DIANA WEST: It’s called revolutionary justice, as pioneered by the Bolsheviks, who turned courts into ideological enforcement with no basis in law.

On By M. WalgenbachIn Revolutionary JusticeLeave a comment

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PORTER STANSBERRY: As we approach our 250th anniversary, I believe it’s worth noting that our government is only actually 165 years old. The American Republic established in 1776 ended in 1861.

On By M. WalgenbachIn American HistoryLeave a comment

 

As we approach our 250th anniversary, I believe it’s worth noting that our government is only actually 165 years old.

The American Republic established in 1776 ended in 1861.

The Civil War cost almost a million lives: one out of every five white men of military age in the South and one out of every ten in the North. It destroyed virtually all of the wealth in the South — a 90% reduction to per capita GDP. The South would not recover economically until 1950.

But the real cost of the war wasn’t economic. It was political.

The Civil War destroyed the Federalist system that our founders built to ensure the central government’s power remained genuinely limited. Not limited by the goodwill of its legislators, which is no limit at all, but limited by the existence of rival sovereign States, which could restrain the central government and each other through competition.

After 1865 the only real limit to federal power was the self-restraint of the men in office. And that didn’t last for long…

But, before we look at the long-term impact of America’s first war of aggression, let us dispel a critical myth: that the Civil War ended slavery. Slavery was ending because of technology and economics. And it would have ended just as surely if no war had ever been fought between the States.

Britain abolished slavery, without a war, throughout its empire in 1833, freeing some 700,000 people in the West Indies alone. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848. Russia — the most backward great power in Europe — emancipated some twenty-three million serfs in 1861, the very year of Sumter. The Netherlands freed the slaves of Surinam and Curaçao in 1863. Across the entire industrializing world, unfree labor was abandoned within a single compressed generation. And, in no other great nation, was war required.

In America, slavery did not end because of General Grant and the boys in blue. It did not end because of a moral awakening. The cause was economic.

Chattel slavery extracts muscle power from human beings. Therefore, slavery only makes economic sense if muscle power is the binding constraint on production. Once machines had multiplied the labor output of muscle by hundreds of times, slavery was not only immoral but inefficient. In an industrial economy a slave costs more than he yields. As a result, capital flees from slavery into factories. All over the world. And even in the South.

Slavery ended everywhere at roughly the same time for the same reason: innovation and economics. It would have ended in the American South regardless of who won at Gettysburg. Even Brazil, the last holdout in the Western hemisphere, freed its 725,000 slaves with the Golden Law of 1888. No war was required: slavery was no longer productive.

With apologies to the celebrants of Juneteenth, slavery was not legally abolished in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865. The institution died, not because of the war, but because the world had entered the machine age.

The unnecessary destruction of half of our country and almost a million people wasn’t the greatest tragedy of the Civil War. The greatest tragedy was the loss of Federalism and the hard-won liberty Americans won in the Revolution.

The Civil War destroyed the federal structure of the American republic, in which the several States were sovereign in their own spheres, with genuinely different legal systems, cultures, and traditions. The national government was beholden to the States, with only limited and enumerated powers.

The clearest proof of this change lies in our language. Before 1861, the United States was a plural noun. Men said the United States “are.” After 1865 our country became singular. The United States “is.”

The doctrine that a state could check the central government — by interposition, by nullification, in the last resort by departure — died at Appomattox, and with it the last structural brake on the power of the federal government died too.

The framers had not relied on parchment to limit the government they created. They relied on competition. So long as the States were genuinely sovereign — so long as a man oppressed in one State could remove to another, so long as the national government had to reckon with twenty or thirty rival centers of authority each jealous of its own jurisdiction — the central government could not easily grow into a Leviathan. The States were not administrative subdivisions. They were the Constitution’s immune system.

What followed the Civil War was America’s first empire — in the South. And Empire’s require a strong central government. Thus began a long erosion of the line between the citizen and the State, and between private institutions and public power.

Twelve years after the war, the Supreme Court considered whether a State could fix by law the prices a private grain warehouse charged its customers. The owners argued it was a taking of their property without due process — that what a man does with his own property, and what he charges for its use, is rightfully his own affair. The Court disagreed. Chief Justice Waite ruled that when private property is “affected with a public interest, it ceases to be juris privati only,” and may be regulated by the government for the common good (Munn v. Illinois, 1877).

That was the end of private property in America. After all, if the national legislature may decide which property is “affected with a public interest,” and may then dictate its prices and uses, there is in principle no property the government may not control.

Justice Stephen Field saw it and dissented with prophetic fury. The doctrine, he warned, “is nothing less than a bold assertion of absolute power by the State to control at its discretion the property and business of the citizen.” A legislature that could fix the uses and prices of property “against the consent of the owner” could “deprive him of the property as completely as by a special act for its confiscation or destruction.”

New York City’s landlords are finding out the truth of this reality. They believe they own their properties. But they are about to find out otherwise, as rents will now be controlled by the mayor, who is a communist. This will spread. A communist ruling over all of America is only a matter of time. Why? Because the law provides an unlimited incentive for such power. There is nothing in America the government cannot take from you. Nothing.

The proof of the unlimited central authority was established in blood. The courts followed where the armies led. And the first American Empire — the North’s conquest of the South — led to more such military adventures, which continue to this day.

In its first century, the United States heeded its founders’ warnings against entangling alliances, a large standing army, and foreign military adventures. But the creation of the massive Northern army created its own momentum. Only 20 years after Reconstruction, the country clamored for another Empire and war against Spain. America became an imperial power, with possessions from the Caribbean to the far Pacific — Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines.

The consolidated nation that emerged from the Civil War was the precondition for the American Empire that emerged in 1898. Power flows to the center, and the center’s reach has no natural boundary.

The Leviathan must be fed.

In 1913, every American became a direct serf to the national government: The Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to tax incomes directly. The size of a government is set, in the end, by the size of its revenues. The income tax removed the ceiling.

The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified the same year, provided for the direct election of United States senators. Under the original Constitution, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. This was the last vestige of State sovereignty. It could not be allowed to stand. The Senate stopped being the guardian of federalism.

And… then… with these Constitutional impediments finally vanquished, you saw Leviathan act to ensure its permanent dominance: it would control the money supply.

In December of 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System. The power over money, which the Constitution had strictly withheld from the central government, was enshrined into law. Income tax, a central bank, and the removal of the states from the Senate — all in one year.

The Revolution that began in 1861 was complete. America’s Empire had begun.

Munn established that the government may dictate the use of private property. 1898 established that the consolidated nation would project power without limit beyond its borders. 1913 established the revenue, the money power, and the removal of the states from their guard post. The 1964 Civil Rights Act expanded this dictatorial power into every private transaction in America.

Government of the people, for the people, and by the people has been destroyed.

We now live in an Empire, not a Republic.

The Civil War didn’t free any slaves; it enslaved all of us.

On By M. WalgenbachIn EducationLeave a comment

Behind a paywall.  Totally worth it.

4:00.  There’s never any backstory as how it could be that there is a country that is people to buy the same on Chinese that you will find on the mainland except these are certainly there are four bears were anti-communists who fled mainland China and you may get a mention of the Civil War between communist China and nationalist China but you don’t find out that America was largely responsible for the Nationalist China’s defeat.  And that is a fact and what can we do about it now well we can know about it and it might inform some of our attitudes or understandings of what’s really going on I truly believe that despite all the economic or the military reasons why the Chinese communist s want Taiwan so badly I think there’s also, there must be, at some level a desire to capture the memory entirely by taking over that at this point still anti-communist or non-communist or Democratic country which has a physical genealogical link to other times that are not controlled by the Communists and I was sort of reminded by it because I was kind of looking over American in the opening with China so-called by Richard Nixon and some of the reaction at the time there was kind of a conservative earthquake that was essentially calmed pretty quickly but there was kind of a revolt over it briefly anyway and one of the columns I read about this in 1971 was by William Buckley whose brother senator James Buckley initially was one of these people very much against Nixon making this move to normalize Mao.  Which is horrifying when you put it that way think about what it meant and how it changed us we enriched them but we didn’t change them they changed us which is always what happens when you deal with these communist dictatorships but one remark he made in passing was that probably if you had a referendum in communist China at that time 1971 now would probably win because he had murdered millions and millions of people who opposed him and I was thinking about that in relation to Taiwan and I imagine that that must be part of it that they want to erase or destroy corrupt or capture the memory just the living memory and again another reason that history in seeking the truth trying to capture it you get those books and keep them is so important just as a human it’s part of the human to keep the human spirit resilient I suppose.

6:57.  But getting back to these characters let’s just go over it a little bit because it’s so absent from the conversation.  If we have Lachlan Curry, the Soviet agent, FDR’s, one of his top, top aides, China portfolio, what do you know, picks the guy to go and be Chiang Kai-Shek’s American liaison Chiang spoke no English.  He’d been fighting the Japanese since 1931.  America is helping.  The Soviet Union is helping at this time, because it was part of their strategy, which would change the strategy against Japan, trying to keep Japan pinned down and doesn’t want Japan attacking it.  That’s where that comes from.  We send Lachlan Curry who deploys Owen Lattimore to be Chiang’s  principal assistant,Owen Lattimore, Pacific scholar, and after much determination, I love this line, he is labeled a “conscious articulate instrument of the Communist conspiracy by the senate committee that investigated The Institute for Pacific Relations.  It was one of the best investigations that Congress ever did and it was done thanks to all the spade work and difficult and storms endured by Senator Joseph McCarthy.  It was not his investigation but it was kind of his.  He was the father of that investigation.  Let us say it wouldn’t have happened without him.  We sent General Stillwell, the most pro-Rred possibly military man to be a military advisor.  The treasury which was under the influence of a Soviet agent named Harry Dexter White sent another Soviet agent to be changed US Treasury liaison Solomon Adler Harry Dexter white was also presiding over Chinese Affairs and European affairs as well and he was very instrumental in in I mean he was in many ways a lynchpin of the war with Japan I don’t think it would have happened without his this communist group and maybe I’ll explain that because it is all connected you know the American experience with Japan the American experience with China it’s all interwoven and the Advent of communist China being the result is all interwoven one thing I did not know which I was actually kind of kicking myself over I must have read it but somehow it didn’t penetrate or I skimmed too quickly or trying to master all this information but there was another communist agent of great note who also is very influential in our policy making decisions vis-à-vis China and many many other places but this would be at the Far Eastern desk of the state department under Cordell Hall it was not a communist that man who ran that desk not a communist, named Stanley Hornbeck.  But his principal assistant, and this is always where they get you, was Alger Hiss.  I didn’t know that that is extremely important because of the role of the agent of influence and Alger Hiss was hornbeck’s assistant from 1939 to 1944 and why this is so important is that these communists here and in Tokyo there was another Network under the extremely famous and important communist spy Richard sorga Soviet spy Richard sorga who also had networks in China in Shanghai it was an international conspiracy in America in Japan in China and that was able to bring Japan and America to war and ultimately turn China communist.  So they all are of a piece this is why president Trump is talking about Taiwan Visa V Chyna today and there is no concept of it and I find that very almost Indescribable in terms of it’s like watching crime and frustration dream and having a gag in your mouth so you can’t say look stop and it isn’t as if to stop something but it’s just something to be aware to understand to have a sense of responsibility and a sense of protectiveness against the strategy in terms of this is not just a new day this is not just another deal and that is completely gone and what we do see in the trip which I did kind of want to talk about is I I think another flashback to the Roosevelt days which is the agenda of convergence.  Convergence was something that I talked about, not because I thought it up, and not because it’s in American Betrayal that is, and not because I had a feeling.  It’s something that comes out of the record of different people’s memoirs of conversations with FDR.

SOUTHERN MAMA: Once you realize how many in media have no connection to our history and have personal agendas to push, you will understand why they run hit pieces against Heritage Americans.

On By M. WalgenbachIn MediaLeave a comment

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From Southern Mama,

The reporter and two producers involved in this story are not Heritage Americans.

Leslie Stahl’s grandparents were Jewish refugees from Russia and Poland. Her father was a prominent Jewish member of a community near Boston.

Producer Shachar Bar-On is originally from Israel.

Producer Jinsol Jung was raised in Southern California. She is a product of the Asian immigrant community.

Their “expert” Freddy Cruz, of the Western States Center in Portland, has longtime ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is currently facing indictments for fraudulently funding groups like the KKK. His entire livelihood is based on whipping up claims of racism.

Once you realize how many in media have no connection to our history and have personal agendas to push, you will understand why they run hit pieces against Heritage Americans.

I have first-hand experience in dealing with media figures with similar backgrounds who are not from the South or flyover country due to my former career in journalism. They loathe our existence. They have preconceived notions about us that dictate how they cover stories.

The fact that Sheriff Lowell Griffin allowed himself to be used for this propaganda isn’t surprising. The fact that a supposedly conservative Republican sheriff expressed concerns over citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights legally should be surprising as well, but it isn’t. Too many Republicans bend over backwards to please people who will always hate them no matter what they do.

What Stahl, Bar-On, and Jung fail to understand is that Heritage Americans help other Americans regardless of race in a crisis because that is part of our nature. Robert Rundo even says so in his interview.

As far as I’m concerned, it shouldn’t matter what those volunteers do in their free time, whether it be La Raza, the Black Panther Party, or the Active Club. All that matters is that they helped victims in need with their own money and time.

ATHENAEUM BOOK CLUB: It is now the norm to go from kindergarten to PhD without reading a single word of Homer, Plato, Augustine, or Dante.

On By M. WalgenbachIn Western CivilizationLeave a comment

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