Let's go.

Welcome to Citizen.

We have a special guest today from Spartan Forge, Bill Thompson.

How you doing?

Tell me about, well, I don't know how much you want to talk about your past life.

Because loose lips and all.

But I'm curious as somebody who's been a collector,

how you feel about the way that we've used that against our own citizenry

and what the implications of that are?

Yeah, so, I mean, obviously in the past, like everything that led up to things like the

church and pike committee hearings and that type of thing, obviously there's a documented,

you know, released, declassified corpus of information that definitely looks like we were

using shit against American citizens. The amount of stuff that I saw while I was still serving,

at least to the degree that I can talk about it, and I'm not

trying to sound like a douchebag. It's just I don't want some federal agents knocking on my door

saying I talked about something on a podcast I shouldn't have. It seemed to me, and again, I've changed

a lot since then. So whereas while I was in the government, while I was in the military, I wasn't as mature.

I didn't have an understanding.

I was just following orders.

And that's not an excuse, by the way.

You know, following orders is not an excuse.

But what I am saying is, I think the U.S. government in particular, there are things that they did that I have moral opposition to, one of them being like the Patriot Act.

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