Category Archives: Founding Fathers

UPDATE II: Brussels: Obama's New Mecca (& Cameroon)

Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Private Property, States' Rights

My new column, “Brussels: Obama’s New Mecca,” is on WND.COM. Here’s an excerpt:

“… Fifty five delegates convened in 1787 at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, to carve out the contours of this Constitution. Imagine those magnificent men making the case that the people of the colonies they represented ought to sit idle should their homesteads be overrun by trespassers and their families and friends imperiled. Imagine those very men arguing for a future central authority that acted as the sole arbiter in deciding who would breach the perimeters of their respective home patches.
Inconceivable.

If we lived in the old decentralized republic of absolute property rights, land owners in border communities would be policing and defending their properties and the commons. They’d have stopped the ongoing influx in its tracks. Whereas America’s modern-day community leader is suing Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for being a “bad gringo, a racist, and a bully”; community leaders in early America ? as historian David Hackett Fischer tells it ? often required an immigrant to furnish them with an affidavit from the Old Country, attesting to good character, before being permitted to settle among them.

Read the rest of “Brussels: Obama’s New Mecca,” on WND.COM.

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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UPDATE I (Sept. 4): As I mentioned in the column, “America’s modern-day community leader is suing Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for being a ‘bad gringo, a racist, and a bully.'” The sheriff has responded. Via Doug Powers, blogging for Michele Malkin:

“The Obama administration has filed three lawsuits against Arizona in the last few weeks … one against a college district, one against the state of Arizona and now one against my office. Each lawsuit centers on something to do with alleged racial discrimination.

These actions make it abundantly clear that Arizona, including this Sheriff, IS Washington’s new whipping boy. Now it’s time to take the gloves off. As for today’s lawsuit against my office: These people in Washington met with my attorneys only a few days ago. And in that meeting, Washington got our cooperation; they admitted they already have thousands of pages of the requested documents; and they were given access to interview my staff and get into my jails. They smiled in our faces and then stabbed us in the back with this lawsuit. The Obama administration intended to sue us all along, no matter what we did to try to avert it.

Washington isn’t playing fair and it’s time Americans everywhere wake up and see this administration for what it really is. Calculating, underhanded at times and certainly not looking out for the best interests of the legal citizens residing in this country.”

UPDATE II: We like the bright, plain-spoken Arizona state Sen. Frank Antenori:

UPDATED: Tea Party Central

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Politics, Race, Racism

How do you tell that a grassroots, decentralized movement has moved into mainstream politics and has been thoroughly co-opted by its forces? Here’s one sign: A movement that arose in order to address profound issues of political philosophy begins to front “spokespersons” to apologize and bend over backwards in order to pacify mainstream muckrakers and race-baters. That’s one way to know for sure that the Tea Party is being schooled and groomed for grimy politics as usual.

MSNBC:

Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.
He shrugged off the diss, calling it “grandstanding” from a “minor player on the fringe.”
A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a “Jewish Uncle Tom” and President Obama an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”
But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from “the Colored People” to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line.
The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams’ group when it wouldn’t fire him. “We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,” federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

You got a hint of the forces controlling the Tea Party—the kind of people who’ve clawed their way onto establishment forums such as “Face the Nation”—when the “gritty” movement doubled up in pain and then went into defense mode over being accused of racism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Being so accused by such people is always false and is almost always a badge of honor.

Andrew Breitbart’s “Go to hell” is a start. But even better would it have been to ignore an organization that is too stupid to debate, but is sufficiently wily to work to ensure that nothing of the old, founding liberties remains or is revived.

It was wrong to so much as dignify these contemptible efforts to silence the small segment of America that is still true to her origins. Leaders of that America should never have chomped down on the bait, which is nothing but ad hominem intended to paralyze and marginalize liberty.

“The Many Ministries of Truth,” I wrote,

“make truth telling a difficult task. In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. They’ve evolved over time, and they issue countless subliminal edicts.
One type of aversion treatment is to call the unhappy victim a racist. It’s the contemporary version of fingering a witch during the Salem witchcraft trials. This treatment awaits any and all who fail to conform to the correct thinking, transmitted by the education system, the churches, and the intellectuals.”

UPDATE (July 19): “Is it not an absurd world we live in?” asks a fired-up Pat Buchanan, who I’ve been seeing less and less on MSNBC.

“Here is an organization whose very name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pronounces its goal—advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race—accusing another organization of being motivated by race.”

Jealous and the NAACP are trying to change the subject from Obama’s failure to Obama’s race, and from the failures of liberals to the motivations of conservatives.
By accusing the tea party of harboring racists, the NAACP is, in effect, demanding that the party appear in a court of public opinion to prove itself innocent of an unsupported slander.
Sorry, that’s not how things work in America.

Oh, but that’s exactly how things work in America.

UPDATE II: Beck Is Abysmal On Lincoln (Al Sharpton Slips-Up On States’ Rights)

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, History, Neoconservatism, Race, Racism, Republicans, States' Rights

I take some credit for pushing my good friend Tom DiLorenzo to respond to Glenn Beck’s “absolutely awful and sometimes untruthful” depiction of the antebellum South, “the subject of Lincoln, the War to Prevent Southern Independence, and its legacy.” Now, Tom has done so in spades. I’m especially relieved that in “Glenn Beck’s Lincoln Contradictions,” Tom has dispelled one of Beck’s most jarring tall tales:

“During one show he claimed to have read the actual original copy of The Confederate Constitution. I assume he made this assertion to show that he must really be quite the expert on the document. I didn’t believe him when he said this, and his next sentence proved to me that he did not read the document. The next sentence was the statement that the formal title of the document was ‘The Slaveholders’ Constitution . . .’ Anyone can look the document up at Yale University’s online Avalon Project, which warehouses all the American founding documents, commentaries, and more, to see for yourself that Beck was wrong about this.

Beck’s next false statement was that ‘I read it’ (the Confederate Constitution) and ‘it wasn’t about states’ rights, it was all about slavery.” Read it yourself online. It is a virtual carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution, with a few exceptions: The Confederate president had a line-item veto; served for one six-year term; protectionist tariffs are outlawed; government subsidies for corporations are outlawed; and the “General Welfare Clause” of the U.S. Constitution was deleted.

The act of secession was the very essence of states’ rights, contrary to Beck’s proclamation, for the basic assumption was that the states were sovereign. They delegated certain defined powers to the central government for their own mutual benefit, but all other powers remained in the hands of the people and the states, as stated in the Tenth Amendment. As sovereigns, they had a right to secede for whatever reason. If a state needed the permission of others to secede, as Lincoln argued, then it was not really sovereign.

The U.S. Constitution adopted a federal, not a national system of government. That is another way of saying a states’ rights system of government. The Confederate Constitution was nearly identical.

As for slavery, the Confederate Constitution was not essentially different from the U.S. Constitution as it existed at the time. Beck was grossly deceiving when he told his audience that the Confederate Constitution protected slavery while saying not one word about how the U.S. Constitution did the exact same thing.”

[SNIP]

Tom draws an interesting connection between “the idea of ‘collective salvation” that Obama himself espouses,” and the “Right’s “militarism fueled by Lincoln idolatry.”

To the Yankees, their “kingdom” was to be a “perfect society” cleansed of sin, the principal causes of which were slavery, alcohol, and Catholicism. Furthermore, “government is God’s major instrument of salvation” … “Collective salvation,” as opposed to the individualistic salvation that the Bible teaches, was what motivated the Yankees and their war on the South. This of course is exactly what Glenn Beck has been ranting and raving about recently when it is practiced by opponents of the neocon establishment – the exact same establishment that embraces the Lincolnite, Yankee millennialist fervor as one of its defining characteristics.

Much to his detriment (and to our benefit), Tom is ever vigilant about reminding spaced-out Americans just how bad the the Republicans—the drag queens of politics—are.

The column is “Glenn Beck’s Lincoln Contradictions.”

UPDATED I (July 17): I asked Prof. DiLorenzo to comment on Beck’s obsession with MLK. Beck appears incapable of mentioning the Founders without the obligatory mention of MLK, a minor philosopher by comparison. I also wanted to know whether it was true, as Beck has claimed, that we had black founding fathers. For sure, there were black good guys, but were these laudable men founding fathers?

“As I say in the article,” writes DiLorenzo, “it really is part of the neocon ideology to hate the South and Southerners. They were the only ones to ever seriously challenge the authority of the centralized Leviathan state that the neocons champion, therefore, they must be eternally demonized.

The neocons are also MLK and FDR worshipers, therefore, Beck cannot be too critical of either men if he wants to keep his job.

There were free black men who participated in the American Revolution, and should be considered to be a heroic as anyone else who did the same. But they weren’t Thomas Jefferson/James Madison/Patrick Henry/John Randolph caliber.

The idea that there was a black Jefferson who has been airbrushed from history is simply asinine.

UPDATE II (July 18): Al Sharpton said it. He inadvertently seconded the idea that the tea party’s impetus was a return to the original federal scheme of a weak central government and a stronger locality. The “Reverend” was making his unique contribution to the lynching of his fellow (predominantly white) Americans, when he blurted out that,

“‘the civil rights movement sought to pressure the federal government to step in when states were enforcing segregation laws, and the tea party’s focus on states’ rights puts people at risk. They talk about restoring dignity. They are really talking about restoring a time before the federal government intervened and protected the rights of people,’ Sharpton said.”

He went on to admit that, “this is not just about race. It is about how you see government.”

So, if I understood Sharpton, he just conceded that the idea of States’ rights is a matter of political philosophy, and not necessarily of race.

Al probably forgot his shtick for a moment: his ilk equate states rights (and everything else) with racism. In truth, “The issue of segregation or racism … is intellectually independent of states’ rights. The reason for the mistaken conflation of states’ rights and segregation resides with the same propagandists who successfully equate, for the purposes of discrediting, the right of secession with an alleged support for slavery.”

UPDATE III: Beck Revised (Who Eats Nails? Spencer Or Mercer?)

Conservatism, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, History, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Race, Republicans

I’ve followed Glenn Beck closely and have concluded that overall, flaws and all, he is a force for liberty. One such example was when “Beck Broke From The Pack” to denounce perpetual war as the health of the state. Let us not forget how polluted are the waters in which conservatives swim. Glenn has changed that somewhat. Not for nothing does Sean Hannity keep his distance from Beck.

“Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot” discusses some mindless Beck missteps, such as mistaking “Geert Wilders, an influential Dutch parliamentarian working against the spread of Islam in his country, as a man of the fascist, far-right.” Unforgivable.

IMMIGRATION IGNORANCE:

Glenn also vastly overestimates the virtues of the “American People,” and underestimates the forces (state-managed mass immigration) that are dissolving what remains of that people and busily electing another. (Glenn: Once the country is 50 percent Third World, you might as well be talking to the hand.)

Nevertheless, I revised the “blithering idiot” verdict I passed some years back.

Richard Spencer has not. Glenn “going-to-school-with-each-new-show” has earned the contempt of the editor of AltRight.com.

The funny thing is that I second Richard’s analysis, as I have made the same points myself about Beck’s ridiculous fetishes (stop waxing fat about “Faith, Hope, and Charity”; build on life, liberty, and property, I wrote).

Beck’s (Harry) Jaffarsonian civil rights preoccupation and racial revisionism—sad to say, there were no black Founding Fathers!—are contemptible. But, what do you know?, I have been more forgiving of Glenn than Richard Spencer. Having been characterized as someone who eats nails for breakfast, I’m pleased when along comes a young man who is more uncompromising than myself, even if this guarantees he will not be playing footsie with this conservative tootsie (“intellectual windsock”) on Sean Hannity’s Great American Panel, a forum of and for the Idiocracy.

Read Richard’s superb analysis, “The Glenn Beck Deception: Inside the PC Lunatic Fringe.”

UPDATED I (June 22): I have been extremely careful to separate Beck from James Huggins’ Republican “freedom fighters” (see comment hereunder). Without much success. If you are convinced by Huggins’ GOP loyalism—and Mr. H has stuck to his guns, insisting these hacks stand for liberty—your learning curve is, well, wobbly.

UPDATE II: Here’s the “‘Mercer Eats Nails For Breakfast’ (Not)” accusation:

I’ve been called THE WORD WARRIOR…but I would run for my life if I saw Ilana Mercer coming my way! Does she eat nails for breakfast?— Anthony St. John

UPDATE III: Who Eat Nails for Breakfast, Spencer Or Mercer? Probably both, but Spencer wins out this time, I’m pleased to say. In case you think (sorry Huggs) that every tough-talking toots on Hannity’s “Great American Panel” can eat nails or swallow flames: tough, here, implies an ability to reason, and an uncompromising fealty to first principles. These must draw on fact and on history. To reason in the arid arena of pure thought is not what Richard (or myself, for that matter) does. Most libertarians, however, do so err.