Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!

Rep. Waters, You Are 

Sullying

 Martin Luther King’s 

Legacy

Derrick Hollie / @DJHollie / June 25, 2018 / 73 Comments

As American leaders—particularly black American leaders—we cannot praise the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr. on one day and incite violence the next. (Photo: akg-images/Newscom)

COMMENTARY BY

Derrick Hollie@DJHollie

Derrick Hollie is president of Reaching America and host of Reaching America on Demand podcast. The organization addresses complex social issues impacting African-American communities.

Every January, our nation celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and every February, during Black History Month, we contemplate his words of nonviolent resistance and how the practice of that philosophy brought about the civil rights movement.

Leaders, both black and white, rightly venerate him, but somewhere along the way, his message has been corrupted or outright forgotten by some on the left.

Over the weekend, longtime Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., called for disrupting and “absolutely harassing” members of the Trump administration.

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them!” she exclaimed at a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday.

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

“And I want to tell you, for these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend [President Donald Trump], they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, to be able to stop at a gas station, to be able to shop at a department store,” Waters said.

“The people are going to turn on them. They’re going to protest. They’re going to absolutely harass them until they tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’”

To hear these words coming from a black lawmaker—one who saw firsthand the trials of the civil rights movement—cuts me to the core. That’s because, as American leaders—particularly black American leaders—we cannot praise the beliefs of King on one day and incite violence the next.

We cannot preach the gospel of equality on Sunday and show hatred toward our brothers and sisters of a different political belief on Monday.

We cannot criticize the violence shown against those on one side, while at the same time delighting in attacks on the other. Is that not a double standard?

Waters’ remarks ostensibly came as a response to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, being asked to leave a restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, on Friday because the owner doesn’t agree with the administration politically.

Like most conservatives, I believe absolutely in that restaurant owner’s First Amendment rights. But does her tactic, and the more extreme tactics proposed by Waters, really reflect the views of tolerance and inclusivity those on the left say they espouse?

Folks on the other side of the political aisle are free to make their discontent known, but advocating physical confrontations is how mentally ill people like left-wing activist James Hodgkinson, whose June 2017 shooting spree nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., begin justifying their plans for terrorism or even assassination.

To me, a black man who has lived in the South most of my life, this strategy sounds more like that of the segregationists than those of our civil rights heroes and heroines.

So, the question must be asked of anyone, Republican, Democrat, or independent: Where does this sort of rhetoric lead?

What do people in other countries think of us advocating violence against other Americans?

Will dehumanizing Republicans and other supporters of the president lead to constructive policies that preserve justice and the rule of law? Will it lead to a better America, or more likely, will it lead only to destruction and discord?

Waters’ words are not the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. or of the people. She should be ashamed of herself.

Black Lives Matter Is Wrong Headed

My ‘Black Lives Matter’ Problem (Or… is it Your Problem?)

“Black Lives Matter” is wrong on crime, wrong on Israel, and wrong on education.

www.israel-commentary.org

By Jason D. Hill

Excerpted and redacted from the article in COMMENTARY,  JUNE 2018

… I had lunch recently with a retired (uber liberal) professor who once taught at a university in New York and now teaches inside prisons.… 

… Our conversation, had left my mind racing with thoughts about the moral hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter. I thought about two transgressive and unpardonable sins of the Black Lives Matter movement. The first has to do with its outrageous position on Israel; the second pertains to its immoral demands regarding the education of black Americans.

The leaders of Black Lives Matter have written a profoundly anti-Israel (and anti-American) manifesto in which they accuse Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.” The manifesto endorses the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement and takes the view that the United States justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliances with Israel. This, according to Black Lives Matter, makes the U.S. complicit in a supposedly genocidal massacre of the Palestinian people.

As a staunch defender of Israel on moral grounds, I categorically condemn the moral ineptitude of the Black Lives Matter movement on this point. If there is a victim in the Middle East, it is the beleaguered state of Israel. 

The Jewish state is the only technologically advanced and democratic country in a region of illiberal, primitive, and human-rights-abusing nations that treat women worse than cattle and don’t know the meaning of religious reciprocity. 

Since its founding, Israel has fought marauders in the likes of the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the Syrians. These parties have invaded Israel, threatened her right to exist, and tried to eliminate her and Jewry itself from the region. 

Israel’s enemies among the Palestinians have sought to do the same with the help of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority. And the Palestinians have made an unprecedented demand in the history of warfare. Displaced by a war that their leaders started and lost, they claim a right to return to a territory they failed to conquer. 

While Arab Israelis serve in the Knesset side by side with Israeli Jews, Palestinians have elected governments whose charters have called for the annihilation of Jews and whose leaders portray Jews as pigs, vermin, and an evil to be eradicated.

Israel is the only country I know of that grants citizenship and land rights to its avowed enemies. What’s more, Israel offered a Palestinian state to both Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and was not only repeatedly turned down but repaid with the second intifada and the indiscriminate murder of Israeli citizens. Palestinian intransigence is forged in the conviction that no deal will be made so long as Jews—any Jews—occupy the land of Israel. 

In 2005, Israel unilaterally handed over its territory in Gaza to the terrorist government Hamas and was, and still is, rewarded by a daily showering of rockets into Israeli land.

With its accusations against Israeli Jews, Black Lives Matter suggests that in their support of Israel, such Jews are complicit in the unproven crimes of genocide and apartheid. We must remember that even amid the daily onslaughts of war and terror that Palestinians inflict on Jews, the Israelis, in a spirit of almost irrational altruism, take great pains to limit civilian casualties and to ensure that those caught in a war they did not personally initiate are spared as much harm as possible.

Black Lives Matter is not only being unjust toward Israel; its anti-Israel stance betrays Jews in America, to whom blacks in this country are enormously indebted. If there are any unsung heroes of the civil-rights movement, it is those Jews who played an enormous but largely unacknowledged role in the liberation of blacks from racial oppression.

 American Jews undertook monumental efforts to found and fund some of the most important civil-rights organizations in the U.S. These include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1909, Henry Moscowitz joined W.E.B. Du Bois and other civil-rights leaders to create the NAACP. The vice chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism), Kivie Kaplan, served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975. Arnie Aronson worked with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins to found the Leadership Conference.

From 1910 to 1940, there were more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and 20 black colleges (including Howard, Dillard, and Fisk Universities) established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. 

At the height of enrollment at the so-called Rosenwald schools, nearly 40 percent of Southern blacks were educated at one of these institutions. 

During the civil-rights movement, Jewish activists represented a disproportionate number of whites involved in the struggle for black emancipation. Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Leaders of the Jewish Reform Movement were arrested with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964, after mounting a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of the Religious Action Center (RAC) of Reform Judaism, under the aegis of the Leadership Conference, which for decades was in the RAC’s building.

The hard, cold, and unsentimental fact of the matter is that without Jewish financial backing and moral contributions, there may never have been a civil-rights movement.

There is another morally irresponsible claim made by the Black Lives Matter movement—a claim that should offend any self-respecting black American citizen. I refer to the movement’s demand that the United States provide free college education to blacks. 

On what grounds is this organization making such a demand? Why free college education for blacks but not for poor whites or for Latino, Asian, or Native-American college students? What special sociopolitical conditions exist for blacks that do not hold for other ethnic or racial groups such that blacks deserve to be exempt from paying college tuition?

Could it be that the spokespersons for the movement are failing here to recognize another cultural pathology blacks face? I have in mind the problem of single-parent families—in which 70 percent of African-American children now live. This is a financially untenable situation for a massive swath of black America. And it is certainly an issue over which blacks have control. 

…The cardinal sin of asking for anything for free in this life is that you abnegate your responsibility not just for maintaining your existence but, more important, for achieving your humanity. 

The demand for a free education, along with the demand for race-based reparations by Black Lives Matter and others, is symptomatic of another problem in race relations. There are those on the left who see self-reliance, initiative, and a commitment to one’s own life as, at best, hopelessly naive. 

Such people see grit, honor, hard work, and self-reliance as “white” ideals that are being imposed on others. Those traits reinforce whiteness, in their minds, and there is a gnawing resentment of those blacks who wish to appropriate such virtues for themselves. They cease being black in the minds of some on the far left. 

Such ideas assume a malevolence about the American polis that is untenable and empirically false. No doors are closed forever to anyone in this great country of ours. If your ethos and character disposition are set for achievement, if your will is wedded to a resilience and tenacity, and you rid yourself of the idea that you are entitled to the financial earnings of other people, you will find a way to make it here. 

On the other hand, the kind of dependency that Black Lives Matter promotes lays the groundwork for personal failure.  (And their followers proudly embrace that perpetual personal failure, aiding and abetting their own self-destruction) jsk

This essay is adapted from Jason D. Hill’s forthcoming book We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People, which will be published by Bombardier Books in July and is available for pre-publication sale on Amazon.

Gun Rights Are More Important Than Current Media Reports Reveal

Gun Rights Actually Are a Civil Rights Issue

Jarrett Stepman / @JarrettStepman / March 28, 2018 / comments

Modern protests demanding more gun control have been likened to the civil rights movement, but civil rights and gun rights often have gone together in American history. (Photo: David Tulis/UPI/Newscom)

It is becoming increasingly fashionable for those who support gun control to compare the post-Parkland, student-driven movement to the civil rights movements of earlier generations.

“Young people said, ‘We will not tolerate what our ancestors have tolerated. We’ve had enough and we’re willing to fight for it and we’re willing to march in the streets for it and, if necessary, die for it,’” TV personality Oprah said in comparing the student marches to civil rights demonstrations.

One writer in The New Yorker wrote of the pro-gun control March for Our Lives protest: “The Parkland students seem to instinctively understand that their fight not only crosses racial and class lines but also exists on a historical continuum, as an extension of the civil-rights movement.”

Another recent article in The Washington Post, headlined “Gun rights are about keeping white men on top,” even tried to connect American gun culture and support for gun rights to racism.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>

However, the author’s historical argument, whether intentionally or not, actually reveals that it is gun control, not gun rights, that generally has been used for the purposes of white supremacy.

Gun rights and civil rights, historically, have gone hand in hand.

In a recent interview on “The View,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice highlighted the importance of preserving the Second Amendment as an individual right, in some cases the last line of defense in protecting life and liberty.

“Let me tell you why I’m a defender of the Second Amendment,” Rice said on the show. “I was a little girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham police were going to protect you.”

“I’m sure if Bull Connor had known where those guns were, he would have rounded them up,” she said. “So I don’t favor some things like gun registration.”

‘The Work of the Abolitionists Is Not Finished’

In the aftermath of the Civil War, a ferocious battle emerged over how to preserve both federalism and the individual rights of citizens in the states.

Gun rights, in some cases, were the only safeguard of liberty and personal safety.

Some of the first states to pass highly restrictive gun control legislation were, in fact, in the Reconstruction-era South. They implemented so-called “black codes” to restrict the rights of former slaves, including the right to bear arms.

One 1866 Alabama law baldly stated that “it shall not be lawful for any freedman, mulatto, or free person of color in this state, to own firearms, or carry about his person a pistol or other deadly weapon.”

The law also made it illegal “to sell, give, or lend firearms or ammunition of any description whatever, to any freedman, free negro, or mulatto.”

Famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass warned about these abuses and said“the work of the abolitionists is not finished” until the Second Amendment and others rights could be protected.

>>> Right Side of History: It’s Time to Listen More to the Words of Frederick Douglass

This provoked a federal response, according to historian Stephen P. Halbrook. Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which guaranteed to other men “any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to … inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms.”

President Andrew Johnson vetoed this legislation, but he was overridden by Congress.

These battles over the protection of individual rights culminated in the passage of the 14th Amendment.

The 14th Amendment was designed to prevent states from violating the Bill of Rights, which at the time applied only to the federal government.

However, even after the passage of the 14th Amendment, racial conflict and battles over gun rights continued for generations.

As Rice explained, individual firearm ownership was often the only protection black Americans had under some legal authorities that did little to protect them.

As Ida B. Wells, one of the founders of the NAACP and an early civil rights leader, wrote in 1892, a year in which an extraordinary number of brutal lynchings took place: “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.”

“The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well,” Wells continued, “is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

An Inalienable Right

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted this history in his concurring opinion in the Chicago v. McDonald case in which the court ruled that Otis McDonald, a black Army veteran, had been deprived of his Second Amendment rights by the city of Chicago.

Thomas wrote about how the infamous Dred Scott decision before the Civil War was meant to strip black Americans of citizenship and “the constitutionally enumerated rights of ‘the full liberty of speech’ and the right ‘to keep and carry arms.’”

After the war, former Confederate states attempted to curtail firearm ownership for black citizens, and mob and militia violence against those citizens often went unchecked by local authorities.

“Without federal enforcement of the inalienable right to keep and bear arms, these militias and mobs were tragically successful in waging a campaign of terror against the very people the 14th Amendment had just made citizens,” Thomas wrote.

Thomas concluded that in the opinion of the Founders and authors of the 14th Amendment, “the right to keep and bear arms was essential to the preservation of liberty.”

As Thomas, Douglass, Rice, and others so clearly articulated, gun rights—not gun control—have been an essential buttress to civil rights.

Body Cameras Make Police Reports More Accuate So Now Civil Rights Group Hate Them

Remember When Civil Rights Groups Wanted Police Bodycams? Look At What They're Saying Now.

Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

ByHANK BERRIEN

November 17, 2017

Remember when civil rights advocates demanded accountability from police and wanted them to wear bodycams? Those bodycams cost police departments a good chunk of money.

But now, a group called The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights avers that bodycams pose a “threat to civil rights.” They released a report titled, “The Illusion of Accuracy: How Body-Worn Camera Footage Can Distort Evidence," in which they decry bodycams because the officers can view the footage before they write incident reports.

In the report, Vanita Gupta, the leader of the Leadership Conference, who is a former ACLU director and former acting assistant attorney general of the civil rights division under former President Obama, writes, “The vast majority of the nation’s leading police departments with body-worn camera programs allow unrestricted footage review – meaning, officers are permitted to review footage from body-worn cameras whenever they’d like, including before writing their incident reports or making statements.”

The report adds:

Unrestricted footage review creates an illusion of accuracy because it produces a false impression about how much officers actually remember about an incident. It makes officers’ memories appear to be more accurate, and thus more credible, than the memories of other eyewitnesses — which can distort how an independent factfinder, like a judge or a jury, might understand how an incident truly unfolded. In the worst cases, because of the inherent limits of body-worn cameras, unrestricted footage review allows officers to square their version of events to the footage, and potentially create false beliefs about what actually happened.

You would think that those championing civil rights would want to simply see the facts of the case, but the report seems to be more concerned that a police officer might be more credible than some eyewitness:

Yet unrestricted footage review gives officers the opportunity to augment their initial incident reports with information that would not otherwise be available to them from their own memory. This makes officers’ reports artificially consistent with video footage and appear to be unnaturally comprehensive and credible, particularly compared to reports of other witnesses to events.

And as we all know, whether it’s Ferguson, Missouri or anywhere else, supposed eyewitnesses are uniformly accurate in their depiction of events.

Even The Lefties Denounce Obama

Hero Of The American Left, Professor Noam Chomsky Denounces Obama Administration

April 30, 2013 by Sam Rolley 

SPECIAL

In the 2008 Presidential election, Professor Noam Chomsky endorsed Barack Obama.

Notable left-wing polemicist Professor Noam Chomsky has made a career of writing and speaking out against government abuses of civil liberties in the United States and abroad. In the 2008 Presidential election, the professor endorsed Barack Obama but contended that the youthful Presidential candidate would have little positive or negative impact on civil liberty.

Chomsky now says he is surprised and disgusted by the current President’s inexplicable “attack” on civil liberties, which he said goes beyond anything he could have ever imagined.

In an interview, Chomsky told the liberal blogAlternet: 

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don’t seem easy to explain. In many ways the worst is what you mention, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project. That’s an Obama initiative and it’s a very serious attack on civil liberties. He doesn’t gain anything from it — he doesn’t get any political mileage out of it. In fact, most people don’t even know about it, but what it does is extend the concept of “material assistance to terror” to speech.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2010 in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project that the broad application of a Federal law prohibits human rights and humanitarian aid organizations from communicating with foreign terror organizations (FTOs) or providing aid supplies to areas where they are known to operate in efforts to promote peaceful conflict resolution. Individuals face up to 15 years in prison for providing “material support” to FTOs, even if their work is intended to promote peaceful, lawful objectives. “[M]aterial support” is defined to include any “service,” “training,” “expert advice or assistance” or “personnel.”

“And the wording of the colloquy is broad enough that it could very well mean that if, say, you meet with someone in a terrorist group and advise them to turn to nonviolent means, then that’s material assistance to terrorism.” Chomsky said, “I’ve met with people who are on the list and will continue to do so, and Obama wants to criminalize that, which is a plain attack on freedom of speech. I just don’t understand why he’s doing it.”

The professor has also taken issue with Obama’s continuation of an executive branch power grab that was sparked in reaction to the 9/11 attacks by the Administration of George W. Bush.

“What it is is the same kind of commitment to expanding executive power that Cheney and Rumsfeld had. He kind of puts it in mellifluous terms and there’s a little difference in his tone,” he said. “It’s not as crude and brutal as they were, but it’s pretty hard to see much of a difference.”

Through the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, continuous harsh prosecution of whistle-blowers, the growing surveillance state and extrajudicial execution, the Obama Administration has set the United States on course for tyranny that would make some of history’s most unjust leaders proud, according to the professor.

“It’s interesting to see the way in which due process is being reinterpreted by Obama’s Justice Department in regards to the drone killings. Attorney General Eric Holder was asked why the administration was killing people without due process.” Chomsky continued, “Well, there was due process, he said, because they discuss it within the executive branch. King John in the 13th century would have loved that.”

What Happened in 1950?

For the past several years we have been asking the following question to everyone to whom we have talked. What happened in 1950 or thereabouts to dramatically change this country?

Since 1950, we have not won a war? Nor have we gone to war with both barrels blazing. Our morals have gone by the wayside. We have started giving away the store to our citizens and countries around the world. Our "apparent" power as a world power is present but in decline. Our respect as a country has shriveled up.  Why the change?  What caused this dramatic change?

There is something afoot and we want your input.

The following article may get some of those brain cells and synapses moving.

Thanks in advance.

Conservative Tom

It’s Not America Anymore

October 2, 2012 by Brandon Smith 

PHOTOS.COM

Many of us in the liberty movement find ourselves searching for a distinct root cause of the trials and tribulations of American culture — the Holy Grail catalyst that, if unraveled, would save this country and heal the septic wounds covering the landscape of our hobbled society. The obvious answer would be to remove the global elites who are poisoning the well from the picture entirely. Yes, this has to be done eventually. However, we must also identify how those elites have been able to so thoroughly con the masses of this Nation for so long.

What inherent weakness has made us susceptible to manipulation? For this question, there are no easy answers. If I had to choose a single frailty of our collective psyche as paramount to our downfall, I would say that Americans most of all are confounded by their own patriotism. We often embrace the ideal without knowing what it really means.

There are in fact two kinds of patriotism: the concrete and the imagined. Many Americans fall haphazardly into the fantasy of being patriotic. They define patriotism upon the exploits of the mainstream and of the government in control at the time. They become cheerleaders for the establishment instead of stalwart champions of their country’s founding principles. In fact, true patriotism is not about blindly defending one’s nation or leadership regardless of its trespasses; true patriotism is about defending the philosophy that made one’s nation possible in the first place — even if that means standing against the power structure in place today.

I often hear the uneducated and unaware claim that America and its principles have been a bane to the rest of the world. They say America is at the center of the vampire squid, flailing its vicious tentacles against innocent foreign civilizations. This is an oversimplification at best. The crimes that these well-meaning but naïve activists scorn cannot be attributed to “America” because the American ideal has been completely abandoned by those in the seat of power in our modern era. We do not live in “America” — at least, not the America that the Founding Fathers and authors of the Constitution created.

America has been ransacked and deformed into a hideous lampoon of its former self. This has been done for the most part through the destruction of the guiding principles we pretend we still hold onto as a culture, but in reality have abused and cast aside. If we are ever to undo the damage that has already been done, we have to rediscover what the original design of America was. Wailing and growling about the inadequacies of the present do nothing unless we establish where it is that we have fallen from grace. What is America supposed to be? What did the Founders truly intend?

America Is Supposed To Be Controlled By The People

The concept of a republic revolves around a reversal of the traditional narrative of power. Throughout most of history, government stood at the top of the pyramid, where the hands of a few dominated the destinies of the citizenry. The future was a matter for the elites, not the peasants, to be concerned with. The American republic, as designed by the revolutionary colonists who defeated the old oligarchy, flipped the role of government to servant rather than master. The goal was to make government tangible and accountable rather than abstract and untouchable. The America of today has no such accountability anymore.

We have a two-party system that pursues the mechanizations of globalism in tandem, not in contest. When both parties have the same desires and goals, when both parties collude to remove civil liberties rather than protect them, and when both parties are funded by the same corporate backers, there is no such thing as change through the process of elections. Anyone who claims that government corruption can be punished through the ballot box hasn’t the slightest clue how our system really functions. They think we are still living in the original “America,” one that values the voice of the people.

When the government decides to push through banker bailouts, the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, etc., all while ignoring opposition by a vast majority of citizens, it is clear that the paradigm has shifted and the American value of representation by and for the people is lost.

America Is Supposed To Prosper Through Free Markets

One of the first acts of the American Revolution in the fight against British tyranny was to decouple from British economic dominance. They stopped relying on goods produced in England and peddled by the European merchant class and began making their own. From homespun clothing to homemade rifles, Americans created a legitimate free-market environment. Free markets are systems controlled by the people, thriving on the natural functions of supply and demand. They are not administered by bureaucracies or corporate hierarchies that manipulate the economy to fit preconceived political and social ends.

Free markets are decentralized markets. Corporations were never meant to exist, according to Adam Smith, the architect of traditional free markets. Today’s framework operates on centralization and the removal of options and choices, which is facilitated by the imbalance and lack of accountability in the corporate legal structure.

I have to laugh every time I hear someone attack “capitalism” and free markets as the source of all our ills. America has not had the pleasure of free markets for at least 100 years (since the construction of the private Federal Reserve, a collusion between banking and government interests). No one alive today has ever seen an actual American “free market.” So to blame free markets for our modern failings is rather thoughtless.

America Is Supposed To Have A Reserved Foreign Policy

The Founding Fathers specifically sought to keep America out of foreign entanglements and haphazard alliances. They knew from experience that the elites and monarchies of Europe often used wars as a means of consolidating power and keeping populations in relative fear. They were well aware of the methodologies of Niccolo Machiavelli and knew that forced alliances were a trap used to ensnare nations into unnecessary conflict and financial dependency while keeping the masses subservient through false patriotism.

Today, our government has utterly violated the original principles of reserved foreign policy, especially in the past century. The excuse always used is that “we are under attack,” yet we usually discover later that these “attacks” were actually fabricated by our own leaders. From the sinking of the USS Maine, to the sinking of the Lusitania, to the Gulf of Tonkin and beyond, for the past 100 years, Americans have been presented with false flag threats used as leverage to convince us to become entangled in foreign engagements. This strategy has become so common that elitists now openly admit their intentions to commit future false flags in order to draw us into yet another war, this time with Iran.

The current policy of “exporting democracy” has not only been a complete failure (just look at Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), it is also a total affront to the foundation of the American dynamic. Patriotism in the name of interventionism is foolhardy and decidedly un-American.

America Is Supposed To Respect Individual Rights

The Founders witnessed the extreme abuses of government firsthand: invasion of privacy, invasion of property, wrongful arrest and imprisonment, loss of representation, overt and malicious taxation, thuggish law enforcement, and the targeting of those who dared to dissent in their speech. The excuse used by the British for their tyrannical behavior was, essentially, national security. In the end, though, the elites’ actions had nothing to do with security for the populous and everything to do with what they saw as opposition to their hegemony. Our government has become a mirror image of the elitist power-mongers of Britain in the days of the revolution. Absolutely everything the colonists fought against has been re-established by the globalists in our political structure today, once again, all in the name of national security.

We have seen the enslavement of our money supply and general economy by the Federal Reserve; invasive and violent taxation through the Internal Revenue Service; loss of privacy through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance and the Patriot acts; loss of property rights through multiple agencies including the Bureau of Land Management, the Environmental Protection Agency, the IRS, the Food and Drug Administration, etc.; the militarization of law enforcement through the Department of Homeland Security and Federally dominated fusion centers; potential loss of habeas corpus through the NDAA; and even wrongful arrest against those who merely speak openly of their discontent (look into the case of Marine veteran Brandon Raub for a taste of what is to come).

What Have We Become?

Those who rally behind the America of today rally behind a façade — an empty shell devoid of the heart and soul that gave life to this once great experiment. I do not support what America is. I support what America was and what it could be again if the truth is adequately smashed into the faces of the currently oblivious public. If this country is content to suckle from the putrid teat of globalism and forsake the moral force of conscience that gave it life, then it has become another place — an alien land.

I have heard the argument that America is meant to be a kind of chameleon meant to change its stripes and adapt to the demands of the era. I have heard it argued that the Constitution and the principles of the Founding Fathers are outdated and inadequate for our new age of technological wizardry and terrorist ideologies. This is pure intellectual idiocy. The principles of freedom never expire. Individual liberty is inherent and eternal. It is the driving force of every great accomplishment in the history of mankind. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights embody the spirit of the eternal battle of individual liberty. There is no adaptation. There is only freedom or tyranny.

It is time for us to decide what kind of Americans we wish to be: the deluded rah-rah puppets of a desiccated totalitarian society or the watchmen on the wall. Will we be the keepers and protectors of the vital core of the American identity or will we be fly-by-night consumers of the flavor-of-the-day political carnival, eating every sample from the elitist platter in an insane attempt to replace our free heritage with a sleek, sexy rehashed form of top-down feudalism?

–Brandon Smith