Banning Franco

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s description of his experiences fighting the Spanish Civil War. Like all Orwell’s nonfiction, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia is a deeply personal and unflinchingly honest narrative. Unlike many political writers, Orwell was interested in people more than ideology. He favored truth and decency above party platforms. Orwell’s account is biased, but he admitted his biases and warned the reader not to take his or any other account at face value.

George Orwell

Orwell was a partisan for the Republicans first and a journalist reporting on the war second.  For this reason, I believe he misses some salient points about that war. Orwell spent the war entirely on the Aragon front. He fought with the POUM Militia, a faction of dissident Communists. He sympathized with the Anarchists who had gained control of Barcelona. Orwell spent much of the war in the most radically left-wing Spanish province with the most extreme left-wing faction of the Republican forces. That naturally skewed his perceptions.

George Orwell believed that Francisco Franco had almost no public support in Spain. He correctly understood that Franco was not genuinely a Fascist. Franco was a conservative who sought to restore the ancien regime of Spain. Orwell believed only conscripts and foreign mercenaries from Germany and Italy fought in the Nationalist army. Only the very rich and romantics supported Franco. I am not so sure about that.

Francisco Franco

I concede that few Spaniards may have loved Franco. The Spanish Fascist or Phalangist Party was a minuscule, fringe organization before Franco took it over as a vehicle for his political ambitions. Likely, not many people in Spain were enthusiastically in favor of Fascism. Many Spanish must have regarded the Republic as the legitimate government. Under normal circumstances, perhaps, an attempted coup by a few officers would have gained little public support.

Conditions in Spain during the 1930s were not normal. The Spanish far left was determined to convert Spain into a Soviet Socialist Republic, no matter what the voters in Spain wanted. The Spanish left’s policies frightened many Spaniards. Small farmers and shopkeepers did not want to see the socialists nationalize what little property they owned. Pious Spaniards were horrified by the Socialist and Anarchist attacks on the Catholic Church. Spanish patriots did not want the outlying territories of Spain, such as Catalonia and the Basque territories to become autonomous, perhaps as a prelude to independence. For these reasons, many people in Spain supported Franco out of fear of the Communists.

To test this hypothesis, I decided to google Spanish support for Franco. (In fact, I used Duckduckgo. I do not use Google. Google is evil). I did not discover how much support Franco enjoyed during the Spanish Civil War. I did learn that the Leftist dominatged Spanish Cortes has recently enacted a law banning praise for or support of Francisco Franco.

Spain’s Senate house has approved a landmark bill that will ban expressions of support for the former dictator Francisco Franco, and seek to bring ‘justice’ to the victims of the 1936-1939 Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship.

The new ‘Law on Democratic Memory’, which was already approved by the Spanish Congress in July, will for the first time also make unearthing mass graves a ‘state responsibility’.

Organizations that praise or support the policies and leaders of Spain’s 20th-century dictatorship, including the private Francisco Franco Foundation, will now be banned under the legislation. Fines for non-compliance will range from 200 to 150,000 euros.

The new law does not allow for crimes under the dictatorship to be prosecuted, however.

The bill was approved by 128 lawmakers in the Senate on Wednesday, with 113 votes against and 18 abstentions.

So, the Spanish government is defending democracy by limiting democracy. It is protecting freedom by restricting free expression. It is preventing a possible dictatorship by dictatorial means. How Orwellian.

I am not very familiar with Spanish politics. I do not know how many people in Spain would support a Franco-style dictatorship. I imagine that few Spaniards pine for the bad, old days of authoritarian rule. Even if there does happen to be a substantial number of people in Spain who desire a restoration of Fascist rule, it is not going to happen.

Spain is a different country in the twenty-first century than in the 1930s. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Spain was a badly polarized country with little experience of democratic government. Today, Spain is a mature democracy. The Spanish military is not likely to rise against its own elected government. It seems to be unnecessary to ban any expression of support for a dictator who has been dead for half a century. In any case, banning the praise of France will not change the minds of any die-hard Francoists. It only gives the appearance that they are the victims of government persecution.

Franco is dead,

I think I know what is going on here. The Left-wing parties behind this legislation are not frightened by a revival of Fascist dictatorship. They are taking the opportunity to ban opposition. At first, they will act against overt expressions of praise for Franco. Before long, right-wing or conservative statements will be considered subtle Francoist dog whistles. Opposition to the Spanish left will be equated with supporting Fascism. Eventually, anything but enthusiastic support for the left will be de-platformed and canceled.

This Spanish law would only be a minor concern to me if the trend toward censorship were confined to Spain. Unfortunately, they are part of a wider trend seen throughout the formerly free world. Nation after nation is increasingly imposing controls on speech, ostensibly to fight disinformation or hate speech. Even in the United States, with our First Amendment, we see the government attempting to control information with the collusion of social media platforms. It seems fewer and fewer people anywhere see any virtue in freedom of speech.

George Orwell did not think Franco would win the Spanish Civil War. His fear was that whatever government, whether of the left or the right, that emerged from that conflict would be a dictatorship. In the short term, Orwell was wrong. Franco did win the war. In the long term, it looks as if he might have been correct. Post-Franco Spain is becoming less free. It also appears that the dystopian world he imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four is getting closer to reality here and in Eurasia.

Some Thoughts on Class

In the second part of his book, “The Road to Wigan Pier,” George Orwell discusses the prejudices against socialism and the working classes. These prejudices make it challenging to improve the dire conditions faced by the people living in the industrial north of England during the Depression Era, which he described in the first part of his book. Orwell begins by examining the development of his own prejudices in the first chapters of the second part.

Orwell’s background was what he described as the “lower-upper-middle class.” Orwell’s family was not what we might call the one percent. His family was not even part of the ten percent. They were barely well off enough to distinguish them financially and socially from the middle-middle class, especially the lower or working class. In a sense, people in Orwell’s lower-upper-middle class were in a pitiable position. They were close enough to the top to aspire to rise to that top, yet not so close as to make such aspirations easy or even possible.

If Orwell’s family had been solidly middle or working class, the idea of joining the upper class would have been inconceivable. They could have led comfortable and contented lives. Because the possibility was tantalizingly close, they found it necessary to live as though they were upper class, as far as their finances would allow. They had to keep up appearances. Young Orwell had to attend the best schools possible. They had to pronounce their words the correct way. They had to have the correct manners. They had to avoid associating with their inferiors lest they pick up uncouth mannerisms.

Orwell was taught to believe that working people were coarse. They had atrocious accents. They were dangerous and violent. They were dirty and smelly. People of Orwell’s class clung to their prejudices all the more tightly because they, themselves, were so close to the working class. The most racist people of the Jim Crow South were the poor Whites. In many ways, they lived on the same level as the Blacks. Their white skin was all that distinguished them, and so they were the biggest proponents of the doctrine of White supremacy. The petty nobility of pre-revolutionary France were the most fervent upholders of aristocratic privilege. Other than their titles, they were indistinguishable from their peasant neighbors.

Among the ideas that Orwell discusses is the belief that the lower classes ought not to be too well off. They ought not to enjoy the same luxuries that middle-class people, let alone the upper class, enjoy. If the lower classes are prosperous enough to enjoy decent houses with indoor bathrooms, automobiles, etc., then the class distinctions between upper, middle, and lower start to fade away. People of Orwell’s lower-upper-middle class might find that they are not in the superior position they believe themselves to be. And anyway, what is the fun of being in the elite if ordinary people can afford some of the luxuries of the elite?

Much of Orwell’s discussion of class seems a little strange to me. I am not an Englishman, raised to believe that people can be graded like so many eggs. I am an American. I was taught that any man is as good as another and maybe a little better. It seems to me that class in America is more based on money than is the case in Orwell’s England. There is less of an idea of an impoverished aristocrat. Race also matters. The Whiter a person is, the better. Balanced against this idea of superiority of race and money, however, is the egalitarian ideal of America’s founding. That is why the definition of White has become more inclusive over time. People formerly considered nonwhite, South and East Europeans, have become White. I expect that in a few decades, Mexicans and other Latinos will be White, whatever the shade of their skin.

Yet, an American class system has arisen in recent years. There has developed an aristocracy based on going to the right universities and having the correct opinions on matters such as immigration or LGHTQETC affairs. People outside the elite class are deplorable who bitterly cling to their Bibles and guns. That explains the hostility towards Donald Trump. He may be wealthy. He is not of the proper class to be president.

What inspired my thoughts in this direction was the column, America’s Dysfunctional Overclass, by Michael Barone. I found the poll Barone cites to be particularly revealing. It seems the class prejudices of our elite are not dissimilar to those of Orwell’s background.

What does America’s overclass think of the rest of us? The short answer is “not much.” They think ordinary people’s splurging on natural resources is destroying the planet and needs to be cut back forcefully. And that the government needs to stamp down on ordinary people enjoying luxuries that, in their view, should be reserved for the top elites.

What is surprising is the extent to which this American overclass would deprive its fellow citizens of things they have taken for granted. Half of these groups, 47% of Elites and 55% of Ivies, say the United States provides people with “too much individual freedom.”

More than three-quarters favor, “to fight climate change, the strict rationing of energy, gas, and meat,” a proposition rejected by 63% of the public. Again, “to fight climate change,” between half and two-thirds favor bans on gas stoves (a recent target despite demurrals of Biden bureaucrats and New York state Democrats), gasoline-powered cars (heavily disfavored by Biden Democrats and California rules) and SUVs, “private” air conditioning and “nonessential air travel.”

The upper classes of Orwell’s time believed the working class to be dirty, coarse, and ignorant. The upper classes of our own time believe ordinary Americans to be racist, intolerant, and ignorant. In early twentieth-century England, the elite thought members of the lower classes who owned automobiles or houses with indoor plumbing to be impertinent. In twenty-first-century America, the elite think Deplorables who own gas stoves and air conditioning are climate criminals. Perhaps there is not as much difference between Orwell’s Britain and our America as we might wish.

 

Replacing Biden

---

Over the last year, there has been a lot of speculation that the Democrats will replace Joe Biden on the ballot for the 2024 presidential election. Since Biden “won” the election of 2020, it has been increasingly apparent that Biden suffers from advanced dementia. His policies have been unpopular, and it would be fair to say that the majority of the American people are not better off than they were four years ago. The Democratic Party would surely be better served by another candidate. Certainly, the Democrats will replace an ailing Biden with Gavin Newsom, Michelle Obama, or anyone who is not practically an invalid.

I am skeptical. It seems to me that if the Democrats intend to replace Biden, they would already have done so before the primaries began. There is normally a primary challenge when an unpopular president is running for reelection. Ted Kennedy ran against the unpopular Jimmy Carter back in 1980. Pat Buchannan ran against the unpopular George Bush in 1992. Most notably, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy ran against Lydon B. Johnson in 1968. In the latter case, Johnson dropped out of the race after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary.

No one has challenged Biden in the Democratic primaries as one might expect. Robert Kennedy Jr. had planned to run against Biden but instead decided to run as an Independent. It seems that the power brokers inside the Democratic Party have pressured any potential candidates not to challenge Biden. I suspect they made it very clear to Kennedy that his candidacy would go nowhere. If anyone in the Democratic party planned to replace Biden, they would have encouraged a rival against Biden, hoping that a string of primary victories would induce Biden to drop out, just as Johnson did. That has not happened.

They could make a switch at the Democratic National Convention. Again, I am skeptical. The days of open conventions when a dark horse candidate could beat the odds to be nominated are long over. These days, political conventions are tightly scripted pep rallies for their parties. The candidate who has the primary votes is going to be nominated. For the Democrats, that candidate will be Joe Biden. Replacing Biden with a nominee who nobody voted for is unprecedented Since 1972, the nomination process has been dominated by primaries. Nominees are no longer chosen in smoke-filled rooms.

Why has there been no movement to replace Joe Biden? It is hard to say. Biden wants another term for president. He obviously believes he is up to the job of president. Perhaps Biden is healthier than his public appearances indicate. Perhaps Biden is as senile as it appears but the people surrounding him prefer a president who is pliable to one who is healthy and dynamic enough to actually run the country. Biden’s career in the Senate was one of a centrist Democrat. The far-left policies promulgated by President Biden might suggest that Biden is not making the policies. Then again, it may simply be that presidents who have to fight off primary challengers do not get reelected. A Democrat running against Biden would be as good as delivering the general election to Donald Trump.

I say that Biden will be on the ballot in November. We will see if I am right.

Reciprocity

Before the second Republican debate, Michael Reagan wrote a column calling for Republican unity at Townhall.com. Here are some excerpts

Too bad Donald Trump won’t attend the second Republican presidential primary debate next week at the Ronald Reagan Library.

To me, what’s even more sad – and worrisome for the GOP’s chances in 2024 — is hearing Trump say he won’t promise to support whoever the party’s nominee is if it isn’t him.

There are some conservative pundits in the media-sphere who agree with Trump.

They’re telling the MAGA Republicans listening to their shows that there’s no one but Trump to vote for and everyone else is a RINO.

My father would be appalled at these suicidal Trump-only Republicans. He always supported the nominee of the Republican Party and set the bar when it comes to party solidarity.

He supported Gerry Ford in 1976 after he lost the GOP nomination and the Reagans all went out and campaigned around the country for Ford.

The Republican Party was united in my father’s day because it had strong leadership – people like him.

I mostly agree with Michael Reagan. I am neither a Never Trumper nor an Only Trumper. I will vote for almost any of the candidates currently running for president. I think Trump did an excellent job as president in his first term, but I have some reservations about supporting him for a second term. Not least of these reservations is the question of Trump’s age. If Trump is elected, he will be 78 when he takes office in 2025. Granted, Trump is more mentally acute now than President Biden was at forty, but he will still be too old for such a stressful job as the presidency. Having said that, if Trump is the Republican nominee, I will gladly vote for him.

The problem with Michael Reagan’s plea for unity in the Republican party is that, somehow, the effort towards unity goes only one way. In the elections of 2008 and 2012, the Republican establishment gave us John McCain and Mitt Romney. Like many conservatives, I didn’t like either candidate, yet each time, I held my nose and faithfully voted for the Republican. In 2016, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination despite the best efforts of the Republican establishment. Donald Trump did not have a consistent record as a conservative before he ran for President. Unlike the other candidates in both parties, Trump actually listened to the ordinary people who were not being served by their political leaders. Like many conservatives, I reluctantly supported Donald Trump as the Republican nominee and hoped for the best.

Like many conservatives, I noticed that many of the same establishment Republican leaders who always told us we had to take one for the team and support candidates we often disliked refused to support a candidate they disapproved of. Many Republican leaders and allegedly conservative pundits announced that they could not, under any circumstances, support Donald Trump for President. Some voted for Hilary Clinton. Others voted for third-party candidates, effectively voting for Clinton.

By 2020, Trump had proven himself to be an effective conservative leader. I was willing and eager to vote for him. Some of the Conservative leaders had come around to support Trump. Many others had spent the previous four years assisting the Democrats in hamstringing President Trump in every way imaginable. These were the Never Trumpers, “respectable conservatives” who opposed the most conservative President since Reagan. When the election came, they preferred to support Biden.

Since the “election” of Joe Biden, these same respectable conservates supported the Democrat narrative at every opportunity. They have sided with the Democrats against anyone who has raised questions about the results of that election and have helped the Democrats silence any skeptics. They have supported the Democrats in their efforts to transform an unruly mob on January 6 into the worst insurrection in American history, a threat to Our Democracy. You have to ask whose side they really are on.

The problem in the Republican Party is a lack of reciprocity. The establishment elite expects ordinary Republican voters to support the candidates they endorse but refuse to support the candidates we favor. This is not just about Trump. The establishment Republicans despised the TEA Party as much as they disliked Trump. Why should we continue to support an establishment that loathes us? Why do we have to be the ones to reach out to people who only wish we would sit down and shut up?

The split in the Republican Party is not the fault of the Trump supporters. It is the fault of the Never-Trumpers who refused to support the Republican Party’s nominee in 2016 and 2020. I don’t agree with the Only Trumpers, but I can’t really blame them.

 

 

 

They Are Afraid

Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit links to this essay, The Frightened Left, by Victor Davis Hanson. Like everything Victor Davis Hanson writes; it is worth reading, but that is not my concern. My concern, rather, is with the comments left on the Instapundit post. It seemed to me that many of the comments that Instapundit readers posted were some variation of “Of course, the left is not frightened. They have become all-powerful. They control every institution in the United States and have nothing to fear from the people. That represents an attitude that has become all too typical among the right. a sense of doom and gloom pessimism. The left has won, they say, and all we can do is reminisce about our lost country.

I think they are wrong. I think the left is afraid of us. Why am I so sure? Because the leaders of the left have become tyrants, and tyrants always fear the people they oppress. J. K. Rowling said it well, speaking through Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! Voldemort is no different! Always he was on the lookout for the one who would challenge him.

While I attended Indiana University, I had a professor named Mubarak who met Saddam Hussein. Talk about your six degrees of separation. Many years before the Gulf War, while working on the faculty of the Kuwait University, Mubarak attended an academic conference in Iraq. Saddam Hussein opened the conference with a speech and then went around to shake hands with each of the attendees. The one thing Professor Mubarak noticed when he was in the presence of Saddam Hussein was how nervous and frightened Saddam was. Saddam Hussein was always looking around the room, always on guard. He told the class that he realized that for Saddam Hussein, every waking moment must be one of fear. Saddam Hussein always had to wonder which of his subordinates was plotting to overthrow him or when the oppressed people of Iraq would rise against him. Saddam Hussein may have seemed all-powerful in Iraq.

Dictators do not conduct purges, create secret police, fill concentration camps, and institute censorship for the sadistic joy of oppressing people. They do all that because they are afraid of the people they oppress. The more a dictator oppresses, the more he has cause to fear his victims who rightly hate him, and the more he must oppress. He dares not ease up on the oppression.

The Leftists who control almost every institution in our country are no dictators like Saddam Hussein, but they wield power. They have totalitarian aspirations, and therefore, they fear the people they would tyrannize over. Contrary to what many conservatives assert, the leftists are not confident and secure. Confident and secure people do not fortify elections. Confident and secure rulers would not feel the need to build a wall around the capital building or to deploy the National Guard to protect them. They would not inflate the actions of an unruly mob on January 6 into a full-fledged insurrection. A President secure in his office would not make a speech demonizing half the population as “ultra MAGA” domestic terrorists against a backdrop reminiscent of a Nazi Party rally.

They are afraid of us

 

The Leftist elite is afraid of us. The elite has good reason to be. They have turned the greatest nation on Earth into a third-rate banana republic. They have proven themselves corrupt, incompetent, and authoritarian, and they know we have begun to see through them. The TEA Party was the first shot across the bow of the left and their conservative enablers. We told them we didn’t like the way they were ruining the country into the ground. We told them to leave us alone and stop imposing their values on us. We tried to be nice, but they only called us racists. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was the second shot. We weren’t so nice, then. They called us Nazis and plotted to rig the election of 2020. They won’t like the next shot. I’m afraid we won’t be nice at all.

The Mug Shot

The Democrats have finally taken the scalp they have wanted for six years. They have finally seen their arch-enemy, President Donald Trump, the enemy of Our Democracy compelled to turn himself in at the Fulton County courthouse in Georgia to answer the criminal charges against him. Unlike his previous indictments, this time, the process included a mug shot that was quickly released by the Fulton County jail in an apparent attempt to humiliate the former president.

I am not a lawyer, so I cannot comment on the legal aspects of Trump’s situation. It does seem evident to me, and to nearly every other thinking person, that the motivation behind the state and federal indictments is political. The Democrats want to destroy Trump and have no compunctions about corrupting the American justice system to achieve their aim. I think they are making a terrible mistake on two levels.

If the intent was to humiliate Donald Trump and get his supporters to forsake him, releasing the mug shot seems to have backfired. The Trump campaign has been getting millions of dollars in donations, and Trump is making money selling mug-shot merchandise. Moreover, the mug shot makes Trump look like a victim of political persecution. Trump’s supporters have been quick to compare him somewhat fancifully to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, two other men arrested for political reasons. The mug shot might also be gaining Trump supporters in the Black community, who are familiar with being harassed by those in power. If Trump manages to be elected president again, the mug shot will play no small role in his victory.

More serious is the precedent set by this series of indictments. The Democrats have been. justifying their unprecedented legal vendetta against Trump by stating that no one should be above the law. They do not actually believe this platitude themselves. If they did, they would not blindly defend every Democrat accused of wrongdoing. While we would like for everyone to be treated equally under the law, the fact is that when high-level politics is involved, political considerations often override legal ones.

Why was Hilary Clinton never locked up after the 2016 election? She is certainly guilty of storing classified information on an insecure server and obstruction of justice for destroying a hard drive that may have contained criminal evidence against her. FBI Director James Comey admitted that Hilary Clinton possibly had committed felonies but declined to ask for any indictments. That was probably the correct decision. The United States of America was not a country in which the winners of elections arrest and imprison the losers. We were not, at the time, a banana republic. Prosecuting Hilary Clinton before the election would look like election interference. Prosecuting her after the election would look like we had the sort of government that persecutes its opponents.

I am not saying we should allow politicians to get away with crimes. What I am saying is that if anyone is going to investigate or indict a person running against an office holder, they had better make sure that there is not a hint of suspicion that they are motivated by politics rather than simply enforcing the law. So far, the many indictments against Donald Trump do not meet this standard. They all look like attempts to prevent Trump from running against Joe Biden. It looks as if the Democrats are trying to rig the election of 2024 even more openly than they rigged the election of 2020.

The United States of America has become the sort of country where the political winners prosecute the losers. We have become a banana republic.

 

An Illegitimate Election?

A recent CNN poll found that a large and growing majority of Republicans continue to believe that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud, making Joe Biden’s alleged victory in that election illegitimate. I found the story in the Daily Mail.

Polling continues to show that former President Donald Trump convinced a large portion of Republican voters that President Joe Biden‘s 2020 win was illegitimate.

A CNN poll released Thursday found that 69 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters still believe Biden’s win wasn’t legitimate – up from 63 percent earlier this year.

Among registered voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020, the numbers were even higher – with 75 percent expressing doubts that the last election was conducted properly.

The ex-president will be indicted for a third time Thursday in Washington, D.C. over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and role in the January 6 Capitol riot.

Overall, pollsters found that 38 percent of Americans currently believe the so-called ‘big lie,’ while 61 percent say that Biden legitimately won the 2020 race.

Among those 69 percent of Republican-leaning voters who expressed skepticism about the 2020 election, 39 percent said they believed there was solid evidence proving it was illegitimate.

The other 30 percent simply said they had a suspicion that something was afoul.

Another 29 percent of GOP-leaning voters believed that Biden’s win was legitimate.

Special Counsel Jack Smith detailed how many people in Trump’s circle were expressing to the president that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud – including from the top-tiers of the Department of Justice and the Director of National Intelligence.

Federal prosecutors will need to show that Trump knew he was lying about election fraud in order to prove their case.

Directly after the January 6 Capitol attack, 54 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they believed there was evidence proving the election had been stolen from Trump – the lie the ex-president was telling his supporters.

Looking forward, voters who chose Biden in 2020 were more likely to say they’d only back candidates who didn’t support the ‘big lie.’

Forty-eight percent of Biden voters considered this an essential shared view.

Only 20 percent of Trump supporters said they’d only support a candidate who shared their views on whether the 2020 election was rigged.

Trump’s 2024 Republican rivals tend to try to have it both ways – they’ve expressed skepticism about how the 2020 election was conducted, but won’t say they believe Trump was the legitimate winner.

The fresh polling showed widespread anxiety about U.S. elections.

Fifty percent of Americans said they felt it was at least somewhat likely that elected officials could successfully overturn the results of an election if their party didn’t win.

The Trump indictment laid out a scheme the ex-president pursued that included pressuring election officials, putting in place fake slates of Electoral College electors and pushing Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election during the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.

A majority – 58 percent – said they are just a little or not at all confident that elections reflect the voters’ will.

Another 42 percent said they had at least some confidence elections are carried out properly.

Only 13 percent of those polled said they are ‘very confident’ in U.S. elections – which is the lowest percentage captured in CNN surveys since 2021.

This is not good. Whether there was fraud or not, having large numbers of Americans believe our electoral system is fundamentally corrupt does not bode well for future political stability. We simply cannot have large numbers of people questioning the validity of our elections if we wish to remain a constitutional republic. If there was sufficient fraud in recent elections to affect the outcome, it must be ended. If not, the public must be assured our elections are clean.

While it has become fashionable among our political and media elite to blame Trump and his followers for the increased skepticism concerning election integrity, I believe it is almost entirely the elites’ fault. To put it bluntly, our leaders have not acted like honest people. They have largely refused to take action to make our elections more secure against fraud and interference. They have been unwilling to even discuss the issue.

If I were in charge of such things, I would do whatever I could to assure the Americans that our elections are honest. I would appoint a commission of trusted experts to thoroughly examine the electoral process in every state, particularly in those swing states that were close in 2020. This commission would examine allegations of irregularities, perhaps offering immunity to people willing to testify about any illegal acts they participated in. The purpose of the commission would not be to punish anyone, but to discover the truth. No doubt the commission would find some irregularities, no election is completely clean. Once it has completed its investigation, the commission could make recommendations to secure future elections against attempted fraud.

This is not what happened in the wake of the 2020 election, of course. Instead, we were basically told to sit down and shut up. Any attempts to talk about any problems with the election were shut down. Social media accounts were censored. Anyone who brought up the question was labeled a threat to “our democracy” and a domestic terrorist. Reporters used the same phrase “baseless accusations” to describe any allegations of fraud, without bothering to investigate the matter. Protesters against the fraud were accused of sedition and insurrection and locked up. The National Guard was called out to protect the capital. These are not the actions of honest people who won an honest election. These are the actions of people who have something to hide.

If they wanted us to trust them they would act in a trustworthy manner. If trust in our institutions is at an all-time low, the people who control the institutions have no one to blame but themselves.

The Declaration of Independence

For this Fourth of July, I thought I might present the text that started it all, the Declaration of Independence, along with a few thoughts.

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, 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 of Happiness.–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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

This is my favorite part of the Declaration. I have actually memorized it. It is hard for us to understand just how radical the idea that the governed should replace a government that doesn’t serve them was at the time. At the time, most people believed that kings were appointed by God and were answerable only to God. England had already begun to establish the idea that kings and governments depended on the consent of the governed in the English Civil Wars. Still, the Declaration lays out the concept more clearly than it has ever been established before or since.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I suppose the Democrats and the media would call this sedition and insurrection. Well, let them make the most of it.

–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

King George was a libertarian compared to our present federal government. Talk about repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states, we’re living it right now.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

Our whole government, both parties in Congress is refusing to pass laws for the public good.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

Our government is refusing to enforce immigration laws and actively discouraging new immigrants legal and illegal from assimilating to our laws and culture.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

Oh boy. The IRS, EPA, FBI, and the whole slew of alphabet agencies, all for the express purpose of harassing our people.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

Do the attempts to limit our rights by signing treaties such as the Small Arms Treaty and the Paris Accords count?

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

The J6 defendants might have something to say about this

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

This is a reference to the Quebec Act of 1774 which permitted the French residents of Quebec to live under their own laws and customs, including retaining the privileges of the Catholic Church in Quebec. This was an enlightened measure of the British Parliament, but the colonists didn’t see it that way.

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

We haven’t gotten that far yet, thank God, but we do have a president who seems to delight in threatening his own citizens with F-16s.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

The description of the Indians as merciless savages seems more than a little extreme, if not racist. We should remember that while we tend to view the American Indians as the hapless victims of White aggression, the attitude of the colonists was quite different. To them, the American Indians were a real threat on the frontier and the fact that the British were willing to encourage them to go to war with the rebels was a terrifying threat.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We have tried to petition the government with the Tea Party movement, only to be dismissed as racists and Nazis. We elected Donald Trump as our standard bearer only to see the entire government, with both parties, arrayed to destroy him.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor

As I have noted throughout, our present situation is not unlike that of the patriots who signed the Declaration of Independence. Like them, we have a government that will not listen to our just complaints and which seems determined to grind us down into a system of absolute tyranny. I do not think it is time to take up arms yet. God willing, that time will never come. We still have options short of revolution, but time is running out. We may yet have to pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

 

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.