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Lifting the Veil On Black Lives Matter

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Yitzhak Goldstein, Professor Errant

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1To understand Black Lives Matter, it is necessary to distinguish between the organization by that name and the general movement operating under the same banner. Three Marxist lesbians formed the Organization following the Trayvon Martin case in 2014. Their goal is abolition of Judeo-Christian based Western society and violent over throw of all its institutions. In addition, they contend the white race is attempting to exterminate the black race with police their instrument of execution. I plan a future expose on them but for now, my focus is on the broader Black Lives Matter Movement (BLMM).

Liberal media mouthpieces, aware of the revolutionary, violent, and communist nature of BLM, are quick to point out that most protesters marching under its name are not necessarily members of BLM or aware of its extreme goals. They worry connection between BLM and the protest movement will damage the latter’s cause. However, a close examination of the movement’s beliefs and ideology may prove equally problematic. What do they believe?

In general, to varying degrees, the Black Lives Matter Movement [BLMM] assert systemic white racism besets America. This means racism permeates America’s institutions from government, the family, church, education, its economic system, cultural norms, to its criminal justice system. So pervasive is this racism, it is intertwined with and inseparable from these institutions. The nature of white racism is structural meaning built automatically into each institution from the ground up. White privilege means Caucasians, by virtue of their skin color, have automatic societal acceptance and access to opportunities denied others. BLMM asserts this explains why whites achieve success and prosperity at higher rates than blacks do. White Supremacy means Caucasians construct culture and mechanisms to protect and preserve their dominance against challenges. This renders non-whites permanent second-class citizens unable to enjoy the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality. For “proof”, BLMM points to the inordinately high percentage of blacks in poverty and prison claiming those behind bars are political prisoners, not criminals. Political for challenging the status quo. Because the police are the bodyguard for white supremacy, BLMM exhibits special hatred toward black officers.

Two inescapable questions come to mind. First, if the white race has so constructed America’s institutions to preserve its hegemonic dominance, how is it brown and black immigrants from East and Southwest Asia, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and Africa scale these barriers achieving economic success equivalent to whites? Second, considering that black mayors, city councils, police chiefs, and boards of education have controlled black dominant cities for decades, how are white people to blame? To ask such questions invites shrieks of outrage and accusations of racism. You will be “cancelled”. BLMM addresses these discrepancies by insisting pathologies afflicting black dominant cities; poverty, unemployment, high school dropout rates, children born out of wedlock, drug use, domestic violence, and violent crime are the direct legacy of slavery. Former conditions of servitude, Jim Crow, and structural racism, lock blacks into inescapable economic inferiority leaving them few avenues to survive other than crime. It is the white man’s fault. If this is so obvious and demonstrable, why then do Caucasians deny their culpability? BLMM says it is because white people are inherently racist. It is a part of white people’s nature as if a component of their DNA. Inherent racism blinds them not only to the plight of blacks, which they see as the norm, but also to their role in creating and perpetuating problems endemic to the black condition. This blindness renders any white observation or opinion on race illegitimate. The white race must accept and purge its collective guilt.

Black author Taleeb Starkes also notes what he calls the Racial Grievance Industry (RGI), blames black poverty, and crime on the legacy of racism in cities long ruled by blacks. This is for political reasons. If black leaders accept responsibility, no longer can they blame white society. Blame and accepted guilt allow them to extract from whites economic tribute and political advantage.2 Starkes refers to the notion the legacy of slavery damns whites to eternal responsibility for problems plaguing black cities the “Theory of Exploitivity”. It promotes not only perpetual white guilt, but also argues all conflicts between the races stem from blacks attempting to confront white racism. It is a one-way street.3 Riots are a form of political expression their condemnation therefore racist. Since 1965, the federal government has spent trillions in black cities on poverty and education programs yet little has changed.4

For BLMM and its groveling self-flagellating white sycophants, “Racism is the end-all-be-all-explanation” for everything that is wrong in the black community. Therefore, “no fact finding mission is necessary”. Whites must accept total blame and responsibility for all problems in black communities without question or equivocation. Because whites are guilty, what is there to argue about? Any study or investigation into the root causes of black societal problems, whose starting point does not begin with presumption of white guilt and responsibility, is racist and invalid.5 Discussions of racial issues by whites must begin with their confession of guilt and blame. Pointing to studies revealing fatherless homes play a role in black crime, Baltimore’s riots for example, is a non-starter because it does not begin with the presumption white racism is always the cause.6 The white race must also purge its collective guilt. Part of that process is to dismantle all institutions, symbols, and vestiges of racism and slavery. Purging must include culture, holidays, language, historical documents, statues, and so forth.

For years, I have advocated a name change for the nation’s capital. Not to denigrate the man who was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen (George Washington for those who went to public school), but to separate his name from the disgrace on the Potomac. The federal government’s functions today bear no resemblance to the Constitution. Heretofore, my voice has gone unheard, but now, from a new corner, comes a voice demanding this change. George Washington’s family owned slaves so his name must go. Supporters of BLMM, including white members of Congress attempting to exorcise their inner-slave master, bandy names about like a badminton shuttlecock. Leaks suggest in the running was domestic terrorist and murderer John Brown, who attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry Virginia, (16-18 October 1859) to spark a slave rebellion and mass murder of whites. Then someone scrounged up a history book and discovered Brown was white. He is out of the running. Next the People’s Committee to Rename the Capital turned to Black Panther leaders Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Black and communists, would they not do? Newton, Seale, and Cleaver were male and Davis is heterosexual. Cross their names off the list. It seems this leaves only Maya Angelou.

In their Bolshevik-style redo of America, BLMM and its Communist ally, Pantifa7 want to replace the National Anthem as well. Rumor has it Soviet Russia’s anthem was proposed but once again the same problem reared its ugly head. White guys wrote it and pasty-skinned ones at that. Claims they are considering communist Zimbabwe’s national anthem remain unsubstantiated. BLMM has engaged in violence, riots, looting, and thuggery knowing that as long as they cloak it all in racial terms, cowed white liberals will do nothing. Worse, liberal professors, actors, actresses, and media personalities race to the airwaves to support these crimes as a way to purge their racism and white guilt. Like sharks tasting blood, BLMM asks, why stop now? To flex their political muscle, they need to make examples of people.

After committing the counterrevolutionary crime of expressing patriotism and pride in the flag of his country, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees became that example. Black teammates and professional jocks in other sports descended upon Brees in furious rage over his racist crime. Caving in and submitting to reeducation, Brees recanted and apologized for his insensitive crime of being proud of family members who fought against the Nazis in WWII. Not wanting to suffer the same fate, Hollywood and corporations quickly and cravenly rushed to throw their necks into BLMMs guillotine. Legos deemed its toys featuring police stations, officers, and patrol cars so vile and racist, corporate cowards quickly yanked them from their product line. A & E Channel immediately canceled its popular Live PD TV show as if, like Brees and Legos, they are all inherently guilty of George Floyd’s indefensible death. When the people Americans depend on for courage and leadership, men and women of character, surrender without a fight, what chance is there people of lesser spine will stand for the truth? The decisions we make, when those decisions are difficult, define who and what we are. Dominos continued to fall.

Quaker Oats could not expunge Aunt Jemima’s face from its pancake mix boxes fast enough. I, like so many others, grew up with Aunt Jemima never once imputing negative stereotypes to her happy face. The same goes for Uncle Ben. Mars Incorporated is scrubbing his friendly face from their boxes of parboiled rice as well. Introduced in 1943, Uncle Ben has been a staple in kitchens for decades. To fight racism, companies must airbrush the faces of two iconic black people from food boxes? It gets worse.

NYT’s propagandist

Unbeknownst to kids growing up years ago, Mary Poppins and chimney sweep Dick van Dyke were racists. In the 1964 children’s classic, Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) uses her magic to ascend a chimney with the kids she is babysitting to a rooftop above. Covered with soot, Mary commits the unpardonable sin of powdering her face making it darker to look like a chimney sweep. Then she dances across the rooftops with equally be-sooted Dick van Dyke. According to gonadectomized New York Times hyphenated editorialist Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, this is pure racism. White people in “black face” is an unacceptable form of racist mockery. Shame shame.8 Perhaps Pollack-Pelzner has been in cryostasis for a long time but black face fell out of favor in the 1930s. It made a few cameo appearances in early 1950s Hollywood films and then disappeared. It has been gone for some seventy years. I never saw or heard of black face as child hence, watching Mary Poppins, I made no connection between her soot smeared face and black people. Poppins was about to dance with a chimney sweep who naturally would have a carbon blackened face. It was a skit, a musical. Like subliminal messages Hollywood purportedly embedded throughout drive-in movies, one would have to strain very hard to find secret coded racist messages in Mary Poppins. Pollack-Pelzner’s white-guilt ridden garment rending lament, and that of other BLMM mouthpieces, makes it sound as if slavery ended last week. Perhaps someone should examine Julie Andrew’s performance in The Sound of Music for other hidden messages. Better yet, Pollack-Pelzner could write an expose about racist Kentucky coal miners emerging from beneath the ground in black face. How does scrubbing the faces of friendly black people from product boxes, banishing police shows from television, and violent protests, looting, and rioting save one black life in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other cities? Maybe for BLMM, not all black lives matter.

Over Father’s Day weekend (2020) in Chicago, killers shot 104 people. Fourteen died including five children, a 3-year old, and a 13-year old girl. Almost all the victims and their killers were black.8 Liberals, like Democrat Party strategist Jessica Tarlov, appeared on news programs arguing the sudden tidal wave of black inner city violence was the natural consequence of people cooped up too long from China virus stay at home orders. Tension between family members leads to conflict, fights, and ultimately someone grabs a gun.9 If this were true, violence would be uniform across America including in white neighborhoods. However, this is not the case. It was limited almost entirely to Democrat run cities with large black populations. Over the same weekend, Detroit experienced 25 shootings with four dead. Police Chief Craig noted most were drive-by and targeted shootings. The same proved true for Chicago.10 Minneapolis, where its ultra-liberal government is dismantling its police department, witnessed 12 people shot with one dead. Most of those the hoods shot were standing in a crowd on a public street. A drive-by. In Syracuse, New York, thugs shot nine people who were at a large outdoor gathering. None of these shootings was between people cooped up too long.11 It is clear that blacks are gunning down other blacks, including children and infants, every week in major cities, but no one marches for them. Are whites killing blacks in large numbers? In one place they are.

The majority of feminists promoting abortion and owners of abortion mills are white. Keeping this in mind, the abortion rate among black women in America is four times that of white women. On average, doctors abort 900 black babies every day [328,500 each year]. Considering black women make up approximately 7% of the U.S. population, and have 35.6% of all abortions, it is clear it is not the police blacks should fear but the white doctor holding a scalpel and vacuum hose.12

Freakonomics, authored by liberal University of Chicago and Yale professors Steven Levitt and John Donahue, respectively, was a 2005 bestseller. They argued abortion is a significant factor in reducing crime. Unwanted babies are typically born to black unwed mothers. Black males, growing up poor and fatherless, are much more likely to become violent criminals than kids who grow up in two-parent families. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in 1973. According to Levitt, violent crime began dropping in 1991 because black kids, who would have turned eighteen that year, were never born.13 One would think a book arguing for the preemptive mass murder of unborn black babies as a crime-fighting tool would generate outrage leading to mass marches. It has not. Ultra-liberal MIT professor Jonathan Grueber, mover and shaker behind former President Obama’s socialized healthcare scheme, made the same argument as Levitt; abortion is an economic boon reducing welfare spending and the costs of America’s criminal justice system.14 Arguments that abortion of black children amounts to genocide are persuasive and our silence a form of complicity. Black and white people should be surrounding abortion mills not pulling down statues. Where is the outrage?

BLMM is a political movement. All black lives, especially those gunned down by other blacks and those killed by abortionists, do not matter to them, only those serving as expedient political props. BLMM’s insistence whites accept total blame and responsibility for all pathologies in the black community while refusing to acknowledge any responsibility on their part, sets up an impasse impossible to resolve. Whites cannot accept blame for racism and police brutality that is not occurring and nothing will ever change if those who are to blame for what is happening in black communities refuse to accept responsibility.

Do all black lives matter? Do black lives matter? Do family member’s lives matter to each other? Of course they do. Black folks have been part of America since the beginning. They are as much American as anyone. Yeah, but as slaves. Mechal Sobel, professor of history at the University of Haifa, Israel, argues regardless of condition of servitude, a natural result of blacks and whites interacting together was that blacks influenced and shaped white culture as much as the reverse. From architecture, food, lifestyles, and cultural values, blacks shaped what people perceive as “white” culture to the point they are inseparable.15 If so, that means, regardless of race, we are all family. A family that attends separate churches obviously has many problems to say the least. Nevertheless, being members of the same family is a much better starting point for understanding and reconciliation than the alternatives.

 

11 These are actually my boxes. I purchased them before the Left’s Committee of Public Safety could confiscate them from all store shelves.

22 Taleeb Starkes, Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter To The Racial Grievance Industry (Lexington, Kentucky, CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016), 1-3.

33 IBID. 3.

44 Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy Of American Compassion (Washington, D.C. Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1992), xi-xvii, 3-5, 184-199.

55 Starkes, 3.

66 Thomas Sowell, “The Inconvenient Truth About Ghetto Communities ‘Social Breakdown”, May 15, 2015, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/article/417899/inconvenient-truths-about-ghetto-communities-social-break-down-thomas-sowell.html. Thomas Sowell, who is black and an economics professor, posted his observations on YouTube. Having lived in and gone to a Baltimore inner city school, I gave Sowell’s video a like on Face Book. Subsequent to that “like”, white suburban high school, administrators investigated me for “racism”.

77 They call themselves Antifa (Antifascist after Russian Communist dictator Josef Stalin’s practice of calling rivals, who were also communists, “fascists” in order to “cancel” them) and are themselves communists and revolutionaries with European origins. Several websites, forums, and Face Book groups mock them as “Pantifa” for their penchant of wearing masks over their heads that look like “panties” to hide their identities. They consist mostly of white youth. They form a Leftwing paramilitary militia, the shock troops of the radical left and Democrat Party. Many are self-loathing society hating rage-filled white females and white hermaphroditic hipster Millennials sporting “pot-knots” (man-buns) and white “males” with long braided blonde pred-dreads (their rope hair reminiscent of the monster in the Predator movies), who despise civilization almost as much as they hate themselves. They hate all forms of achievement because it reminds them of their own failure to grow up and be a man.

88 Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, “Mary Poppins, and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting with Blackface,” New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/movies/mary-poppins-returns-black-face.htm.

88 Editors, “104 shot, 14 fatally, over Fathers’ Day Weekend in Chicago, Sun Times Wire, Chicago Sun Times, at https://www.chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicago-fathers-day-weekend-shootings-homicides-gun-violence-june-19-22-104-shot.

99 Martha MacCallum Show, FOX News, 22 June 2020.

1010 Fox2 Detroit News, “25 shot, 4 killed in Violent Father’s Day Weekend in Detroit. Chief Craig says Violent Crime Up 7%”, at https://fox2detroit.com/news/25-shot-4-killed-in-violent-fathers-day-weekend-in-detroit-chief-craig-says-violent-crime-up-7%.

1111 FOX8, “Gun Violence During Father’s Day Weekend” June 22, 2020, at https://fox8tv.com/newspost/gun-violence-during-fathers-day-weekend/

1212 Black Abortion Statistics at http://www.righttolifeofmichigan.org

1313 The Economist, December 1, 2005, “Did Steven Levitt, Author of Freakonomics, ‘Get His Notorious Paper Wrong”? at https://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf.

1414 Mona Charen, “Abortion-Distortion-and Crime, National Review January 2, 2015 at https://www.nationalreview.com/article/395585/abortion-distortion-and-crime.html.

1515 Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton New Jersey Princeton University Press, 1987). Having lived in 7 states, north, south, east, and west, and the inner cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and San Jose, I agree with her.

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Academics, Culture, duty, gun grabbers, guns, Law, mindset, Political philosophy, Politics, Rights

Freedom and the Role of the Militia Part III

You can’t fist fight tyranny

“The American people, Lee wrote Samuel Adams, had not fought the British only to be ‘brought under despotic rule under the notion of strong government, or in the form of elective despotism; Chains still being chains, whether made of gold or iron’. The “Corrupting nature of power’ made it essential for public safety that ‘power not requisite should not be given’ to government and ‘that necessary powers should be carefully guarded”.1

Richard Henry Lee

“America is a system of taxation to which a government is attached.”2

Part 1 covered an article by conservative journalist Daniel McCarthy wherein he rebutted liberal solutions to Public Mass Shootings (PMS). He hit the right chords at first but then notes turned sour. McCarthy tied private ownership of firearms to membership in a militia under strict State control. He contends the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) “inspired” the Second Amendment. He adds a reason to keep arms is to maintain a well-regulated militia “under strict subordination to, and governed by the civil power” dismissing as “right-wing folklore” claims the Amendment’s authors in any way intended it to support citizen uprisings against a tyrannical government i.e. Shay’s Rebellion.3 Stephen King writes in Danse Macabre that Bram Stoker’s Dracula inspired his novel Salem’s Lot, an homage to Stoker. However, King’s novel is wholly his own and the narrative quite different.4 McCarthy’s problems are more serious than errant extrapolation.

Article III of the Virginia Declaration of Rights written by George Mason reads, “That a well regulated militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to Arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defence of a free State; that standing Armies, in Time of Peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty” [emphasis and spelling in the original].5 Regardless of inspiration, Virginia’s Declaration of Rights is not the Second Amendment. In addition, local autonomous militias pre-existed declarations and constitutions.

Colonial survival, especially in outlying villages and settlements, required individuals possess and be skilled with arms long before the Revolution. For the most part, Americans did not acquire skill at arms serving in militias or in standing armies.5 No army or police force existed to protect colonists from criminals or against attacks by the French and their Indian allies. When British Royal Governors began seizing the firearms and ammunition of colonials, Virginians George Washington, and George Mason formed the Fairfax County Militia Association. It was a ground up not top down unit. Enlistment was voluntary. Each member had to supply his own weapons and ammunition and they chose officers through election.6

Mason shed light in 1775 on the meaning of militia noting a “well regulated militia” was comprised of “Gentleman, Freeholders, and other Freeman”. Its purpose was to “protect ‘our ancient Laws & Liberty’ from a standing army” [emphasis and spelling in the original].7 For Mason and many of his contemporaries, a standing army, whether British or American, national or state, was a threat to liberty. Mason wrote, “All men are by nature born equally free and independent”. The greatest threat to liberty was government in all its forms. He defined a “well-regulated” militia as the whole of the people, possessed of arms, who formed and organized themselves into “independent companies” prepared to “resist the standing army of a despotic state”.8 Founding Father Richard Henry Lee observed a militia could only consist of the people as a whole. If it was organized and maintained in continual service, it would constitute a “select militia” no different from a standing army in peacetime a practice that the Founders, for the most part, abhorred.9

Americans and political leaders universally viewed the individual right to keep and bear arms, and the right of States to call up a militia, as two separate issues neither dependent on the other. Beyond the Founder’s hope that Americans would maintain their precision with arms, the right to keep and bear arms had/has nothing to do with membership in a militia. If states called on the people to form a militia, prior experience with arms would lessen the time to train them.10 Had the Founders known future Americans would manufacture confusion concerning the Second Amendment’s meaning, they might have bifurcated it into two separate amendments. Why didn’t they? At the time State delegates ratified and then amended the Constitution, there was no confusion with respect to the right to keep and bear arms. It was an individual G-d given right. Some delegates opposed adding a Bill of Rights to the Constitution as superfluous. States delegated specific authorities to the federal government enumerating them in Article I, Section 8. Government cannot regulate activities or rights over which it has no authority. The States delegated to the federal government no authority to regulate the right to keep and bear arms. For it to do so is unconstitutional. Various state delegates argued to declare that people have an individual right to keep and bear arms was akin to declaring people breath air.11

Part 2 explained the so-called “Shay’s Rebellion” in Western Massachusetts was used by proponents of a strong national government, who wanted to jettison the Articles of Confederation, as a boogeyman to whip up fear among Americans that the nation was falling apart. Like public schools today, merchants of mendacious propaganda told Americans then that landless rabble, thieves, bandits, and poor hardscrabble farmers deeply in debt had formed a violent mob and marched on Boston to overthrow the state government. If successful, the rebels would have freed men in debtor’s prisons, erased public and private debts, and seized the land of the rich to divide among themselves. This story is problematic to say the least.

Shay’s was actually several rebellions led for the most part by leading men in their communities. They were patriots, Revolutionary War veterans, political and religious leaders, landowners, and men of means.12 They called themselves “Regulators” organized into militias to halt depredations committed against them by the corrupt government in Boston controlled by a coastal banking and commercial aristocracy.13 Only three years prior (1783), Americans had concluded a war against Great Britain based on similar offenses. It is incongruous that leading Founding Fathers then and textbook authors today, fail to see the parallels and similarities.

Daniel McCarthy is a credentialed well-established journalist writing for conservative and Libertarian publications. It is unfortunate he dismisses as “right-wing folklore” the notion the Founders intended the Second Amendment support a Shay’s-like rebellion. They certainly did. If the federal and or State governments commit crimes against the people’s rights, they have but two choices, submit or resist. The Left employs the labels “right-wing” and “far-right” equally to the former Nazi Party, Ku Klux Klan, and their modern iterations. They also apply it to patriots from Ronald Reagan to Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives, the antithesis of such groups. Although their motive should be obvious, regrettably such a malicious and deceitful practice works in post-literate America. How disappointing a learned man like McCarthy would follow suit. Was Shays’ Rebellion emblematic of anarchy, lawlessness, and chaos verging on destroying America or, were their actions an embodiment of the spirit that sparked and guided the Revolution of 1776? Is it possible to find support for the rebellion in the Founder’s writings?

The Federalist Papers are not part of the Constitution nor do they necessarily reflect majority opinion among America’s Founders. They are a collection of polemics in support of ratification of the proposed Constitution (1787). Its author’s opinions represent a spectrum spanning desires for a strong national government with states as appendages, Hamilton and to a lesser extent, Madison, to true Federalists like John Jay.14 Nevertheless, with respect to resisting government tyranny, they represent commonly held views among Americans.

Hamilton and his allies adopted the name Federalists but they were actually nationalists. They sought to extinguish state autonomy and sovereignty in favor of a central unitary government much like that in England. Hamilton believed the English system was the best of all. Others, like James Wilson of Pennsylvania, were Federalists but recognized Hamilton’s plan to destroy state sovereignty would also destroy the Constitution hence supported creation of a federal system of government. The central government would have authority over international relations, trade, war, and functions only a central government could execute. States would retain all other functions and authorities, sovereign in their own sphere. Both nationalists and true Federalists supported the right of the people to overthrow their own government should it become oppressive, tyrannical, and destructive to their liberties.

In Federalist 28, Hamilton writes there exist circumstances in which the “national” (sic) government may “resort to force”. They would include “seditions and insurrections” that are “maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body…” He also refers to uprisings in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.15 However, Hamilton addresses circumstances in which the people have a legitimate right to rise up against their rulers. He observes, “If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government…” Hamilton adds that self-defense (armed resistance) against a “national” (sic) government offered greater “prospects” for success than against an “individual state”.16 Whether resistance to a federal or state government would likely be more successful, Hamilton affirms the right of the people to rise up against a tyrannical government. Only an armed people could execute such an undertaking.

Hamilton condemns those who betray the people’s liberties as “usurpers”. Although people might organize for armed resistance, “usurpers, clothed with the forms of legal authority, can too often crush the opposition in embryo”. Hamilton argues states should be in charge of organizing and executing the resistance not local militias raised by the people. This is because the states would have more arms and larger forces to resist a federal army.17 However, suppose States, not the federal government, commit usurpation against the people’s liberties. Did Hamilton forget that the people of their respective states raised their own local militias to oppose the State Militias controlled by Royal Governors? He explains the methods by which states can organize in cooperation with each other to resist “invasions of the public liberty” by the central government. Even if a federal army quelled resistance in one state, others states would respond “with fresh forces”.18 Strategies and methods aside, Hamilton establishes that States have the right to raise an army to resist usurpation of their powers by the federal government. The people possess the same right against their respective states. Is Shays’ Rebellion a great departure from this principle? Hamilton, nor anyone else, argues people have a right to arm and rise up against government over pet peeves or perceived injustices. The standard justifying resistance is gross violations of the Bill of Rights and suppression of the people’s liberties by government with no possibility of redress.

Critics of the proposed Constitution warned the federal government might turn its power to call up, organize, and equip state militias against the states turning militias into a federal army. Hamilton addressed this possibility in Federalist 28.19 He conceded in times of extreme emergency (invasion by a foreign power, insurrection) the federal government would need to call up and train state militias because such training allows them to act in concert. However, it would not be the same as raising, organizing, equipping, and disciplining a federal standing army. To do so would be futile requiring too much time in the face of an immediate threat. It was not feasible to take the “yeomanry” far from their towns and farms long enough to transform them into professional soldiers. If the federal government called up State militias, the latter would be responsible for arming, equipping, and choosing their officers. The federal government would train and subject them to military discipline. The point is militias come from the people. If harnessed for a national purpose in times of extreme emergency, their loyalty remains to their respective states. Once the crisis had passed, the federal government returns militias to their states. This would create a trained body of armed people large enough to oppose a standing federal army should one attempt to suppress the states. Hamilton wrote that militias were the “best possible security” against a standing army. For any of this to be remotely feasible, the people would have to retain their own arms.20

In Federalist 46, James Madison noted, “Ultimate authority wherever the derivative may be found, resides in the people alone” and not in the federal or state governments.21 If the federal government attempted to expand its “power beyond due limits” at the expense of states, the “latter would still have the advantage in the means of defeating such encroachments”. The States would resist the federal government by force. Even if the latter had the resources to raise powerful standing armies, states would always possess a greater resource in the number of citizens within their boundaries. State militias would outnumber a federal army.22 He added that Americans possessed a great advantage over all others in the world; whether the threat came from federal or state governments, the people are armed. In America, all government is “subordinate to the people” and the people are ultimately the masters of the militia because they are the militia.23

The Founders are clear. People have an individual right to keep and bear arms independent of membership in any form of militia or military unit. States have a right to resist, by force, federal usurpation of State rights and Constitutional liberties. The people retain the same rights with respect to both. Why do some attempt to tie firearms ownership to service in a quasi-professional militia or “national” (sic), State guard? Perhaps they do not trust the common man to be the master of his affairs including responsibility for his safety. People buying, building, and selling arms sans government oversight frightens them. What you smell is the aroma of elitism that permeates all aristocracies, economic, political, or professional. They have never trusted the Great Unwashed with freedom. To the elite, for anyone to claim people have the right to keep and bear arms, as a defense against the federal and state governments is unthinkable. Nevertheless, that is how this nation was born.

11 Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate The Constitution, 1787-1788 (New York N.Y., Simon & Schuster, 2010), 67.

22 Author, 12 March 2020.

33 Daniel McCarthy, “Liberalism Cannot Stop The Shootings” American Spectator at https://spectator.us/liberalism-cannot-stop-shootings/

44 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York, N.Y. Berkley Books, 1982), 25, 26, 62, 63, 79, 80.

55 Stephen P. Halbrook, The Founders Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms (Chicago, Illinois, Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 129.

55 Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution Of A Constitutional Right (Oakland, California, The Independent Institute, 1984), 58.

66 IBID. 60.

77 IBID. 61.

88 IBID. 61.

99 IBID. 71-72.

1010 Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas, 1985), ix, 60-63. See also, Gary T. Amos, Defending The Declaration (Brentwood, Tennessee, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, Inc., 1989), 35-74, 117-118. Sheldon Richman, “Properly Interpreting the 2nd Amendment”, Human Events (June 16 1995), Halbrook’s The Founder’s Second Amendment, 221, and Gary A. Shade, “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms: The Legacy of Republicanism vs. Absolutism”, at https://www-firarmsandliberty.com/papers-shade/TheRightToKeepAndBearArms.Pdf

1111 Maier, 56.

1212 Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 43-62.

1313 IBID. 89-116.

1414 Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution (Washington, D.C. Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2007), 15-28.

1515 Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist (Birmingham, Alabama, Library of American Freedoms, Palladium Press, 2000), 170-171.

1616 IBID. 173.

1717 IBID. 173.

1818 IBID. 174.

1919 IBID. 175.

2020 IBID. 175-176, 178, 179.

2121 IBID. 305.

2222 IBID. 309-310.

2323 IBID. 310-311.

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Culture, Law, mindset, Political philosophy, Politics

Open Letter to American Handgunner

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Dear Editor, American Handgunner

Contrary to Alan Korwin, [American Handgunner, July/August 2020] Thomas Jefferson got it right. When I taught government, I explained to students the Declaration represented the accumulated political and religious wisdom and philosophy relevant to the American cause. It was a religious, not secular Libertarian document. For centuries, monarchs and emperors had employed Romans 13: 1-2 as justification for the notion of an unquestioned Divine Right to rule. Through the Declaration, the Founding Fathers established the principle rights are G-d-given, rather than privileges dependent on royal prerogatives. Rights are inalienable due to their divine origin and not dependent on one’s title or the force he commands. No people before had established their own government instead of the other way around. It should be common sense the Founders knew rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not extant. Inalienable rights are those which government cannot separate from people. As long as one person still draws breath, these rights exist. By declaring rights inalienable, Jefferson established the ultimate goal for which nations should strive. In naming those rights, he established a template by which Americans specifically, and nations as a whole, could judge their progress toward that goal. Jefferson knew future generations would hold the Declaration up to determine their progress on that journey. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “got it” when, in 1963, he declared at the Lincoln Memorial, people of color had come to collect on the Declaration’s promissory note of inalienable rights. It is too bad Alan Korwin doesn’t get it.

 

Yitzhak Goldstein

 

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authoritarian swine, Culture, Junk Science, Law, mindset, Politics, Rights, So Much Stupid!

Coroniacs: Drinking the Kool Aid

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“They don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with that.’ Governor Andrew Cuomo (Democrat, New York), in forcing nursing homes to take COVID-19 patients, resulting in thousands of nursing home deaths, NBC News, 4/25/20. On May 17, when questioned about his decisions, reports RedState, Cuomo said: ‘Older people, vulnerable people, are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen…[W]e can’t keep everyone alive”.1

They drank the Kool Aide

“We’re all in this together” is a government slogan oft repeated by its witless mouthpieces: movie stars, professional athletes, entertainers, and elite cultural dilettantes. Unlike waitresses, hair stylists, restaurant and hotel workers, officials who slammed businesses shut still receive a check squeezed from the taxes of those they put out of work. Where is the “we” in all this suffering? Is it government of the people when officials can strike at any moment, like a cobra, destroying the lives and businesses Americans labored long and hard to build? We?

“Question Authority” was the de rigueur bumper sticker pasted on the Volvos of Bay area liberals when I was a policeman2 in California.

Question Authority

Having metamorphosed from the larval to the adult stage of the liberal life cycle, they now are the authority and chief dispensers of government Kool Aid. Those who once urged Americans to question government authority now wield the club of censorship beating down voices that…question authority. Citizens who dare to exercise their Bill of Rights, they arrest. “Drinking the Kool Aid” is a phrase with horrific antecedents and it is instructive to reprise its origin.

[Disclaimer: I am not a doctor nor a theologian. Observations with respect to denominational practices are for elucidation only].

Jim Jones, a self-avowed communist, grew up a bright charismatic young man in Indiana. His Marxist views were well known but proved no impediment to the Methodist Church’s District Superintendent ordaining him a minister. His support for racial integration in the 1950s was another matter. Methodist leaders asked him to leave so Jones formed his own church, the “Wind of Deliverance”.3 While attending big-tent revivals, he learned the lucrative connection between experiential based religion and fundraising. Jones adopted those methods.4

In 1965, Jones renamed his church the Peoples Temple and moved it to San Francisco where he adopted the name “The Prophet”. By the mid-1970s, Jones was rich and hobnobbed with powerful state politicians and mover and shakers. Newspaper journalists learned from ex-cult members there was a dark side to the Peoples Temple and began investigations. Reports of embezzlement, stealing church member’s money, and drug use, began circulating in newspapers. Fearing legal consequences, in 1977 Jones moved his cult to Guyana, South America where he established Jonestown as a socialist agricultural commune. He ruled it with an iron fist. He confiscated drivers’ licenses and passports and meted out punishment for rules infractions including beatings and interning people in dirt holes. Family members stateside heard these stories and pressured their Congressman to investigate. On November 14 1978, California U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led an unofficial delegation to Jonestown. Four days later, his work finished, Ryan, his entourage, and 14 defectors, headed to the local airstrip. Jones feared what they would reveal so he ordered the Ryan party assassinated. His hit squad attacked at the airstrip murdering the Congressman and four others. When Jones learned the others escaped, he knew they would head straight for the police. He decided mass suicide was the only answer. His lieutenants mixed up a concoction of Flavor Aid and cyanide.5 They filled cups for the obedient and syringes for the reluctant. When the Guyanese police arrived, they found 913 dead cult members, 276 of which were children. Jones was dead by an apparent self-inflicted gunshot to the head.6 Over time, the term “drinking the Kool Aid” came to mean people who accept, embrace, and believe what political organizations, union leaders, the media, and so forth, tell them uncritically, rejecting evidence to the contrary. For them, propaganda is gospel.

This past Saturday I entered an almost empty Ace Hardware store. By the time I made it to the checkout counters, the store was packed out. I stood in line behind a sullen faced middle-aged man wearing a black United Auto Workers Union Ford T-shirt. Once at the counter, he told the teenaged Asian girl behind a plastic shield, to spray the counter before he would touch it. When she asked a colleague where the bottle was, he became angry. “You don’t know where it is means you are not spraying down the counter between each customer,” he barked angrily at her. He was wearing no mask. I wanted to yell, “Drop the Kool Aid and leave her alone you Coroniac!”

I am stunned by the willingness of Americans to drink the government’s Kool Aid with respect to edicts that have eviscerated the economy and imprisoned people in their homes. Even churches have fallen in line without questioning the efficacy and legality of these diktats. Who is asking how executives, be they mayors, county executives, governors, or the president, acquired legislative powers to make laws to which are appended police enforcement? Who is asking if government is violating the Bill of Rights? Who is asking if government lockdown edicts are constitutional? Even so-called reopening policies reflect ingestion of government’s Kool Aid.

Great Clips Hair Salons require online appointments. They have removed waiting room chairs. Once there, patrons must wait in hot cars until summoned by a stylist. Ten people may have their haircut at one time but they cannot permit two or three to wait in the lounge, masks or not? Many doctor, dentist, and physical therapy offices permit only patient entry. If chauffeured, drivers must remain in their cars, in the heat, unable to find a bathroom mask or no mask. A young man I know passed his driver’s test. In order to complete the process at the license bureau, he had to book an appointment online. The problem is they are booked for over a month. However, they allow “walk-ins”. This requires people to line up and wait until the end of the day. He waited five hours, in 90+-degree heat, outside. His father waited two hours in his car. The closest bathroom is behind a dumpster. This is safe? “Customers”, when they finally make it inside, are required to wear a mask. Clerks behind the counter are and were not. Rumors several people died and those waiting in line simply stepped over their bodies remain unsubstantiated. Government requires people to have a driver’s license and then makes no provision for them to do so under less than inhumane conditions. They do not care. They are the government.

A Baptist pastor with whom I am acquainted sent an email to church members detailing protocols for reopening. He admonished members to trust and obey his and the leadership team’s decisions. He based protocols on the “wisdom” of local political officials, upon whom he “leaned” along with the word, prayer, and “discernment and discretion to lead G-d’s church each step of the way”. He removed 100 chairs from the church auditorium to enforce “social distancing”. Considering this church is typically packed out, members arrive early to save seats and even rows for habitually tardy family members and friends, where will they sit? Coffee is no longer available in the Coffee House. Why? Does Red China’s Virus contaminate the boiling hot water? More likely, Church leaders cannot trust adults to obey County edicts limiting human gatherings to ten or less. Apparently, “science” has determined if 10 people or less congregate, they are safe but add one more, and they all die. A “Welcome Team” will be at the entry door, armed with clipboards, taking down names of attendees. Why is that, so the church will know whom to contact if someone later tests positive? Who does the contact tracing, the Church or government officials? The pastor did not say. Forget nursery and Sunday school classes. Canceled. The ten-people rule? Where will they go, the auditorium?7

This Church prohibits all forms of physical social interaction including handshakes and hugs. Does this include family members who live together, arrive together, and sit together? They do not say. They banned early entry. Would be seat-savers must line up, six feet apart, at the one entry door. Ushers will ensure proper government mandated distancing. Only one person may enter at a time. What is the rationale for six feet as opposed to seven, or eight, or twelve? When I move up in line, taking the place of the man who was in front of me, won’t I enter the wake of his exhalatory backwash? Social distancing applies to potty breaks as well. Ushers guard bathroom doors to ensure members, standing in lines inevitably long, maintain proper separation. Worse, they allow only one person in at a time. One person at a time? Bathroom guards had better collect cellphones, makeup, and magazines or it could get ugly. Ushers wipe down bathroom doors and knobs between each use but not toilet handles or sink faucets. For Diabetics who often most go frequently, these protocols are untenable. Church dismissal is single file with each person maintaining proper distance. The pastor writes that Romans 13: 1-2 requires people to obey their secular rulers (city, county, state, and federal). Remarkably, the church requires no one to wear a mask. This is truly odd. He adds that Ephesians 4 requires members to preserve unity by supporting and obeying these reopening rules. 8 One wonders, who made them, the DMV?

Policies like those of hair salons, doctor’s and government offices, and churches are feel good window dressing. They calm Henny Pennys and placate politicians who revel in fashioning red tape and hoops through which people must jump. If the pandemic remains that deadly, why reopen at all? If infections reappear, does that mean these measures failed? Then what, close forever? If to ask these questions engenders anger in response, is it because those imposing draconian protocols share no interest in their efficacy and legality? Where to begin with respect to Biblical support for unquestioning obedience and asking no questions. We begin with the New Testament Bereans.

Acts 17 finds Paul, formerly Saul a Pharisee, on a missionary tour through Greece and Asia Minor. On this mission, Paul visits various synagogues where he discusses and debates with local Jews over who Jesus is. When it became unsafe for Paul to remain in Thessalonica (modern day Greece), the brethren sent him to Berea. The Jews in this Greek town were renowned for studying everything they read, including the Scriptures, and testing their veracity.9 I will follow this model.

In Romans 13: 1-2, Paul writes, “Everyone is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For these is no authority except from G-d, and those which exist, are established by G-d. Therefore whoever resists has opposed the ordinance of G-d; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves”.10 Is Paul referring to ecclesiastical or secular civilian authorities considering the latter were pagan or heathen. English and European Kings fastened onto Romans 13 to claim a divine right to rule. This meant no one could question the monarch’s rule. Manegold of Lautenbach (1030-1106), a theologian, priest, and member of the Church Canon, addressed Romans 13 writing that people choose their rulers. Their function is to “protect the good, destroy the wicked, and administer justice to every man”.11 Justice refers to administration of G-d’s Law. By entering into a compact (covenant) with a ruler, the people also enter into one with G-d. The people and their governors are under equal obligation to obey the terms of the compact. Should the ruler violate the terms of the pact, the “people are justly and reasonably released from its obligation to obey him. For he was the first to break the faith that bound them together”.12 Manegold argued the king’s authority within the pact is derived from “the consent of the people” and not from conquest or divine right. English bishop John of Salisbury (1115-1180) contended that if government disobeys the law, secular or divine, it becomes the duty of people to oppose their ruler as “resistance to tyranny” is obligatory.13

Thomas Aquinas also addressed Romans 13 noting Paul referred only to those authorities who “derive their authority legitimately from G-d” and not those who come to power through illegal means (conquest, coup, and so forth). G-d is not the author of disorder, anarchy, and lawlessness. If a legitimate authority commands people to commit an immoral or illegal act, they are obligated to resist.14 In 1579, French theologian Philippe du Plessis Mornay wrote Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (vindication of resistance to tyrants) in which he argued “governmental leaders are bound by the same laws of G-d as anyone else”. Kings rule as “delegates” of G-d. Their authority is limited to administering G-d’s law and justice.15 Mornay agreed with Paul that government is ordained by G-d but, as an institution in general rather than an endorsement of any specific form of government. Absent the personal rule of G-d on earth, without government, mankind tends toward anarchy and lawlessness ultimately leading to rejection of G-d. However, people are to oppose tyrannical government because it provokes resistance, which may spark rebellion resulting in anarchy.16

America for the most part was a Judeo-Christian nation at the time of the Revolution. Her various denominations, Baptists, Catholics, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and so forth, agreed Romans 13 means people are not to “overthrow government as an institution and live in anarchy nor does this passage mean they had to submit to every civil law”. The template by which people determine if resistance is legal is to ask; is the intent simply to overthrow unpopular rulers, or is it to restore an aspect of G-d’s law wounded by the actions of their rulers? If resistance is to “bad laws, bad acts, or bad governments”, then it is justified.17 Americans resisting violations of their Bill of Rights would not be in violation of Romans 13.

No executive at any level of government has the right to legislate. This is the proper and constitutional role of City Councils, State Assemblies, and the federal Congress. Any law that includes punishment and deprivation of rights must be subject to a veto by the people. The diktats of executives violate the legislative process and as such are immune from consent of the governed. No level of government has the authority to violate, let alone suspend Constitutional rights. In the lead up to the War of Independence, America’s religious leaders, in pulpits, militias, and in the Continental Army were at the forefront of resistance to tyrannical British rule. They carried Bibles and rifles. Today, in the face of harsh rules fastened on the necks of Americans, they are nowhere to be found.

Finally, in Ephesians 4, Paul declares that the Church has unity because it is one body through Christ with one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one doctrine. He is calling for unity in faith and doctrine. Obedience to that one faith is what demonstrates unity, not obedience to the edicts of secular authorities passed on by church leaders having no bearing on theological doctrine. Religious leaders must be prudent when using Scripture in support of secular civil law. Family and friends ask me if we will return to “normal”. Considering the amount of Kool Aid Americans are consuming, this is a good question.

“Lockdown U.S.A. bears little resemblance to America. It is a grim, oppressed place, with empty streets and closed stores and snitches. Masked pedestrians, few and far between, trudge to permitted destinations, following one-way arrows painted on sidewalks and in grocery aisles. Tattles and scolds socially regulate their fellow citizens on proper maskage, calling those who question this depraved new normal ‘murderers’ and ‘granny killers’.18

Covid fears

11 Rush Limbaugh, “Teachable Moment: This Is What Socialism Looks Like” The Limbaugh Letter 6 (June 2020), 10.

22 The Word program attempts to change any word designating one of the two sexes (gender refers to femininity or masculinity of nouns) to some ambiguous trendy hermaphroditic word and I have to change it back. Considering how hard it is to teach people there are but two sexes, it’s the science, after all, my computer is probably hopeless.

44 I visited a Pentecostal Church wherein services culminated with people working themselves up into a shaking sweating lather, and then passed out on the floor. Ushers collected money in large KFC buckets with the minister exhorting church members to make them clink and heavy with coin. At another conservative church in the Midwest, I will not mention the denomination but it requires full emersion for baptism, the pastor “caught” me reading a book on English history and “warned” me against the dangers of “head-knowledge”. I am a retired history teacher…

55 It was not Kool Aid. The manufacturer of Kool Aid attempted to educate people that it was not their product, nevertheless, the name stuck.

66 Britannica.

77 The Pastor’s Email, My files, 25 May 2020.

88 IBID.

99 Editors, Holy Bible, New American Standard Bible (La Habra, California, The Lockman Foundation, 1995), 107.

1010 IBID. 127.

1111 Robert J. Hutchinson, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2007), 206.

1212 IBID. 206.

1313 IBID. 206-207.

1414 IBID. 208.

1515 IBID. 209.

1616 David Barton, “Was the American Revolution a Biblically Justified Act”? Wallbuilders Press at http://www.wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detail.php?ResourceID=46

1717 IBID.

1818 Limbaugh, 10.

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Culture, defense of others, duty, Media, mindset, Political philosophy, Politics, self defense, Sellouts and traitors, So Much Stupid!, Voting

An Open Letter to Drew Brees

The great sport of football

During an interview with Yahoo News, a sports journalist asked Drew Brees his opinion on football players kneeling during the National Anthem. Brees declared love and support for teammates and their fight for racial equality and justice. However, he could never agree with anyone “disrespecting” the flag during the National Anthem. He cited the heroic World War II records of his grandfathers and pays homage to them during the Anthem. Who could find fault with that? Nevertheless, following the interview, Brees’ black teammates and black professional athletes in other sports attacked and savaged him. They called him ignorant, a racist, and next the profanity and threats flew. Brees, an openly devout Christian, then apologized for his insensitive remarks in defense of patriotism and America. He apologized to teammates, the city of New Orleans, the NFL, and the black community at large. Brees rejected President Trump’s support when he came to the QBs defense. Brees now claims it is not about the flag afterall.1

Legos is pulling its police station and related game sets from the market as if policemen and women who protect and defend the weak, vulnerable, and defenseless are now evil and unacceptable. Taboo. A&E is pulling its most popular television show, Live PD, from the airwaves again, as if anything to do with the police is dirty, filthy, intolerably offensive. This they do in solidarity with an extremist group promoting assassination of police officers, riots and looting, anarchy, overturning Western Society and its Judeo-Christian foundations. This group is Black Lives Matter (BLM). Legos, A&E, and many other corporations are choosing sides against the folks behind the badge who willingly lay their lives on the line every day for their fellow Americans.

Where are the corporate chieftains, business leaders, elected officials, pastors, priests, rabbis, school boards, principals, teachers, and sports figures willing to stand for the truth? What is that truth? Contrary to what BLM claims on its webpage, the white race is not engaged in a war of genocide, with the police its instrument of execution, to exterminate the black race. This is what they preach and believe. Who is pointing this out?

What are you saying Drew, police officers, who never ask what the job pays or count the risks, but only how to protect Americans from the ravenous wolves that prey on them, are the bad guys? Men and women who, instead of being home with their families for birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, who work long hours, weekends, nights, in the heat, cold, rain, and snow, with little sleep and no food to make streets safe for you deserve no respect? That our brothers and sisters killed in the line of duty, whose names are quickly forgotten or never known, deserve no respect? That our family members who fought in wars and served in the military no longer deserve respect? What have millionaires like you done in comparison to make America a better and safer place, throw a piece of leather to other millionaires on Sundays? Think of the little kids who wear your jersey and hang your poster on their bedroom walls. You are telling them to side with those who spit on the flag and the men and women who sacrifice so much to keep their little lives safe.

Today, now more than ever, leaders like you should be standing up for America but instead abdicate that responsibility. Is it because you have too much to lose, fame, fortune, and career? Or, do you hope someone else will take your place sparing you from putting it on the line? When you count the cost and say no, you abandon us behind enemy lines. When you surrender without a fight, the time comes when there is nothing left for which to fight.

Black as well as white have died for the flag. In apologizing for your patriotism, you surrender that flag to those who hate all for which it stands. Once you kneel before its enemies, as you have, that is where they will keep you. You must continue kneeling to prove you are not a racist but no proof will ever be enough. Do you believe they respect you for turning your back on devoutly held beliefs? In capitulating, you have lost your dignity, respect, and moral authority to speak for the truth. Kids long for adults who are men and women of character possessing the strength of their convictions. Adults who never waver regardless of how sharp the arrows fired at them. You cannot get back what you surrender.

Yes, there is a price for standing your ground. We average Americans who stand up for the truth pay it every day in our work and in our lives. This country is worth it. How sad, in spite of all the blessings playing in the NFL, for you this nation does not merit the same affection. The choices we make when those choices are difficult define who and what we are. You have made your choice.

Blue Lives Matter too

11 Andrew Holleran, Managing Editor, The Spun, “Former NFL All-Pro Has Telling Comments On QB Drew Brees”, at https://www.thespun.com/nfc-south/new-orelans-saints/former-nfl-all-pro-has-telling-comment-on-qb-drew-brees.

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"News Media", authoritarian swine, Culture, Junk Science, Law, Media, mindset, Politics, So Much Stupid!

Corona Mad hatters and Viral Narcs

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“There are currently no vaccines available to protect against human Coronaviruses…”1

Won’t hurt a bit

I am fresh from my son’s orthodontist appointment where a stern faced dental hygienist, hidden behind a lab coat, oversized gauzy surgical mask, and opaque gloves confronted us before a locked door. As we began up the steps, she waved a spray bottle back and forth like a crazed gunman yelling something unintelligible. Seeing my lack of comprehension, she stabbed a Latex coated finger at a sign jutting from a flowerbed like an East German prison guard. Words in red letters ordered us to return to our car, telephone the orthodontist to announce our arrival, and then wait until we received a callback summons for my son to enter. Can I not tell you we are here, I asked. She shook her head and yelled “no”! We must follow the system. My response in English questioned the intelligence of this process but a phrase in French crossed my mind.

This is a polemic but not necessarily a dissertation on the science of Red China’s2 virus. After all, what exactly is the science? Is it the proclamations of government mouthpieces or the opinions of scientists censored by Face Book and other social media platforms? Claims to having the “science” are like moles popping up from numerous holes, no two alike. Science? My high school’s government course included a required unit on AIDS. On the one hand, teachers were to scare the bejabbers out of kids over how easy it was to contract AIDS so they would practice “safe sex”. I was relieved no one asked me to differentiate safe from unsafe sex. I thought it had to do with rhinestone cowboy boots, a unicycle, a giant kite, and a rope bridge spanning an Andean gorge. On the other hand, teachers were to stress how difficult it was to get AIDS in order to relieve homosexuals of further stigma. Science? Yeah, public education. Regardless of what the “science” is, reactions by Americans to China’s virus has been a revelation.

From the nation’s experts: politicians, movie stars, entertainers, and professional athletes, comes the rallying cry, “We’re all in this together”! What a joke. Who is this “we”? How are they suffering? If anything, the frenzied manner in which greedy grubby fingered savages ravage store shelves, hogging up the product de jour, demonstrates it is really, every man for himself. And it’s not even Black Friday. Reaction by the Great Unwashed provide us a peek as to how they will react in the face of a greater crisis.

In the very early days of the Wuhan Pandemic, American officials raced breathlessly to microphones announcing the virus did not originate from a laboratory nor had Commie scientists biologically modified or weaponized an existing virus. These premature declarations reminded me of government officials, following an explosion, mass shooting, or rental truck mowing citizens down in a city center, racing before news cameras to announce, “It’s not terrorism” even before the names of the injured or suspects were known. Okay, what did they say was its origin? It came from Chinese raw bat eaters who coughed on Chinese raw baby Koala bear eaters in Wuhan, China. Make’s sense, doesn’t it? Like ripples from a rock thrown in a pond, Red China’s virus continues to have reverberating consequences.

No Tourists

Years as policeman and teacher left me with a lifelong need to decompress. Peace and quiet in the outdoors, far from Thomas Harding’s Madding Crowd, has proven the best medicament. I spend a fair amount of time in the wild especially winter, my favorite season. For any outdoorsman/woman, the attraction is nature’s beauty, aroma of wild flowering plants, animals, birds, and the sound of wind rushing through branches absent the strident cacophony of civilization. All was good until government lockdowns spawned disastrous levels of people practicing unprotected tourism in the woods and along once tranquil trails.

New to the outdoors, CoronaTourists tend to be loud, obnoxious, and display self-centered ignorance with respect to trail etiquette (yield trails to runners and the mountain bikers who built them). They don jackets, coats, hats, and mittens to brave frigid 60-degree temperatures. Millennial CoronaTourists seem to drag every vestige of civilization along with them. Blaring radios, clouds of marijuana, screaming children, tampons, fast foot wrappers, baby binkies, Big Gulp cups, Happy Meal toys, condoms, cigarettes, Band Aids, undergarments, and beer cans are now parts of the “regular” landscape. For Pete’s sake, shouldn’t these people be crowding into stores fighting over the last roll of toilet paper and box of 9mm ammunition? With respect to Touristbasms, winter has proven the only effective disinfectant to clean them out of the woods.

Gimme shelter

Following a recent hike, I crossed a rural road to the above shelter perched in a lonely field surrounded by woods. A sign announced the shelter is closed. The incongruity of closing an outdoor shelter, in the middle of nowhere, in the wind, fresh air, and sunlight, as opposed to people cooped up in homes, apartments, and buildings rebreathing the same air, is unfathomable. County officials cannot trust people to limit gatherings to ten or less so, they closed the shelter. One size fits all rules with no appeal to common sense permitted. Typical bureaucrats. Suppose more than ten people gather beneath the shelter to commemorate a War Veteran’s passing, a child’s birthday, or a teen’s graduation. Who would know out there, unless someone snitched? Probably liberals. Would the Coronastapo come and round up these malefactors? Prior to all this, I accepted lockdowns, quarantines, and that millions of us were going to die. However, these incongruities caused me to begin asking questions about the efficacy and legality of the government’s response to the viral outbreak.

If only two people are in a store, one healthy and one infected with the virus, and the latter coughs on the former, the healthy person is now likely infected. Suppose there are two hundred people in the same store, and none infected, and those with a dry throat cough on others, how many will be infected with the virus? None. Stay with me now. Healthy people cannot transmit what they do not have. Why quarantine masses of healthy people? Why is it “safe” for ten or less people to congregate but add one more, and now they are all doomed? It makes no sense. There is one possible explanation however implausible. The Wuhan virus is super-intelligent and someone has taught it arithmetic. Loathing humans, nevertheless, it can tolerate up to ten people but if one more comes along, Red China’s virus goes berserk.

I began asking more questions. Before long, I discovered many Americans have so fallen in line with the government’s talking points that to ask questions makes them go berserk.

I texted a friend about a humorous incident. I found a surgical mask on a trail that is no more than a sliver of dirt, boot width wide, bisecting a large field. Facing the woods from the gravel parking lot, the field extends approximately one hundred yards to the left and a half-mile to the right of the trail. It is always windy out there. Instead of seeing the humor in the situation, like bicyclers and people in cars wearing surgical masks, my friend was outraged. He denounced people who do not wear masks and practice social distancing as “disgusting”, lacking in “proper education” who had probably been “born and lived under a rock” and needed hit over the head by one. He was ecstatic that our governor, Maryland Republican Larry Hogan, had “taken the bull by the horns” implementing “strict enforceable guidelines” and thanked G-d we had a governor with “insight and fortitude”. Considering Hogan is a RHINO, called a “closet Democrat” by the ultra-liberal Baltimore Sun,3 I thought he was joking. I asked if this was sarcasm and he replied with an emphatic “no”. I replied, “I’m sorry to say, I see it a bit differently”. His demand to know why was more emphatic than his no. We had never discussed politics and, not wanting to step on toes, I tread lightly.

Instead of specific arguments, I listed categories; lockdowns based on debunked models, Constitutional problems, and the efficacy of quarantining entire populations. I observed it was remarkable Governors closed down gun stores and churches but deemed pot shops, liquor stores, and abortion mills essential. That was it. My friend’s responses came so rapid fire I could not keep up. I was answering question one but he was on number four. I tried to explain the government based its rationale for shutting down entire countries first on Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College-London computer model predicting two-million dead and then the University of Washington’s model claiming several hundred thousand dead by sometime in April. Reality and the subsequent work by scientists obviated the need for shutdowns when they debunked both models.4 Ignoring this, my friend declared medical emergencies superseded my “constitutional theory” adding that the Constitution had been amended many times. I noted the Constitution was the law of the land and superseded by nothing. Uncertain as to the relevance of counting amendments, I pointed out it has been amended only seventeen times since 1792. I added no amendment had abolished the Bill of Rights or principle of federalism. He became angry and told me to pass an amendment overruling the virus. I asked, what is the rationale for shutting the country down for three weeks, why not four, and why six as opposed to seven? I asked how long should we be in lockdown and what was the rationale for his answer. What should happen if, when the government lets Americans out again, there is a spike in viral infections? Do we all go back into lockdown? Refusing to answer my questions, he instead accused me of treating him like a student in one of my classes and called me a “pompous ass”. It went downhill from there. Hoping we could emerge still friends, I did not descend into ad hominin attacks. Had he not ended the conversation abruptly, I would have explained this; the Constitution is a contract between government and the people. It lists specifically what governments, state and federal, may or may not do. It bars the federal government from engaging in any activity not authorized by the Constitution. The Constitution is also a restraining order against government to protect the people’s rights from infringement. If people accept an “exception” to the law in but one case, it establishes precedent for future exceptions made by those in power. Exceptions to one’s Bill of Rights. Witness now how quickly people rush to snitch on those daring to exercise their Bill of Rights. Google how many states are hiring folks to execute contact tracing surveillance schemes. Will the government and schools create National Antiviral Zealous Informer Youth Leagues to Narc on people, even their own parents?

The President’s powers are found in Article II of the Constitution and comprise but three paragraphs. Other than exercise of military powers in time of war, appointing listed government officials, and granting pardons, his/her only other function is to ensure “the laws be faithfully executed”.5 No mention is made of executive orders. At most, one could argue presidents may issue an executive order in furtherance of a constitutionally legal law or bill passed by the Congress. However, no such order could create law, directives, regulations, restrictions, and so forth, as those are the sole functions of the legislative branch. The Constitution does not authorize the president to shut down commercial businesses, confine people to their homes, restrict any legal activity, dictate what people must wear in public, social-distancing, or send taxpayer’s money as bailouts to businesses and individuals. Therefore, these activities are illegal. If true, cannot Congress do all this?

The Constitution lists the powers of Congress in Article I, Section 8, known as the Enumerated Powers. Seven of the eighteen deal with the military. The others cover land set aside for the capital, laws regulating immigration, post offices, coining of money, creation of federal courts, copyrights, punishing pirates, trade, and taxing and borrowing money to fund the above.6 Congress has no power, under the Declaration or Constitution, to shut down commercial establishments, schools, or confine people to their residences. It has no authority to appropriate the wealth of Americans and transfer it to others for any purpose whatsoever. Nor do Governors. These are grotesque violations of the Constitution. Regardless of what people, mostly liberals, say, there are no “for the public safety” or “for the common good” exceptions to the Constitution. America’s Constitution is over the government. The subordinate cannot overrule its superior. Does anyone care? No doubt, enemies of the Constitution will argue the Commerce Clause grants Congress authority to engage in illegal activities.

At the time [1787] delegates meeting in Philadelphia drafted and debated the proposed Constitution, States had established trade barriers against sister states. They taxed goods crossing their borders. Coastal states with ports added additional tariffs on goods from abroad. This led to a great deal of conflict between states. Delegates wrote the Commerce Clause to deny states the power to restrict interstate commerce in any way. Liberals disguise and lie about Congress’s power to “regulate commerce”7 by ignoring its 18th century common use meaning in favor of their redefinition. Regulate did not mean control, supervise, or make rules in any way. Regulate meant to keep “regular”. If states enacted taxes and tariffs restricting the flow of commerce across their borders, Congress had the power to knock them down. Congress has no authority to control any commercial activity simply because it crosses state lines. It has no authority to direct, regulate, restrict, or control commercial activity within any state whatsoever.8 American ignorance with respect to their own Constitution is appalling. Even a conservative Baptist preacher with whom I’m acquainted texted church members saying he had to obey the government’s order to close the church based on Romans 13: 1-2; (1) “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from G-d. (2) “Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of G-d; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves”.9 I wanted to ask him what he would say to America’s Founding Fathers who rebelled against George III, King of England, King of the English Empire, King of the colonies, and Head of the Church of England. I held my peace.

Historian and theologian David Barton writes that the pastor’s opinion gave birth to the principle of “Divine Right of Kings”; the notion G-d selected every ruler who ruled, a principle eagerly embraced by monarchs and emperors. Regardless of how arbitrary, capricious, and tyrannical, people have to obey these rulers. French theologian Philippe du Plessis Mornay wrote in 1579 [Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants] the government ordained by G-d referred to “the general institution of government” not each and every distinct form of government. G-d’s purpose expressed in Romans 13 was to oppose anarchy. Dissolution of society leads to lawlessness ending in rebellion against and ultimately rejection of G-d and His law. Therefore, G-d opposes rebellion if it leads to anarchy and chaos. Otherwise, people would have to obey the dictates of murderous Communist regimes.10 Another way to look at is this; if presidents, Congresses, and Governors violate their own Constitutions and state laws, are they preserving G-d’s order or provoking resistance? If the acts of political officials in violation of the law become so egregious, it sparks rebellion, whose actions then are leading toward anarchy, those of political leaders, or those of people attempting to restore the rule of law?

Red China unleashing yet another Coronavirus has revealed much. If government officials can scare enough people with claims a crisis menaces the United States, (global warming, murder hornets, viruses, etc.) then people will do what they are told without question even if to do so violates the Bill of Rights. If these officials can convince them it is their patriotic duty to obey, they will turn against their neighbors reporting those who do not comply. There is no longer a “we”. In a crisis, it is every man for himself. As Tucker Carlson would say, “I have to live in the same country as these people”? Finally, people who lust for power will always stoke fear, panic, and anarchy in order to promote their personal agenda that, throughout history, has always been to rule over others.

Health worker?
Nope, snitch
Yeah, it’s been done

11 National Federation For Infectious Diseases, “Coronaviruses” at https://www.nfid.org/infectiousdiseases/coronaviruses/ There are approximately seven Coronaviruses. There are no vaccines for any of them.

22 As a high school government teacher, during a “discussion” with colleagues over certain countries hosting symposiums on education (Cuba, Communist Vietnam, and Communist China) Jenny, a liberal colleague at a sister high school, became incensed over my use of the term “Red China”. After all Jenny said with rage, she had adopted two children from China and that made me a racist. Why would adopting children negate the nature of their country’s government of origin? I have no idea. Jenny had a map in her classroom with South America at the top and North America at the bottom stating the current north/south designation was “racist”. She also had pro-Obama posters hanging prominently. A few years later, one of my government students was telling me about the District sponsored student trip to China. She revealed that Jenny had personally attacked me, in front of the students, in China. My student thought my reaction would be anger. On the contrary. I smiled the remainder of the day basking in the glory of having been trashed out, by name, in a Communist Country!

33 Baltimore Sun, “Larry Hogan: Closet Democrat”? April 10 2018, at https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-0410-larry-hogan-20180409.story.html

44 Douglas MacKinon, “What if the sky is falling Coronavirus models are wrong”? The Hill at https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/489962-what-if-the-sky-is-falling-coronavirus-models-are-simply-wrong/html.

55 Richard J. Hardy, Government In America (Boston, Massachusetts, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), 122-23.

66 IBID. 116-17.

77 IBID. Clause 3, 117.

88 Randy E. Barnett, “The Original Meaning of the Commerce Clause”, University of Chicago Law Review (Winter 2001), at http://www.law.edu/rbarnett/origins.html. See also Brion McClanahan, The Founding Father’s Guide to the Constitution, (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2012), 38, 50, 54-56, 86. James Madison, The Federalists #42 Clinton Rossiter, Editor (New York, N.Y., A Mentor Book, New American Library, 1961), 267-68. John Taylor of Caroline Virginia, James McClellan, Editor New Views of the Constitution of the United States (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1823/2000), 328-30.

99 Editors, New American Standard Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Zondervan, 1995), 1081.

1010 David Barton, “Was the American Revolution a Biblically Justified Act”? Wallbuilders, at http://www.wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detai.php?ResourceID=40

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"News Media", Academics, Courts, gun control, Law, Media, Politics, Rights, Schools and campuses, Sellouts and traitors

Freedom and the Role of the Militia Part II

What I find most galling are not Republican allegations former Democrat Vice President Joe “Boss Tweed” Biden leveraged his position to benefit his son Hunter in Ukraine.1 Nor do I find Democrat accusations President Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine pressuring President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate potential Biden influence peddling most galling. Democrats want Americans to believe Trump withheld aid while Ukraine was at war with Russia. However, Putin invaded Ukrainian Crimea on 20 February 2014 and later sent military units across Russia’s western border into Ukraine to assist “separatists” in May of the same year. Trump did not place his party line call to Zelensky until July of 2019, five years later.2 Can we be frank? Notions Ukraine would survive let alone prevail in a war with Russia are preposterous. Therefore, American military and economic aid would be pointless. Why then do Democrat and Republican administrations send it? Are Americans willing to offer their sons to die for Ukrainians fighting Russia? Is the U.S. willing to risk nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine? We must address yet another reality.

Since Tsar Nicholas I, Russia has pursued a policy of “Russification” in conquered nations and territories. Imperial Russia took control of the education system, mass media, and popular culture in subjugated countries. They replaced native tongues, customs, history, literature, art, music, and holidays with those of Mother Russia. Whether the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania for those who attended public schools) the Caucasus, Poland, or Ukraine, conquered people were forced to grow up as Russians.3

Soviets added a new dynamic to Russification by transplanting hundreds of thousands of Russians to the Baltics and especially Ukraine. The Communist’s goal was to displace natives and breed them into a minority population or, at least have a forward base of Russian immigrants embedded in targeted nations. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviets uprooted entire Russian villages and moved them to Ukraine. In 1926, only 8.2% of Ukrainians were ethnic Russian. That figure rose to 16.9% in 1959 and 22.1% in 1989. In addition, by 1985, the Soviets had relocated by force, over 185,000 Ukrainians to faraway places in Russia and to the Baltics. So successful was Russification (America’s open-borders crowd pay attention), that native Ukrainians living along their eastern border with Russia dropped from 33.4% in 1926 to 2.3% by 1970. In a conflict with Russia, where will their loyalties lie? With whom will ethnic-Russian “Ukrainians” side?4 The idea that America can simply show up with her military and straighten this all out is ludicrous but still, this is not what is most galling. Instead, it is the profound degree of self-inflicted constitutional ignorance afflicting so many Americans. Who asks; what part of the Constitution authorizes Congress to seize the wages and property of American citizens and hand it over to foreigners in other countries? Go ahead and look. I’ll wait. You will be the subject of an archeological dig before you find it because no such authority exists. What the Constitution does not authorize it forbids.

The Constitution’s Framers and State Ratifying Conventions were clear in 1787-1788; powers they delegated to the new federal government were finite and few. The Framers enumerated (listed) them in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. These powers are explicit. They rejected notions that, through novel interpretations later on, anyone could create implied from explicit powers. Scottish immigrant James Wilson became a prominent Philadelphia attorney and patriot. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and was a “Federalist” delegate to the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention. Wilson described the new form of government that would replace the Articles of Confederation as a “confederate republic”. It was not a “single centralized state” because that would lead to “despotism” and tyranny. The federal government had only those powers delegated to it by the States. It could not exercise powers it did not have nor could the government imply powers into existence.5 No one is asking why the U.S. government, under Democrats and Republicans, is stealing the money and property of its citizens in order to buy and reward “friends” around the world.

I suspect to some degree America’s ruling class elite have always hamstrung the cause of liberty. They do not quite trust Americans, even their political followers, with liberty. A condemnation of liberals and Democrats? On the contrary. Republican Presidents, including Richard Nixon, George H W and George W Bush, and candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney ran as conservatives who would defend the Constitution. Once in office, as Presidents, Governors, or Senators, they shed conservative principles like snakes squirming from old skin. It is as if they believe the job of supporters is to get them elected and then shut up and go away until the next election. They talk a good game and then make one compromise after another always moving in the direction of opponents. One can find unease and mistrust of social “inferiors” even in the writing of some conservatives.

Writing for conservative The American Spectator, Daniel McCarthy notes liberals believe the mere existence of firearms, in conjunction with the election of Donald Trump, whose words have radicalized the young, is the cause of public mass shootings (PMS). For liberals the only remedy is to remove Trump from office, ban and seize all firearms in private hands, and double down on suppression of “hate speech”. This in spite of the fact police investigations reveal those guilty of PMS are typically creatures of the Left, not Trump supporters. McCarthy notes the Second Amendment’s intent was to protect the firearms liberals want to seize. He adds that a “well-regulated militia” means a citizenry well practiced with arms as opposed to a standing army. To be effective, the militia must have the same firearms as a federal standing army. So far so good. Then McCarthy runs off the rails. He asserts notions the Second Amendment supports citizen rebellion, like Shays’ Rebellion, is “right-wing folklore”. McCarthy offers as proof the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason that “inspired” the Second Amendment. Its stated reason for arms is to maintain a well-regulated militia “under strict subordination to, and governed by the civil power”.6 Where to start? Part one covered the meaning of “militia”. Here we turn to a story of mistrust by the people’s “betters”.

Typical high school government textbooks allege the Articles of Confederation had failed. This led to unpaid State and private debt, violence, and economic chaos verging on tearing the union apart. “Shays’ Rebellion in Western Massachusetts (31 August 1786-June 1787) was only the most spectacular of several incidents”.7 They assert “By 1786, people in many states were on the verge of rebellion…Led by Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolution, hundreds of angry farmers and laborers banded together, marched on court houses, and freed imprisoned debtors from jail”. Richard Hardy, like other government textbook authors, uses Shays’ Rebellion (a name invented by enemies of the farmer’s protest) as an argument for abolishing the Articles and replacing it with a strong national government of centralized powers.8 This interpretation was strongly echoed by liberal teachers (is there a distinction?) with whom I taught and the jock-coaches principals assign to teach government. Ill-versed in the subject, the latter deviated not from the script. Little, if any, of what they teach, including the book’s representation, of Shays’ Rebellion is accurate. The same holds true at the University. For example, a typical college text explains “hard times, tight money, and heavy taxes” sent Massachusetts farmers to debtors’ prison while others “lost their land”. The farmers’ rebellion was “put down” by “state troops”.9 Liberal John Garraty’s text asserts Shays’ Rebellion was the result of Massachusetts attempting to pay off its war debt with the tax bite “falling most heavily on those of moderate income”. He describes mobs shutting down courts to prevent foreclosures and Daniel Shays leading an army to seize the federal arsenal in Springfield, a battle they lost.10 Liberal historian Samuel Eliot Morison, despised by Communist Howard Zinn, author of the most popular fictionalized history passing as truth in public schools and universities,11 writes that Shay’s Rebellion consisted of poor farmers facing harsh economic conditions who demanded relief from their State government. They seized control of courts in Western Massachusetts preventing them from opening until the legislature amended the Constitution. Their demands included ending requirements debts be paid in specie and ending legal favoritism of coastal commercial interests at the expense of farmers. Morison labels Massachusetts’ Governor James Bowdoin a “staunch conservative” who called out the militia to put down these illegal protests.12 Postwar economic conditions were indeed harsh in several colonies but were not the cause of the so-called Shays’ Rebellion. Liberal teachers wield the story in classrooms as a “cautionary tale” to convince students the United States must have a strong national government of consolidated powers. Moreover, at the expense of State and individual rights.

Scare stories are part and parcel of the weapons used by those pushing an agenda to effect a desired outcome. Their creators spin and spoon-feed them to gullible Americans all too willing to embrace lies over truth. It works because Americans are too intellectually lazy to think beyond the accepted wisdom of the herd. Manipulators fuel preexistent worry and fear already planted by mass media and government schools (global warming, Putin under every bed) to create panic and alarm. Their goal is to cause rash imprudent reaction. The nation’s “Father” was the target of such an effort.

With no desire to leave Mount Vernon again, George Washington was enjoying retirement from public life. In 1786, he received visitors and letters from friends and veterans reporting on a “rebellion” in Massachusetts. Their shared goal was abolition of the Articles of Confederation and replacing it with a strong national government of consolidated powers. They wanted to reduce or eliminate State sovereignty. They weaved scare stories ranging from exaggeration to outright lies. Washington was already discomfited by hysterical scare stories he read in newspapers written by editors who also shared a strong desire to scrap the Articles. Political leaders, former army officers, bankers, merchants, and large landowners added their voices to claims the nation was falling apart and about to disintegrate into revolution or civil war.13

General Henry Knox, Washington’s former artillery commander, along with others, knew Washington was a large landowner constantly dealing with squatters. Therefore, they painted Massachusetts’ rebels in the most lurid and false terms. They told him rebels wanted to close courts to stop foreclosure on land for unpaid debt, seize land belonging to the rich, and that Massachusetts’ militias were too weak to oppose them. Knox claimed a “licentious spirit” was widespread among the rebels and they were “malcontents” and “levellers” who, through violence, would abolish all social, economic, and class distinctions. In addition, they would erase all private debt and redistribute amongst themselves the land they seized.14 Knox used the term “levellers” to spark alarm in Washington and others. It sprang from the English Civil War of 1642 between Charles I and Parliament. Near the end of that war, common soldiers discussed what improvements they desired for postwar England. Levellers wanted to abolish the tax-supported state church, establish basic natural rights belonging to all men, declared sovereignty was in the people not kings, and that government was a social-compact with the people.15

Through malice or ignorance, Knox was conflating Levellers with English “Diggers”. The latter were essentially proto-communists. Basing their doctrine on the New Testament, Diggers wanted all unenclosed land seized and made communal, farmed, and its produce distributed by the commune to the poor. England would abolish private property along with “unequal wealth”.16 Knox’s misrepresentation of Shay’s Rebellion, and use of the term “Levellers”, had the desired effect. He conjured images of rogue uneducated, poor, and debt- ridden rabble rising up to burn the homes and farms of the rich, looting businesses and banks, and overthrowing the government in Boston. None of this was true.

The men in Western Massachusetts who marched on and closed courts in several towns were comprised of farmers, large landowners, merchants, Revolutionary War heroes and veterans, and political leaders. They were typically middle class, from leading long established families, and were neither poor nor debtors. They rebelled because land and note speculators, led by Governor James Bowdoin, had taken over the government in Boston. Like other states during the war, Massachusetts issued paper notes to pay its soldiers, farmers, and merchants from whom it requisitioned supplies. Not backed by specie, inflation ensued and soon, like the famous Continentals, they were worthless. People had to eat and pay bills so, when speculators offered to buy these notes for a fraction of their face value, their holders sold them. After the war, Bowdoin and his cronies bought up as many notes as they could. Once in power, they passed a law requiring the State redeem them at full face value, with interest, and much of it paid in specie. To finance redemption, Bowdoin’s government passed a head tax on families for every male 16 and older and farm families tended to be large. In addition, the state would tax their land. Those unable to pay faced losing family farms and going to prison. The State had forced soldiers, farmers, and small merchants to accept worthless notes during the war. From them speculators bought these notes for next to nothing. Now the state was taxing those who lost an enormous sum selling the notes to speculators to pay an even greater amount to redeem them on their behalf.17 Public school texts seem to leave out this part of the story.

Is it any wonder farmers in Western Massachusetts reacted in anger and protest? They demanded a change in the law. Specie was scarce and farmers knew the government in Boston was robbing them to benefit Bowdoin and his wealthy cronies. Boston was deaf to farmers’ complaints. Their protests became larger and eventually they closed local courts to force change. They were not attempting to overthrow the government. Bowdoin reacted with force. The State Legislature granted him authority to arrest, torture, and even hang rebels. He could also seize their land and sell it. To his benefactors, naturally. He suspended habeas corpus meaning he could arrest and keep rebels, even political enemies, in jail until they rotted. This he did. Massachusetts’ militia was more than large enough to suppress the rebellion but, when Bowdoin called it out, they refused. They would not march against men they knew to be honorable, patriots, and war veterans. Bowdoin and his rich speculator friends passed the hat amongst themselves and raised enough money to hire a mercenary army of 4,400 led by war veteran General Benjamin Lincoln to suppress the “rebellion”. Following several skirmishes, the rebellion ended when Lincoln’s State army seized the federal arsenal at Springfield before the farmers did.18 Proponents of a new “national” government did not tell George Washington this side of the story.

Although a war hero, Daniel Shays was a newcomer to Western Massachusetts. He was leader of one of many groups who protested what Boston was doing. Those comprising “rebel” groups never called themselves “rebels, insurgents”, or “Shayites”. The press and allies of Bowdoin invented these labels. The same way the left uses “right-wing” for conservatives implying the latter are Nazis. Shame on you Daniel McCarthy. Instead, they referred to themselves as “Regulators” a term originating in England during the 1680s. Britons who took this name opposed corruption, cronyism, and tyranny in government. Americans knew this history. The term Regulator gained usage In Britain’s North American colonies in the 1760s, first in North and then in South Carolina. Lawyers and land speculators gained control of Carolina County Courts and used their position to levy heavy taxes, fees, and fines on farmers. They jailed delinquent taxpayers, seized, and sold their land. When the governments in each colony refused to reply to the farmer’s pleas for relief, they took matters into their own hands forming organizations of Regulators who drove corrupt lawyers, judges, and officials from office. Like Massachusetts, the aristocracy consolidated political power into its hands rewarding themselves and cronies at the expense of farmers, exactly what Britain’s appointed Royal Governors had done in the colonies. Each state in turn suppressed rebellion. Following in the footsteps of those who came before, Massachusetts’ Regulators vowed to end tyrannical government in Boston based on cronyism and corruption. Their goal was to rewrite the hated State Constitution of 1780.19

Men who favored creating a European style strong national government with centralized powers used Shay’s Rebellion to argue the government under the Articles was too weak to survive. They stoked fear and panic. “Nationalizers” created and disseminated false narratives through the media they controlled. They pressured Madison and Washington to support abandoning the Articles in favor of a yet, unwritten new form of government.20 It is remarkable that American patriots did not realize that, in beholding the rebels of 1786, they were seeing themselves in the mirror of 1776. There can be but one explanation. These men evinced a trait shared from time immemorial among those who would rule. They do not trust “lesser” citizens to rule themselves sharing the same amount of freedom as their “betters”. It is why they target the Second Amendment, freedom of speech, and challenge the outcomes of elections. Even some Republicans, conservative pundits, opinion makers, and movers and shakers believe in government for, not of the people. They want their base to vote and then shut up. Do not accommodate them. Read and learn the truth.

11 Peter Schweizer, Secret Empires (New York, N.Y., HarperCollins Publishers, 2018), 55-73. Spoiler alert, Republicans have their hands in the till as well.

22 Natalyia Vasilyeva, The Associated Press, “Russia’s Conflict With Ukraine: An Explainer,” 26 November 2018, The Military Times at https://www.military-times.com/news/yar-military/2018/11/26/russias-conflict-with-ukraine-an-explainer/

33 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, Sixth Edition (Oxford, England, Oxford University Press, 2000), 332, 333, 380, 394, 397, 575-576.

55 Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (New York, N.Y. Simon & Schuster, 2010), 104, 108.

66 Daniel McCarthy, “Liberalism Cannot Stop The Shootings”, American Spectator at https://spectatorus/liberalism-cannot-stop-shootings/

77 William A. McClenaghan, Magruders’ American Government, 2000 Edition (Needham, Massachusetts, Prentice Hall, 2000), 37.

88 Richard J. Hardy, Government In America (Boston, Massachusetts, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), 45.

99 Rebecca Brooks Gruever, An American History, Second Edition, Volume 1 to 1877 (Reading, Massachusetts, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1976), 175.

1010 John A. Garraty and Robert A. McCaughey, The American Nation: A History Of The United States, Sixth Edition (New York, N.Y., Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987), 151.

1111 Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, 2019), 6, 12, 14, 23-28, 251, 257.

1212 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History Of The American People, Prehistory to 1789 (New York, N.Y., A Mentor Book from New American Library, 1972), 390-394, 395.

1313 Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1-3.

1414 IBID. 3-4.

1515 Goldwin Smith, A History of England (New York, N.Y., Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 305-334.

1616 IBID. 334.

1717 Richards, 1-10, 15-16.

1818 IBID. 23-61.

1919 IBID. 64-74, 61-63.

2020 IBID. 89-116, 129-138.

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Academics, authoritarian swine, Culture, gun control, gun grabbers, guns, Law, Politics, Sellouts and traitors, spirit of rebellion

Is the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Dependent On Militia Membership? Part 1

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The entertaining Greta

My opposition to Red-Flag laws has been steadfast countenancing no exceptions. Until now. Liberal Time Magazine’s Girl, er um “Person”1 of the Year’s trembling quivering rage-filled Greta Thunberg, who should be starring in H. P. Lovecraft inspired movies, could be that one exception. Ghostwriters and Handlers, please, do not allow Greta near sharp objects or anything that goes bang. Perhaps parents should be scheduling counseling sessions rather than enabling Greta’s delusions of imminent human extinction. Scandinavia once gave the world Vikings. What happened?2

From the Great Depression, mass starvation, to man-created global warming, the Left needs crises with which to menace people. Only through scare tactics terrifying the masses can they evoke reaction based on emotion rather than reason. People who have lost their minds seldom make good decisions. Since the Second World War, the Left, either through ideological compatibility or supreme naïveté, has promoted notions the way to deal with adversarial nations (Communist dictatorships) and people is through non-violent appeasement. Leftists are moral relativists rejecting concepts of good and evil. Therefore global and personal conflicts result from misunderstandings not malevolent intentions. Because people have “issues”, not problems, conflicts can be resolved without anyone having to accept blame or facing consequences. All Stalin needed was a couch, a good listener, and a hug. Today, if the puny underweight wretched victim of bullying stands up to his tormentors, school administrators suspend him along with the thugs. Through its evangelists teaching in public schools, the Left has indoctrinated Americans to reject notions of self-reliance and taking responsibility for their own safety. Lockdowns, shelter-in-place, hide under your desk or in your home…Hence, they grow up to despise the Second Amendment. They are aghast at the idea citizens can own guns and decide when and where to use them in self-defense. Appearing on Fox’s Martha MacCallum Show in response to the Fort Worth Texas church shooting, Democrat strategist Doug Schoen argued people are not competent to carry guns for personal defense. This he added, should be left to the police who, coincidentally, were not there.3 The Left hates the Second Amendment for two reasons; first, it exposes their unwillingness to stand up to bullies and criminals whether on American streets or as heads of State. Think, Justin Trudeau. Second, it is an obstacle to the Great Project.

Whether taking the name Liberal, Socialist, Progressive, Central Planner, Democratic-Socialist, and so forth, Statists are determined to dismantle the Second Amendment either through abolition or redefining it out of existence. Until accomplished, it remains the single greatest impediment to The Project begun by 19th century American Progressives and European Socialists. Its central imperative is to bend the will of the individual completely to the volition of the State to plan, control, and regulate every aspect of human existence. And, the Left is the State. Because altering the Constitution has proven un-doable, the Left has chosen to redefine the Second Amendment as they did the Commerce, General Welfare, Necessary and Proper, and Supremacy clauses until they mean the opposite of their intent. For example they claim owning firearms is dependent upon membership in a federal (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines) or State (“National” sic Guard) standing army. This claim could not be more wrong.4

Proponents and enemies of the Bill of Rights have debated the Founders’ meaning of “militia” ad nauseam. Rehashing it here would seem superfluous. That is, if its enemies were not using mass media, popular culture, and public dis-education to peddle lies conjoined with an American public too intellectually lazy to read and think for itself. As a recovering public school teacher, I can attest to the pervasiveness of this mental lassitude.

Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken writes that the Founders’ idea of a militia was not one comprised of “unorganized amateurs”, called up by local authorities, to address insurrection or invasion. Instead, it was to consist of men between a certain age range, proficient in arms, possessing some degree of training in military discipline and tactics, a system of choosing officers, subject to call up by State or local authorities, and under civilian control.5 McMaken’s conclusion is problematic. In the 1740s, the French, perennially at war with England, established a large fort at Louisbourg near Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. From there the French threatened New England with invasion and provided safe haven for pirates and “cruisers” who raided its fishing villages and naval commerce. Finding the British unwilling to act, in 1744 New England raised an army of unorganized amateurs including commoners, farmers, merchants, fishermen, and so forth. With little or no experience, these New England boys executed a successful amphibious landing under difficult conditions, besieged the fort for three months, and forced the French to surrender.6 During the French and Indian War, the British could not have defeated the French without the assistance of colonial militia troops, amateur soldiers who fought as local units under American command.7

On 1 October 1768, in a lead up to what became the War of Independence, Britain dispatched 700 troops led by General Thomas Gage from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Boston. His orders were to suppress resistance to British commerce, trading, and tax laws.8 A month later (8 November 1768), King George III declared Bostonians to be in rebellion against English law and government. British political and military leaders drew up plans to subdue the insurrection.9 They employed their standard method of subjugation; round up, jail, and execute the rebellion’s leaders and door-to-door searches for arms and munitions in private hands. Colonials often stored gunpowder in storehouses outside of town due to its volatility. In order to prevent the Red Coats from seizing it, locals formed militias to guard them. In Virginia, Patrick Henry led the Hanover Independent Militia Company comprised of armed locals independent of the Governor’s control. They comprised the nucleus of resistance against British forces. Other colonies replicated this strategy.10

In 1774, British soldiers marched from Boston into the countryside to seize colonial supplies of gunpowder and weapons in Charlestown, Cambridge, Medford, and Salem. Forty thousand militiamen met the British, called “Bloody Lobsterbacks”, by locals, at Charlestown. These amateurs drove them back to Boston without firing a shot.11 British confiscation of private arms led to the “shot heard round the world”, the British march on Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, to seize arms.12 Among the militiamen awaiting the British attack were farmers, craftsmen, mechanics, gentlemen, laborers, slaves, dairy farmers, and veterans of the French Indian War. Americans gave as good as they got forcing the British back to Boston.13

McMaken contends, “Gun Rights advocates fixate” on the latter part of the Second Amendment, “The people having a right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” as the rationale for private ownership of arms separate from militia membership. He asserts the Second Amendment’s purpose was to guarantee that States “would be free to raise and train their own militias as a defense against federal power and as a means of keeping defensive military force available to Americans while remaining outside the direct control of the federal government”.14 He is correct state militias are supposed to be outside federal control but his assertion the militia is the primary focus of the Second Amendment is incorrect. The Second Amendment clearly contains two independent parts that framers could have fashioned into separate amendments. In fairness to McMaken, his purpose was to demonstrate State Militias are to be independent of federal control and that the so-called “National” (sic) Guard is a standing army and a gross violation of the Constitution.

Drafters wrote definitions of a militia into State Declarations of Rights and later into the federal and State Constitutions from 1791 on. They typically refer to “the mass of ordinary citizens, trained to arms” who would be available for call-up by State or local authorities, and to which was often appended an age range for those subject to service. Founding Fathers from Patrick Henry, George Mason, John Adams to Thomas Jefferson made clear the purpose of the Second Amendment was “that every man” be armed.15 Was this not so that the people would be equipped for militia service if needed? True but only in part. The Founders clearly saw that as an auxiliary advantage. However, the stress was that all men possess the right to keep and bear arms and government in no way have the power to infringe on this right or disarm the people. During debates over ratification of the proposed Constitution (1788) at the Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry declared, “The great object is that every man be armed…Everyone who is able may have a gun”. Zachariah Johnson added, “The new Constitution could never result in religious or other oppression because ‘the people are not to be disarmed of their weapons”. Not militias, people. At the Massachusetts’ ratifying convention, Samuel Adams stated, “That the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience, or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms”.16 Again, these rights, freedom of speech, religion, and arms belong to individuals, not states or any other form of organized political entity including militias.

Many States, including Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, and others specifically state people have an individual right to keep and bear arms and it is not tied to membership in a militia, military, or any form of security force.17 The Founders knew Americans opposed standing peacetime armies (as we have today) and that States were reluctant to cede any of their sovereignty to this new untried federal system of government. They also knew government, like an irresistible force of nature, attracts to it men of ambition, those craving power, and men with no moral scruples. Therefore, they added the militia phrase. States would retain the means to resist federal usurpations of their power and infringement against the liberties of people. Under the proposed Constitution, the federal government, facing a national emergency such as invasion or insurrection, could request the states call up their militias. Governors would send them to federal authorities who in turn would arm, equip, and organize them into a standing army. The States would retain the right to choose officers commanding their militia units. Once the crisis was resolved, militiamen would return to their respective states and mustered out of service. Constitution or not, efforts to “federalize” (actually, “nationalize”) State militias placing them under presidential control began almost at once just as so-called Anti-Federalists had warned.18 The individual right to possess arms was always a separate issue.

English philosopher John Locke’s Treatises On Government were widely read (1689) in the colonies. He argued man had a “natural” (G-D given) right to life, liberty, and property. Inherent in each is the right to the means of defending it.19 Under the supervision of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.20 Drawing on many widely held philosophical and theological roots; Jefferson wrote that all rights are individual and a gift from G-D. Among them are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (property, wages, and the fruits of one’s labor). Rights imputed by Divinity are inherent in the nature of each individual’s humanity. People are born already possessing these rights. A right to life presupposes a right to the means of defending it.21

The Second Amendment employs the words “right” and “shall not be infringed demonstrating it refers to “a right that is already assumed to exist” (which comports with the Declaration). It does not say, “The people shall have a right to keep and bear arms.” The amendment recognizes but does not grant the right” [emphasis in the original].22 Requirements to join the military, a militia, or engage in a government specified activity in order exercise a right would negate that right. Any regulation, red tape, or hoops one must jump through before accessing a right is a gross infringement and, again, negates it as a right. Governments can in no way qualify a right. No vote by a majority of one’s neighbors to limit a right in any way is legitimate. In addition, people cannot through constitutions or laws, “agree to an infringement on their rights”.23 This is because of the inherency of rights. Only Divinity can alter or abolish rights divinely created. So why does the Second Amendment continue to confound people?

George Mason’s proposed draft of the amendment read, “That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state”.24 Madison’s version read, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well-regulated militia being the best security to a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person”.25 Madison, like Mason and other Founders, wanted it understood that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right separate from membership in any form of militia. For example, those objecting to military service on religious grounds, still possessed the right to keep and bear arms. This would not be true had the right been dependent on being in a militia. Madison’s intent “is clear not only from his wording, but also from his notes for his speech proposing the amendment”. He states it pertains to an individual right which his “colleagues clearly understood the proposal to be protective of individual rights”. Massachusetts delegate Fisher Ames wrote that among other rights, that of bearing arms “to be inherent in the people”. Writing under the name “A Pennsylvanian” in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, Madison’s friend Tench Coxe argued that the delegates wrote the Second Amendment to “guarantee the right of the people to have ‘their private arms’ to prevent tyranny and to overpower an abusive standing army or select militia”. Madison read Coxe’s articles and agreed, the amendment pertained to an individual right.26

So much, did the Founders write about the Second Amendment; its meaning is beyond question. These documents and writings are available to anyone. On what basis can opponents of an individual right interpretation justify their position? Simple. The truth is unimportant. Only the Great Project matters. All narratives, including history, must be made to fit and support it. Like a starfish turning a clamshell over searching for a vulnerability by which to penetrate its defenses, so too do enemies of the Bill of Rights search for weaknesses. They find it in contemporary American’s unfamiliarity with grammatical construction.

It is important to keep in mind, of the Bill of Rights none refers to “States having rights”. Each refers to a right of the people. These are individual rights. To argue the Second Amendment applies only to members of a military organization turns it into a State not individual right. We have clearly seen that was not the Founder’s intention. If the Founders had intended military or militia membership dependency in order to own or possess arms, “Why would they say, ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”? Madison and those who shaped the amendment’s wording “chose to put the militia reference into a dependent phrase” choosing “the weakest possible construction by using the participle (word formed from a verb) ‘being’ instead of writing say, ‘Since a well regulated militia is necessary…” The militia wording’s weak form demonstrates its framers listed it as a right of states. “The main independent clause” of the amendment reads, “The people’s right to have guns ‘shall not be infringed”.27

An independent clause is a stand-alone sentence dependent on nothing. The militia part of the Second Amendment forms a dependent phrase. It cannot stand alone by itself containing a subject, verb, and complete thought. Therefore, it is secondary in importance to the main independent clause. The words; “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” would mean what by itself? The words; “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” would mean what without the first part of the amendment? People have a right to keep and bear arms. By reversing this order, the amendment’s drafters made emphatic that the independent clause was its most important part. “The Founders correctly intuited that in a bill of rights (list), the last thing the reader should have ringing in his mind’s ear is the absolute prohibition on infringement of the natural right to own guns”.28

If the Bill of Right’s enemies read America’s founding documents and writings, they know the truth. None of that matters. What does matter to them is total disarmament of American citizens. The Great Project cannot culminate until that happens. Toward that goal, the end always justifies the means.

11 Unlike men and women since the dawn of time, those on the Left are stymied when it comes to determining their sex, of which, there are but the two aforementioned options.

22 As with the Marjory Stoned Man Douglass high school “useful idiots,” Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, David Hogg, et al, the Left cowardly uses kids as stooge props, their youth supposedly giving them and their terribly immature and uninformed rantings an unassailable immunity against critique. Isn’t this what Muslim terrorists do, hide behind children?

33 Martha MacCallum Show, FOX News, 31 December 2019.

44 Sheldon Richman, “Reading the Second Amendment”, The Freeman 2 (February 1998), 112.

55 Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute, 22 August 2018, “Why We Can’t Ignore The ‘Militia’ Clause Of The Second Amendment”, Mises Institute, at https://mises.org/wire/why-we-cant-ignore-militia-clause-second-amendment/

66 Marvin Olasky, Fighting For Liberty And Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth Century America (Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, A Division of Good News Publishers, 1995), 93.

77 IBID. 97-98, 102-105, 107, 109.

88 Stephen Halbrook, The Founder’s Second Amendment (Chicago, Illinois, Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2008), 13.

99 IBID. 17-19.

1010 Halbrook, 104-105.

1111 Willard Sterne Randall, Ethan Allen: His Life And Times (New York, N.Y., W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 8.

1212 Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause, The American Revolution 1763-1789 (New York, N.Y. Oxford University Press, 2005), 272-274.

1313 Randall, 8, Halbrook, 76-79.

1414 McMaken.

1515 IBID.

1616 Stephen Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (Albuquerque, New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 73-75.

1717 McMaken.

1818 Edwin Meese III, Matthew Spalding, and David Forte, The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005), 139-143.

1919 Gary A. Shade, “The Right to keep and Bear Arms: The Legacy of Republicanism vs Absolutism,” at http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/papers-shade/TheRightToKeepandBearArms.PDF.

2020 Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume I: The Colonial Experience 1607-1774 (Wadley, Alabama, American Textbook Committee, 1987), 182-183.

2121 Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas, 1985), ix, 60-63. See also, Gary T. Amos, Defending the Declaration (Brentwood, Tennessee, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, Inc., 1989), 35-74, 117-118.

2222 Sheldon Richman, “Properly Interpreting the 2nd Amendment” Human Events (June 16, 1995), 16.

2323 IBID.

2424 Halbrook, Founder’s Second Amendment, 22.

2525 Shade.

2626 Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed, 76-77.

2727 Richman, Reading the Second Amendment, 112-113.

2828 IBID.

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"News Media", Academics, authoritarian swine, Culture, genocide, gun control, gun grabbers, guns, hoplophobia, Law, mindset, Political philosophy, Politics, Rights, Sellouts and traitors

Retreat Compromise, Fall Back Accommodate, Rout Surrender

Liberal media’s bouffant coxcomb chattering class bemoans the fact most women elected to Congress are Democrats thereby suggesting Republicans are the party of sexist misogynists as claimed by bitter harridan Hillary Clinton. It is true most women in Congress are Democrats1 but what the princes of pompous pontification ignore is Republican women often lose to Democrat males in general elections. It’s not Republicans voting against them. Genitalia plays no part in my voting. I’d climb over a pile of limp celery stick Republican males like Kit Bond, John McCain, Jeff Flake, John Kasich, Mitt Romney, and Pot-Peddler John Boehner any day to vote for a Phyllis Schlafly.2 Female Republican candidates are likely to be conservative, a serious enough offense, but worse, some commit the unpardonable sin according to Leftist Holy Writ; they are Christians. Against this horrific threat, the Democrat Party Machine swings into action deploying its myrmidons; Hollywood’s Big Donors, spokesboob actors and actresses, radical environmentalists (Crypto-Marxists), feminists (Crypto-Marxists), radicalized college youth (Crypto-Marxists), liberal media, and union and race voters. Blacks and Hispanics in large urban areas typically vote against one of their own if she is a Republican. And who are the misogynists?

Liberals have accused conservative males debating liberal females of “picking on the girl” if they “come on too strong”. Just ask Rick Lazio who lost to Hillary Clinton in their New York Senate race (2000).3 Conservative males now face an additional quandary. Do they “go easy” on liberal males in political debates? After all, with liberals, you never know when ‘he’ might come out a ‘she’. Lest anyone consider this an attack against Democrats on behalf of Republicans, read on.

Conservative radio talk show host Joe Pags recently interviewed Texas Republican Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick (23 September, 2019) about the latter’s support for universal background checks. Patrick proclaimed fidelity to the Second Amendment with a ‘but’…an affirmation followed by an equivocation is a negation…as was the case. Sure enough, Patrick argued in favor of total, 100%, universal background checks (UBC’s). His rationale was, since 90% of guns purchased already involve a background check, what’s the harm in extending it to the remaining 10%? In support of his proposal, Patrick claimed the people now avoiding background checks, presumably his 10%, do so because they cannot legally buy firearms. He said UBC’s would end this practice.4

Next Patrick asserted “gun-merchants” are getting rich selling firearms to persons who cannot legally buy them charging $4000 dollars for a $2000 dollar gun. Because of their ineligible status, “customers” have no choice but to pay huge markups. Patrick said UBC’s would shut these gun merchants down. In addition, he declared UBC’s would also stop and end public mass shootings because they would prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Patrick believes suspects in recent mass shootings were legally able to buy guns even though health officials had adjudicated them to be mentally unfit. When Joe Pags (Pagliarulo) observed Second Amendment “hard-liners” might object to Patrick’s proposal, the Lieutenant Governor said the Second Amendment guarantees people the right to “bear” not “sell” their guns.5 Wow. Where to start? Trying to follow Patrick’s “logic” is like untangling twine after an explosion in a string factory.

If an unknown number of people are not subject to background checks, how does Patrick know what percentage are, let alone 90%? What is 90% of an unknown number? Is this the “new math?” He didn’t say. Private transfers between family members, friends, and acquaintances are not subject to background checks and hence not recorded. Again, how can Patrick quantify an unknown quantity? This is an important question because he grounds support for UBC’s on the claim since so many people are already subject to background checks, no one would notice if extended to the rest. Sort of like being covered with poison ivy and getting one more bump. Even if Patrick’s numbers are correct, when has the “everyone else is doing it” ever been a compelling argument? Would it be valid to argue, because government has suppressed 90% of American’s First Amendment rights, what is the harm in surrendering the rest? At the risk of being crass, would a rescuer tell the victim of a shark attack; “Well, he got most of your leg so, you might as well let him have the rest”? Imagine its pre-W.W. II Berlin. Jacob hears a harsh banging on his door. He opens it to find goons standing there dressed in black uniforms trimmed in ominous silver runes.

“Your guns, give them to us now!” barks one of the goons.

“But why, gun ownership is legal” responds Jacob.

“Ninety percent of the other Jews have handed theirs over. What could be the harm if you do too?” says the goon.

If the people surrender any portion of a right to the government, will government ever cede it back? Would not any rationale for the government to seize a portion of a right also be equally compelling with respect to it taking the rest? Ten percent of a bad idea is still a bad idea let alone ninety percent.

I wish Pags had asked Patrick how UBC’s would force ineligible persons to submit to background checks. If a person is ineligible, they are ineligible. Most criminals obtain firearms through the black and secondary markets. This includes theft and straw purchases wherein eligible individuals buy firearms on behalf of those who are not. Who are Patrick’s “gun-merchants”? If he knows, why doesn’t he alert the Texas Department of Public Safety? Those willing to break the law selling contraband, be it untaxed cigarettes, bootleg music CDs, drugs, guns, and so forth, have and always will regardless of prohibitions and legal sanctions. Experience, history, and the facts contradict Patrick’s arguments. How could the number two man in the Texas Republican Party make such an ill-conceived and dangerous argument?

Contrary to what Patrick believes, the law already prohibits individuals from buying or possessing firearms if the Courts and or mental health officials have determined them to be mentally “defective”. In addition, the law requires officials to report such adjudications to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Anyone purchasing a firearm through an FFL is required to fill out form 4473. This an affidavit swearing they do not fit in any prohibited class listed on the form (felons, domestic abusers, illegal aliens, drug users, mentally unfit, etc.). Lying on this form is a felony. The FFL then calls the FBI’s NICS who determine if the customer is eligible to purchase the firearm. How does Texas’ Lieutenant Governor not know this? If individuals, barred by law from buying firearms, resort to the black market already operating outside the law, how would they be stopped by universal background checks?

I like Joe Pags but have to ask; what is a Second Amendment “hardliner?” Are they people who believe in an individual right to keep and bear arms, that the Second Amendment means what it says, and that one cannot compromise rights endowed by G-d? ? I’m a homicide hardliner. I reject exceptions to laws prohibiting anyone from illegally taking my life. Am I extreme? Liberals use “hardliner” to cast opponents as unreasonable in order to soften up the rest of gun owners to accept compromises. With all gun laws, each compromise leads to a diminution of rights.

According to Patrick, although the Second Amendment guarantees a right to keep and bear arms, those arms are not your private property. If one does not have the right to sell his or her property, then someone else does. Who is that? Government? If the latter, your arms must belong to them. The Declaration states people have a right to life and it is a gift from G-D, not one created by man or his laws. Inherent in this right is also a right to the means to protect it. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments recognizes the individual’s absolute right to own private property and dispose of it as they see fit. Firearms are private property. Crypto-Confiscationists argue, however, because firearms possess an intrinsic potential for lethality, exceptions to Second Amendment and property rights are valid. Baseball bats, knives, ice picks, meat cleavers, hammers, hatchets, axes, arrows, staves, and so forth also possess intrinsic lethal potential. This is no facetious comparison. The FBI reports that murderers kill more people with knives, hammers, clubs, and feet each year than rifles. In 2018, 297 people were killed with rifles, 1,515 were killed by murderers using a knife, 443 were murdered by killers using hammers, clubs, and blunt objects, and 672 were killed with “fists, feet and other ‘personal weapons”.6 The law can impose harsh consequences for irresponsible behavior but government cannot abridge an individual’s 4th, 5th, and 14th Amendment rights based on potential lethality of property owned. More importantly, American government, constituted as “federal”, cannot pass “national” laws.7

James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” writing in Federalist #39 noted a national government has authority over the “individual citizens” along with “an indefinite supremacy over all persons and things.” Under this system, “supremacy is completely vested in the national legislature” that has total control over city, county, and state governments as well as all commercial and other activities within the states. However, the United States has a “federal” not a “national” government. Its jurisdiction extends only to powers delegated to it, and enumerated, by the states.8 In Federalist #45, Madison wrote; “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects such as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which the last, the power of taxation, will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concerns the lives, liberties, and properties of the people”9 [emphasis mine]. Oops, the “federal” government has no Constitutional authority to establish any form of “national” background check law in the first place! It is sad those calling themselves Republicans and conservatives know so little about the Constitution.10

Lieutenant Governor Patrick predicates his failure-doomed proposal on two false notions near and dear to liberals; 1) the mere existence of firearms “causes” violent crime and 2) Individuals engaging in “hate” or “hate-speech” are dangerous to others, mentally ill, and the ones who commit public mass shootings. In the first case, the solution is simple; eliminate firearms thus ending violent crime, so they say. In the second, “red-flag” and stop mentally unstable persons from possessing arms or have police seize those they possess.

First, there is no correlation between the degree of access to firearms and the degree of evil in a person’s heart. Intent to inflict pain, great bodily injury, and murder germinate from within the individual not from proximity to implements of harm. In addition, access to firearms, including by teenagers under 18, was relatively unregulated before the 1960s. People could purchase firearms through the mail. “Federal” (sic) background checks did not exist, yet public mass shootings, were rare. Each decade of the twentieth century, until the 1970s, “had fewer than 10 mass public shootings with one in the 1950s. The rise began in the 1960s with six, followed by 13 in the 1970s. This upsurge spiked in the 1980s with 32 public mass shootings jumping to an unimaginable 42 in the 1990s even though access to firearms was increasingly regulated and controlled by the government following the Gun Control Act of 1968.10 What changed?

It began in 1947 with Everson versus Board of Education (330, 1, 18, 1947) in which the Supreme Court illegally amended the Constitution inventing the doctrine of “separation of church and state”. Through the Court’s tortured interpretation, it granted Liberal Humanism the means to drive G-d, its greatest foe, from the public square.

In the 1960s, moral relativism, the notion that all values are “relative”, that there is no good and evil or right and wrong, or moral absolutes became the dominant philosophy in America. Books like, I’m Okay, You’re Okay and The Pathology of Normalcy became wildly popular along with the philosophy of “do your own thing”. Simon and Garfunkel’s prophets wrote, “G-d is Dead” on subway walls. The humanist left, the equivalent of cultural acid, declared concepts of right and wrong to be judgements and those holding to them to be judgmental. If notions of morality are relative, “who are you to impose your values on me” became the battle cry of those destroying Judeo-Christian based Western Society. In order to force cultural and moral relativism on everyone, liberal humanists worked through “modern” left teachers and the Courts to drive G-d and Judeo-Christian based values from schools. For decades, Public Dis-Education has taught notions of morality and even truth are merely social constructs. How then could the consequences surprise anyone? Religion’s decline in the role of people’s lives, disintegration of the family, loss of respect for law and order and spike in violent crime, massive drug use, wild promiscuity, murdering unborn babies, normalizing sexual perversion, school and public mass shootings, and a rise in suicides. And all this would be solved by more background checks?

Patrick’s claim that all public mass killers were/are known to have been mentally unstable and dangerous is problematic. Most recent mass killers, with exceptions, did not exhibit a “specific profile” that would have identified them as potential murderers. An FBI Study (2013) revealed only 25% of mass murderers had previously been diagnosed with a serious mental illness. However, many of the others had displayed behavior considered hostile and anti-social.11 Laws designed to prevent violent crime before it happens by nature must be anticipatory. They rely on “red-flags” triggering a response from the courts and police. Who and on what basis determines what constitutes a red flag resulting in the police seizing a person’s arms? Therein lies the rub. Short of actions requiring incarceration in the Puzzle Factory, what constitutes behavior triggering these responses? According to the “Left”, hate speech should be a “Red-Flag” because it is de facto “proof” of mental instability and potential for violence. But what is hate speech? The Left defines it as anyone holding to Biblical morality, opposition to the invasion of the US by illegal aliens, belief in limited government, and a demand government follow the original intent of the Constitution. In short, opposition to any part of the left’s agenda.

Criminals and the mentally unstable are already prohibited from buying and possessing firearms. Universal background checks will do nothing to stop the ineligible from obtaining them. Nor will they stop criminals from buying guns on the black market. UBCs serve two purposes. First, a misguided attempt to buy off Confiscationists through compromise. Second, when UBC’s fail in their intended goal, Liberals will argue it’s because gun laws didn’t go far enough and what is needed is total gun registration. This too will fail and again the Left will say it’s because “We didn’t go far enough”. Guess what they’ll call for next. Support no sell-outs regardless of political party.

Beauty of the 2nd Amendment

11 Political Parity, “Where Women Win: Closing The Gap In Congress,” at https://www.politicalparity.org/research/where-women-win/

22 Phyllis Schlafly was a giant in the conservative movement. She led the battle against “me-too” males in the Republican Party, fought the radical feminist and homosexual movement, and worked to expose leftwing bias in schools. The Left, in conjunction were their useful idiots in the liberal media, pop-culture, and public diss-education, have done all in their power to flush her down Orwell’s Memory Hole.

33 Cheryl K. Chumley, “Hillary Clinton Gets Pity Party, For Rick Lazio, But Elaine Chao? Left to Fend…” The Washington Times at https://washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/27/hillary-clinton-gets-bully-card-rick-lazio-elaine/

44 Joe Pags Show, 980 Am KMBC, 23 September, 2019.

55 IBID.

66 Law Enforcement Staff, “FBI: More People Killed With Knives, Hammers, Clubs, And Even Feet Than Rifles, In 2018,” October 2, 2019 at https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/fbi-more-people-killed-with-knives-hammers-clubs-and-even-feet-than-rifles-in-2018/.

77 Teaching Government for years, I never encountered a student who knew the difference between a federal and national government or why it even mattered. Using primary sources, I addressed this ignorance for which I was summarily punished by Administration and colleagues in the SocialIST Studies Department.

88 Clinton Rossiter, Editor, The Federalist Papers (New York, N.Y., A Mentor Book from the New American Library, 1961), 244-245.

99 IBID. 292-293

1010 I explained the difference and significance between a “national” and “federal” government to self-avowed conservatives for years. All listened, few cared. To one in particular stocking up on supplies because Constitutional abandonment will lead to collapse, I supplied primary source and scholarly articles. He refused to read them and called me, and those like me, “deranged a**holes.”

1010 Dennis Prager, “Why So Many Mass Shootings? Ask The Right Questions And You Might Find Out,” June 4, 2019, Rear Clear Politics, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/04/why-so_many_mass_shootings_ask_the_right_questions_and_you_might_find_out_140486.html.

1111 Lisa Dunn, “Fact Checking 6 Myths About The Perpetrators Of Mass Shootings,” Guns And America, August 6, 2019, KERA NEWS at https://www.keranews.org/post/fact-checking-6-myths-about-perpetrators-mass-shootings/.

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"News Media", Culture, gun grabbers, hoplophobia, Media, Politics, Schools and campuses

American Universities, AKA; NFL Farm Teams

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Uneducated and ill-informed buffoons

“Labour thou under the notion I believe there be not significant exceptions to the narrative contained herein? Forbear it not for this is certainly untrue.”1

Author

It was Sunday and the church was awash in a sea of color supporting the local NFL team taking afield that day. Noticing I was not similarly attired, a church member asked me why. I no longer watch the NFL because I am a retired police officer was my reply. Looking puzzled, he walked away saying nothing. How can anyone watch the NFL? Players, receiving enormous sums simply to play a game, use it as a platform to trash America’s police, military, and the flag. “Program Directors” have replaced pretty pom pom and baton twirling girls leading college marching bands at halftime with male dancers clad in unitard body suits prancing about trailing long multi-colored scarves. Female singers, more aptly described as “sexual livestock”, belt out paens to bedroom partners and political causes. What does any of this have to do with football? How can people of faith watch the NFL? Like Mafia enforcers, the NFL uses coercion and extortion threatening to take the Super Bowl from states daring to pass laws stipulating males and females use sex-appropriate bathrooms (G-d made them male and female, two sexes, not “genders”) a disgrace for which the NBA is equally guilty. How far must those who hate this country push until Americans fight back? Had the churchman stayed to listen, I would have explained my disgust for athletes who take a knee (group-hug in the case of the Seattle Seahawks) during the National Anthem. A fundamental problem also exists with respect to the role of sports and America’s institutions of higher learning.

The human race established it as the “natural order” from the start. Those winning the genetic lottery, the more attractive and athletically talented kids, grow up treated better by parents, teachers, peers, and society as a whole. Those fortunate to embody both attributes come closest to approaching divinity on earth. In the movies Carrie and Christine, based on Stephen King novels, a star athlete hangs out with friends who are awkward nerdy social outcasts. Not likely. If this was the norm, movies like She’s All That, starring Freddie Prinz, Jr., and Rachael Lee Cook (1999) or The Duff (Designated Ugly Fat Friend), starring Robbie Amell and Mae Whitman (2015), wherein on a dare or bet, school hunks attempt do-overs of girls deemed by peers as unattractive outcasts,2 wouldn’t be wildly successful. These are modern Cinderella stories people wish were true. Should kids, based on looks, receive preference in college admissions? Most people would answer, no. Should universities extend admission preferences to children of the rich, the connected, and athletes there primarily to play sports? They do. Each takes a slot from non-scholarship kids who worked hard earning grades for admission. Should athletes uninterested in scholastics be able to trade on the names of academic universities using college as training camps for professional sports where they will enjoy lucrative salaries? These questions are perhaps more profound than the controversy of athletes taking a knee during the National Anthem.

Full disclosure; I love football. I always have going back to Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts. I grew up watching every game possible dreaming of the day I wore the blue quarterbacking the Colts. Alas, it was not to be. I tried two sports in high school and one in college but I was never meant to be a jock. Standing 6’ and weighing 120 pounds my high school senior year, I might have made a good javelin for someone to throw. I had no negative opinion of athletes whatsoever but then came high school.

Like flour, my first high school sifted kids into one of three sections; Academic: college bound, Commercial: junior college, maybe, and General: kids warehoused until graduation because they were too young to be tried as adults. Classes for each were completely different. Before my defenestration from the Academic Section, I met a kid named Thurman. He was a walking stereotype; brainy, large glasses, unkempt clothing, whose closest brush with exercise was getting on and off the bus. He posed no threat nor physical challenge to anyone. Nevertheless, high school football players singled him out for torment and persecution. Distances between classes at my large sprawling high school afforded jocks, patrolling the halls like packs of ravenous hyenas, ample time to spot prey. Separating Thurman from the herd, the jocks soon ran him down. They tore textbooks from his hands tossing them onto the breezeway, threw his lunches in the trash, broke his glasses, roughed him up, and shoved him inside the full sized lockers…regularly. The Phys-Ed department divided the 10th grade course into short units covering sports from basketball, vaulting, volleyball, flag football, gymnastics, to climbing ropes where, hanging exposed, the jocks yanked Thurman’s shorts down in front of the girls. Coaches teaching the class did nothing. Thurman had no idea who they were. Sometimes they got others and me too but I had no glasses or lunch and General Section courses weren’t big on textbooks.

Kids soon learned wealthy kids from the North end’s Country Club, cheerleaders, and jocks were demigoddesses and demigods, untouchable. Jock cafeteria behavior was often obnoxious, they acted out in class, bullied lesser males, and forced others to allow them to copy homework and off answer sheets during tests. Was it because victims feared a beating if they snitched, other kids worshipped them, and teachers were indulgent that jocks seemed to suffer no consequences for their actions?3 At times students, usually girls, spoke out against their behavior. Jocks argued they were entitled to special treatment because of sacrifices they made in practice and games.

In my freshman gym class was a gangly uncoordinated white kid who towered 6’7’. He had no interest in sports. Our gym teacher, the basketball coach, asked him to try out for basketball but he said no. From that point on, the coach encouraged, pressured, then cajoled, mocked, and harassed the freshman until he broke and went out for the team. He was terrible. He showed up in gym class bruised and battered from practices. He attended basketball camp over the summer and returned a much better player. From then on girls hung on each arm of his Letterman’s jacket like Christmas ornaments. He no longer spoke or associated with his former freshman gym class chums.

Because I was “non-verbal” (a consequence of living in Philadelphia, a story for another time), my grades suffered. Summoned to the guidance counselor’s office, he waved my grades over his head like a Grand Jury indictment asking what I wanted to do after graduation. When I said, college, he laughed saying I had no chance of ever getting in. Anywhere. Upon his recommendation, the school humiliated, summarily dismissed, and sentenced me down to the General sections. School administrators and guidance counselors were notorious for relegating kids with emotional and behavioral problems, and those deemed “slow”, into those classes. Every student understood General Section meant “dummy classes”. For example, there were no labs, beakers, Bunsen burners, formulae, or experiments in Hoodlum Chemistry. I earned an A writing a short story detailing science problems astronauts would encounter going to Mars, including fighting lizard men living beneath the sand.

The high school football team’s field goal kicker sat behind me in Hoodlum English. Because I never said a word, teachers used me as a “buffer” to separate kids that would not shut up. It was Friday and a frustrated and very pregnant teacher admonished the class if any of us so much as said a word, she was giving us an F. She caught the field goal kicker talking and goofing off but gave him a pass because he was playing that evening. Anyone else would have been staring at a big fat red ‘F’. Then my family moved.

What passed for my second high school in Dog Patch, Appalachia, had a soccer and baseball but no football team. It was too small. Had poaching deer and guzzling Hillbilly beer been Olympic sports, they would have realized their dreams of glory. However, they did have homeroom based intramural flag football teams.

In my senior year, homeroom teacher Mr. ‘P’ announced he was posting a flag football sign-up sheet during lunch. We could choose any position on a first come first served basis. Back from lunch before anyone else, I signed up for wide receiver. Although skinny, I was fast and good at throwing and catching a football. Then the jocks got their hands on the list. By the end of the day, each “skill” position; quarterback, running back, tailback, field goal kicker, punter, and wide receivers belonged to jocks who played school sports. I was no longer a wide receiver. Soccer players Rodger (co-captain), Don, and other jocks erased mine and wrote in the name of a teammate. Six-foot nothing and one hundred and nothing and I was now an offensive lineman? My appeal to Mr. ‘P’, citing his first come first served rule, fell on deaf ears. He refused to overrule the jocks. I quit the team. At first, no one cared. Then coach ‘P’ and the jocks realized, with kids playing both sides of the ball, they needed every boy they could get their hands on and asked me to reconsider. I wouldn’t budge. They offered a compromise; I could play tight end and they would throw me the ball. Tight end means offensive lineman. Jim, a defensive lineman and jock twice my size, knocked me into the dirt so many times I looked like a crash test dummy. This was supposed to be flag football. Team hotdogs, the jocks, took complete control of the team, deciding on plays and who did what. No one else had a voice. Ask yourself why their sense of entitlement came so easily to them. Rodger was naturally the quarterback. The only time he threw me the ball was when he’d been flushed from the pocket and was about to be sacked in our end zone. I caught and took the ball all the way back to the line of scrimmage before being pile driven into the ground by defensive linemen. I never found out who punched me in the jaw on the way down. We made it to the championship game but the superstars were off their game that day. With nothing going right and backed up in our own territory, an angry Rodger insisted on being the punter and proceeded to kick the ball backward, over his head, into our end zone. Opposing players fell on the ball and it was game over. We lost.

At both high schools, kids complained teachers who were also coaches exhibited favoritism toward athletes in their classes. Girls made the same complaint about teacher-Cheerleader coaches with cheerleaders sitting in their classes. Sour grapes? Jealously? Possibly. I witnessed and heard the same later as a teacher. Just me? Maybe, but if true, you would have to explain the 1984 smash hit, Revenge of the Nerds. On to the university.

In college, a friend who double-majored in English and French, tutored at the University of Maryland. Most of her tutees were jocks. She described one as dumber than a sack of rocks, an insult to paper and minerals. He went on to enjoy a successful career with the Dallas Cowboys. My girlfriend at the time was a Parks and Recreation major. Jocks packed out her requisite classes. Coaches typically taught them and, naturally, they preferred “group” work. She was the “g to the p” in “group”, doing all the work. Nevertheless, phantom jock members received the same grade as her. Dark rumors circulated on campus about Jocks getting girls plastered at parties and taking turns having their way with them. In addition, it is common for students to become acquainted with professors in their discipline. Several confided in me that administrators pressured them to pass star athletes, especially those with scholarships, whose academic level wasn’t worthy of a high school freshman.

I tried sports my sophomore year. Too skinny for football, I chose a new sport, rugby, thinking it would help me meet girls. Practices were rougher than actual games and it was there I blew out my left knee. Orthoscopic surgery did not yet exist and I was terrified of needles so I chose home-rehab exercises. My limp lasted a year. As a final insult, the University Year Book staff left my name off the team photo. Outside of sports facilities, I rarely if ever saw a jock. So few, if any, college athletes were enrolled in the Art, History, and Science courses I took (I graduated three universities) the following observations are by nature anecdotal. Perhaps others saw it differently.

During Rugby tryouts the next year, my knee buckled like Jell-O. I hung up the cleats. The knee still bothers me. After Christmas break my junior year, I discovered a secret cabal of non-jocks had commandeered and turned the attic storage room of an old building into a weight room. Although I had never touched a bar or dumbbell, I asked to join them still hoping to rehab my knee. It was January, the attic unheated, and the equipment antique heavy-duty Anglo-Saxon stuff. Floorboards were warped, clouds of chalk hung in the air like fog, barbells rusted, and paint on plates was a distant memory. Risk of tetanus be damned, I loved it. Then came big news my senior year. The University closed our medieval attic gym but opened a multi-million dollar sports complex featuring an Olympic pool, tennis, volleyball, and basketball courts, and a fully fitted weight room. And it was heated. Although designed for all students, in no time power-lifter and football players migrated from their facilities soon taking over the Sports Complex weight room as their own. They did all in their power to intimidate and make non-jocks feel as unwelcome as possible. Lines for the bench presses, one of the few exercises performed by power-lifters, were always long. Jocks made their displeasure vocal and known over having to wait so long between sets because of us pencil necks. Their sense of god-like entitlement, probably germinating in elementary school, was on full display. They mocked and ridiculed us spaghetti armed and legged men unable to lift weight they manhandled with ease. My journey up from pencil-neckdom began by working out with five fellow spaghetti-men. One by one, jock intimidation drove them away. Not me.4

Over Easter Break, the weight room was deserted. A miracle. A young football coach came in and, in a rude manner, told me because of a water main leak, the facility was closed and to leave. I asked why that was a problem. Because there is no water for the showers, he said. I explained I lived off campus and never used the showers but he was unable to grasp this concept, became irate, and yelled at me to get out as if the Sports Complex belonged to him and his football players. My last semester arrived and, dilly-dallying too long looking for off-campus housing, I found none available. Football coaches had gone door to door snagging up everything for freshman athletes who had yet to attend a single class. Because a Maryland State Trooper finished rehabbing a house at the last minute, I found a room. Thanks Fred.

I often wondered why Monday Night Football announcers introduced players by giving their name and the university they attended. What difference did their college make? It’s a football game. Whether at work, shopping, or at places of worship, do the rest of us automatically tell people we meet the name of the college we attended? “Hi, my name is Tim, Auburn U”, or “I’m Sally; The Ohio State”. At least our speech would be comprehensible. It finally dawned on me. Professional football players were identifying the NFL Farm Team in which they had trained. Wow. Was I naïve or what? I thought colleges were scholastic institutions of higher learning not training camps for the NFL. Every “student” attending college to play sports, if they do not belong, displaces one who does. Taxpayer-subsidized Colleges deny deserving kids, admission to the university of their dreams, because they place so much emphasis on sports. Jocks, whose goal is raking in millions as professional athletes, take advantage of the “system”5. Some go on later to “tweet” while driving exotic SUVS costing more than most middle-class homes; America is a racist and unjust country.

Embarrassingly ignorant of history and fueled by the lies of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and their allies; liberals and self-loathing white people, NFL players began spitting, metaphorically, on police officers and America’s soldiers past and present by taking a knee during the National Anthem. Spokesmen for BLM have advocated violence and murder of cops claiming it is self-defense against a war of extermination waged by police officers on behalf of the white race. In previous articles, I documented that this narrative is false, myth, and a massive lie orchestrated and coordinated by the Left. Because public (dis)education so poorly serves today’s pop-culture saturated Americans, they believe this claptrap. Because so many of today’s youth lack any degree of inquisitiveness, and are scandalously gullible, they are oblivious to the fact their ignorance renders them accomplices to attacks on men and women who wear the blue.

Colin Kaepernick, multi-million dollar former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, a team notorious for involvement in anti-2nd Amendment causes, became the face of BLM’s lie in 2015 when he took a knee during the National Anthem. Marcus Peters of the Kansas City Chiefs, and others soon copied him. Journalists reported Kaepernick was under the tutelage of girlfriend, Nessa Diab, an MTV-DJ, Islamic “activist”, and strong supporter of BLM. Kaepernick began posting quotes on social media from Malcolm X, communist mass murderer Che Guevara, communist Black Panthers founder Huey Newton, and cop-killer Assata Shakur. He celebrated Muslim holidays and wore T-shirts depicting Malcolm X and Fidel Castro with slogans deriding America’s police.6

Forty-Niners coach Chip Kelly refused to stand up for America’s police and military. He framed Kaepernick’s disgraceful and buffoonish attacks as a free speech issue7 as did most in the ESPN-Jock sports media Howard Cosell derided as the “Jockocracy”.8 Apparently, Kaepernick’s cheerleaders in the fawning liberal media and the Jockocracy are unaware 1st Amendment speech protections are predicated upon one owning the platform from which he speaks. No one has the right to pop off on any topic tickling their fancy at their place of employment any more than in a neighbor’s living room. NFL players do not own the playing field, bleachers, locker room, training facility, stadium, and so forth. The NFL has hard and fast rules with respect to what players may wear or attach to their uniforms during games. Owners, general managers, and coaches maintain and enforce rules for proper behavior on and off the field, just ask Kareem Hunt (Kansas City Chiefs) and Antonio Brown (New England Patriots). NFL policy requires players to stand, helmet in left hand, and face the flag during the playing of the National Anthem. The NFL spells out disciplinary consequences for violators. But the NFL refuses to enforce these rules and is unwilling to stand up for the country whose citizens lavish millions of dollars on it and its players including tax-payer financed and supported stadiums. Instead, the NFL punishes with fervor any state daring to take a stand against what Archie Bunker called “sexual-preeverts”, men dressed as women, who insist on violating women’s bathrooms. NFL spokesmen claim respect for 1st Amendment free speech rights motivates their tolerance for players kneeling during the National Anthem. Really? Ironically, the same vertebral-challenged NFL prohibits players from possessing or storing firearms at any location associated with the NFL including training facilities, in vehicles on parking lots, team planes, buses, and you name it. The same applies to fans. For the NFL, some rights are more rights than others. In a shameless display of hypocrisy, the craven NFL refused to allow the Dallas Cowboys to wear decals on their helmets honoring the five Dallas police officers gunned down in a BLM inspired ambush.9

Perhaps huge profits, salaries, mansions, and exotic automobiles has blinded NFL panjandrums, team owners, and players to the fact that football is just a game. It possesses no inherent social value. Perhaps copying actors trying to deflect attention away from their mahoosive salaries and aristocratic lifestyles, teams exploit people’s emotions by sporting colored ribbons supporting the current cause de jure. Following public outrage over players taking a knee during the National Anthem, some teams, like the Seattle Seahawks, tried to have it both way by standing arm in arm instead of kneeling or placing hand over heart. Gutless. Kansas City Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce, who graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in “Exploratory Studies”, and has a 5-year contract worth $46 million dollars stooped even lower placing hand over heart and kneeling. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t honor those who despise this country while standing up for this country. Journalists rank teams on a “Thug-Scale” based on the number of players arrested for DUI’s, drug charges, assaults, domestic violence, rape, and even murder possibly explaining player’s dislike of law enforcement.10 Attempting to clean up their image, the NFL ran commercials with players telling us not to hit our spouses. Who are they to give moral advice to anyone?

A lifelong fan who grew up watching every college and professional football game possible, it pains me to give it up. I am no longer able to stomach the hypocrisy of the NFL. Sports has perverted the purpose of colleges and universities. Scandals involving players who coasted through high school and now college with grades they never earned, graduating with diplomas they can barely read, and the cover-up for athletes who pawed and mauled girls too humiliated and intimidated to go public, has gone on for far too long. Players, who grew up treated by schools and society as demigods now inject themselves into politics supporting causes determined to destroy values and beliefs Americans hold dear. I watch no more.

11 Please forgive my shabby attempt to channel Sir Walter Scott. Published two hundred years ago in 1819 and purchased in 1983, I am finally reading his novel, Ivanhoe. It is refreshing to rediscover classic literature and sad to realize Americans are too lazy and intellectually flaccid to tackle literature, formative of their culture, as what remains of Western Civilization slides beneath the waves.

22 Spoiler alert: Neither girl in either movie is fat or unattractive, quite the contrary which evoked criticism from girls who, sadly, believe they are both. The notion weight and unattractiveness are mutually inclusive is terribly wrong and has destroyed the lives of many young people.

33 Unbeknownst to me, a jock copied off my test answer sheet in biology. Other kids lied and told him I knew he was copying and purposely put down the wrong answers. Twice my size, He cornered me in a hallway and threatened to beat the *BEEP* out of me if this turned out to be true. He would have if this had not been a lie. I still remember his white T-shirt and size of his arms as he grabbed my shirt and slammed me against the wall.

44 I never touched steroids, (lifters called it “juice” and “the sauce”) or any form of sports enhancing drug ever. Yet, several years after college, I was able to hit 350 on the bench, one rep-lock outs too, 425 deep squat, and 10 lock out reps with 185 pounds on the military press. My weight went from 120 to 225 eating food, not drugs.

55 at https://work.chron.com/much-money-nfl-player-make-year-2377.html. The median salary for NFL players is $860,000 per season with rookies starting at an average of $450,000. However, this does not take into account their haul from endorsements, commercials, team merchandise, and so forth.

66 Fox News, “Kaepernick Social Media Posts Laud Black Lives Matter, Black Panthers, Since Dating Activist DJ”, August 30, 2016 at http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2016/08/30/kaepernick-social-media-posts-laud-black-lives-matter-black-panthers-since-dating-activist-dj.amp.html

77 David Codrea, “O say can you see…” Views News, & Reviews Guns Magazine 2 (February 2018), 65.

99 Codrea, 65.

1010 “Which NFL teams have the most player arrests? Bengals, Broncos, among longest rap sheets since 2000”, at http://blog.masslive.com/patriots/2017/05/nflarrests_which_teams_have_t.html. Updated May 12, 2017. The top 10 were: 1. Minnesota Vikings, 2. Denver Broncos, 3. Cincinnati Bengals, 4. Tennessee Titans tied with Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 5. Indianapolis Colts tied with the Jacksonville Jaguars, 6. Cleveland Browns, 7. Chicago Bears tied with the Kansas City Chiefs, 8. Miami Dolphins, 9. Baltimore Ravens tied with the Seattle Seahawks, and 10. Los Angeles Chargers tied with the San Francisco 49ers out of 32 teams.

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