, much?).

I literally do not care about elections, so why did I bother questioning a candidate for the Montana legislature? It seemed to me to be an opportunity to demonstrate to Wolf and his listenership that if Monforton is the best that reformism can offer them, then (I argue) they should be less than impressed; disgusted would be ideal. Hell, for all they know, Monforton’s opponent could easily rig the election and no one would be the wiser. Even if the voter fraud was never made any easier than what used to be done with paper ballots, the latest social science research indicates that voters are literally incompetent when it comes to making coercively binding political decisions. The farce that is modern electoral representative democracy should be tossed into the refuse bin, at least until such time that these American governments have been constitutionally restored or abolished.

In summation, I think that Judge Monforton is sincere in his desire to restore constitutional government in Montana, but I know his method of running for a legislative seat is completely misguided. On the off chance he is successfully elected, what chance does he realistically have in toppling the entrenched bureaucracy that persecutes innocent men like Ernie Tertelgte? I sincerely wish Judge Monforton all the best, but I hope he begins to see through the fog of illusion to the nature of the situation we are all suffering under, for I am not asking him to instantly transform into a libertarian, but to immediately stop working within the system. Some conservatives have withdrawn from reformism, usually by becoming survivalists, and I think that if the judge were to pursue a similar course, I think he could become quite an good ally to the cause of liberty, if only by starving Leviathan of his own energy and support. One more government employee who has decided he is “going Galt” is one less government employee perpetuating the most dangerous superstition of authority itself.