constitutional issues

Never Tolerate the Intolerant

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Alexander Kerensky could have had Lenin shot.

In the history books, there is a certain inevitability about Lenin but when the situation on the ground is examined closely, it is clear that right up until Lenin’s coup he could easily had been disposed of. The Bolsheviks were, indeed, gaining support in Russia after Lenin’s return from exile but that support was concentrated in St Petersburg and Moscow and even in those two power centers their power didn’t amount to majority power. Lenin was not some all-powerful person.

And Kerensky, last head of Russia’s Provisional Government knew what Lenin was up to and, indeed, was urged by people from Right to Left to move against Lenin. But Kerensky was not a ruthless man. His politics, in spite of his later association with the Conservative Hoover Institute, were Left. And he was a true believer! While not himself a Marxist he, like most Left people, had bought the Marxist notion that the ills of society are due to the leadership of the society – that the bad isn’t just part of human nature but is created and fostered by wicked people in power. Kerensky was absolutely convinced that once Tsarism was swept away the natural goodness of the people would shine forth and a just social order would emerge.

And, so, he was simply not a man who believed that he could or should shoot someone. All glory to him for standing by his convictions – but his failure to shoot one, single man, Lenin, ensured the overthrow of Kerensky’s government and the start of a system in Russia which eventually murdered tens of millions. The October Revolution wasn’t a revolution – it was a coup where Lenin and a small number of his followers shoved Kerensky and his people out of their offices in St Petersburg and started to govern. It succeeded because Kerensky’s lack of ruthlessness against the Bolsheviks convinced everyone from Left to Right and he wasn’t the man to stand against the Bolsheviks when they made their move. A bullet in September, a hero’s funeral for Lenin, and the Bolsheviks then fade into history as they squabble endlessly over what to do.

It really is a pity that it came out that way.

And I bring this up because it shows that while tolerance is a good thing – a necessary thing in any free society – as in all things human there are limits. Specifically, one must not tolerate the intolerant.

Lenin was saying from the get-go that his goal was total power for himself and his Bolsheviks and that once they got power they were going to smash everyone else. Hitler said the same sort of things. Mao as well. It has been dogma on the Right that we must extend tolerance to people expressing any idea because if we want to be free we must tolerate everything. This, as it turns out, has been incorrect – and it is wrong on both moral and practical grounds.

On the practical side of it, tolerance of the intolerant merely allowed people like Lenin and Hitler to plot and plan their takeover. It is like allowing an enemy army to arm and train itself in plain sight while you make no effort to hinder it. Just amazingly stupid and I’m rather surprised that we all bought it to one degree or another. But on the moral side of it, it is also wrong to tolerate the intolerant. Look at the mountains of corpses which resulted from people not killing Lenin, Hitler and Mao. Sure, we saved three bullets, but we lost more than a hundred million lives. That book doesn’t balance out.

To be part of a pluralist society the first requirement must be that you pledge to never end pluralism. That there is no individual, race or class which you say is a problem that needs to be destroyed. The assertion must be that everyone who is willing to tolerate is tolerated – but anyone who says that a person, class or race is evil, that person has to go. The Communist saying the Capitalists are evil must be destroyed. The Nazis saying the Jews. The Klansman saying the blacks…the CRT professor saying that white people are inherently racist.

“But Mark (you may say), aren’t you, by saying we must destroy the intolerant, becoming a person who says that an individual, class or race must be destroyed?”

No, I am not. I am not Hitler brooding in his Vienna flophouse about how the Jews kept him out of art school. I am not Lenin raving in Switzerland that he, and he alone, knows what to do and so everyone else must obey or be destroyed. I don’t care what anyone believes – but when a mad dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot it.

If we allow these people to live in our society then we are continually at risk of their gaining power and starting to kill their targets. To me, it is not worth the risk. I do believe that the bullet for Lenin is justified. And all anyone has to do to avoid the bullet is say, “hey, I don’t like that group, but as long as they leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone”. We’re not talking a very high bar here for participation in our society – you just can’t be a bloodthirsty maniac raving that if just this one group is destroyed, everything will be great.

It is very important that we learn philosophy and thus develop our theories about why things should be and what we should do. This sort of thing is invaluable in making certain that our actions are based upon thought as far as possible. But we must remember that outside the hard sciences, what we theorize isn’t always a hard and fast rule. In general I as a male will never hit a woman – this is because even though I’m not a particularly large man, I am still a lot stronger physically than almost all women and so it would be simply unfair and cruel for me to hit someone who can’t effectively hit back. On the other hand, if a girl is coming at me with a baseball bat, I’m clocking her.

Our philosophy of freedom places a premium on not censoring thought and speech. We have learned over time that in order to possibly get a good result, people must be able to think and say what they wish because in the free exchange of ideas and facts, we are more likely to find the correct solution – or at least the less bad solution – than when we carefully control thought and speech with a mind towards obtaining a pre-determined choice. That is our theory and, most of the time, it is applicable. But our theory must not interfere with our practical choices. Our theory that the police should try to de-escalate a situation falls flat on its face when there’s a knife-wielding maniac loose.

So, too, with our politics. Broadly tolerant – right up to the time when we find someone who is saying that some person, class or race must be restricted or destroyed in order for good things to happen. That person should be shot at the earliest opportunity…and without even a twinge of guilt that we in some way violated our principal of tolerance. We didn’t – we enforced it in the most efficient manner possible.

As we all know, we’re rather backs to the wall at the moment in politics – mostly because we tolerated the intolerant and, as per usual, now that these intolerant people have gained power, they are seeking to destroy their enemies. But as we seek to gain the power we need to reform our nation back to a sane Republic, we must not lose sight of the necessity of intolerance of the intolerant. We must, that is, do the things necessary to ensure that those who hate individuals, classes and races, are removed permanently from any ability to influence our society.

Turning Citizens into Serfs

Mark Noonan55 Comments

You might recall back in the late 1990’s a quasi-religious movement in China called Falun Gong. It was, at least to a Westerner, a pretty conventional Asian set of practices regarding meditation and exercise to grow spiritually – but the Chinese government hated it. And, so, it was (and remains) heavily persecuted in China and is now actually headquartered in New Jersey. As to why the Chinese government hated it: Falun Gong held itself to be outside of Chinese government control. It wasn’t a movement of rebellion, but it appears to have rejected the the PRC’s totalitarian control over the minds of the Chinese. As far as that goes, just par for the course in China. But I was reminded of it yesterday.

What my mind went back to was some news reports when it was a big thing in China back in the 1990’s where one enterprising reporter decided to ask regular Chinese people what they thought about it. Naturally, given what was going on, you had to take anything said to a foreigner with a grain of salt but one bit of opinion stood out starkly: several Chinese asked about it came up with an opinion that religious faith should be free, but it was the responsibility of the government to protect the people from “bad” religion.

I put that answer down at the time to PRC propaganda combined with the basic Asian social structure which is tightly disciplined and hierarchical. I never imagined that any such thing could come to America. I was wrong.

As Musk has taken the lid off of what Twitter was doing what we’re seeing – aside from all the illegal censorship – is that plenty of people sincerely believe that the government has a role to play in “protecting Democracy”. That is, protecting it from people who put out dis- or mis-information. That the government must protect us from “bad” ideas. How very Chinese, huh?

This is, of course, an entire reversal of the very idea of the United States. It must be remembered that it was us, we Americans, who proposed and first implemented the idea that sovereignty resides with the people, not with the government. Under the European monarchies, the Monarch was sovereign. All power flowed out and down from the King. You were assigned your station and granted that power which the King thought best for you to exercise. We turned that around and said that we, the people, were sovereign and we lent the government such of our power as we thought necessary to promote the general welfare. Even in the Republics of modern Europe is it still the State holding the ultimate power as those States hold themselves the inheritors of Royal authority. We are pretty unique. But now we have very many of our own people saying that the government should assign our opinions and make sure that no bad opinions make it into the public square.

This is a gigantic problem and it may prove fatal to liberty. It has already de-facto killed off liberty in Europe, Canada and Australia: in the UK, if you question why biological males are in the female hospital ward they will kick you out of the hospital. Meanwhile, in Norway people are facing three years in jail for saying that men can’t be lesbians. Scores of examples like that are out there – if you have the “wrong” opinion then you will be punished. And the reason you’ll be punished is because your “wrong” opinion puts Democracy at risk. It is all very Orwellian. Kafkaesque, too.

And I’m not at all sure how we fix this – how, that is, do we turn people who have developed the mentality of a serf back into citizens? They are so far gone now that they positively crave someone to take charge and “protect” them…something, of course, our corrupt Ruling Class is all too willing to do. And they have a wide variety of reasons to “protect” – not just Democracy but also The Climate Emergency and Covid…we’ve all gotta be protected from that, too. And if there is some aspect of life not covered by Democracy, Climate and Covid, rely on it on that they’ll find some other thing they need to “protect” us from.

We will have to figure it out, though. Because if we don’t, then we’ll find ourselves all doing 20 years in the Happy Fun Re-education Camp because we once said “boys will be boys” or some such.

Trump’s Opponents Miss the Point. Again.

Mark Noonan77 Comments

Over on Truth Social, Trump made a statement asking if we should overturn the 2020 result. This has made lot of people very angry – with many saying it is disqualifying for any future office.

To be sure, it is an amazing thing for a former President to say. But I cannot see how it is a morally wrong thing to say.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that there was no voter fraud in 2020. Let us further stipulate that the laptop story would not have altered the result. In other words, lets pretend that it still would have all come out the same, laptop or no laptop. You are still left with the fact that elements of the Department of Justice conspired with Big Tech and the MSM to hide a story which would have been devastating to the Democrat candidate. This is election interference writ as large as you can write it. What it is saying is that if the people want the “wrong” candidate, then the top echelons of the American Ruling Class will conspire together to do whatever they think necessary to thwart the will of the people. As a side note, please remember that the DOJ had the laptop in 2019; this means they also interfered with the 2020 Democrat primary. The Democrats were not able to properly assess their candidates because the DOJ withheld crucial information from them.

Hate to break it to you, but a Republic cannot survive with that sort of thing going on. Even assuming that this time it didn’t work, the mere fact that such entities would make the attempt proves that the Constitution – the rule of law, itself – is a dead letter in the United States

There is no mechanism in American law for a do-over on elections. Once the result is entered into the books, it is what it is. So, Trump’s call for a re-vote or what have you is going nowhere even if the overwhelming majority would like it. But what we cannot do – what we dare not allow – is for this to go unanswered. Even if you’re willing to move on from Trump, you have no assurance that the same and worse won’t be done to the next candidate. We already know that people in high positions in Congress, the bureaucracy and the MSM are willing to assert the most fabulous lies about their opponents – now we know that those in charge of law enforcement are willing to ignore the law and help the liars make the lies stick. If they get away with this, they will do it again. Anyone running for office who doesn’t meet Ruling Class approval will simply be destroyed. So, while Trump’s call for a re-vote can’t happen, something must be done. People must go to jail. People must lose money. The victim must be compensated.

This is the turning point. There is no going back from this. If this sort of thing is allowed to happen unchallenged, then our votes will become worthless…our candidates will be destroyed, or will merely be tools of the Ruling Class from the get-go. What we, the people, may want, will no longer matter…we’ll get what the Ruling Class wants.

But it won’t just end with our corrupt and stupid Ruling Class living forever. That is what the Roman Ruling Class thought once they had disposed of the Gracchi. The people’s champion was destroyed and the people to all appearances knuckled under…and then once fine day Octavian, Antony and Lepidus issues proscriptions of hundreds of members of the Ruling Class and the people were entirely indifferent. What I’m saying is that if the people cannot elect their champions, then they will passively support the person who kills the people who destroyed their champions. If the law is dead and its just a competition to see who can hold power, then the winner of that power struggle is invariably the person most willing to kill those the people hate.

Just a cautionary word. I hope people figure this out fast – because it is either some DOJ people doing 20 years, or it is eventual civil war followed by a tyrant.

The Last, Best Hope

Mark Noonan12 Comments

I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. – Abraham Lincoln

That, boiled down, was all the Civil War was about. Lincoln’s view was that regardless of any complaints the South had about the result of the 1860 election or the structure and function of American government, they could not legitimately break up the country because they didn’t get their way. Popular government requires that the losers accept the loss and set their minds to reversing the result at a future election. But there was more to Lincoln’s statement than the immediate problem of the Civil War – the assertion is rather universal: is popular government something wise, or nothing but folly? The jury is still out. Spoiler: the jury will always be out. It is an endless effort.

Popular government has two requirements: the aforementioned acceptance of the election results and that the government never seeks to thwart the popular will. People have to get out there and campaign and vote, accept the results and then the government has to do what it was elected to do within the restrictions of the Constitution. Obviously, we’ve settled whether or not secession is something to do when you lose, but we haven’t settled whether or not popular government can maintain a system where the popular will prevails. The popular will is whatever the people want done now via Constitutional means and the unrepealed Constitutional things they did in the past: the government, to be truly popular, must do both to the best of it’s ability – honor what exists, and implement what is desired under law.

Voting is, of course, only a mechanism for assessing the popular will. It tells us who convinced the most people to go along with a party or candidate. This is a very important thing, but it isn’t the end of it. Voting is only an aspect of how things work. Far more important is what the government does once it is in power. First and foremost, does it do what it said it would do? Secondly, does it obey the law as it does things? A government which doesn’t do what was proposed – or, even worse, does the opposite – is deliberately thwarting the popular will. A government that doesn’t obey the law is attacking the very concept of popular government.

And as I said, our experiment is still on-going – and we’re rather up against it. For a short while there, the example of America started to spread liberty around the world. But even at its peak in, say, the 1950’s, the freedoms being established weren’t American freedoms. They were conditional. How so? Well, let’s take a look.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Congress shall make no law. That is a very vigorous statement. Doesn’t matter how bad you want it. Doesn’t matter how justified you think you are or even if 90% of the people agree with you…Congress shall make no law. Boom, as the hip people say. Done. Now, to be sure, you can break the law and so make laws against free speech and so forth, but if you are obeying the law – as is required for popular government to work – then you have no recourse other than changing the Constitution, a very difficult process and even here in 2022 you’d never get close to an Amending majority to change so much as a word of that. Now, how about this for a contrast:

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

The Canadian Charter goes on for quite a bit after that detailing this, that and the other thing but it is all moot: Everything after the word “it” negates what was said before and makes nonsense of what comes after. What are “reasonable limits”? The Charter doesn’t define them so what a “reasonable limit” is will be whatever the government of the day decrees…and as that government, via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, essentially controls the terms of the political debate, it isn’t like the people have a real shot at changing who will be decreeing what is reasonable. The current government of Canada got 32.6% of the vote last election – and just today it announced that it is freezing handgun purchases…because, to the government, that is a reasonable limit. And as we saw with the trucker protests, the government will also decide what are the reasonable limits to popular opposition to government decrees.

Neat, huh? Voting all over the place…and your freedoms are non-existent; entirely depending on the government deciding whether they meet reasonable limits.

And it is like that all over the world. Either there is no specific assertion of the rights of the people (France’s Constitution, for instance, only asserts that it honors the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man – but it doesn’t make them obligatory under French law), or such assertions are hemmed in with weasel words allowing the government to do whatever it wants. Only in the United States do you get things like Congress shall make no law or shall not be infringed. And, let me tell you, this just irritates the heck out of our Ruling Class.

And don’t act all surprised about this – what government ever really wants to limit itself? Well, we know of one, and just one: The Constitutional Convention of 1787. For the very first and only time in history, a group of people came together to craft a government which would have built in provisions to limit the power of government. Most people – even most historically literate people – don’t realize how astonishing this is. People who are drawn to government are, after all, mostly drawn to power. Such people are inherently unlikely to enact anything that would actually stop them from doing something. But in 1787, a whole bunch of people drawn to power did just that. It was a miracle – and as I said many years before, I think that God moved them to do as they did. Can’t prove it, but what emerged out of Philadelphia in 1787 was so unique and so sublime that I can only credit God for it. But, that aside, the main thing is that it was done.

And ever since then, people far less worthy than the Founders have tried to work their way around it. You can just look at a Pelosi or a Clinton and see them burning with envy at Justin Trudeau just deciding, all on his own, that you can’t buy a pistol in Canada any longer. They hate the fact that here in America there are clear, easy to understand laws which say the government can’t do that. And of course they still circumvent the law as often as they can. But even that probably bothers them – they have to dress it up, slip it into a must-pass bill, make sure the MSM gets the right Narrative…and all the while they have the fear that our genuinely independent judiciary will strike it down, with the added complication that dozens of States are likely to resist and by non-cooperation and lawsuits cause all manner of trouble. So, soooo much easier if you could just get Pudding Brain to sign a decree between Matlock and Nap Time.

And they also very much prefer that our ability to speak, worship, own property, be armed and so forth were subject to their arbitrary interpretation of what the law says. They really want some “reasonable limits”!

They’re trying to get those “reasonable limits”. Been trying for decades and they’ll never quit. Dressed up as “gun safety”, “reproductive rights”, “equity” and such, they are very much trying to impose some “reasonable limits” on us. And we have to fight them off – as preparation for utterly destroying them as a political force. We must do this because we must continue to obey Lincoln – we must, that is, continue to prove that popular government isn’t an absurdity. It is either win this fight, or throw up the sponge and look for the first likely dictator who at least promises to leave us alone in our personal beliefs. We’d get the choice between the Left’s Lenin, or our Caesar. I don’t want that – I’d rather we kept freedom. But, in the end, there might not be enough of us to do that. But I’m sure going to try.

This is still the world’s last, best hope. Has been since 1776 and will be until such time as the rest of the world starts writing into its laws the things government isn’t allowed to do. And in this, you’ll now pardon me if I don’t give a damn about the world and it’s problems. This is a big reason why I’m indifferent to things like Ukraine: I’ve got bigger fish to fry right now. Namely, making sure America as founded continues to exist. All else comes a very distant second to that. We are, thank God, not involved in a hot Civil War, but we’re just as much in a Civil War as ever…because as was said regarding the last one, the House must become all one thing or all the other. Either we restore an America where government is restricted, or we become an America where the people are.

Shall Not Be Infringed

Mark Noonan16 Comments

As per usual in the aftermath of a shooting, the debate is over what restrictions should be placed on gun ownership. And even gun rights advocates essentially concede the point that there should be restrictions – the only thing being debated is what sort of restrictions there will be. We have to get away from that. We must, that is, start insisting that words mean what they mean and that written law is obligatory. Because we’ve allowed words to be twisted and permitted the written law to be optional we’re in the mess we have today. Time to take that stand: draw that line.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Our liberal friends like to concentrate on the first four words: asserting that firearms ownership is tied to militia, with the National Guard, essentially the Army reserve, being now the only legitimate place to bear arms. But that is just obvious drivel – anyone reading the sentence can see that the author was merely explaining the reasoning behind the amendment…and the militia is not the National Guard: it is, essentially, all adult citizens capable of bearing arms. It most emphatically is not the military – that is why it says “militia”. The Military is a permanent force raised and armed by the State. The militia is an ad hoc organization of self-armed civilians called into service in an emergency. Very different species! But even if you want to assert that the Militia is now the Military, you can’t get around the last fourteen words – the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. Even if the author meant to write that you have to be in the Militia to bear arms, the sentence doesn’t assert anything like that – but it does clearly state that the right to bear arms is something that government can’t infringe upon.

Infringe is an important word here – because it means to transgress, to violate, to invalidate, to encroach upon. The author could have used all sorts of words here, but he choose “infringe” because he wanted to make clear that there were no circumstances where you could deny the people the right to keep and bear arms. The government, per the Second Amendment, can do nothing to prevent or even so much as hamper the ability of the people to keep and bear arms.

No exceptions! It doesn’t say “shall not be infringed, once you pass a background check” or “shall not be infringed, except in a gun-free zone” no “shall not be infringed except for reasonable safety regulations”. It says shall not be infringed and then, literally, period. End of sentence. Nothing to add, retract or modify. We’re done here: the government cannot infringe upon the people keeping and bearing arms.

Now, lets move on to the next very important word in the sentence: arms. What is an “arm”? Well, it is anything you choose to arm yourself with. It doesn’t say the right to keep and bear muskets. Nor the right to keep and bear swords. Or keep and bear arms as long as they aren’t too lethal. No, it says “keep and bear arms.” It secures our right to keep and bear anything you wish to use as an arm – as a weapon. The author could have been specific but he wasn’t – he merely wrote the word arms. Even if in the author’s mind something else was meant, the word “arms” means what it means: it means weapons in general. Anything from a Swiss army knife to a thermonuclear device.

Hey, Mark – you’re not saying that the people can keep and bear nukes, are you?

I’ll bite: yes. Technically, you have a right to keep and bear nuclear weapons. Now, in practical terms, the chances that any person will obtain the necessary materials, skills and funding to build a nuclear device is nil. But the way the Second Amendment was written does not provide any exclusions. You might want exclusions in there. The author might have thought there was still exclusions in there. But the words of the law – which is what we must adhere to – makes no exclusions. It says “arms” and that people can keep and bear them.

In practical terms, what we’re really dealing with in keeping and bearing arms is arms that one person or, at most, a small crew of people can maintain, deploy and operate. And to drill down further, 99.99% of the time we’re going to be talking about small arms. But small arms does include things like automatic weapons, grenade launchers, anti-air and anti-tank missiles. And it must include those things because the clear intent of the author was to ensure that the population, without exception, was able to be armed sufficient to shoot back at an oppressor. It isn’t like no exceptions are placed into the Constitution. There’s lots of them in there – heck, even habeas corpus, the primary legal defense of free people, has exceptions. Arms do not. And the people who enacted and ratified it could read. They knew what they were doing. They were members of government who were ensuring that their fellow citizens could shoot them if they got out of hand. They were, of course, a much braver bunch than our current Ruling Class…and I’m pretty sure they had our current Ruling Class in mind as they wrote and ratified.

But aside from the crucial need to shoot oppressors, there is a larger issue at stake here: the rule of law. For many decades now, we have allowed the Ruling Class to say the law says something it doesn’t say and/or ignore what the law clearly says. The whole mess we have right now was allowed to happen because of this practice of law becoming really just whatever the bosses wanted it to be at the moment. It can’t be that way. Well, it can’t be that way in a Republic. You want that sort of thing, get yourself a monarchy where the King can decree suddenly that the law now says this or that. For us, the law says what it says and it won’t say anything different until we change it via Constitutional means. No short cuts. if you don’t like what the Second Amendment says then you can’t just ignore it and start infringing on keeping and bearing arms. If you want to place restrictions on keeping and bearing arms the only path you have is via Amendment: you’d have to change the law.

And that is the way it should be and must be because we must get back to Rule of Law. If we want to live in a Republic then the law, even when its stupid, must be enforced. After all, we made the law and must be bound by our own actions. It is the only way to safety. We’d be safer under the most draconian but strictly enforced laws we made than we can be under the most liberal legal regime that has people ignoring the law when it suits them. If I know I’ll have my head chopped off for doing A, I won’t do A…but what am I supposed to do when whether or not I’ll get my head chopped off for anything depends on the whim of an official? Because for a free people, in the law lies our only safety.

What Are Human Rights?

Mark Noonan12 Comments

There has been much debate this past week over Florida removing Disney’s special tax and governing provisions and as it went on it occurred to me that the concept of “rights” isn’t properly understood in America these days by a lot of people. We know that the Left doesn’t understand the concept at all, but even many on the Right seem to be pretty hazy on the subject. So, let’s take a stab at defining what a right is:

A human right is something that an individual inherently has: to determine if something is yours by right, you must consider whether or not any human being, at least in potential, can think, say or do a thing on their own: if they can, it is almost certainly a right. If thinking, saying or especially doing something requires the cooperation of one or more additional people, it isn’t a right but a privilege.

In our Declaration, we assert that we are endowed by God with these rights. It isn’t necessary to believe in God to hold that rights are inherent, but it is a lot easier if you do. The main thing about it, though, is the assertion that a human being, as such, simply has them. They aren’t granted, they are secured. And that is the crucial thing – because we go on to assert that governments are instituted among men to secure our rights. That’s the only purpose of government: to make sure that everyone’s rights are secured: left up for debate is just how to secure the rights, but that the individual has the rights and government must secure them to be legitimate is a bit of dogma absent which the United States has no reason for existing.

It is also important to remember that rights are individual in nature. They don’t adhere to a group: they adhere to you and me, as people, simply because we are people. There are no black rights or gay rights or women’s rights: there are only human rights and only individual human beings have them.

What has gone very wrong in America over the past century, and especially the last fifty years or so, is the loss of this understanding of human rights, and what our government is supposed to be doing. When a Leftist says that the Constitution doesn’t give you a right to own a machine gun, all he’s doing is talking drivel. Of course it doesn’t give you a right to a machine gun. It doesn’t give you anything. It secures all your rights (or, that is what it is supposed to do). To say it doesn’t specifically authorize machine gun ownership, or their other argument that gun ownership is dependent upon militia membership (with the further assertion that the militia is now the standing Army) is to talk nonsense. The Constitution also doesn’t specifically say I can have a ham sandwich – and I doubt anyone will try to enact common sense ham sandwich control. I have, as a human being, the inherent right to do anything that any individual human being has the potential to do on their own: as long as I’m not required to obtain the consent of another to do a thing, then I get to do it and the only purpose of government is to secure my right to do it.

I can thus own any property that someone wishes to sell me. I can say whatever I want. I can believe whatever I want. I can go in the public domain anywhere I wish. I don’t have to account for my actions to anyone unless I’ve tried to take something from them (ie, their life, their liberty or their property). Most people don’t get this concept: that we are all free agents. We’re not supposed to have to fill out a form. We don’t need permission. To take it to a small level as an example: in most places, every year you have to re-register your car and pay for the privilege of not getting a traffic ticket while driving your property in the public domain. What possible argument can be made that I, as a person, should have to tell the government what I own? Why should I have to pay each year to tell them what I own? I have an inherent right as a person to own a car and that’s the end of it. You might reasonably be able to tell me that I have to keep it on the roads, that I can’t exceed certain speeds as a means to protect the rights of others on the roads…but you don’t need to know if I own a particular car. But we’ve grown so used to this sort of thing that we don’t even see it for the imposition that it is. And because we do things like register cars, the Left says it is reasonable to register our guns. And, hey, please have your child fill out this form telling the government what religion you are and what language is spoken at home. One thing leads to another, doesn’t it?

The Left makes their arguments because they (a) don’t know what a right is and (b) haven’t the foggiest notion of how the United States Constitution and government are supposed to function.

But it also infects the Right. Plenty of voices rose up as Florida removed Disney’s special protections to say that we on the Right are violating Disney’s right to free speech. They are asserting that Disney corporation, in engaging in the debate about sex education in school, was merely exercising its right to free speech and to take away Disney’s tax breaks was unjustly punishing speech. This is an absurdity. Disney is a publicly traded corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees…it is a collective thing and thus has no rights at all. All it has are privileges…and the Florida legislature has decided to revoke some of those privileges. Each Disney employee is, of course, free to say whatever they want – and the employees of Disney are also empowered to range their corporation on any side of the political spectrum they wish. Nobody can make the least move against any individual Disney employee for speaking out…but the collective entity called Disney has no rights and, as it enters the political debate, it is entirely legitimate for their political opponents to use their constitutional powers against the Disney entity. In this case, the power inherent in government to decide what the tax bill is going to be.

These days, we’re so used to asking permission to do things that even many on the Right seem to think that as long as you can go to court and have a judge say you can do a thing, you’re free. But that isn’t how it is supposed to work. It isn’t for me, as an individual, to argue I have a right – it is for those who say I don’t to argue that I don’t have it. Like this: what was wrong in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case was that the owner of the shop had to defend himself. He had to go through a long, tortuous, expensive legal process just to get a judge to say, “hey, turns out he as an individual doesn’t have to bake a cake if he doesn’t want to”. Do you see how utterly ridiculous that is? Who the hell was anyone to think, even for a moment, that they had the right to tell a person they must do anything? Free people can’t be told to do something they don’t want to do. The end. The whole case should have been five minutes:

Plaintiff: Your honor, I want that man to bake me a cake.

Judge: Defendant, do you want to bake the Plaintiff a cake?

Defendant: No.

Judge: Ok, sorry, Plaintiff, he doesn’t want to do it. Case dismissed. Oh, and Plaintiff: you owe the Defendant his legal costs.

But because we’ve got into this “mother, may I?” attitude, it went on for years. And because it was allowed to go on for years, the people trying to destroy Masterpiece Bakeshop simply tried again and again with different plaintiffs and slightly different arguments. But they all came down to the same absurdity: an assertion that Person A has a right to order Person B to do something. That in this or that circumstance, a person loses their rights as an individual depending on the supposed need of another individual.

We must get back to the understanding of human rights – it will be crucial as we reform America. The old America we grew up in (and especially that, say, our grandparents knew) is gone. We’re at the crossroads where we are going to decide if America will remain free, or become a quasi-Socialist society of Rulers and Ruled. But for us to recreate a free America, then Americans are going to have to re-learn what being free means. They’ll need to re-learn, that is, that we don’t need permission. My grandfather used to make massive business deals on a handshake. There was no contract. There were no lawyers involved. They were free, adult Americans presumed by all concerned to be in full possession of their faculties and so if the deal went belly up they’d all take their lumps and move on. They didn’t need to fill out a government permission form (and the very concept would have amazed them): they saw their opportunity to make money and agreed to give it a try. We must restore that mental attitude – something in the mind which assumes we’re all able to do a thing without permission from anyone save those directly involved.

Because if we don’t, then even our victory over the current Left will be hollow – unless people are imbued with a spirit of liberty, they won’t remain free. They won’t, that is turn from Marx to Madison, but from Marx to Franco. In the end, Franco is still vastly better than Marx…but Madison is better than both, by a long shot.

We Need a Tribune

Mark Noonan30 Comments

The title, of course, is ancient Roman – tribuni plebis. Tribune of the Plebes. The common folk. You know: you and me. While the title Tribune was applied through Roman history to a variety of offices and functions, the part I’m most concerned with is the actual tribuni plebis. Those charged with protecting the people from the Ruling Class.

In the Roman Republic there were ten Tribunes, one for each of the Roman tribes and they had the power of legislative veto and ius intercessionis – they could veto Senate legislation and they could intervene to protect any commoner. That isn’t exactly what I have in mind for an American Tribune because I also take a bit from the Roman Censor – who was periodically elected to look after public morals and how the officials were conducting their offices. I just want one Tribune and here’s the powers I want it to have:

  1. The ius intercessionis: I want the Tribune to be able to intervene in any federal prosecution and simply annul the charges against the accused, prior to or after conviction. It isn’t a pardon (though it would work out to one given our Constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy): it just releases the accused and prohibits the government from prosecuting over the crimes charged at the time ius intercessionis is invoked.
  2. The Tribune is empowered to investigate any elected or appointed official of the federal government. No elected or appointed official can refuse access by agents of the Tribune to any federal document or property: the investigative power of the Tribune is to be absolute, not subject to review or check, no official can refuse a Tribune’s demand for documents or access. For appointed officials (the bureaucrats) the Tribune would have power to prosecute (with a jury trial) and punish without recourse to federal appeals courts. For elected officials, the Tribune presents the evidence to Congress and calls for expulsion (of Congress members) or impeachment (of Executive or Judicial office holders). The Tribune would not have the power to investigate State or local officials, nor any citizen who isn’t employed by the federal government. The Tribune is a watchdog on the federal government, nothing more.

I’d have the Tribune elected in odd numbered years by national popular vote with a limit of one term per Tribune who cannot seek another federal office until seven years after leaving office. The election would be held on the second Tuesday of December, the Tribune taking office at the stroke of midnight, New Years Day with a four year term. The Tribune would be limited to a staff of no more than 100, the budget provided by a set tax which can’t be reduced or abolished but which does rise indexed to inflation to keep the budget stable in real terms (it wouldn’t really require much: no more than a few million dollars a year; we could probably fund it by a penny tax on the sale of shoes or some such).

What I want here – and others can modify my idea – is a person, elected, who has no other role than to check up on the government. That is all the office is empowered to do. It can’t be interfered with by other branches, it would be very difficult to bribe, it can’t be used as a launching pad for a different office as the gap between running for a new office is long. What is wanted is a looming threat over all officials of government…that their game will be exposed. True, a Tribune with a small staff couldn’t find all problems…but it could find a lot of them, and merely exposing them would often be sufficient to force reforms. And it would also serve as a fallback for Americans oppressed by their own government – there would be a lot less chance of trespassers being held in solitary confinement or people being entrapped in a FBI scam to kidnap a governor if there was an official who could, just on their say so, stop the whole thing in its tracks.

We had thought the checks and balances of the Constitution were sufficient. They weren’t. To secure justice for ourselves and punishment for corrupt officials, we need a new power in the land…one which only we, the people, can raise up and who has no other job than to glare at those who would rob our substance and oppress us.

ACAB

Mark Noonan16 Comments

You’ve seen that. Especially in 2020 you saw it scrawled everywhere when a BLM/Antifa riot took place. If by some chance you still don’t know what it means:

All Cops Are Bastards.

This is not true and grossly unfair. But we do have a problem, folks.

Those of you of a certain age remember The World at War: A BBC series about WWII and they devoted one episode specifically to the Holocaust. I recall that one of the people interviewed was a former camp guard who described how horrified he was when he first witnessed the gassing of Jews. What the story doesn’t go on to do is tell you that the man fled his post and started an anti-Nazi resistance. That story isn’t told because it didn’t happen. As the man was told by a more experienced hand, eventually you just get used to it. Very likely, the horrified young man got used to it. Maybe later he came to regret it. Maybe he regretted it all along. But the most important thing for the Nazi regime is that he went ahead and did it.

Now, why that particular Fritz became a camp guard, we don’t know. I suspect a lot of them joined the SS-Totenkopfverbande because it kept them out of the Army or the Waffen SS (though the Nazis did cull a division of soldiers out of the camp guards). And, once in, there were various pressures on them – especially anyone who didn’t immediately get enthusiastic about the work (some did: being such a guard drawing out latent sadistic streaks). You could, of course, get in simple trouble is you disobeyed. You could lose your job. Lose your pension. Find it hard to obtain other employment. So, almost all of them just went along with it. There are only few tales of concentration camp guards being at all kindly (hardly any tales of Soviet camp guards, either, and for the exact same reasons). But the main thing to keep in mind is that they weren’t drawn from the pool of wicked Germans – they were drawn from Germans, as such. They were just regular folks. People you wouldn’t look twice at.

I bring this up because a little before I sat down, word came out that the Canadian police are starting to crack down on the truck protestors. We don’t know how it will come out – maybe the truckers will still prevail. I have my doubts: they have no guns. There is nothing, that is, to scare the Canadian government with. The officials of government won’t go short of anything – they can wait out the truckers who will eventually have to go back to work to feed their families. And if the truckers do break, you can rely on it that they’ll be slandered and hounded by government.

But the real problem is the police. If there is a crackdown, the cops have to do it…and early reports indicate that the police are obeying orders. I’m sure all of them took some oath somewhere along the line where they pledged to defend the rights of Canadians. But what is that compared to the possibility of getting in trouble? Of losing your job or pension? Sure, maybe you’re horrified at it all – and maybe you even hold back and don’t make any arrests yourself…but you don’t stop it. Just like the Germans of yore, they’ll just go along with it, which works out to de-facto approval and assistance to oppression.

I’ve long had my doubts about our own police – especially the blue city police. Ever since Eric Garner was killed by the cops for selling “loosies” my understanding of the police has altered. I used to be Back the Blue. But am I supposed to back a blue which allows itself to be turned into tax collectors for upper class NYC busybodies who don’t want the poors to smoke? “The law says”. Sure it does. But you’re not supposed to care what an unjust law says. In the Uniform Code of Military Justice is it spelled out: no member of the armed forces is obligated to obey an unlawful order. This was inserted into US military law after WWII precisely to remove “I was only obeying orders” as an excuse for crime. Any cop who can’t or won’t see that putting a choke hold on a guy for selling untaxed cigarettes is an unlawful order isn’t worthy of being in any police force. Seriously: at most they should have ticketed the guy and moved on. But even that is ridiculous – real police who take an oath to defend the people would have told their superiors to get stuffed. They simply would not have enforced a stupid tax law about cigarettes.

But then you might lose your promotion, your job, your pension. You might get into legal trouble yourself. See the problem?

Any official organization has this fundamental weakness: those employed by it are at the mercy of those running the government. And we know what sort of people gravitate to government: the power mad and the corrupt. This is not to say that everyone in elective office is a psychopath, but a huge number of them are and all of them sat down one day and said to themselves, “you know who would be best to lead? Me!!!”: that right there is proof of at least a partially unbalanced mind. No fully sane person would ever think themselves fit to lead. So, what you’ve got in government agencies – all of them – are people who’s livelihood is dependent upon pleasing people who have a high propensity to lunacy. This is not a good thing.

And, really, its been in front of us all along. Think about how many police scandals you’ve heard of in your life. Military scandals. Bureaucratic scandals. People taking and giving bribes. Committing and covering up crimes. Giving special deals to political cronies. On and on it goes: because the people who actually work the levers of power are beholden to people who are often insane and just as often corrupt to the bone. And, of course, to rise to the top of the bureaucratic structure, you proved ages before that you play ball – that you know who is to be allowed to skate, what corrupt deals you are to turn a blind eye to.

Our problem is that these sorts of people – weak willed subordinates with police power, corrupted senior officials and lunatic/thief elected officials – have at their disposal local law enforcement, State law enforcement, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security…on and on and on like that. They have the power to snoop, harass, arrest. To not use these powers against regular folks who question them they’d have to be positively holy. How many Saints do you think work for our government at any given time? The temptation to abuse power is enormous, the fear of crossing it immense.

Think about what they are doing to the 1/6 detainees. Think about that poor SOB they arrested after Benghazi. Think about the number of innocent people who have been sentenced even to death by corrupt law enforcement officials. And then add to this an MSM which is a mere propaganda arm of this class of people – in other words, no matter how wicked they are, they can rely on the MSM to cover it up, at least as long as possible, and then downplay it if it happens to come out. You start thinking of yourself as brilliant and bulletproof in that situation.

And, so: ACAB.

An unfair accusation in the specific sense, but all too apt in the general. If we were confident that even 60 percent of the police wouldn’t obey an unlawful order, we’d be ok. But how many of us have that level of confidence? Remember we used to think the FBI was made up of stalwart patriots who were ruled over by corrupt political fools…but, if so, where are the FBI agents resigning over the corruption at the top? Coming forward to spill the beans not against the latest target of Ruling Class ire, but spilling it about those inside the FBI who are corrupt? It doesn’t happen. And, sure, I’ll bet when a fresh-faced FBI agent first comes across the garbage he’s horrified…but, you can get used to anything after a while. If you don’t join in the corruption then you ignore it, take on protective coloring, fade into the background and simply don’t look at the dirt.

Our Progressive friend’s battle cry was “Defund the Police”. What they really meant by that – most police being controlled by Progressives – was “move cop money to this or that grift I’ve got going”. Our cry must be “Abolish the Police.” We need to entirely rethink how laws get enforced and how public safety is maintained. One thing certain is that we know we can’t afford a large, professional, permanent law enforcement bureaucracy. It is incompatible with morality and liberty.

I’m not entirely sure how we do this, but my preliminary thought is to place primary law enforcement on elected Sheriffs and city Marshals. Elected, never appointed. Term limited. With only a small professional staff. Oregon is one of the least policed States with approximately 1.6 copes per thousand residents. I think we’re going to have to reduce that by a factor of about ten. So, instead of New York State having a total of 62,000 copes, make it 6,200 full time, paid professional police. The people who will be charged with investigating crimes more than preventing crime – the preventing, I think, is going to have to be something we, the people do. Some sort of volunteer or part-time citizens militia which patrols its own local communities (seriously: me and a few other guys from my development here in Las Vegas take it in turn to patrol nightly): it is the patrols which keeps crime at bay, anyways. The thought of a cop a phone call and five miles away doesn’t deter a burglar nearly as much as shotgun-armed Joe Blow passing by that house every few minutes while he patrols his neighborhood. And you’d still have a small, professional police force to provide backup…so if Joe Blow sees a guy breaking in and feels he can’t take them, he’d call for police backup.

Whatever we do, we can’t continue as we have. Our lives and liberties are at too high a risk under the current system. New times call for new thinking – and Back the Blue is fully obsolete.

Freedom Must Destroy Tyranny

Mark Noonan39 Comments

The word anti-fascist was coined by Soviet propaganda in the 1930’s. The idea behind it was to convince everyone to join with the Communists against the Fascists. It was a clever bit of phrasing. What decent person, after all, would refuse to be anti-fascist? It started suckering people immediately and continues to do so to the present moment. But whenever anyone on the Left says something, you always have to look very carefully at it – what they really mean by it. What is most emphatically not meant by anti-fascist is “pro-freedom” or “pro-democracy”. Wouldn’t really work, now would it? No sane person could look at the Soviet Union and say that was the home of freedom and democracy. But they were anti-fascist! Very much so. Much like one criminal gang is opposed to another criminal gang.

To me, it was this phrase – along with the various “popular front” movements in Europe at the same time (which was no more than anti-fascism put into practice) – that was the start of the real Marxist infiltration of Western society. To be sure, the Marxists had been around and both the Labour Party in Britain and the Social Democrat Party in Germany paid lip service to Marxist ideology but there was no real purchase in the social organism for Marxist ideology. It was outside; alien. Your basic Marxist in the West prior to the mid-1930’s was a political crank fighting tedious internal battles over Party orthodoxy and producing books and magazines hardly anyone ever read. But anti-fascism allowed entry: the Marxists could now get together with all the other anti-fascists and start to turn any group joining the anti-fascist movement towards Marxism. It was a gigantic mistake.

It is never good enough to merely state what you are against. Stating you are against a Fascist or Nazi government is actually fairly meaningless unless you then state what you are for. The Marxists got around this issue by asserting the threat of Fascism and Nazism was so dire that nobody should bother with anything other than opposing them. They were taken at their word – naturally enough, the Marxists didn’t limit their efforts to fighting fascism: they took the opportunity to expand their own power and influence. You can understand why people fell for this. But, the 1930’s were a long time ago: it is time to reassess.

What we are for is freedom. But even in this we have to be specific. The Left has moved so far into the fabric of our society that the meaning of the word “freedom” has become unclear. Deliberately so, of course. So, too, with words like “justice” and “democracy”. You and I of the Right know what we mean but at lot of regular folks are unclear on the words – because the waters have been muddied. A person of the Left holds that freedom means freedom from lack. That justice means the oppressed get their pound of flesh. That democracy means only the Left can win. We have to state it clearly: we are for the freedom of the individual to live life as they see fit; that justice means a person gets the benefit or punishment they have earned; that democracy means the people ruling themselves.

But here’s the problem: how can be propagate our ideas? The Left – the Marxists – have gained control of all the levers of power and nearly the entire public square. The Left controls the media, the schools, the NGOs, the bureaucracy, the corporations. Being that they are of the Left, they use these tools to broadcast their lies endlessly into the minds of the people – and only at times, when really pressed to it, do the people rebel against this. The truckers in Canada are showing that the people can be pushed too far…but while we’ve watched in delight as these protests have developed, it must be noted that for the most part the media isn’t covering it. When they do, it is to downplay the size of the protest and to hint darkly that they are inspired by racists or agents of foreign powers. Eventually, the truckers will have to go home…and when they do, all that will be left in the public square is the lies the Left will say about them. We’re really up against it.

But I also think we can win. But to do so will require us to do some things which many will find distasteful. It will require a major shift in how we think and what policies we pursue. Because we’re not just trying to win an election – we’re trying to win an ideological battle. More accurately, we’re trying to carry out a counter-revolution. We lost: understand that. The USSR fell in 1991 but the battle against Marxist ideology was lost, at the latest, by 1975. We had allowed it to ooze through all our institutions and capture them. They didn’t have total control (they still don’t) but by 1975 they were so firmly entrenched in power they were able to control policy even when officially not in power and they were able to ensure their views were increasingly the only views in the public square. That even when we debated, we argued on their terms. This has to be ripped out, root and branch.

It isn’t enough to be anti-fascist. One has to be pro-freedom. And as Lincoln said ages ago, freedom and anti-freedom cannot coexist. One or the other must triumph. Just as we wouldn’t tolerate an avowed or even secret Nazi in a position of power, so we must become intolerant of an avowed or secret Marxist holding power. They have to go; all of them, from every position and once removed they must never be allowed back into any position of power. We must become pro-freedom. Not just in favor of it in theory, but actively insisting that only freedom is allowed: that people only hear about freedom. That freedom be taught from kindergarten up. That anyone who argues under any pretense that freedom must give way is to be ostracized from society.

To do this, we cannot tolerate the forces of tyranny. People who adhere to Fascist, Nazi or Marxist ideology must not be able to obtain employment in the United States. Certainly not in government, schools or publicly traded corporations. Books and other publications advocating for these poisonous ideologies should not be for sale except to people with a scholarly interest in the subject matter. Any discussion of these ideologies must always start with and continually emphasize the number of people murdered by adherents of these wicked beliefs.

Tall hill to climb, I know. But it must be the end goal. The ideal. If you want to do anything, the first thing you need is a theory: an ideal. A dream, as it were. You must know where you want to go before you start on the road. We want a land of freedom – a place where people live free and only want to live free. You don’t get this merely by asking – and you can’t get it while massively wealthy and powerful interests are allowed to work against your ideal. If freedom is good – and we believe it is good; an inherent good – then anything opposed to freedom must go down.

But, you may ask, doesn’t freedom mean the ability to see all ideas and choose among them? I think we should all have learned our lesson by now: the crackpot spouting anti-freedom nonsense in one age is the precursor to the narrow-minded, ideological bigot in the next telling you that you’d better get your mind right or else.

Freedom is very broad. It is why it is preferable to any other status. But any human thing has its limits. Don’t be so open minded that your brain falls out, right? We went entirely too far in the direction of tolerance of anti-freedom ideology. To get back to freedom, we are going to have to get a bit narrow for a while. Still not nearly as narrow as a Marxist, but a lot more narrow than we have been. We will not, of course, ever load up our opponents in box cars and send them off to death or slavery. We won’t even stop them from believing something as stupid as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. We’re just not going to allow such a person to have a say in what goes on. We’re going to make it difficult to believe such drivel as a Marxist, Nazi or Fascist believes.

Without getting into too much detail, the primary key for us in this effort to wipe out the forces of tyranny is to take away their money. I’ve talked about this before, but it can’t be emphasized enough. Being the dimwit materialists they are, money is what makes their whole world go ’round. Take away their money…and, honestly, they’ll just have to get real jobs. That, right there, is a major death blow against their beliefs. One thing which is common among Nazis, Fascists and Communists is their desire to worm their way into well-paid sinecures where they can advance their twaddle without having to produce anything worthwhile. People who work for a living are only very rarely against freedom: people who earn their own keep wish to keep what they own and do with it as they wish. It is the college professor or high level bureaucrat who has never had to produce anything useful who sees himself as destined to tell everyone how to live.

But taking away their money is going to be a hard pill for many freedom-loving people to swallow. Because it isn’t just about kicking a Marxist professor out of college. Would that it was that easy! No: it is a lot more than that. It is mass terminations of government bureaucrats; it confiscating the assets of NGOs and private colleges; it is forcing corporations to break up into smaller units, it is confiscating most of the wealth of Leftist billionaires. It is arresting people – quite a lot of them – and charging them with criminal negligence over things like that bridge collapse the other day (the money was provided for repairs – tax payer money – and it was diverted to other things…clearly things which just lined the pockets of the well connected politically); we have 10,000 cases we can find before we even start looking hard for such things. It is providing criminal and civil penalties for people who lie in broadcast, print and on line.

Can you do it? I know I can. I see things clearly now. I only remain free if the people who want to destroy freedom lose. Our choice is now. What will we decide?

Reparations?

Mark Noonan49 Comments

The subject bubbles up from time to time. The first time I recall hearing about it was maybe 1988 or 1989. When I first heard about it, I rejected it in anger: the whole concept was ridiculous. How could people living today be held in any way responsible for actions of those long dead? For a long while, that is where my opinion rested. But, things change.

In 1776 we adopted as part of our founding document the assertion that “all men are created equal”. If we were to write that today, we would say “all persons are created equal” but the meaning doesn’t change in the least. When Jefferson penned those words and when the representatives of the States in Congress assembled adopted them, they probably didn’t fully grasp what they had just did. It was an astounding thing to say but even more astounding to make it part of a government document.

It is good to keep in mind that the concept wasn’t tied to a Republic or to Democracy. In 1776, most of the world was under monarchy but there were Republics in Holland and Venice and other places – but none of them had any assertion of human equality as their foundation. And, indeed, these Republics were very restrictive on who could be a citizen and who was allowed to be in charge. Outside of a religious concept of a brotherhood of man, inequality between people was taken as a given – and those at the top of society expected – and almost invariably received – deference from the lower orders. This really was something new: we were asserting that all human beings are created equal and, as equals, are all endowed with certain rights (that is also crucial: “certain rights” is a very forthright statement that there is no doubt that the rights exist and all people are endowed with them). My main point here is that it didn’t have to be a Republic making the assertion: any system of government could assert it. The form of government is irrelevant to the statement – but the statement, once adopted, compels a certain manner of government.

Once you make that assertion then it is required that the system of government, as far as practical, act in a manner which treats all persons as equals. You could, in theory, still have a king; still have a hierarchy. But you must treat everyone as equals under the law. Meaning: that nobody is allowed to be under legal disability for reasons other than their personal actions. You can’t, that is, say “you can’t do this because you are that”. That is inadmissible; can’t happen. We’re all equals and we are all allowed to do every legal thing anyone else is permitted to do. And one of the very specific things which immediately became morally and legally impossible in a system founded on “all men are created equal” is slavery. No argument can be made – all men being equal – that one person shall be compelled to labor for the benefit of another.

As I said, I don’t think Jefferson or the Founders fully grasped this – they were thinking of their peers when they wrote it. Men of the 18th century, their world was a world of higher and lower orders and an expectation that those below would serve those above. Some men already saw that slavery was incompatible with any just system, but by far almost everyone simply accepted things as they were and never figured they would change or, indeed, that there would ever be a need to change them. Keep in mind that even free labor was expected to be subordinate and respectful. The franchise wasn’t universal even among white males. In 1776 in no place on Earth was there a system where anyone thought that everyone could rise as high as they wanted: certain avenues of advancement were permanently closed off to this or that group of people for this or that reason. But, still, the Founders went ahead and wrote it down and then adopted it. The Declaration isn’t a law like a part of the US Code is law, but it is the founding document – the legal justification for the existence of a thing called The United States of America. Without it, there is no legal basis for the existence of our nation. And we went ahead and declared all men are created equal. At the very instant we adopted it, slavery was legally and morally defunct in the United States. From that moment on, every person held to slavery in the United States was having his labor stolen under the color of law.

That we did not immediately abolish slavery doesn’t change the fact that we said “all men are created equal”. We still said it. We still asserted it. It was still a dogma we claimed was essential to the justification of our existence as a nation. You can try to slice and dice this any way you like, but you can’t get away from it – starting on July 4th, 1776, the labor of black Americans was unjustly stolen from them (it had been before, as well, but the United States, as an entity, only became responsible on 7/4/1776). And it went on like that for 90 years. And when we finally got around to abolishing the slavery which existed in unjust law, we then spent the next century placing legal disabilities on black Americans. Doesn’t matter why we did that – it was wrong; they were created equal and so had the right to do everything everyone else was allowed to do. But by law and custom black Americans were hamstrung a thousand different ways from exercising the rights we said were theirs – inherent to their humanity – on July 4th, 1776.

Good for us that in 1965 we finally put an end to the injustice under the color of law. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we finally said “in law, all people are created equal and we will ensure that”. For most people – including me until recently – that was the end of it. The Law was now, at long last, equal for all. But, there’s a problem: during the time when black Americans were having their labor stolen (1776-1865) and the time they were legally hampered in enjoying the fruits of their labor (1865-1965), a gigantic wealth gap opened up. In other words, by fake laws which were unjust the moment they were placed on the books, we had prevented black Americans – who were just as much American citizens as George Washington on July 4th, 1776 – from gaining what every other American was permitted to gain: wealth.

So, now what? I’m not entirely sure. Well, that’s not entirely correct: I am sure about two things

  1. In some manner, this injustice visited upon our fellow Americans has to be rectified.
  2. In no way can we allow the rectification to end up pouring money into leftwing race-hustlers.

Most of those who argue for reparations are merely con artists hoping for a gigantic, taxpayer-funded payday. If you look at the proposals, what you don’t find is money going to actual descendants of American slaves. It is all for “programs” and such…gigantic piles of money to be placed under the control of mountebanks who will then dole it out, mostly to themselves. I don’t want that – and I’ll fight against that.

But, still, something needs to be done. Some means of helping balance the books. And the books are unbalanced. Howard University’s endowment is about $700 million. Harvard’s is about $53 billion. The difference is how much wealth each community was able to generate and thus provide for higher education. Nobody who went to Harvard ever had their earning opportunities curtailed. The people who graduated Howard before 1965, regardless of how brilliant or hard working, had their earnings curtailed as a matter of course.

I admit that I don’t know how this is to be done. I’m descended from a 1776 American, but as far as I can tell no ancestor of mine ever owned a slave. And given they were from New England, there is a high probability they were Abolitionists early on. But the other strain of my ancestry arrived much later; very near the end of slavery. How is my liability to be calculated? And what of the guy who’s ancestors got here in 1910? And 1970? We know that most black Americans are descended from slaves, but a very large portion aren’t. At least, not American slaves. A black guy who’s great-grandfather emigrated from Jamaica in 1890 doesn’t really have any claim, does he? He was never an American slave and he volunteered to come to a society where legal and social disabilities had been placed on black people. But I do believe we need to square accounts.

As a Distributist, my preference is, of course, that individuals and families obtain property. Heck; it isn’t a preference: it is more of a demand. It is the only point of working: obtaining property. The national patrimony is, also, quite large. Uncle Sam owns about 640 million acres of land, after all. Land is property and if we transferred, say, ten thousand acres of land in Southern Nevada to a trust for verified descendants of American slaves and allowed them to develop or sell the property as they saw fit, where’s the skin off anyone’s nose?

It is just an idea: one of probably many people can think of where at least in some measure, we can make up for the fact that black Americans were prevented from building up wealth. The most fun idea I have is confiscating half the Ivy League endowments and transferring them to the endowments of HBCU. Kind of a two-fer there: helps right a wrong and drains money away from upper class far left nitwits. I think it is something we can and, in the end, must do. We must, that is, demonstrate by actions that we, the American majority, really want full participation by black Americans in the life of America. And, yes, I know that the race-hustlers will never stop. I don’t care about them. But I do care that my fellow Americans who are black know that I’m on their side. That I really do know my nation’s history. That I want all of us to go forward, together, and make a more perfect union.