9-4-26 - 10am - Where's The Beef, Private Money Paying Cops and Public & Private Land vs Hunters

0:00Why you deal with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever feel like ordering lunch turns you into the office emergency hotline? One meal becomes allergies, budgets, delivery timing, and a dozen opinions. Suddenly, you're not doing your job. You're managing a food crisis. That's why companies use EasyCator. EasyCator is the workplace food platform. With catering from over 100,000 restaurants nationwide for team lunches, client meetings, trainings, and more. With EasyCator, you get budget controls, recurring orders, invoicing, and support when plans change last minute.

1:02So the food shows up right on time and your day stays on track. Stop managing a food crisis. Start ordering with EasyCator. Visit EasyCator. That's easykater.com and find reliable catering for your next meeting in minutes. This episode sponsored by HomeBase. HomeBase is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With HomeBase, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use HomeBase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. HomeBase. Built for small businesses that do it all. This episode sponsored by HomeBase. HomeBase is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant.

2:02With HomeBase, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use HomeBase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. HomeBase. Built for small businesses that do it all. Interesting story about Barry Morphew being arrested and bolder after having a hit and run while being monitored via GPS. Barry Morphew. So I don't know what's going on, but in the Clancy trial, the one out in Texas, Tussets. Explain this, Mr. lawyer. I don't, I have, for all I see are the, is the Kairon.

3:04Right. The Kairon says, Judge pauses Miss Trial for one hour in Clancy Trial. So has he declared a Miss Trial? I mean, I think about 20 people texting me saying he has declared a Miss Trial. Well, if you declared the Miss Trial, what are you pausing? Is it my non lawyer, Blaine's, they're trying to tell the jury to, you've got another hour. Give me another hour at least. I don't know is the jury in? I'm assuming the jury is not in because the cameras are not in the courtroom. Right now, these some Fox news, CMB is doing something else. The camera's not in the courtroom. If the jury's in that courtroom, I can hear them to you. The cameras would be on. So I don't know what's going on. It's what we call in the business. It's in Black's Law Dictionary, a cluster. Yes. Oh, yes. That makes a complete sense. It's a compound word, but you just start with the cluster. Right. Yeah. That'll get you to the rest of it. Yeah. Yes. All right. Now, back to beef for a moment.

4:06Where's the beef? Where's the beef? Now, remember the lawsuits about the anti-trust that's all alleged. Price fixing all alleged. But notice what happened to those Packers, Tyson and Cargill, they have put up 87 and a half million bucks to try to settle the claims from the beef buyers. JBS put up 52 and a half million before them. Every one of them settled without admitting they did a single thing wrong. You're grown up, draw your own conclusion. It's brought carefully. But here's the question I think gives away the game. If the real case is about the Packers and the Ranchers, that's been building for years since long before this administration. Why did Washington spend this week marching wall-marding Costco and Amazon in front of the cameras? Oh, the calendar. Last November, Trump went out on his own website and he accused the meatpacking companies of,

5:07and these are his words, elicit collusion, price fixing, price manipulation. Then in May, the Justice Department opened the Packer Pro. In July, it quietly put letters in the mail to eight grocery chains asking them to preserve records and turn over their beef pricing, their margins, their cost going all the way back to 2020. And then this week, the very week the beef prices are getting a hot political problem. It announced the grocery store expansion outwelled with a big famous name attached. The Attorney General went on to talk up a whistleblower bounty, 15 to 30 percent of whatever the government recovers, and a review of more than three million documents. Now, look hard on what those eight companies actually got. A sternly worded letter. A demand to hand over their pricing records and come explain themselves. It's not an indictment. That's not even a criminal charge.

6:08Nobody at Walmart or Costco or Amazon has been accused of any crime whatsoever. What the Department of Justice did was send them a subpoena with a press release. That was it. That would keep beef too. I've stood at the meat case. I've run the math. Same math you have. But when a guy in Washington stands up and tells me he has found the villain who did this to my grocery bill or to your grocery bill and by God, he's going to make them pay. Yeah. I would have said at one time I might want to stand up and cheer. And maybe you do. But because I've been there done that, I'd be lying to you if I'd cheer. If I tell you Walmart emptied that pasture, I'm selling the story that the government's own cattle cow says is not true. Now, my timing argument about, oh, it's liberating weekend. Oh yeah. The midterms are coming up in just what six weeks. Well, how far is it?

7:09So is it eight, 10 weeks? That's all inference. A probe can be politically convenient and still turn up something real. And maybe it will. So I'm not telling you the grocery investigation is a fake. I'm telling you, I don't think the evidence is there. The burden is on the Department of Justice to find it. And everything I can find actually points to the shortage, not to a conspiracy at the checkout line when you go to King's supers. Two things are true at the same time. The packers may well have cheated the ranchers. And after years of it, the jury is finally going to look at them in the eye in Minnesota. And the price you paid to meet case this week is mostly, I believe the drought, the parasite, the smallest cattle herd in 75 years, all grindings, things like the air every well those things. Grinding out very slow, the way that shortage is always due.

8:09What actually brings that price down for good? More cows, more cows, more cattle. That takes, well, it takes rain. It takes time. It takes a rancher who is willing to bet a few hard years on the idea that the price will still be there when his calves are finally on the ground. What it does not take is three grocery chains holding in front of the cameras. The week the hamburger got expensive. So we have a job report there. I didn't plan to talk about jobs. I just want to mention it very briefly. The job report comes out. Exceeds expectations. I think the number was 162,000 or something anyway. It was a big number. And the very first thing I hear is, it proves that the economy is getting better for everybody. And inflation, of course, is down. The core inflation I heard quoted, I haven't confirmed.

9:12I heard quoted today was 1.6%. But all the 2% target level for the Fed. 1.6%. I don't think anybody understands inflation. Because you're telling me that, okay, so the prices they got inflated during the Biden administration, up to what, 14, 15, 19%. So that's a 20 bucks. Whatever, whatever the thing is, 20 bucks. And then inflation starts slowing down. What does that mean? It doesn't mean the price comes down. It means the price increase slows down. So if you have 1.6% inflation, that means that whatever the price was last, let's just say yesterday. Yesterday. And if they're saying today, inflation is 1.6%. That means that whatever the price was yesterday, today is going to be 1.6% higher.

10:15Yeah, that's better than 20% higher. That's better than 15% higher. Hell, that's better than 5% higher. But 1.6% is still higher. You cannot change that. You simply cannot change it. Now, I want you to go from beef. Let's take our burgers. Let's set the burgers aside for a moment. And I want you to go to a courtroom in the Florida Panhand. Ready? Are you there yet? Okay, here we are. There's a defendant sitting at the table. The jury sitting in the box. And on the witness stand is a detective. He is sworn. He carries a badge and a gun. He's a detective. And he made the case that put this man on trial. Now, I want you to picture the defense lawyers now standing up. And instead of asking the detective about the evidence, the defense lawyer wants to ask the detective about his paycheck.

11:20First question. Who hired you for this job? It seems kind of weird, doesn't it? Next question. Who bought the car that you drove to the stakeout, to the surveillance? Weird. What? Next question. Who paid for the software that cracked the phone that you used to get to the dirt bank? Another weird question. Who bought the gun on your hip? And the answer, the honest answer from this detective all the way down is a ministry in Colorado Springs run by a guy who's now running for the governor of Colorado. Yeah, let's go back. I know that was like, what? Yes, let's go back to that courtroom for a second. Because that detective is the whole story here. Not this wild biography that you hear that, you know, everybody's that me and everybody

12:21else has been talking about. Not the debates that that guy won't show up for. Something that Victor Marx built with his own hands and he was bringing here to Colorado. Yes. Wow. For three weeks, I've talked to you about Victor Marx, the candidate, the empty chair, the club 20 debates, the foundation, Republicans walking out. The merchant money running through a shell company up in Wyoming, all of it real, all of it, Victor Marx. But right now, I want to talk to about his ministry because the man is the symptom. The ministry, I think, is the disease. The Guardian newspaper got the documents. Yesterday, the signed agreements, the tax filings, and here's the playing version of what they show. Victor Marx's charity, all things possible, has been paying the salaries of cops in Florida, not donating to a fundraiser, not buying a squad car for a photo up, paying the officer, his salary,

13:26his benefits, his vehicle, his forensic computer. In one county, down to the vest on his chest, in the hang-gun on his belt and the rifle in his trunk. So follow that for a minute. This is all reported in the Guardian. A private charity, funded by donors, nobody has to name, hires a detective, equips him, helps him decide who he is and how he gets graded. And then he goes to work as a sworn officer of the state of Florida, carrying the state's authority, wearing the state's badge. So there's a law professor named Elizabeth Jo. She asked the only question that matters. Who's that cop accountable to? The public that swore him in or at the donor that signs his checks. Then she made an even sharper point. You do not need a written order for the money to talk. When your job depends on the next donation, you already know what the donor wants. You don't have to be told.

14:28This work gets even worse. The Florida sheriffs signed their agreements with something called the Protecting Children's Innocent Task Force. Now on paper, the agreement calls it a tax exempt charity. A nonprofit has got its own charter. Except the ministry's own chief executive told the Guardian, no, that's not what it is. His words, it is not a separate nonprofit and it does not have its own tax ID number. So that's the ministry with a different name. So one of the sheriff's office was asked by the Guardian a very simple question. Who funds the group that is paying for your detective? The answer in writing, according to the Guardian, was we don't know. The spokeswoman said the office has no information identifying the sources of the funding. And then the police chief in another Florida city said exactly the same thing.

15:30His words, I'm not aware of who funds the ministry. Wow. So a sheriff's office took a detective, a car, and a forensic lab, from an outfit it cannot identify, funded by donors it cannot name, on a contract that calls that outfit a charity. Those own leaders say does not legally exist. That's not a partnership. That's kind of a black hole with a badge somewhere on. Then there was a law professor Seth Stalton, actually a former cop himself. Told the Guardian exactly what happens next. These are his words. A good defense lawyer is going to run this one to the ground. Every case that detective touched, every arrest now has a lawyer asking who really ran the investigation and who was really paying for it. Take it from a retired lawyer. He's right. And if this was one time thing, I'd tell you so, but it's not.

16:33Again, according to the Guardian, before the ministry started buying detectives, they ran something called school games. Those are weekend events were volunteers. Build as special forces intelligence operators were handed police cases and told to go find people online. The intercept reported exactly how they did it. Fake social media accounts, facial recognition tools, and a surveillance platform from an Israeli company called Cobwebs. I'm just telling you what I read yesterday. Now here's the detail I can't get past. That same company Cobwebs had already been banned by the parent company of Facebook meta, publicly banned, named in a report on what they called the surveillance for higher industry. The companies despy on people for money. Facebook threw them off the platform five years ago in 2021.

17:34But in 2023, Mr. Marx's ministry announced a partnership with them and put out a press release writing about it. So this is the pattern twice now. Private money buying the tools of public power, private money buying the tools of surveillance, investigation, arrests with nobody who ever voted for standing in that room. And Florida was a detective before that was a banned spy firm. Same instinct every time by the capability skipped the public. Why is this a Colorado problem? Let me bring it home because this stops being a Florida story. The day you fill out your ballot. The governor called her out of commands to call her out of state patrol. A real police force, our police force, we pay for it. And the man is asking us for that command has shown you in another state how he thinks policing should be paid for. I guess, apparently, quietly and privately. With the donor keeping a hand on who gets hired and how they are judged,

18:36and the public finding out if ever long after the fact, just thanks to some good reporting by the Guardian and the Intercept. The ministry's tax return that would show the Florida money is not even due until the middle of November. I think like the 15th or 16th, some 12 or some days after the election. So we're being asked to vote first, look at the receipts later. So I'm not telling you that Mark's broke along Florida. Let's be clear about that. What I'm telling you is the Guardian and the Intercept are reporting that that was his model. That is how he builds. And in eight weeks, you get to decide whether to hand that model say to our state troopers. Now I'm not going to stay in here and dump all that on one guy and just then walk away clean. You know I'm not going to do that. We nominated him. Republican primary voters, my people, our people, looked at the field and they picked Victor

19:40Mark's. Nobody snuck him onto the ballot. Barb Kirk-Maris said out loud during the primary that he had a legal obligation to follow the law and a moral obligation to send an example. I heard her. I think you heard her, but we picked him anyway. So this is a mirror again. It's always a mirror. A party series about rebuilding does not get to be surprised when the nominee it shows turns out to be exactly what these documents said that he was. I care about this because I'm one of the guys trying to rebuild this party for 2028. And this is the lesson all laid out in signed agreements and tax filings for anybody willing to read it. It's on the Guardian's website. It's on the Interceptor's website. I'd encourage you to go this episode sponsored by Homebase. Homebase is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With Homebase,

20:41you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use Homebase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. Homebase, built for small businesses that do it all. Please, Michael, every damn channel has this trial thing on. Talk about something else and something that's important. This whole thing is messed up. Please don't discuss it because everybody is do something different. Please, Anthony from Liquid. Hey, honey, discuss what we had just heard. We don't like it. Put the lawyer touch on it.

21:41No, I just want to go back. It's now 1034 in the morning. We'll be on the air an hour and a half, hour and 34 minutes. And I, in hour and 34 minutes, I spent what, what do you think? Two minutes? If that. Yeah, maybe 90 seconds about the stupid trial. And I finally found out during the break what's really going on. The judge. Sam. Huh? Thanks to our guy. Sam. Yes. The judge gave the defense one hour to appeal to the, to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. His intent, the judge's intent to declare a mistrial. So he can, he gave the defense lawyer an hour to run to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, asked for a stay to stop the judge from declaring a mistrial so they can argue that in the Supreme Court. That's why the jury is not sitting in the jury box. That's why they're still back in the, in the, their, their deliberation room,

22:44while they spend this hour. Is that hour up? Correct. The hour ended five minutes ago. Do we know whether we have a stay or not? There just says no word from the court. And here's what's interesting. Because of the talk back, bitching about that, I had to explain that we didn't talk about it, which led to me talking about which cuts from the time of what I really wanted to talk about. It's a whole chicken and egg thing, isn't it? It is. All right, let's go to carbon county Wyoming. There have been a carbon county nothing special about it. Actually, there is something very special about it. It's the story. A steel post, a strand or two of wire, the wind doing what the wind always does up there. But what's interesting is that post, that fence post, it stands on an exact spot where four sections of land, four square miles of land come together at one point. The way that four squares meet in

23:46the middle of say a checkerboard, two of those squares are private land, two of those squares, two of those sections are public land. The public land is public. It's yours and mine. Now put four men in the picture. They drive out from Missouri to go hunt elk. And they had every legal right to stand on the public land. There was just one problem because of the way the land is situated to get from the public land behind them to the public land in front of them. They had to cross that single point, that little tiny point where all four corners touch. And the guy that owns the two private squares, the two sections of private land, had made it very clear. You put one boot on my dirt. I'll have you arrested. So they didn't put a boot on his dirt. These are very good hunters. They brought a ladder with them.

24:51In 2021, those four men set up a portable ladder down right at that very corner. They climbed up one side and down the other. And they stepped from public land to public land. They never touched a blade of the private grass on either side. They were very careful about it to a fault. They did not want one inch of trouble. And for that, they got four years of trouble. Let me tell you first about who one of them arrested. His name is Fred Eshelman. He made his fortune in pharmaceuticals. Some say he's a billionaire. I really have no clue how much he's worth. One of his companies once held the rights to a drug for men dealing with a certain finding problem in the bedroom. I'll just leave that there. He owns a spread of about 50 square miles, what's called Elk Mountain Ranch. And he owns it through a company called Iron Bar Holdings. Here's a piece of history most people never learned. The reason that land is a checkerboard in

25:52the first place goes back to the 1800s when Congress handed the railroads every other square mile across the west so they could build the tracks. Public square, private square, public square, private square, all the way to the horizon. That is why all across the mountain west, the land you own as an American and the land of private men owns are usually stitched together corner to corner. Nobody sat down to try to design a trap. That's what it became. Because if touching that one shared corner is illegal, then that means that millions of our public land are surrounded by private land and their walls off reachable only with the permission of whoever owns the private squares around them. That became the entire fight. Now the private owner side, the billionaire side is arguing with this. Yeah, the hunters never touch my ground. But when they climb that ladder and swung a leg over the corner, their bodies pass through the air above my land.

26:58And there's an old room wall. This says when you own a piece of ground, you own the column of air above it all the way up. The longest even say it in Latin. It means roughly whoever owns the soil owns all the way to the heavens. So what about anybody like flying a plane? Well, because we've now rolled that back. Don't confuse my story here. Okay, but there is a reasonable man above the ground that you own above that becomes public airspace and is controlled by the FAA and everything else. Okay, where that is. Because I'll wear you are. Yeah. That's a real doctor, though. It really is a real doctor. So the law gave all the way to the heavens the day the first airplane flew over the first farm and everything started to change. Because that rule is still real. Every jet crossing the country at 35,000 feet would be trespassing over a million back yards, right? It courts through that idea of generations to go.

28:04Now it comes down to a reasonable standard and reasonable. This is the entire ballgame here. This is the reason the story gets under my skin. I believe in private property rights. I don't I fish. I'll defend the landowner's fence line as hard as any man on this radio. Property rights are close to pretty. I probably rights are sacred to me. But sacred does not mean unlimited. Every right we've got runs right up to the point where it collides with somebody else's right. And then a reasonable line gets drawn between those rights. Your rights swing your fist. My right to my nose. We've all heard that since we were kids, right? A man's right to his own land cannot be stretched so far that as small as the public's right treats the land the public owns. And the moment that happens, the word public starts meaning anything. Let's have this play out. They first charged those four guys with criminal trespass. So while Mingyuri heard the whole thing and in 2022 found them not guilty on everything again.

29:07Of course you think of Wyoming during but do otherwise. But you'd think that'd be the end of it. But no, because we are dealing with a billionaire. He his company turned around to the hundreds and federal court for money. How much? Somewhere between seven and nine million dollars. Now what could form him with a step letter? Possibly has cost the billionaire. They didn't break a fence. They didn't shoot a stock. They didn't leave so much as a gum wrapper. The theory. The theory. He argued his ranch was worth millions less now because the public could finally reach the public land next door. So the value he was suing to protect was the value of literally keeping you in the out. The lockout was his asset. Wow. Mike, from what you're saying, I can't understand why Marx didn't try to run to replace DeSantis. He had probably have a better chance down there.

30:11Yeah, I'd like to see that. So the the Wyoming court rejects the billionaire's claim and the gentlemen are clear to any wrong doing. So then the billionaire sues the guys who use the latter to get from public land to public land by climbing over the private land. So he took it to federal court. The federal trial judge didn't buy it either. So they appealed to the 10th Circuit. Then last year the 10th Circuit right here in Denver, three judges ruled against him unanimously. Then he asked the Supreme Court to step in. And this past October, the Supreme Court said no. The client even hear it, which means finally over done. And the law those judges leaned on is the best part of the whole story. It's called the Unlawful Inclosures Act passed in 1885. It was during the range wars when the big

31:14cattle barons were stringing barbed wire around public land and then telling the home status and all the small outfitters get off the ground. It was never the barons to close in the first place. Congress looked at that and said no. You cannot fence the American public off the American public on land. That's been on the books for what 140 years plus those all the way across those one there in 40 years to protect 400s on a ladder. A pharmaceutical forchants, lawyers on one side, a step ladder and an 1885 statute on the other and the ladder won. The reason I'm telling you this in Denver, not just as wild mean curiosity, the 10th Circuit also covers Colorado. So this is our law now too. And there are millions of acres of corner locked public land across the entire west, including Colorado. There's a good chunk of it right here in our state that just

32:15received a legal key. Land you already own that you finally have a lawful way to stand on. So let me say just plainly as I know how private property is sacred and I'll keep saying so in this program every chance I got. But a wealthy guy does not get to use the courts to build an invisible wall around that land that belongs to all of us and then call that wall his property line. There's a, well, they're supposed to be 10th Circuit affirmed it. I'm getting ready to use a phrase that I think we've lost sight of. A reasonable, a reasonableness standard. Thank God for it, right? Because without it, public land just becomes a phrase on a map that you can never walk to. So 400 climbed a ladder to stand on the land they already owned and they were right to do so.

33:17The fact that went all the way to the Supreme Court and the fact that the billionaire kept spending money after money after money to go not just to federal court first because remember he's so he they're not doing it on the contingency. Oh no, they're charging five six seven hundred thousand bucks an hour and they're taking it all the way through federal court to the court of appeals appealing to the US Supreme Court finally gets back to the 10th Circuit and 10th Circuit says no, nope, can't do it. That's how our system works and that's fine. You get the money go pursue it but what was unreasonable about what those guys did in the first place? Four corners when you think about it if you knew like you go to the real four corners, over where you know Arizona New Mexico, Utah and Nevada all come together or Colorado, they all come together, not Utah, Utah and Colorado and Mexico, but they all come together four corners.

34:17There's actually a little pen right there. They um, a disc and it shows the four states where they come together. So there is literally when you think about land boundaries, there is literally a line where they cross. So you can in four corners, whether you're in four corners, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, you can literally step from Colorado into Arizona, right over. That's kind of what's going on here. A reasonable standard. I don't think they needed the latter because if you knew precisely where that corner was, they could have just stepped over it, but they went the extra mile. The reasonableness standard. I'm not sure there's anything left in the country that we judge based on reasonableness.

35:18We're not boring. Lotta news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. We have a winner. Yes. Listen to Armstrong, you get a on-demand on the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.