Patriot Front

To get an idea of how my mind works these days, consider my reaction to the news that the far-right, racist, White Supremacist group “Patriot Front” is on the march. According to the mainstream media, their recent march in Washington DC is another sign of the growing threat that the forces of White Supremacy pose to our sacred democracy, just as Joe Biden has been warning us. Newsweek talks about the march:

ideos posted to social media showed hundreds of members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front march to the United States Capitol carrying shields and battle drums on Saturday.

At least 150 members of the far-right group, wearing masks to conceal their identity, were seen marching along the National Mall and in downtown Washington, D.C. Videos posted to Twitter showed them carrying American flags and holding signs that read, “Reclaim America.”

The march comes as experts warn about the rise of white supremacist groups and sentiment in the United States. According to a study from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published in March, there was a 38 percent increase in white supremacist activity from 2021 to 2022, with more than 6,700 incidents reported throughout the year.

Now, I have never heard of this group before. After reading the article and looking at pictures of this march, my first thought is that the FBI managed to pull enough agents away from harassing parents who are confronting schoolboards about teaching racism and deviant sexuality to kindergarten kids and investigating nooses that turn out to be door pulls to run a false flag operation.

For real?’

Does this look like any group of conservative patriotic Americans anyone has ever seen? Matching shirts and khaki pants?

Here is how real Americans protest. Remember the TEA Party?

No one was wearing uniforms. The signs were homemade, not pre-printed.  The Tea Partiers did not threaten anyone and picked up their own trash. This Patriot Front, whoever they may be, does not have the look of a grassroots group of Deplorables from flyover country. It looks like what someone living in a leftist bubble might think would appeal to ordinary Americans.

So I decided to look up the Patriot Front on Wikipedia. There I found that the Patriot Front is:

Patriot Front is an American white nationalist and neo-fascist hate group.^[7] Part of the broader alt-right movement, the group split off from the neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in 2017.^{[1][8][9][10]} Patriot Front’s aesthetic combines traditional Americana with fascist symbolism. Internal communications within the group indicated it had approximately 200 members as of late 2021.^[11] According to the Anti-Defamation League, the group generated 82% of reported incidents in 2021 involving distribution of racist, antisemitic, and other hateful propaganda in the United States, comprising 3,992 incidents, in every state except Hawaii and Alaska.^[12]

Patriot Front is led by Thomas Ryan Rousseau, who was a teenager when he founded the group. In 2017, Rousseau took control of Vanguard America’s web and Discord server several weeks before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which he participated as the leader of Vanguard America’s contingent. Following the bad press arising from the rally, Rousseau left Vanguard. He used the group’s domain name to form Patriot Front as a new group and recruit rally participants, though most of Patriot Front’s members were former Vanguard members.^[1] Rousseau has been arrested repeatedly in the group’s activities.^[13][14][15]

With two hundred members, the Patriot Front is obviously a major threat. I note that contrary to what some people have contended, the Patriot Front has not simply appeared from nowhere. The group does have a history, which suggests that either the FBI has been running this particular scam for some time, or it really is a right-wing hate group. Here is its flag.

Somehow, I don’t think many Americans are going to be attracted to a movement that uses the Fasces as its symbol.

So, is the Patriot Front genuine or a false flag operation? Wikipedia addresses the claims in the final paragraph of the article.

Some commentators, including Joe Rogan, have baselessly suggested that the organization is an FBI sting operation or false flag by Antifa.^[56][57] Such claims have been debunked as conspiracy theories,^[56] and labelled as “False” by fact-checkers Snopes.^[58]

That settles it in my mind. The statement that the claims are baseless and debunked is all I need to know. A teenager named Thomas Ryan Rousseau may have begun the Patriot Front, but there is no doubt in my mind that the FBI has either taken control of the organization or is surreptitiously funding it in order to provoke violent acts to justify a crackdown on our First Amendment rights.

What settles the matter is the word “baselessly.” Baseless was the word used to describe claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent, usually without any effort to investigate the matter. Every media outlet used that same word, baseless, almost as if some memo went out to every journalist telling them precisely what phrase to use. Perhaps there was. Somehow I do not find the statement that Snopes debunked the claim that the Patriot Front is a false flag operation particularly convincing.

So that’s where I am. I assume that most of what I hear from the government and the mainstream media (is there a difference?) is simply a lie. I have come to automatically assume that the actions of the federal government are malicious. I do not feel as if I am living in a free country but in a country that has been conquered by an enemy that hates it.
I don’t want to feel this way. I want to feel I can trust unbiased news media to keep me informed. I want to believe the government of my country is looking out for my interests. I want to believe I can express myself freely without fear of being canceled. I want to live in the United States of America, not the People’s Republic of North America. I want my country back.

Slavery in the Constitution

I wrote this discussion of slavery in the Constitution as part of my post, America’s DNA. That post began to get too long and I thought the subject deserved its own post given that slavery occupies an ambiguous position in the Constitution, so I spun it off to make this post. Slavery was an established institution throughout the United States at the time of the Constitutional Convention; many of the delegates were themselves slaveholders, so it would not be surprising that they would be anxious to protect the institution vital to their economic welfare. The most curious thing about the Constitution, however, is that it does not mention slavery even once, even in the sections that deal with slavery. The framers use euphemisms and circumlocutions to avoid the subject. It is as if they were ashamed that slavery existed in their new country and wished they could make it go away. An extraterrestrial ignorant of American history might never guess slavery was a part of American society.

I think it is true that most of the men who assembled in Philadelphia in 1787 were, to some degree, embarrassed by the existence of slavery and would have ended it if they could have figured out some way of abolishing slavery without upending the economic and social system in the South. They must have hoped that slavery would eventually die out in succeeding generations. They had some reason for this hope. The northern states were already emancipating their slaves, and the Northwest Ordinance banned slavery in the Northwest Territory. Nevertheless, the framers of the Constitution do seem to have missed the opportunity to fatally weaken slavery at the onset. Still, while the Constitution does contain provisions designed to protect slavery, it does set the grounds for eventually ending slavery.

The first part of the Constitution that deals with slavery in an indirect fashion is Article I Section 2, which deals with the apportionment of Congressional representatives of the states. Paragraph 3 reads in part:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

American Indians would not be represented in Congress because as members of their own tribes, they were considered citizens of sovereign nations under their own government and laws. Those “other persons” were, of course, slaves. Those ignorant of history believe that the three-fifths compromise is a racist measure that defined African-Americans as three-fifths of a person. The truth is precisely the opposite. During the constitutional debates, the delegates from the southern states wanted slaves to be counted along with free persons to determine the number of representatives each state was entitled to. The northern delegates disagreed, pointing out that slaves would not be allowed to vote and, therefore, should not be counted. The three-fifths compromise gave the slave states less representation than they otherwise would have enjoyed in Congress and ultimately decreased the influence the slave owners had in American politics. It would have been better if the slaves had not been counted at all, but the three-fifths compromise was necessary to ensure the ratification of the Constitution.

Next, Article I section 9 paragraph 1 also deals with slavery without mentioning slavery:

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

A person not knowing the history of the United States might imagine this paragraph has something to do with immigration. In fact, it is referring to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Constitution did not allow the slave trade to be prohibited until 1808, twenty years after the adoption of the Constitution. The slave trade was duly outlawed in 1807 with surprisingly little controversy, although the illegal transport of slaves from Africa continued up to the Civil War.  The framers of the constitution clearly wanted to end the slave trade, and again, seemed to be embarrassed by the fact that slavery even existed in the United States. It would have been far better if they had abolished the slave trade right away, but the delay was necessary for the slave owners to adjust to a diminished supply of slaves. The Constitution might not have been ratified without the twenty-year delay.

The final section concerning slavery can be found in Article IV Section 2 paragraph 3:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Without saying the word slave, this paragraph requires escaped slaves to be returned to their owners. Article IV generally describes the relationship each state has other the other states and requires that:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.

That is why a driver’s license issued in one state is valid in every other state. It also means that property acquired in one state remains a person’s property even if he moves into another state. Unfortunately, at the time, the word property included slaves. Just as a cow that wandered across a state line did not become the property of the first farmer that found her, a slave that fled into another state could not become free. Like the other concessions concerning slavery, the men who drafted the Constitution did not have much choice about including this provision.

If there are provisions in the Constitution designed to protect or regulate slavery, even if expressed only indirectly, the last word of the Constitution is decidedly anti-slavery. The Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, ended slavery, made the former slaves citizens, and granted them the right to vote, respectively. These Amendments finally ended the terrible injustice of slavery that the founders ought to have ended, but perhaps couldn’t. Going back to my post, America’s DNA, if slavery and racism were in America’s DNA, these amendments were an act of genetic engineering that excised them from our genes.

The United States is not a perfect country, but we have been trying to live up to the noblest ideals ever expressed. Don’t let the America haters get away with their lies.

King Charles III

King Charles III got his long-awaited coronation today. I know that as an American, I’m not supposed to care about British royalty, except to exhibit a certain sense of superiority that we Americans ditched the royals. I’m supposed to wonder why a civilized country like the United Kingdom still puts up with the expense and bother of the monarchy much less a formal coronation.

Well, I don’t. I support the British monarchy. I have always been something of an anglophile and a monarchist. As far as I can tell, I am descended from Germans, Scots, and English, but I identify most with my English ancestors. I am proud to be an American, but if I had to be of any other nationality, I would choose to be an Englishman. I even occasionally regret the unpleasant events of 1776, at least until I recall that the United Kingdom does not have any equivalent of our First and Second Amendments. They badly need one. In any case, I feel that the British monarch is, in some sense, my monarch and King Charles III is my king. 

Long live the King

And so, God save King Charles III (even if he is a bit of a doofus), and long may he reign over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 

 

 

 

America’s DNA

I sometimes hear it said by American-hating leftists that racism and White supremacy are encoded in America’s DNA.  As the America-hating leftist Barack Obama put it:

The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives. You know, that casts a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it. Racism we are not cured of, clearly.

Is this true? Are slavery and racism part of America’s DNA? If so, does this not imply that racism will always be present in American life just as the fact that the eye color encoded in our DNA will always be a part of our life? Is racism really part of our collective DNA? What is DNA anyway?

The last question is the easiest to answer. DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid is:

A nucleic acid, usually of very high molecular weight, consisting of a linear sequence of monomer units of deoxyribonucleotides, occurring in most organisms in pairs of strands, wound together in the form of a double helix; it is the main component of chromosomes and contains the genetic information which is the basis of heredity, transmitted from parent to progeny, and found in all living organisms except for certain viruses which have RNA as their basic genetic material

Simply put, DNA is the molecule that encodes the genetic information that determines the development of an organism. To put it even more simply, DNA is the blueprint for an organism.

What is America’s DNA? America is not an organism and does not literally have DNA, so the expression is obviously metaphorical. That being the case, what could we say determined the development of the United States of America? I would say the founding documents made the United States into the nation it is today. Our country was born when Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The Declaration sets out why the American colonies felt it necessary to separate from Great Britain and what sort of nation we hoped to create. The Constitution establishes the government under which the people of the United States would rule themselves. The Bill of Rights, a necessary part of that Constitution, set forth the natural rights our government was created to protect.

If racism is indeed part of America’s DNA, it would be detected in these founding documents. If the United States of America was a nation conceived in racism and dedicated to the proposition of White supremacy, these principles would be seen throughout the Declaration and the Constitution. Let us then examine them and see if we can find them.
We’ll begin with the Declaration of Independence. It begins with these paragraphs.

       WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
  We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit ofHappiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Please note the words I highlighted. These are words that inspired Abraham Lincoln to strive to end slavery. These are the words that Martin Luther King described as a promissory note guaranteeing equality that had not yet been fulfilled. These are the words that promised to put an end to inequality of all kinds, including inequality based on race. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most anti-racist documents ever written.

The Constitution of the United States is a more prosaic work than the Declaration. It is mainly concerned with the practical aspects of the establishment of a new government and has less of the aspirational language found in the Declaration. Nevertheless, the preamble declares:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Note that “we the people” are establishing the new government for ourselves. This was not a government created by an aristocratic elite to rule over a nation of serfs. This was a government created by the people for the people; a government for the whole people, not just the white or black people. The fact that the framers never conceived the idea that the descendants of their slaves could possibly stand alongside their own descendants doesn’t matter. The ideals of the government they created could not tolerate such injustices as slavery or racial discrimination forever. The government they created had the means within it to end such injustices.

Rather than racism and White supremacy being part of America’s DNA, our country’s DNA is decisively anti-racist. Despite the dark moments in its history, the United States of America is the most anti-racist nation ever created. America is a nation based on a particular race or ethnicity that France or China might be, but it is a nation founded on the belief that all men are created equal. It is a nation that has made all its people from every corner of the earth, every race and creed into one people. It is a nation that has established a government ruled by that people for themselves.

If is the case that America is fundamentally anti-racist in its ideals, how do we account for the fact that racism has been very much a part of the history of America, from slavery to Jim Crow to the anti-White racism of Black Lives Matter? Well, an organism’s DNA is not the only factor in its development. The environment in which an organism is conceived and grows also plays a role. The environment determines to what extent an organism will flourish and how it will make use of the potential provided by its genetic heritage. An organism’s environment can even influence which traits encoded in its DNA will be expressed and which will remain dormant.
There is no denying that the United States was born in a world that took for granted ideas of racism and white supremacy. That is the environment that influenced the development of our country.

Despite the unpromising environment of its beginning, the history of the United States has been one in which its people have tried to live up to the ideals of equality and justice, however imperfectly, often against the tide of custom and expediency. The United States of America is far from a perfect country, no nation created by man can be, but we have a history of fighting for the right second to no other country. We have no reason to be ashamed of our history, or our country. Don’t ever let the America haters tell you otherwise.