​​The year is 2030. 

We must celebrate Winter Holiday alone. General Fauci just discovered COVID-666, the thirtieth new strain since the New Normal began; every death on planet earth is attributed to this deadly new variant, just as they have to the other strains every year since Year Zero (formerly known as 2020). 

Alone in our climate-friendly shipping container homes, we wear goggles, gloves, and masks. Between bites of our climate-friendly dinner of mashed beetles, we replace our masks. Things will be different when we “flatten the curve,” or when there is a new vaccine, unless the Regime isolates a new strain. Then it’s back to the drawing board.

Occasionally, we can communicate virtually with coworkers—when the climate-friendly rolling blackouts aren’t in effect. We have no “loved ones.” Everyone over the age of sixty lives on COVID reservations in total isolation, and children under the age of eighteen live on government campuses to keep them safe from the pandemic.

A black transgender Santa Claus adorns the wall, next to the Winter Tree decorated with condoms and topped with abortion clamps. “Christmas” is an archaic and offensive term, banned about six years ago along with the racist, misogynistic, anti-Semite that it celebrated, “Jesus Christ.” We only know what the Ministry of Truth tells us, because those nasty Bibles were burned about five years ago.

For dessert, we have our choice of weekly ration from the Ministry of Health. Most of us choose the opioid mixture. If we’ve exhibited no willful behaviors for the past year, and if we’re in compliance with this week’s vaccination requirements, we might be allowed access to the pornography viewer. It was once called a “television,” but its new name reflects its purpose.

The next day, we will get back to work. Nothing has been open for years now, so we don’t ever need to leave our container homes. 

It’s a wonderful life.

With The Transgender-Industrial Complex, Scott Howard has given decent, red-blooded Heritage Americans one of the most important books of the 21st century. It is a dizzying tour-de-force, a missile bursting overhead, a fire-bell in the night which defies summarization and simply must be read by every good American left in our fallen, prostrate nation. In The Transgender-Industrial Complex, Mr. Howard has succeeded in naming names, in documenting each and every government, NGO, “nonprofit,” globalist organization, and individual responsible for funding and promoting the grotesque psychosis known as “transgenderism.” Far from the grassroots phenomenon it is presented as, transgenderism is an organized conspiracy with billions of dollars and decades of planning under its belt.

​As aforementioned, this book must be read in order to fully understand the enormity, the gravity, of what we face. Think of any powerful institution, corporation, or person—what or whomever you just thought of is almost certainly in this book, or at the very least is scarcely one degree of separation away. An example that might surprise my fellow Arkansans is the Walton Family Foundation and Walmart, Inc. Several names from my alma mater, the University of Chicago, are among this legion of the damned, one of whom I actually have a personal connection to. The Transgender-Industrial Complex is a veritable who’s who of the international ruling class.

One of the most crucial things that we must understand is that it is the same Satanic cabal of the same demons in human skin that is behind not only transgenderism and organized sodomy, but all of the other issues which afflict our people, including infanticide, the Great Replacement, the opioid epidemic, feminism, the growing effort to legalize pedophilia, and the New World Order writ large. Transgenderism is merely yet one more of the social engineering weapons presently engaged in leveling all that stands in the way of the Regime, a Regime which appears to be in the final stages of something darker than we have ever seen, a Regime whose character is fundamentally anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-White, and anti-human.

The uniquely pernicious feature of transgenderism is its aggressive attack on nature itself; as Mr. Howard puts it, “The intent is clear: to serve as a potent means of propaganda and mind control; to demoralize, weaken, and dumb down the population to make them more compliant; to create a new ‘victim class’ for political exploitation and to further splinter the family and atomize the native population; and to produce new ‘markets’ for increased profit. Some of the worst excesses are very obviously done for sport or out of malice, showing that…it is a rejection of natural law, representative of the advanced decay of a civilization being eaten alive from the inside-out, spreading its diseased anti-morality across the globe. It is, in no uncertain terms, pure evil.”

Transgenderism is “the ultimate form of gaslighting. If you can get a population to accept multitudinous genders when in reality human beings are sexually dimorphic, you can get them to accept anything, even eating maggot sausages to delay the carbon-induced apocalypse. It serves other purposes, too, such as the humiliation and degradation of an occupied state’s population, the literal mental retardation of the affected population, and the added consumer economy windfall produced by people ‘switching genders’ and ‘identifying’ with consumer goods that have been linked to this political/lifestyle/identity choice. It is materialistic, hyper-individualistic, and also totally at odds with reality…surgical modifications and hormones and lies do not undo nature.”

Mr. Howard traces the historical development of this plague in the West, noting its cross-pollination with other Leftist causes célèbre. Of course, Big Gay paved the way for the last decade of transgender victories over traditional America in a sort of mission creep, perhaps better described as a Trojan Horse. Just as the Egalitarian Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s paved the way for the anti-White Regime now in place, as the Communist sex maniac MLK’s so-called “colorblindness” rapidly morphed into the proto-genocidal rhetoric of “Kill the Boer” that we now hear day in and day out from the ruling class. So, too, Big Gay; slogans like “love is love,” in tandem with Big Law, Big Media, and Big Tech, forced sodomite “marriage” upon America, just as we are now told that we must let “trans kids” simply “be themselves.” Ah, yes, how could we stifle little Billy if he wants to castrate himself? That would be bad parenting.

Remember: Sodomite “marriage” was “a sustained, coordinated, and well-funded campaign to manufacture an issue, wear the traditional institutions down, and ultimately impose an agenda through a combination of dubious legislation, judicial activism, bureaucratic machinations, executive fiat, media manipulation, academic indoctrination, mass marketing, and social pressure…It should be clear that love has nothing to do with it: it’s a calculated agenda designed to bend people to the will of the Establishment.” Did anyone expect, even a decade ago, “that we would soon be discussing ‘trans women’s periods’ about hairy men in wigs in mainstream society with a straight face? That people of indeterminate gender who pose spread-legged with splotches of blood on their pants-crotches and hashtag their ‘activism’ on social media would be heralded as the epitome of ‘stunning and brave’? That it would be considered a human right for sex predators to declare themselves another gender in order to use the little girls’ room?”

Quite rightly, Mr. Howard focuses much of his book on what is being done to the weakest members of our society: our children. Transgenderism is well understood at this point to be a textbook social contagion; that is, a sort of viral meme that clusters in friend groups. Parents across the country have seen the pattern all too many times: their child becomes withdrawn, watches YouTube “transition videos,” spends their time on Tumblr, and comes to believe, spurred on by and immersed within an organized network of transgender activists, that they are themselves transgender. It spreads to the rest of the child’s friend group, and, where it doesn’t, the child eliminates the normal people from their life. The links between homosexuality and pedophilia are well-known and little-acknowledged; the same holds for the cult of transgenderism. Our children are being groomed by predators of the most depraved kind.

In 2009, the number of transgenders in America was estimated to be between 115-450,000, or 0.04-0.15% of the population—and growing each and every day. Another 2011 study put the number at .3%, an estimate that increased to 0.6% in 2016. This doubling of self-identifying “trans” people certainly seems to suggest that “the spike can be largely attributed to massive social-reprogramming efforts and incentives for becoming or identifying as transgendered.” The number of the damned continues to metastasize, particularly among our youngest generations, with the number of “trans”-identifying high school students estimated to be at around two percent. More ominously, one recent study purportedly found that twenty percent of respondents aged 18-34 identified as “LGBTQ,” as opposed to twelve percent of respondents aged 35-53 and seven percent of those aged 52-71. Is this because there are more people “born that way” now? Of course not.

Children are bombarded with homosexual-transgender propaganda at home, with their friends, and at schools, aided by a legion of thrilled school nurses, “guidance counselors,” librarians, “pediatricians,” and “child psychiatrists.” Though hard to estimate, parents play a significant role—particularly single mothers. Many of these parents, all of whom should be prosecuted for child abuse, are “incentivized to claim their children are transgender for reasons related to social attention and/or approval and to foster a sense of belonging.” In other words, hip, trendy Leftists virtue signal and compete in the grievance Olympics by saddling their children with debilitating mental illnesses. “Oh, your kid was adopted from Haiti? My kid is trans.” A significant number of these parents, Mr. Howard points out, are also certainly suffering from Munchausen by Proxy syndrome, where mothers harm their children for sympathy and affection.

The State of Washington is now setting up “school-based health centers” where children as young as thirteen may receive “medical treatment,” such as infanticides and gender reassignment pharmaceuticals and surgical operations, without parental consent or notification. School libraries are inundated with books targeted at children, presenting “transitioning” as a virtuous path to self-fulfillment. Thousands of schools across the country, at every level of “education,” have chapters of the GSA Network, formerly the Gay-Straight Alliance and now the Gender and Sexualities Alliance Network. This organization is supremely well-funded, boasting over four thousand chapters that produce “educational” propaganda and indoctrinate children in depravity and self-mutilation. Curricula incorporate homosexual-transgender indoctrination all over America and Europe, funded and promulgated by governments, NGOs like George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the international corporatocracy.

Mr. Howard devotes an entire chapter to one of the most disgusting propaganda and grooming/recruitment vehicles of the homosexual-transgender agenda: Drag Queen Story Hour. These “events,” typically occurring at public libraries and targeted specifically at young children, “feature provocative dancing and BDSM accoutrements such as dog collars; one event featured a drag queen spreading his legs to a group of children, revealing his naked genitalia under a short skirt, and another in Texas was run by a pair of convicted sex offenders…Said one drag queen, ‘We are trying to groom the next generation.’ Indeed.” Drag Queen Story Hour, of course, is flush with cash, funded by familiar villains: the American Library Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Education Association, Planned Parenthood, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, along with an almost infinitely long list of other fiends. DQSH also enjoys State support: The city of Spokane, Washington, employed two SWAT snipers and dozens of police officers to protect the pedophiles from a crowd of concerned mothers.

When parents refuse to go along with the ritual mutilation of their children, the Regime prioritizes the homosexual-transgender agenda. A Hamilton County, Ohio, judge gave custody of a “trans” teenager to his grandparents, taking him away from his own parents because they dared to stand up against a team of “doctors” at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital that urged the boy to surgically “transition.” In 2019, the Arizona Supreme Court held that judges can overrule parents on so-called “treatment” for “trans children.” An exemplary case is the tragic saga of James Younger. In 2016, his father, Jeff Younger, initiated divorce proceedings against his wife, Anne Georgulas, a—get this—pediatrician, who was damned and determined to “transition” the then four-year-old James into a girl named Luna. James Younger, it must be said, does not want to be “Luna,” and it is all a project of “Doctor” Georgulas’s deranged mind. In August, 2020, a Leftist judge (redundant, I know) gave Georgulas full, sole custody of James and his medical care.

Of course, the annihilation of the family is the entire point of the “family law” system, as Stephen Baskerville so brilliantly demonstrated in his landmark study, Taken Into Custody. Transgender activists make it their mission to alienate confused children from their loving, concerned families; as College of Charleston professor “Veronica Ivy/Rachel McKinnon” said in a YouTube video on Mother’s Day 2017, if their parents “abuse” them by refusing to accept their new “gender identity,” “it’s okay to walk away…you can find what we call your glitter family. Your queer family.” Make no mistake: The Regime is your “glitter family.”

The LGBT “movement,” Mr. Howard observes, “masquerades as an organic progression of morality toward the heights of tolerance and goodness, while simultaneously destroying any concept of real love or virtue.” This full-scale war on “heteronormativity” began in the universities, where the “assumption” that nuclear families of loving, committed couples raising healthy children together is best for those children and for society is “problematic,” and it must be challenged, nay, dismantled—just like the “patriarchy” and “white supremacy,” etcetera. America’s most “prestigious” universities and research institutions are houses of horror, and should be given the Magnus Hirschfeld treatment.

Consider feminism, the organized drive to deprive women of satisfactory lives, devoted to “campaigning for men masquerading as women and vice versa if they’re not doing the bidding of global capital and conflating empowerment with being either a cog in the corporate machine or becoming glorified prostitutes.” The demonic forces behind feminism “have always viewed the ideology of feminism as highly useful for a variety of reasons, ranging from women as wage depressors and tax cattle to weaponizing them against men and the structure/strictures of traditional society…its mainstream form has always been that which is most advantageous to the ruling class.” This is the essence of transgenderism, to prey upon the vulnerable, “breaking them down and re-forming their identities in the desired image.”

Along with reorienting the foundations of the mind comes the fracturing of the personality, and real psychosis. It is a fact that somewhere between 52-82% of transgenders have at least one DSM-listed mental illness in addition to their gender dysphoria—as Mr. Howard notes, “Happy, well-adjusted people do not join cults.” On the back-end, the transgender suicide rate, even after complete surgical “transition,” is variously estimated at between 18-45%, with most above 30%. Predictably, the rate of “desistance,” or “growing out” of transgender feelings, averages at around 80%.

Why are our children being targeted as the human guinea pigs for sick experimental “medical” procedures? For the same reason they are targeted by pedophiles: because they represent all that is good, innocent, and wholesome in our degraded, despicable society. According to the American Psychiatric Association, children who have just learned how to speak, scarcely two years old, are able to “choose” their “gender identity” and “consent” to irreversible, life-destroying operations and pharmaceuticals, such as hormonal “puberty-blockers” known to interfere with the pituitary gland and thus stunt organ and brain development and growth and cause low bone density, infertility, and IQ, memory, and verbal skill damage. In fact, Lupron, manufactured by AbbVie, is the single most prescribed puberty-blocker being used on children, despite never having been approved by the FDA for that use. Lupron has over 25,000 adverse reports to its name, including 1,500 deaths.

If a girl “identifies” as a boy, she may be prescribed these “puberty-blockers” in order to “prevent her from going through the natural human process of development,” and she would then be prescribed testosterone in an attempt to make her “become” a boy. As one endocrinologist notes, girls are given ten to forty times their normal amount of testosterone, rates similar to the amount of estrogen given to “transitioning” boys. “When people are given far more of the opposite sex hormone than their bodies can handle, they are at increased risk for cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular death, deep vein thrombosis.” In America, the age threshold for taking cross-sex hormones was lowered to twelve, and one National Institutes for Health study recommended that the bar be lowered again to eight. To call this child abuse, Mr. Howard writes, “is the understatement of the century. There is nothing stunning and brave about this; it’s sick, and people are profiting from it.”

Transgenderism is big money for Big Pharma; Lupron alone costs almost a thousand dollars a month. Male-to-female genital surgery ranges from twelve thousand dollars for a “penile inversion” to 28 thousand for a “rectosigmoid transfer,” whereby surgeons extract rectal tissue to “construct a vagina.” For female-to-male surgeries, the range can be from six thousand dollars for a mastectomy to over eighty thousand for “the construction of a penis capable of achieving erection and permitting a person to urinate while standing.” These are just the surgeries, excluding the cost of the hormones, the puberty-blockers, the plastic surgery, the new outfits, and so forth. Mr. Howard makes the biting observation that “you can actually compare prices online to find the cheapest vaginoplasties.”

​Mr. Howard raises a chilling, often-overlooked issue—the proliferation, often via biomagnification, of mind-altering pharmaceuticals in the water supply:

​The man-made and destroyed environment of modernity, he continues, “is weakening our immune systems and both suppressing testosterone and elevating estrogen in men, which in turn also produces a weakened immune system. Perversely, the entire medical establishment claims that high testosterone in men causes immunosuppression and dumbs you down, when the opposite, as always, is true.”

It bears repeating that the LGBT agenda is not an organic, grassroots “movement,” but rather a revolution from above, “a behemoth so vast and insidious that its breadth cannot be fully described.” This swarm of locusts devouring our nation from within is damned—literally—and determined “to undermine the host societies and transform them into something wicked, decadent, and broken.” The propaganda machine works synchronously with the other tentacles of the anti-White, anti-Christian, anti-national, and anti-natal New World Order, each indistinguishable from the other as “reflections of corruption, the marshaling of the disintegrative and corrosive death-forces against those of light and life.” This is “the product of a few wealthy and powerful people, mostly of one ethno-religious group and/or sexual proclivity or proclivities forcing the issue.” Indeed, I would be remiss not to point out that a central finding of The Transgender-Industrial Complex is the unmistakably heavy predominance of Jewish Leftists (including “neoconservatives”) in the funding and dissemination of the homosexual-transgender agenda.

Assemble the puzzle: “viral memes and thought contagions, the ubiquity of support and increasingly incentivizing of ‘trans’ by every significant and many insignificant institutions, the role of technology and social media in isolation and recruitment/grooming, various social pressures, the breakdown of the family and other institutions that provide stability and meaning…we see once again a deeply-enmeshed set of conditions that work synergistically in spreading and amplifying harmful beliefs.” Mr. Howard describes how “the forces of dissolution and decay marshal their ill-gotten power against the world, treating us as ‘human resources’ to be exploited and sucked dry before discarding the husk. In the ultimate irony, we are left asking where the humanity is in this system—a system that channels the energies of something much darker, a system that goes beyond political or even racial or religious quarrels to the heart of something cosmic.”

I experienced a sinking feeling throughout the book, which continued to accelerate the deeper I got. Consider the “human right” of “sex ed,” now mandated in elementary schools across America, the “mandated requirement in this ludicrous, insane, and dehumanizing system run by sociopaths who believe that man may defy the rules of nature—may be above nature—and that we are all infinitely malleable to be molded into the crude and broken shapes of their choosing. Their vision of progress signals the realization of man’s triumph over any and all limitations, a vision that imbues them with the arrogance of believing they can dictate the terms to all life on earth and stay the forces of nature. They truly believe they can live forever through manmade means and bend reality to their will, assured in what is to them the incontrovertible truth that they themselves are not just godlike, but are actual gods. In truth, they actually resemble demons.”

A man called Ray Caruso recently left this comment on a piece on Counter-Currents: Leftists “are malignant nihilists who take the side of evil, destruction, falsehood, ugliness, and filth on all issues, all the way, all the time. They are bad people. The cause of their state of being is spiritual, not biological. They hate God, wish [that] there were no God, and want to set themselves up as gods, which is why having the power of life and death over the unborn, the elderly, and the frail is so important to them…Instead of godhood, they will get slavery, of which iceberg the…Great Reset is [but] the merest tip. The problem is that they will drag the rest of us into their scheme, like they have dragged us into their previous destructive schemes, and they will murder those of us who resist. No coexistence with them is possible; it’s us or it’s them.” That about says it all.

Mr. Howard closes The Transgender-Industrial Complex with a powerful call to action: “Righteous fury and indignation, the cleansing which must surely take place for us to survive, will have its share of ‘evil’ of a kind, but it is not evil as such. It is the capacity for retribution, for violence, to kill to survive, that is harnessed for the good of life itself that is eminently necessary…The lover of life is the one who will kill for it, and for his kith and kin, especially his progeny, which is to say that he will have transcended the materialist illusion through his bloodline and his people, using the tools available to him to restore something that is at once new and eternal, particular and universal, reflecting Truth and Order…We are now faced with a choice: live--really live—in accordance with nature and cosmic principles, or die ignominiously in darkness.” As Revilo Oliver wrote, “What do we owe the rest of the world? Nothing, absolutely nothing…This is our country. He who would take it from us, by force or by stealth, is our enemy. And it is our purpose—nay, it is our duty to our children and to their children and to our yet unborn posterity--it is our duty to use all feasible means to destroy him.”

I ask: What kind of demonic, disgusting, vile, suicidal, Satanic society allows—no, encourages—its children to be brainwashed into psychosis and genital mutilation? Is the “conservative” Supreme Court going to stand in the way? How about Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, whom the cocktail conservative class has declared to be the defenders of Western civilization? Of course not. What a sick joke that is. The Georgia Senate runoffs will not stop this. The Republican Party cares more about the prosperity of its foreign donors than its voters and countrymen. The GOP will never lift one finger to save us. We are merely grist for the mill. They’re going to “hold the line” against the totalitarian Left? Get real.

Let us not lose hope, though; the Regime is not bulletproof. It is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but rather arrogant, glutted, and unprepared to face a real threat, because it hasn’t faced one in a tragically long time. Patriots, I repeat: read Scott Howard’s excellent book, a magnificent addition to the corpus of literature documenting the dark, cloven-hooved track of the Enemy through our nation. How much more humiliation can we take? I pray that the answer reveals itself soon. Of one thing, I am certain: this is not a part of the normal historical cycle. No, it is something else entirely, something far darker. They really are out to get us. Remember each and every name listed in The Transgender-Industrial Complex. It might come in handy someday.

It is often said that the Left is an ouroboros, a circular firing squad, a purity spiral that will eventually disintegrate amidst savage infighting. This is probably true, but they will remain united so long as there exists one unreconstructed white man in America—and probably as long as there exist any whites in America. The situation most closely approximates the temporary coalescence of the disparate elements of the postwar American Right against the Soviet menace; as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, a brief internecine battle resulted in the neoconservatives, scarcely a generation removed from their Trotskyist fathers, hijacking the Right for their own nefarious ends.
 
The Enemy sees in black and white, with no gradations; take the ongoing censorship of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, for example. The book demonstrates that the burgeoning phenomenon of transgenderism among American youth is a textbook case of social contagion, but its argument is painstakingly limited only to argue that more scrutiny be given where children entertain these life-ruining decisions. Ms. Shrier is most emphatically not anti-transgender; in fact, she supports the barbaric practice of “gender reassignment surgery” for adults. That she raises concerns that children are making these decisions with nothing but encouragement from adults who should know better has made her a figure of hatred from the unhinged Left. Even the slightest divergence from the present and ever-shifting orthodoxy is enough to garner “undesirable” status.
 
Further fueling the new Bolshevism is the knowledge that, at least for the time being, the footsoldiers of the corporatocracy can operate with near-total impunity. Middle-American patriots are a stateless people, with little to no representation in our government. Each spot of hope, such as the Barr/Durham probe of the Russia hoax, is eventually dashed as yet another Deep State cleanup operation. Until the entire federal bureaucracy is purged, this will continue.
 
I remain very optimistic that President Trump will emerge victorious from this color revolution, surely the most brazen coup attempt in American history. What comes next? Another four years of a ceaselessly shrieking media parroting the party line that Donald Trump is “illegitimate.” At first glance, this seems like nothing new. Far from it—indeed, the new “illegitimacy” is something else entirely.
 
For much of President Trump’s first term, the totalitarian Left had an external bogeyman in which it could invest all of its bile: Russia. Yes, the ruling class certainly disgorged its seething contempt for the common Middle-American man, a hatred which has festered for decades. Yes, this revulsion from above often translated into savage violence from below, directed at Trump supporters and other whites who do not hate themselves by the coalition of the damned that now constitutes the Democrat Party.
 
Yet in all of this, Leftist leaders still indulged in false appeals to the Constitution, presenting themselves as the true guarantors of a mythical, egalitarian Founding woven by neoconservative court historians, with American history rewritten as a long march toward sodomite marriage, transgender children, and the replacement of the Historic American Nation.

Now, assuming that the coup is defeated, these Leftist appeals to an ahistorical, bastardized Constitution will stop. The external “Russia” will now be directed inwards, fully at the American patriots who voted for Donald Trump and at the system of government that arrested their Great Reset—at least for now. The bastard “Constitution” will cease to be the valiant barrier to a foreign actor, and the real Constitution will be the menace that must be annihilated. Thus, I suspect that the ruling class will drop all pretense of its independence from the terrorists of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and begin to call and act more forcefully for the destruction of our nation and its people.
 
Remember: The Enemy already tells us that we are an “illegitimate” people, that we do not belong here, that this is not our nation anymore, that it was never ours. Native Europeans are told the same in their home countries. Where, then, are whites supposed to go? The answer requires no divination. The new Bolsheviks will take their coming defeat as proof that they must escalate their tactics. There will be blood. Meanwhile, the liquidation of the benighted, deplorable American kulak rolls on.

The Leftist political violence that has engulfed the disintegrating American nation for much of the past year traces its origin on the North American continent to the infernal life of the original American terrorist, John Brown. Like the terrorists of today who prey upon ordinary, everyday patriots, John Brown enjoyed the financial and media support of all of the leading lights of the North, who hailed the murderous maniac as a hero of “the people.” The grisly career of John Brown began in 1856, with the massacre of five innocents along the banks of Pottawatomie Creek as part of the paroxysm of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and met its end with the abortive raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
​
The cabal that armed, financed, and advised the terrorist was the Secret Six: The Unitarian (i.e., apostate) “Reverends” Theodore Parker and Thomas Higginson, the physician Samuel Howe, the industrialist George Stearns, the “social scientist” Franklin Sanborn, and the multimillionaire Gerrit Smith, the profligate heir to a partner of John Astor. These wealthy, influential, and—above all—fanatical abolitionists were animated by one purpose: to destroy the South and remake it in their image. When their efforts led “not only to bloody murder, but to a great…war, they were praised as patriots and humanitarians…But they really contemptible men who hired an assassin, armed a murderer, supported secret crime in the name of compassion, and dealt their country a terrible blow while claiming the motives of angels.”

​Religious apostasy combined with political fervor in the North to forge the new faith of militant abolitionism. New England was long a hotbed of heresy, as the grandchildren of the Puritans drifted into Unitarianism, denying the divinity of Jesus Christ and openly scorning the inerrancy of the Scripture, deconstructing the Word of God into tattered “mountains of footnotes, denials, and arguments.” Abolitionism infused with Unitarianism cloaked itself in the language of Christian rhetoric, in which slavery was rendered a “sin,” and Southerners incorrigible, unrepentant “sinners,” fit for nothing short of the fires of Hell.

The “Reverend” Theodore Parker, so far afield that even the theological liberals of the Boston scene ostracized him, began delivering heretical sermons at the Melodeon theater; his “Free Church” attracted hundreds of attendees every week, including Samuel Howe, his wife Julia Ward, and future Radical Senator Charles Sumner. In May, 1854, Parker, Howe, Thomas Higginson, and several others, including Wendell Phillips, orchestrated a violent, frenzied mob and led an assault on the Boston Courthouse to attempt to free a fugitive slave who had just been arrested. The men put their considerable oratorical skill to raise the temperature. Phillips cried, “The question is…whether Virginia conquers Massachusetts!” Parker continued, “Fellow subjects of Virginia!” The crowd echoed with resounding shouts of “No! Never!” A Court officer was murdered in the melee that ensued.

The destruction and reconstruction of the South, the last bastion of traditional America, became a crusade of religious dimensions. The South simmered “under a wave of denigration that issued from hundreds of Northern presses and hundreds more lecture platforms. The South’s culture and religion were denied, its classes mocked, its heritage and accomplishments ignored. Millions of Northerners regarded the South as a region of nightmare and evil.” Southern anger rightfully increased in proportion with “a Northern barrage that insisted the South revolutionize itself, dislocate its economy, and change its pattern of relations between the races—all to please the consciences of men in another region who would suffer no pain, loss, or change of status.”

The Constitution, abolitionists held, “was a lawyer’s contract that claimed no higher moral law than its managers, who represented themselves as reflecting the will of the people. Since such a will was undefined and indefinable, lawyers made up the rules and procedures of government as they went along, within limits that were often ignored, slyly subverted, or poorly guarded.” Though this is a salient point, especially with regards to the past century of constitutional abrogation and subversion, the abolitionists, just as Leftists today, really meant that the American system of government was ripe for the picking by anyone who cared to seize the initiative.

With the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in which the Missouri Compromise was overturned in favor of the principle of determining the status of slavery in the new territories on the basis of popular sovereignty, the Yankee Eli Thayer organized the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, the first of many organized bodies with the goal of pumping Northerners into the new State in order to use “squatter sovereignty” to ensure that Kansas would be a “free” State. Senator David Atchison, in large part responsible for moving Senator Stephen Douglas and President Franklin Pierce to support the Act, was understandably furious at the abolitionists’ brazen efforts to subvert the legislation that he had crafted so painstakingly.

Senator Atchison thus organized the Southern response, emulating the very tactics of their Northern adversaries. Missourians began inundating Kansas in order to seize the territorial government first. Due to their geographic proximity, they initially succeeded, though Kansas would eventually be officially admitted to the Union as a “free” State in early 1861, after the South had withdrawn its leaders from the Yankee Congress—and after Northern immigrants demographically overtook the Southern settlers, with Yankees constituting nearly ninety percent of the new settlers by 1857. For now, at least, Southerners overwhelmed the territorial elections, treating the event as a classic “romp, complete with rallies, buckboards, costumes, whiskey, shooting matches, and…parades. In the process, the thousands that poured across the border whooped and shouted…and defied…the territorial Governor to undo the election results.” Even without the invasion from Missouri, the Southern contingent would have won, having settled Kansas first.

The stakes of this conflict cannot be overstated; as immigrants filled the North, as the North conquered the West, as Northern industrial capitalism burgeoned, Southerners bore witness to their declining influence in the corridors of power. If more “free” States were admitted, “the precarious balance of power maintained since the Missouri Compromise of 1820 would tilt, and the South would inevitably become helpless against Northern votes.” Dixie thus moved inexorably “toward the condition of a garrison state in its own nation.” Senator John C. Calhoun understood that any shift in power against the South would be accompanied by a reinterpretation of the Constitution, the emancipation of slaves, and “the overthrow of Southern whites.” He warned that “in the hours of abolitionist triumph, the blacks would be raised to favor, office and power. The South would then become the abode of disorder, anarchy, and wretchedness.” It would not be long before Reconstruction proved the prescience of his dire warnings.

Northern abolitionists believed that only one avenue was left to their dark designs: political terrorism. There was precedent: within eight months of the launch of William Garrison’s Liberator, Nat Turner led his horde to massacre at least 57 whites in Southampton County, Virginia, shocking Southerners to their core at “the realization that men of their own race, in their own country, would consign them to death at the hands of another race.” By the 1850s, abolitionists had begun openly calling for Southern blood, “for sacrifices in the name of liberty” and in the name of their heretical god. The leaders of the Emigrant Aid Society, an umbrella organization with innumerable branches, started funneling arms into Kansas. Naturally, the territory rapidly degenerated into horrific violence that lasted for years thereafter. As George Stearns said, “A revolution was what the country needed.”

Enter John Brown. On a dark midnight in May, 1856, Brown, four of his sons, his son-in-law, and two companions butchered five innocent settlers and ruined the lives of the widows and orphans they left behind. As they slank from cabin to cabin, slicing their victims’ dogs to pieces as they went, they announced themselves as “the Northern Army.” James Doyle was shot point-blank in the face, his corpse badly mutilated just after he fell. His son, William, was stabbed in the face, slashed over the head, and shot in the side, while another of his sons, Drury, was beaten and hacked to death, losing his fingers and arms in the process. His head was cut open, and he was stabbed and hacked at long after death.

At the next cabin, Brown and his men dealt a similar death to the elderly Mr. Wilkinson, as Mrs. Wilkinson begged for her husband’s life. At the James Harris cabin, which its occupants had left unlocked, this being a safe community, Brown’s bastards awoke the men with swords at their throats, hissing, “The Northern army is upon you.” Here, they took one man to the Pottawatomie and sliced him to death. One blow of the saber severed his left hand, save for a strand of flesh, as he raised it in futile defense. His skull was opened in two places, “and he fell headlong into the shallows…the chilly waters of the river gradually carried away part of his brain.” Though the murders of these innocents made no secret of their acts, nary a one of them was ever brought to justice for their crimes.

The Pottawatomie Massacre was committed amidst a highly organized and coordinated plot to drive Southern settlers from Kansas. The Emigrant Aid Society accelerated its arms shipments, with Gerrit Smith publicly urging a “real war upon the Missourians.” In the summer of 1856, a series of savage attacks against Southern settlers erupted, their homes plundered and razed, their livestock stolen or slaughtered, their families humiliated and exterminated from the crimson plain. The guerrilla war was waged under cover of night, where “settlers were forced to declare for North or South—often before men whose purposes were hidden until after the declaration was made.”

​Of course, such organized violence “could not have been possible, nor could it have proceeded, without a covering legend by Northern newspapermen, who shrouded its significance from the nation. That legend was woven and spread by a small coterie of rabidly abolitionist journalists in the territory,” who wrote florid tales of a fabricated “reign of terror” by Southern “Border Ruffians” against “Free-State” settlers. The propaganda was widely disseminated across the North, generating “a great wave of anger and indignation. It succeeded in etching an ineradicable image” of Southern barbarity. Beyond its imaginative mendacity, however, the real significance of the fiction is that “it appeared just before the opposing forces launched a real reign of terror.” Abolitionist agents-provocateur seeded the Northern presses with an endless stream of falsehoods, including numerous accounts which excused John Brown’s Pottawatomie murders by ridiculing the five victims as having gotten precisely what they deserved.

​In 1847, a decade before Pottawatomie, John Brown met Frederick Douglass for the first time, at Brown’s home. After “a long preamble in which he cursed slaveholders as bitterly as a black man,” Brown elucidated his mission to the black leader. Essentially, Brown planned to marshal an army in the Southern heartland whose numbers would be supplemented by fugitive slaves. When Douglass inquired as to how Brown’s army would subsist, the terrorist replied: “Upon the enemy. Slavery was a state of war, and a slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom.” This anticipated the later sermons of Theodore Parker, who would argue that slaves had a “right to kill” for “freedom.” When Douglass raised still more issues of practicability, Brown expressed the utmost confidence, yet happily conceded that “if the worst came, he could but be killed, and he had no better cause for his life than to lay it down in the cause of the slave.” Douglass spent the night contemplating Brown’s words. Like most abolitionists, Douglass expounded a policy of peaceful resistance; in Salem, Ohio, however, after his night with John Brown, the black leader said openly, for the first time, that slavery “could only be destroyed by bloodshed.”

After Pottawatomie, the terrorist embarked upon a fundraising tour, visiting, among others, Ohio Governor Salmon Chase, who gave Brown not only money, but a letter of endorsement. Brown made his way to Gerrit Smith, and then to his old friend, Frederick Douglass. The murderer petitioned the Secret Six—Howe, Higginson, Parker, Sanborn, Smith, and Stearns—for thirty thousand dollars to arm and provision a force under his command to “fight for freedom” in Kansas. Parker, and likely his comrades as well, saw in Brown great potential as an experiment: “I doubt whether things of this kind will succeed. But we shall have a great many failures before we discover the right way of getting at it. This may well be one of them.”

Near the dawn of January, 1857, the Massachusetts Kansas Aid Committee met, voting to give Brown two hundred rifles stored in the cellar of the Reverend John Todd in Tabor, Iowa, plus four thousand ball cartridges and over thirty thousand percussion caps. Shortly thereafter, Brown sat for a meeting with Senator Charles Sumner. In New York, the terrorist appeared before the National Kansas Aid Committee, which, despite giving him a significantly cooler reception than he had had in Boston, cautiously endorsed his conspiracy to raise an insurrectionary army and attack the South. His plan now fully in motion, the fanatic charged ahead with more fundraising.

Brown spent a night with Ralph Emerson and Henry Thoreau, regaling the transcendentalists with the tales of his exploits in Kansas. Later, Emerson recalled that Brown had said that he “believes in two articles…the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence…Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a violent death, than that one word of either should be violated in this country.” With the enlistment of these literati in his program of carnage, John Brown “entered the literature of the nation—as a hero.” The writers gave Brown a donation, as did the railroad magnate John Forbes. On another trip, Brown called upon Douglass again, honing his plans in Douglass’s guest room.

Thomas Higginson needed no convincing, and began his own fundraising drive for Brown’s army. As Higginson remarked, “I am always willing to invest in treason.” Franklin Sanborn, for his part, only disagreed with the use of the word “treason,” declaring, more aptly than he could have known, that “the Union is evidently on its last legs, and Buchanan is laboring to tear it in pieces. Treason will not be treason much longer, but patriotism.” Speaking before the American Antislavery Convention in New York, Higginson declared that “the question of slavery is a stern and practical one. Give us the power, and we can make a new Constitution…how is that power to be obtained? By politics? Never. By revolution, and that alone.”

On March 5, 1858, Brown met the Secret Six in Boston. All of the men “had grown absolutely bloodthirsty…they cheerfully contemplated the shedding of innocent blood.” As Gerrit Smith wrote Representative Joshua Giddings, “The slave will be delivered by the shedding of blood—and the signs are multiplying that this deliverance is at hand.” Representative Giddings and Senator Sumner were not the only politicians involved in the proceedings, for Sumner’s senior Massachusetts Senator, Henry Wilson, was also aware of Brown’s bloody scheme. In fact, the two were observed dining together on at least one occasion.

When Samuel Howe introduced the terrorist to his young bride, Julia Ward, he praised Brown as a “very remarkable man…who seemed to intend to devote his life to the redemption of the colored race from slavery, even as Christ had willingly offered his life for the salvation of mankind.” Howe went so far as to give Brown his own rifle and two revolvers. Around this time, the Howes visited Charleston, South Carolina, as guests of Frank Hampton. Frank’s brother, Wade, graciously received the Howes at his mansion as well. In the face of the planter’s Southern hospitality, Dr. Howe was “stricken to think that war could sweep down on such people”—especially when Wade Hampton assured him, “We mean to fight for it.” Franklin Sanborn, fellow member of the Secret Six, wrote that “it shocked Howe to think that he might be instrumental in giving up to flames and pillage their noble mansions.” Howe cannot have been too concerned about the fate of the Hampton family, though, for his bloodlust was unslaked.

Brown’s army now numbered 21: sixteen whites and five blacks. As his preparations continued apace, he stoked the passions of his men by serving them a ceaseless barrage of pseudo-Biblical exhortations about “purging the land with blood.” In time, Virginia was selected as their staging area. Though he had originally planned to launch his attack on July 4, 1859, his preparations were not completed in time. By mid-August, he and his followers were established near Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown met with Frederick Douglass once more, detailing his plan to seize the Federal arsenal and raise a servile insurrection against the whites. It bears repeating that, though the conspiracy in all of its details will never be fully illuminated, it is clear that the entire network of Northern abolitionists was intimately intertwined, and that practically every abolitionist leader was aware of and—whether tacitly or openly—endorsed John Brown’s program of mass murder.

On Sunday, October 16, 1859, Brown and his army shifted into action. They entered Harpers Ferry and captured several hostages, while a second group abducted Lewis Washington, a descendant of the American Cincinnatus, plundering his home for good measure. Among the family heirlooms stolen were a pistol that had been given to our first President by the Marquis de Lafayette and a dress sword given by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart were dispatched to Harpers Ferry, where, within less than 36 hours, Brown’s attempt at fomenting a mass slave insurrection was brought to its ignominious end. By the final assault, ten of Brown’s terrorists were killed, with another seven later arrested and executed. One Federal soldier was killed, as were six civilians, including Mayor Fontaine Beckham. Though John Brown did not accomplish his mission on that October day, the war that he had hoped to spark was little more than one year away.

Almost as soon as the debacle at Harpers Ferry was done with, the Secret Six got to work destroying any material evidence linking them to the terrorist. Several conspirators fled the country. One of Brown’s “soldiers,” Francis Merriam, managed to escape the raid, and was put on a northbound train by Henry Thoreau himself, traveling under the name “Mr. Lockwood.” John Brown’s carpetbag, recovered by the State of Virginia, contained several documents directly implicating Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and Representative Joshua Giddings. Senator James Mason and Governor Henry Wise, both of Virginia, as well as Representative Clement Vallandigham, the future Copperhead leader, knew full well “that Brown was a creature of the Emigrant Aid Society, of New England, of Ohio abolitionists, and of other Republicans. They sought to get him to admit these connections, and expose his sources of guns, pikes, money, and men. Brown said he acted alone. But the South…knew better.”

Indeed, “the North could not admit what John Brown could not admit. As in the case of the Pottawatomie murders, Northern newspapers and their readers began to avert their eyes and to deny the evidence.” The significance of the attack, as well as that of the lives of those innocents so ruthlessly slain, was minimized, while Brown’s “glorious goals” were incessantly lionized. In the South, however, Harpers Ferry was seen for exactly what it was: proof positive of the widely-held Northern desire “to see the whites of the South massacred…to impose a new morality.” As the murderer’s trial approached its inevitable conclusion, “the Northern press began an idealization unprecedented in the history of the nation. George Washington had never enjoyed such a press; Lincoln later would not be so well treated. Until Brown’s time, no American—including the heroes of the Revolution—had enjoyed such a steady series of admiring descriptions and slanted reportage as the terrorist received in the North.”

Ralph Emerson declared that “Brown was a hero of romance and seems to have made this fatal blunder only to bring out his virtues. I must hope for his escape at the last moment.” Brown was “the Saint, whose fate yet hangs in suspense, but whose martyrdom, if it shall be perfected, will make the gallows as glorious as the Cross.” After the execution, Thoreau outdid his friend, continuing the preposterous Unitarian heresy, writing that it was Brown’s doctrine “that a man has a perfect right to interfere with force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him…Some eighteen hundred years ago, Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”

When Brown was executed, Colonel J.T.L. Preston shouted from atop his horse: “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such enemies of the human race!” Meanwhile, rallies of hundreds and thousands met, cannons fired, and church bells tolled across the North, mourning and commemorating the killer’s “martyrdom.” Wendell Phillips captured the Northern mood well: “The lesson of the hour is insurrection. Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms. We seem to be entering on a new phase…Virginia is a pirate ship, and John Brown sails the seas as a Lord High Admiral of the Almighty, with his commission to sink every pirate he sees…Harpers Ferry is the Lexington of today.” Southerners “were first amazed and then driven into fury by the Northern elevation of John Brown. Revelations that his raid had been incited, financed, and armed by famous persons in the North, and that other Northerners rose to praise the terror he created, imbued the people of the South with fear—and with a rising realization that something new and dangerous in racial conflicts was upon them.”

Southerners saw Harpers Ferry as the harbinger of doom that it was. Naturally, a siege mentality finally cemented itself in the South. The people of Dixie stood alone; the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court had proven that the institutions of the Union were unable to stymie the rising tide of blood, unable to quiet the voices of demons such as Representative Giddings, now publicly and gleefully looking forward to the time “when the torch of the incendiary shall light up the towns and cities of the South, and blot out the last vestiges of slavery,” unable to muzzle William Garrison, who had, at the time of the Kansas troubles, called for the shooting of all slaveholders, and said, “Who will go for the arming of our slave population?” The ferociously violent orations of William Seward, of Emerson, of Thoreau, of Phillips, and of Sumner, the subsidized distribution of Hinton Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South, the lunatic sermons of a bastardized faith, and an endless mudslide of Yankee vitriol “were a virtually unanswerable argument that the North was preparing to destroy the white South, in the name of the blacks.”

​John Brown’s body was honored--worshipped might be more accurate—in several Northern cities on a multi-day funeral procession. In New York City, his Southern coffin was exchanged for one of Northern wood. For the duration of the tour, “the North indulged in a frenzy of mourning far greater than any ever before seen. Its intensity rose like a rocket on the day of Brown’s hanging, and remained high over the Northern skies for weeks. Buildings in Cleveland were draped in black; black-bordered poems and elegies appeared in newspapers; sermons were preached in hundreds of pulpits; rallies, demonstrations, and special prayer meetings were held.” In Concord, for example, Emerson, flanked by Thoreau and Amos Alcott, “presided over a ceremony in which poems and elegies were read, and a dirge, composed by Sanborn, was sung.” In hamlets, towns, and cities throughout the North, “militia assembled to fire salutes into the air while church bells tolled, as though for the passing of a great and revered national leader.” Soon, Julia Ward Howe would write “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”

John Brown’s body lies not buried. He marches now every day across our whilom land. His eyes blaze in the sallow, sunken face of every single Antifa and “Black Lives Matter” terrorist now working to destroy the American nation. Their spirit, the very same miasma that bestowed purpose upon Brown’s miserable shambles of a life, is captured no more wholly than by Ralph Emerson’s sneering words: “If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.”

What will it take for my fellow Arkansans to stand up against betrayal after betrayal by our Republican officials? Governor Hutchinson has decided that he is an autocrat, unilaterally decreeing that we wear demonstrably worthless masks. Doubtless, he’ll try to make the “vaccine” mandatory too. Our Governor also took it upon himself to staff an again totally unnecessary “police reform committee” with “Black Lives Matter” black supremacists whose goal is the total abolition of our police. The Governor isn’t alone, though.

Representative French Hill, of our Second Congressional District, recently voted with the Democrats to whitewash — or should I say blackwash — the U.S. Capitol by removing all traces of Southern heroes, including statues of any man who served in the government or armed forces of the Confederate States of America. That’s not all: the bill that Representative Hill has voted for will also remove statues of John C. Calhoun and James Paul Clarke, a former U.S. Senator and Governor of our great State of Arkansas. 

Senators John Boozman and Tom Cotton just voted to pass the new National Defense Authorization Act and thereby strip the names of Confederate officers from military bases. Who are they going to name them after now? Al Sharpton, as President Trump jokingly suggested? Harriet Tubman? John Brown? Nat Turner? Denmark Vesey? Toussaint Louverture? The Marquis de Sade? To Senator Cotton’s credit, he did weaken this legislation from its initial form, though this is not the point. To put the icing on the cake, Arkansas Republicans led by the Governor and State Senator Jim Hendren are pushing through our first “hate crime” statute. “Hate crimes,” of course, are selectively-enforced weapons used to punish thoughtcrime. How can the State criminalize an emotion? Does “hate” make a crime worse, somehow? Of course not. 

On the second morning of September, construction crews removed the Confederate monument that has rested for 112 years at the heart of the town square in my home, Bentonville, in Northwest Arkansas. Through some positively sinister chicanery, “Black Lives Matter” financier Walmart and its personal County Judge, Republican Barry Moehring, forced the United Daughters of the Confederacy to remove the monument. The public was told, in a bald-faced lie, that this was the decision of the UDC. Our Republican officials promised us for years that no action would be taken on our monument without a vote.

All of this merely scratches the surface. By these actions, Arkansas Republicans are legitimating the lies that underpin the entire 1619 Revolution underway in our dying nation. They are tacitly endorsing the wanton destruction of our culture and our history. Why should we let them pretend any longer that they have our backs, that they give a lick about our Southern heritage, about our American heritage? We cannot afford to send any more treacherous, spineless cocktail “conservatives” to represent us. They don’t. They represent our dispossessors. It’s time that we remind them whose State they live in. 

Why did the United States Constitution fail? That it has failed is beyond doubt, as is the how, the method by which it was subverted and enervated; the question of why, however, remains open to debate. Did the Constitution fail because it was “open to interpretation”? If so, if its Framers truly meant for it to be “interpretable,” why was there no expressly delineated methodology for doing so? If one asserts, against the great weight of historical evidence, that the Framers did intend for our Constitution to be malleable to the ephemeral whims of our inferiors, one must still ask precisely how that interpretive work was to be done. The American “Right” answers the interpretability and malleability questions with an emphatic yes, and posits an equally emphatic “original intent” for its preferred rule of interpretation. This textual originalism has always been my approach, but it is almost as compromised as the laissez faire “living Constitution” perversion.

The Constitution was perfectly suited for the Anglo-American colonist-turned-citizen, the virtuous Christian man, and fell apart when God was removed and the Anglo-American disenfranchised through egalitarian mass democracy. Then, the Constitution was readily abused. Could the Constitution have been made “abuse-proof”? No more than a people can be made immune to the evil which stains their nature. The Founders acknowledged this in their recognition that a Constitution can only be as good as the people it purports to represent. Does this necessarily mean that the Constitution carried within it the seeds of its own destruction? Could it have been any other way? Aside from reserving American citizenship to “free white persons” in the very first session of Congress in 1790, the Founding generation did not feel it necessary to take any meaningful steps to ensure that their nation would remain the morally virtuous, white, Christian country that it was. They undertook no “citizen-building” program as they built the nation. Why? They didn’t need to. Though they had their concerns, there is no way that they could have predicted the decline and fall of their proud people into a subjugated heathenism.

i recently wrote a treatise on what I have termed the foundations of the Egalitarian Regime. On two installments, the same brilliant comment was left by H.V. Traywick, Jr., an excerpt of Hamlet, Act V, Scene I. Hamlet asks Horatio, “Is not parchment made of sheepskins?” Horatio answers, “Aye, my Lord, and of calfskins, too.” Hamlet concludes, “They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that.” I can picture in all too vivid relief the dark, irradiated wasteland that “the United States” will be in a decade or less, with a few surviving soot-stained former Republican legislators muttering to themselves, “At least we still have the Constitution.” What is the point, the purpose, of this exercise, of undertaking an exploration of what its Framers intended their Constitution to mean? What is the point of demonstrating that each daily depredation on our liberties is unconstitutional? In other words, who cares? Who is listening?

We have allowed unaccountable, virtually omnipotent kritarchs (whose power, mind you, comes only from our subservient refusal to challenge their atrocious usurpations) to unilaterally declare what is or is not “constitutional,” based on a bastardized version of “precedent.” The cocktail “conservatives” who parrot the originalist line today simply uphold the last eighty years’ worth of patently unconstitutional Leftist rulings, while the rest of American history is jettisoned into the ether. We have allowed our Constitution to become nothing more than meaningless, shapeless putty in the hands of demons. Again, the Constitution failed. The Founders placed their Republic into the hands of fools who proved themselves incapable of keeping it. The only possible purpose that I can see for investigating and illuminating the original intent is that Americans — specifically, white, conservative Americans — still at least nominally proclaim to revere the Founders and the Constitution. What will they do with this knowledge? If experience is any predictor, nothing.

Aside, though, from that one limited purpose, it has proven to be sickeningly ineffective to illuminate the original intent, at least for the purpose of using it to prove the egregious fraud and hypocrisy of the ruling class. Why is originalism an ineffective response to the destruction of America? Simple, really. Because the Enemy no longer even makes the pretense of claiming that it is the guarantor of the original Constitution. The Enemy is an acolyte of William Lloyd Garrison, who called that document “a covenant with death” and “an agreement with Hell.” The Enemy does occasionally claim that they represent the ideals of the new Constitution and the fictional egalitarian “founding” which they promulgate, but it does so while castigating the real Founding and demonizing the Founders and the Framers, effectively writing them out of history. When it thus contends, the Enemy claims to be the true standard-bearer for an “American” ideal that never existed, the guarantor of a “founding” wholly divorced from the Founders, the Constitution merely a vehicle easily altered and dispensed with, each new depredation celebrated as another step along the inexorable march toward the fulfillment of this ever-changing egalitarian myth that American history has been recast as. What good does wringing our hands and pulling out our hair over original intent do when the original America is precisely what the Enemy has sworn to annihilate?

​Originalism is a failure, just as our Constitution is a failure, just as the polity soon to be formerly known as the United States of America is a failure. Our response to our cultural genocide and physical dispossession cannot be to cling to a document which was eviscerated in 1865 and whose last remnants disintegrated through the first half of the twentieth century. Our response to ubiquitous calls for our deaths cannot be to wave a piece of paper around as if has magical properties. The Enemy has tossed the exsanguinated Constitution into the Valley of Gehinnom. If the reader believes that lawyers will save him, one hour in a law school will suffice to disabuse him of his hope. The Constitution is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant to the struggle now in its nascency. We cannot return to the Republic any more than we can turn back time itself. Even if we could, we shouldn’t, for relying on the same Constitution which allowed itself to be penetrated is suicidal. What we can do instead, though, what we must do, is begin to plan for what comes next. Before even this can occur, though, we must take a good, long look in the mirror. We are to blame for the Hell that has been wrought of this land that once was ours. We must change ourselves before we can recapture our degraded nation from the talons of the ascendant Satan gorging himself on our ruin.

So-called “hate crimes” are manifestly unconstitutional, for they are irreducibly thoughtcrimes. How can an emotion or a feeling so nebulous as “hate” be criminalized? “Hate crimes” are the bloody shirt of Black Lives Matter and other “minority” power organizations, and, just as Civil Rights, seek not to dissolve hierarchy, but rather to generate and enforce new hierarchies. A “hate crime”, which of course is rarely enforced against the thousands of murders and other crimes committed by “minorities” against whites solely because they are white, is a declaration which posits that “minority” lives simply matter more. Is a murder any more or less a murder because it was committed against a black rather than a white? Of course not. To create a new category of “hate crime”, akin to the fallacious doctrine of “hate speech” which conflates thoughtcrime with physical violence, is to state that a crime is somehow more invidious because it was committed with a motive that the Regime deems improper. The first federal “hate crime” statute was included in Title I of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, codified as 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2), permitting federal prosecution of “whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, by force or threat of force willfully injures, intimidates or interferes with, or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with…any person because of his race, color, religion or national origin and because he is or has been” engaged in any of six defined protected activities, which encompass most human activity. In 2009, President Barack Hussein Obama enacted the “Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act”, attached as a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2010. This law, codified as 18 U.S.C. § 249, expanded the aforementioned provision by defining “hate crimes” as not only “offenses involving actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin”, but also “offenses involving actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.” The circumstances which activate the statute were just as, if not more, comprehensive as the Civil Rights Act had been. Leaving aside the fact that Matthew Shepard was killed as the result of a drug feud, not because of his proclivity for sodomy, this law is even more ominous in its ramifications than the first federal “hate crime” statute had been. The expanded law has been challenged twice to date; the first challenge was dismissed, and the second occurred in United States v. Hatch, wherein the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a man’s conviction under the statute, citing Supreme Court precedent involving the Thirteenth Amendment. From whence did Congress’ power to create “hate crimes” arise?

The Thirteenth Amendment states very simply that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”, and that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” That is it — slavery and involuntary servitude. Some judicial revisionists have argued that a handful of members of Congress appealed to the Thirteenth Amendment ban on “slavery” for their constitutional authority to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but this was vigorously opposed. The Radical Senator Henry Wilson said that the Thirteenth Amendment “was never understood by any man in the Senate or House to confer upon Congress the right to prescribe or regulate the suffrage in any State…If [that] had been supposed…the Thirteenth Amendment would never have passed the Congress, never have received the sanction of the States.” Republicans generally agreed that suffrage was not a “natural” or “fundamental” right, and emancipation was targeted only at the vitalization of fundamental, not political rights. In fact, Berger noted that “considerable impetus to the Fourteenth Amendment was given by [Representative] Bingham’s insistence that there was no constitutional authority for the Civil Rights Bill and that an Amendment was required…the fact that Congress went on to enact the Fourteenth Amendment refutes the view that the Thirteenth Amendment was conceived to be ‘open-ended’, to authorize legislation going beyond emancipation.”

Following a by now all too familiar course, the Supreme Court expanded the Thirteenth Amendment by reading into it nonexistent language. The Civil Rights Cases deemed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional with respect to its attempt to apply the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to allow blacks “equal enjoyment” of public accommodations, i.e., private businesses and individuals. Justice Bradley wrote that Congress had the power to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment by passing “all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States”, “for the obliteration and prevention of slavery with all its badges and incidents.” The Thirteenth Amendment was drafted to “eradicate all forms and incidents of slavery and involuntary servitude”; unlike the Fourteenth Amendment, which could only be employed against State actors, the Thirteenth was necessarily targeted at private actors. Bradley did, however, make sure to state that “it would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theatre, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business.”

Indeed, Bradley expressly restricted his unnecessary “badges and incidents” conception. He wrote that “when a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights…are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected. There were thousands of free colored people in this country before the abolition of slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of life, liberty, and property the same as white citizens; yet no one, at that time, thought that it was any invasion of his personal status as a freeman because he was not admitted to all the privileges enjoyed by white men, or because he was subjected to discriminations in the enjoyment of [public accommodations]. Mere discriminations on account of race or color were not regarded as badges of slavery.” The Court affirmed this again in Plessy v. Ferguson, where Justice Henry Brown dismissed the idea that segregation conflicted with the Thirteenth Amendment. In his words, “that it does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment…is too clear for argument. Slavery implies involuntary servitude — a state of bondage; the ownership of mankind as a chattel, or at least the control of the labor…of one man for the benefit of another, and the absence of a legal right to the disposal of his own person [and] property…A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races — a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color — has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude.”

The Court injected a world of new meanings into the Thirteenth Amendment in 1968 with its decision in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company. The Court, after a duplicitous and cherry-picked account of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments’ legislative histories, held that it was a “badge or incident of slavery” for a party to refuse to sell his home to blacks because of their race, conferring extensive deference upon Congress to define “badges or incidents of slavery.” Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “Surely Congress has the power under the Thirteenth Amendment rationally to determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery, and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation. Nor can we say that the determination Congress has made is an irrational one.” He continued that a man would be “reduced to slavery” if he was barred from purchasing any property on account of his race. The right of “property” guaranteed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and its constitutional vehicle, the Fourteenth Amendment, was construed to mean that blacks had the right to purchase anything that a white might be able to. This is, as we have seen, completely contrary to the explicit statements by the framers in the Thirty-Ninth Congress; however, assuming that Bradley’s “badges or incidents” expansion of the Thirteenth Amendment is valid — which it is most certainly not — this construction of the fundamental “property” right is at least grounded in some form of rational logic.

As the adage goes, if you give a mouse a cookie…The Court’s holding in Jones, giving Congress the power to “rationally” define the “badges or incidents of slavery”, was a foot in the door through which the deluge now pours. As aforementioned, the newest version of the federal “hate crime” statute was challenged in United States v. Hatch, where the Tenth Circuit upheld a man’s conviction for branding a swastika on the arm of a developmentally disabled Navajo man under the statute, affirming that indeed, Congress has the power to pass legislation targeted at whatever it chooses to define as the “badges or incidents of slavery.” The Tenth Circuit concluded that Congress’ authority to enact the “hate crime” statute rested on the Thirteenth Amendment, and that “Congress rationally determined that racially motivated violence is a badge or incident of slavery against which it may legislate through its power to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment.” Does that seem “rational” to you? The judiciary has presupposed that one must be “irrational” to argue otherwise. It is worth noting the logical contradiction whereby the Thirteenth Amendment, in its new “badges or incidents” expansion, has been applied to “all races, not just those that had been subject to slavery in the United States.” And so, we are presented with yet another example of the fact that whatever the Regime wishes is “constitutionalized” by reading new doctrines into old words with highly limited meanings; the framers of these Amendments, along with the Framers of the Constitution, shudder in their graves. 

​We have now traced the Egalitarian Regime to two of its three major foundations, only to find that those foundations are cracked, poured in quicksand. The basis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which reorganized American society, was a facially fraudulent misconstruction of the word “commerce”, whereby everything that might conceivably have some relation to economic activity was deemed to fall under the power of Congress. In other words, the Civil Rights Act was then and is now unconstitutional. Congress had no power to enact it. The basis of Brown v. Board of Education, which transformed American life and by any honest analysis destroyed the American public-school system, as well as Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, and essentially every single “legal” achievement of Regime goals, was an equally specious, though more elaborate, judicial revision through “interpretation” of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is itself unconstitutional. As we have seen, even if we were to put aside the fact of its unconstitutionality, the uses and meanings to which the Amendment has been put are nakedly the opposite of what its framers intended. Our nation was thus stolen from us while we slept. We enacted no constitutional Amendment to initiate these enormous changes in our lives; indeed, the Regime used the judiciary to do so specifically in order to circumvent that amendment process. We have simply taken it on faith that the Supreme Court has the power and the intention to divine “what the Constitution means.” In reality, the Regime has rewritten the United States Constitution, such that it no longer retains any semblance of its original meaning. It is our solemn obligation to interrogate the source of the powers claimed. We may now conclude that there isn’t any. Now is the time to take back our Constitution, and thus to take back our nation — this is the first step in dismantling the Egalitarian Regime.

In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton assured us that our fears of the judiciary were mislaid, unfounded even. He wrote that “whosoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” Little could Hamilton have imagined the megalomaniacal judiciary or Congressional dereliction of our present state.

He continued, “This simple view of the matter suggests several important consequences. It proves incontestably, that the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power [The celebrated Montesquieu, speaking of them, says: “Of the three powers above mentioned, the judiciary is next to nothing.”]; that it can never attack with success either of the other two; and that all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against their attacks. It equally proves, that though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter; I mean so long as the judiciary remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive. For I agree, that ‘there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.’ And it proves, in the last place, that as liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments; that as all the effects of such a union must ensue from a dependence of the former on the latter, notwithstanding a nominal and apparent separation; that as, from the natural feebleness of the judiciary, it is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its co-ordinate branches; and that as nothing can contribute so much to its firmness and independence as permanency in office, this quality may therefore be justly regarded as an indispensable ingredient in its constitution, and, in a great measure, as the citadel of the public justice and the public security.”

Hamilton wrote, “Nor does this conclusion by any means suppose a superiority of the judicial to the legislative power. It only supposes that the power of the people is superior to both; and that where the will of the legislature, declared in its statutes, stands in opposition to that of the people, declared in the Constitution, the judges ought to be governed by the latter rather than the former. They ought to regulate their decisions by the fundamental laws, rather than by those which are not fundamental.” He emphasized that, “until the people have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding upon themselves collectively, as well as individually; and no presumption, or even knowledge, of their sentiments, can warrant their representatives in a departure from it, prior to such an act.” Hamilton appears not to have even entertained the notion that the very Article V amendment process he alluded to here would be circumvented by the judiciary. He appears not to have anticipated that the very meaning of “fundamental” would be revolutionized, nor to have asked, “Who watches the watchmen?”

We must note that judicial review is not the same thing as judicial revision. Judicial review was formulated in very narrow terms, only “as a means of policing the constitutional boundaries, the ‘limits’ of a given power.” Judicial review was not conceived of as a “license to supersede the exercise of power by the other branches within those boundaries. In fact, judicial participation in legislative policymaking was unmistakably excluded” by the Founders. The Court is not empowered to “strike down” anything at all. Indeed, during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Edmund Randolph’s “Virginia Plan” called for a “Council of Revision” of legislation, where the President “and a convenient number of the National Judiciary” would “examine every act of Congress and by its dissent…constitute a veto.” Aside from Randolph, George Mason, James Wilson, and, perhaps most importantly, James Madison, each supported the proposal. Despite the influence of these luminaries, the Framers rejected the proposal “for reasons that unmistakably spell out the exclusion of the judiciary from even a share in policymaking.” Nathaniel Gorham stated that “as Judges, they are not to be presumed to possess any peculiar knowledge of the mere policy of public measures.” Elbridge Gerry concurred, noting that “it was quite foreign from the nature of ye office to make them judges of the policy of public measures…It was making Statesmen of the Judges; and setting them up as the guardians of the Rights of the people. He relied for his part on the Representatives of the people as the guardians of their Rights and Interests. It was making the Expositors of the Laws, their Legislators which ought never to be done.” Charles Pinckney wholeheartedly opposed “the interference of the Judges in the Legislative business.” Rufus King agreed that, as “the judges must interpret the Laws, they ought not to be legislators.” We could go on, as the examples cascade. Plainly, Berger concluded, “the Framers refused to make the judiciary ‘law-givers’, even to the extent of allowing them to share in the legislative making of law, let alone finally to decide on policy, an exclusively legislative function. They drew a line between the judicial reviewing function, that is, policing grants of power to [e]nsure that there were no encroachments beyond the grants, and legislative policymaking within those bounds.”

The notion that judges could make law as an instrument of social change was “altogether alien to colonial thinking.” The idea that the “fundamental” law was alterable by the judiciary was diametrically opposed to the Framers’ very intent in creating a “fixed Constitution.” Chief Justice Hutchinson of the Massachusetts Supreme Court wrote quite presciently in 1767 that “the Judge should never be the Legislator: Because then the Will of the Judge would be the Law: and this tends to a State of Slavery.” Edward Gibbon agreed that, indeed, “the discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny.” Similarly, Lord Camden wrote that “the discretion of a Judge is the law of tyrants…In the best of times it is often…caprice — in the worst, it is every vice, folly, and passion, to which human nature is liable.” Berger stated that it was evident that “no one remotely intimated that there would be judicial power to rewrite the Constitution. Nothing could have been better calculated to defeat ratification than a claim of judicial power that would leave the States altogether at the mercy of the federal courts.” Indeed, Justice James Iredell wrote of the Framers that, “having ‘smarted’ under the ‘omnipotent power of the British Parliament’…we should ‘have been guilty of…the grossest folly’ had we ‘established a despotic power among ourselves.’” As Berger remarked to this, “if this could be said of a legislature that could be turned out of office periodically, constitution-makers were even less ready to entrust unlimited power to an untried, unelected judiciary appointed for life.”

Justice William Douglas wrote in his Flast v. Cohen concurrence that “when the Court used substantive due process to determine the wisdom or reasonableness of legislation, it was indeed transforming itself into the Council of Revision which was rejected by the Constitutional Convention.” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Osborn v. Bank of the United States that “judicial power is never exercised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the legislature.” In Kamper v. Hawkins, Judge James Henry of the Virginia Supreme Court wrote that “the judiciary from the nature of the office…could never be designed to determine upon the equity, necessity, or usefulness of a law: that would amount to an express interfering with the legislative branch…[N]ot being chosen immediately by the people, nor being accountable to them…they do not, and ought not, to represent the people in framing or repealing any law.” In Ware v. Hylton, Justice Iredell declared that “considerations of policy, considerations of extreme magnitude” were “certainly entirely incompetent to the examination and decision of a Court of Justice.”

For most of its first 150 years, the Court was content with its negative “boundary-policing” function. Berger stated that “it fell to the Warren Court to initiate policy when the legislative and executive failed to act, to take the lead in deciding what national policy ought to be. But the failure of Congress to exercise legislative power does not vest it in the Court.” The Court began to conceive of itself as the “national conscience”, the “moral voice” of America; as Berger sardonically remarked, “If Frenchmen would not be free and virtuous voluntarily, then [Robespierre] would force them to be free and cram virtue down their throats.” Berger asserted that there was “not a shred” of evidence to even remotely suggest “that the Founders contemplated that judges would serve as arbiters of morals. Their function…was merely to ‘construe’, to ‘interpret’ laws, not to infuse them with moral content. Having rejected judicial participation in policymaking, the Framers were little likely to embrace judicial supervision of morals. What ground was there for attributing special competence to judges in the field of morals?” Thomas Jefferson said it best: “I cannot give up my guidance to the magistrate, because he knows no more the way to Heaven than I do, and is less concerned to direct me than I am to go right.”

Those that argue for the fictional power of judicial revision often cite Chief Justice Marshall’s notorious dictum in McCulloch v. Maryland, that “this provision is made in a Constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” As Berger put it, “Commentators at a loss to justify judicial arrogations fall back on” and have an “incantatory reliance on” this concept of the “living Constitution.” Berger argued that, to the contrary, Marshall’s words “have been removed from context…he flatly repudiated the revisory power…attributed to him…this was merely a plea for some freedom in the ‘choice of means’ to execute an existing power, not for license to create a fresh power at each new crisis.” James Madison was among the army of men who assailed McCulloch, rejecting “the replacement of the amendment process by judicial revision as an ‘assumption of powers never meant to be granted.’” To Madison’s quite valid charge, Marshall replied that the phrase “does not contain the most distant allusion to any extension by construction of the powers of Congress. Its sole object is to remind us that a constitution cannot possibly enumerate the means by which the powers of government are to be carried into execution.” Marshall asserted that the exercise of the judicial power to decide all questions “arising under the Constitution and laws” of the United States “cannot be the assertion of a right to change that instrument.” In other words, Marshall was really making an argument with reference to the “Necessary and Proper” Clause of Article I, Section VIII; we must add to Berger’s argument, though. What is “necessary and proper” in the execution of Congressional power presumes that Congress has the power to act in the first place. Furthermore, Marshall’s expansive reading of “necessary” is the opposite of what the Framers intended; the antonym of “necessary” is “unnecessary”, meaning that “necessary” is employed restrictively, as in, “absolutely crucial.”

In fact, even what Marshall did intend is still ominous, for herein is the creation of “incidental or implied unenumerated powers”; this concept of “implied enumeration” is oxymoronic to the extreme, one of the first doors, if not the first, through which the Tenth Amendment was abrogated. President Andrew Jackson saw this and rebutted Marshall’s “construction” in his 1832 veto message, blocking the re-chartering of the second Bank of the United States. President Jackson wrote that “mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered well settled…The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both…Thus may our own powers and the rights of the States, which we cannot directly curtail or invade, be frittered away and extinguished in the use of means employed by us to execute other powers…There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils only exist in its abuses…Nor is our Government to be maintained or our Union preserved by invasions of the rights and powers of the several States. In thus attempting to make our General Government strong we make it weak. Its true strength consists in leaving individuals and States as much as possible to themselves — in making itself felt, not in its power, but in its beneficence; not in its control, but in its protection; not in binding the States more closely to the center, but leaving each to move unobstructed in its proper orbit.” In any case, Chief Justice Marshall did not advocate for judicial revisionism; as Berger said, “If the Constitution is to be altered by judicial fiat, let it not be under seal of a reading Marshall himself repudiated.”

Some may read the foregoing discussion and respond, “Okay. I see what you mean, and I understand everything. But…so what?” So what? As Lord Chief Justice Denman wrote, “The practice of a ruling power in the State is but a feeble proof of its legality.” Thomas Cooley wrote that “acquiescence for no length of time can legalize a clear usurpation of power.” We have by now proven that often, what the judiciary cloaks in the garb of “constitutionalism” is manifestly unconstitutional. Berger forcefully and wonderfully argued that “it is never too late to challenge the usurpation of power; one gains no title by prescription against the government, still less against the sovereign people. Power reserved to the [States] by the Tenth Amendment cannot be taken over by ‘squatter sovereignty.’…Usurpation—the exercise of power not granted—is not legitimated by repetition.” Dante observed that “usurpation of a right does not create a right.” To disavow and correct past depredations “is to pledge anew to abide by the Constitution, which the Justices are sworn to support.” Under our Constitution, a systematic delegation of limited and reserved powers, “the burden is on a claimant to point to the source of his power — failing which, it is a usurpation.” The Founders were essentially united in their belief in “a fixed Constitution of unchanging meaning. They accorded an inferior place in the federal scheme to the judiciary, deriving from suspicion of innovations by judges theretofore regarded with ‘aversion and distrust’…They were attached to the separation of powers and insisted that courts should not engage in policymaking but act only as interpreters. Above all, judges were not to act as revisers of the Constitution, for that function had been reserved to the people themselves by Article V, the provision for amendment of the Constitution.” Berger asserted that, “until the Court candidly discloses…that it is ‘making new law for a new day’, the people can hardly be held to acquiesce in what they have not been told. They have been told that the Court speaks with the voice of the Constitution; they are constantly told that ‘the Constitution (not the Justices) requires.’ And that cannot be converted into ratification of progressive judicial violation of its limits.”

In Eakin v. Raub, Justice John Gibson wrote that “precedents ought to go for absolutely nothing. The Constitution is a collection of fundamental laws, not to be departed from in practice nor altered by judicial decision, and in the construction of it, nothing would be so alarming as the doctrine of communis error, which offers a ready justification for every usurpation that has not been resisted in limine…the judge who asserts [the right of judicial review] ought to be prepared to maintain it on the principles of the Constitution.” As we have touched upon, the very idea of following “precedent” is a sick illusion. How can we refer to our inexorable motion ever farther away from the Framers’ design as “precedent”? The very nature of “precedent” is meant to reinforce the permanent truths, the bedrock upon which our society is founded; the precedential nature of constitutional jurisprudence is inherently traditionalist and originalist. Continuing headlong into the night, deeper and deeper into the slough of despair, continuing to travel down the wrong path, cannot be following precedent. A return to precedent has to be a return to the Founding. The Constitution is the embodiment of “fundamental choices that have been made by the people, and the task of the Courts is to effectuate them, ‘not [to] construct new rights.’ When the judiciary substitutes its own value choices for those of the people it subverts the Constitution by usurpation of power. No dispensation was given to the Court to step outside its powers; it is no less bound by constitutional limits than are the other branches…it was clearly excluded from participation in the making of policy, the function of the legislature…we need to be rid of ‘the illusion that personal power can be benevolently exercised.’”

Berger brilliantly quipped, as to the distinction between review and revision, that “plainly a power to sell a mule does not authorize sale of the barn.” The judicial review that was provided for by the Framers is wholly different creature than the mutant bastard masquerading as judicial review that we are yoked to today, judicial revision. Policing the delineated boundaries of a fixed Constitution is nothing like rewriting and extraconstitutionally “amending” the Constitution. With each step away from the Framers’ design, with each new abrogation of the separation of powers, the Supreme Court has “engaged in a dazzling display of seemingly free-hand constitution-making without apparent concern for the intention of the Constitutors.” The judiciary has thus claimed for itself a panoptic power as “a catalyst of social change with judges acting as planners and even managers of large-scale intervention in social and economic life.” The Court proudly proclaims that it simply knows better than we mere serfs. We are neither credentialed nor imbued with the deep sense of “morality” that historical accident has conferred upon them. Judges, Berger wrote, “are not oracles who, indifferent to the passions of the time, divine the true meaning of the Constitution. What a judge is ‘really discovering…are his own values.” Justice Jackson admitted in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that “we act in these matters not by authority of our competence but by force of our commissions.” Berger described with aplomb the doctrine of judicial revisionism laid bare: “Baldly stated, if a result is benign, ergo it is constitutional; the end justifies the means. Against the ‘consequences’ of repudiating unconstitutional decisions…should be weighed the cost of countenancing undeniable judicial arrogations of power, the Court’s operation as a continuing constitutional convention. The view that it is too late to effectuate the unmistakable intention of the Framers is tantamount to claiming that long-standing usurpation confers title. But squatter sovereignty does not run against the people. No one, the Court declared [in Walz v. Tax Commission], ‘acquires a vested interest or protected right in violation of the Constitution by long use.’”

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Constitution is solely to be construed in conformance to the “safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people at the time of its adoption — a meaning to be found in the explanation of those who advocated it.” In Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall asked the imperative question: “Why does a judge swear to discharge his duties agreeably to the Constitution…if that Constitution forms no rule for his government?” Berger emphasized, as we examined in the light of Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”, that “our Constitution is a covenant running from the first generation of Americans to us and then to future generations. It is a coherent succession.” Similarly, Edmund Burke wrote that society is “a partnership not only by those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The words within the original Constitution, and those within each appended Amendment, are fixed with unalterable meaning at the very moment that they are written, adopted, and ratified. Justice James Wilson believed that “the first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it.” In Gibbons v. Ogden, Chief Justice Marshall wrote that if a word “was so understood…when the Constitution was framed…[t]he Convention must have used it in that sense.” In Eisner v. Macomber, Justice Holmes declared that any Amendment must be read in the “sense most obvious to the common understanding at the time of its adoption.”

In the debates of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment bequeathed us “a transcript of their minds.” The evidence overwhelmingly compels us to conclude that the Amendment was meant only to ban judicial and statutory discrimination with respect to the specifically enumerated “fundamental” rights, each of which carried its own fixed meaning — life, liberty, and property. The unanimous Senate Judiciary Committee Report, signed by the Senators who had voted for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth, or “Reconstruction” Amendments, stated thus: “In construing the Constitution we are compelled to give it such interpretation as will secure the result which was intended to be accomplished by those who framed it and the people who adopted it…A construction which should give the phrase…a meaning different from the sense in which it was understood and employed by the people when they adopted the Constitution, would be as unconstitutional as a departure from the plain and express language of the Constitution in any other particular.”

The amendment process outlined in Article V is the exclusive means by which the Constitution may be altered, “under the long-standing maxim that to name a particular mode is to exclude all others.” Amendments were designed to be extremely difficult to achieve, because of the sheer gravity of the task undertaken; it is imperative that this is so, for the alternative is the perpetual revolutionary Year Zero that the Regime has inculcated. Elbridge Gerry confirmed this, stating that “the people have [directed] a particular mode of making Amendments, which we are not at liberty to depart from…Such a power [to alter] would render the most important clause of the Constitution nugatory.” Gerry, along with many of the other Framers, believed that it was self-evident that “an attempt to amend” the Constitution by any other means “may be a high crime and misdemeanor”, i.e., an impeachable offense. Alexander Hamilton agreed, declaring that “judges who usurped power, for example, exercised a power withheld…could be impeached.” Wise words. Kritarchy far exceeds the boundaries of “good behavior.” Judicial contravention of the will of the people is an assault on our nation; merely take the issue of obscenity as an example—as the result of the Court’s obscenity rulings, unsupported by popular mandate or historical precedent, “the nation is deluged by a flood of blatant pornography and filth that the people are powerless to deal with.” From whence, then, does this assumed power of the Court to jettison Article V and “impose a solution on the people that confessedly could not have obtained their assent” arise? This inquiry is one of the most important tasks we may embark upon, for, as John Adams said, “A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the Constitution…[is] absolutely necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty and to maintain a free government…The people…have a right to require of their law givers and magistrates an exact and constant observance of them.”

Power lusts for power, as the horizon endlessly recedes. Berger remarked that “it is axiomatic that all wielders of power, judges included, ever thirst for more.” James Madison understood this, that “power is of an encroaching nature…it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” Thomas Jefferson affirmed that “it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power…In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” At the Virginia Ratification Convention, Francis Corbin said that “liberty is secured…by the limitation of [the government’s] powers, which are clearly and unequivocally defined.” In the First Congress, James Jackson emphasized that “we must confine ourselves to the powers described in the Constitution, and the moment we pass it, we take an arbitrary stride towards a despotic Government.” The Founders all of a piece shared a commitment to written limits on power. Any and every exercise of power absolutely must be predicated on a concrete source, which can only ever be the fixed meaning of the Constitution. Berger explained that the Constitution was written “to make certain that men in power would be governed by law, not the arbitrary fiat of the man or men in power”, “according to the ‘law of the land’, not by the ‘law of judges’…Our system is committed to ‘equal justice under law’, not to ‘Justices above the law.’ They were not authorized to revise the Constitution in the interests of ‘justice.’”

As Jefferson wrote, “I had rather ask for an enlargement of power from the nation, where it is found necessary, than to assume it by a construction which would make our powers boundless. Our peculiar security is the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. If [power is boundless] then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no other than the definition of the powers which that instrument gives.” That “definition” was concrete and eternal, “to be read in light of the explanations made to those who ratified the Constitution.” Following the logic of originalism, Justice George Sutherland asserted in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell that “the whole aim of construction, as applied to a provision of the Constitution, is to discover the meaning, to ascertain and give effect to the intent, of its framers and the people who adopted it…As nearly as possible we should place ourselves in the condition of those who framed and adopted it.” The Court’s contention that favored policies are “constitutional”, and disfavored “unconstitutional”, is a substitution of its value choices for the choices carefully made by men far greater than we; it is the epitome of folly, tearing asunder “the basic principle of government by consent of the governed…No power to revise the Constitution under the guise of ‘interpretation’ was conferred on the Court; it does so only because the people have not grasped the reality—an unsafe foundation for power.”

Judge Learned Hand called attention to the sordid fact that judges “wrap up their veto in a protective veil of adjectives such as…‘reasonable’, ‘inherent’, ‘fundamental’…whose office usually…is to disguise what they are doing and impute to it a derivation far more impressive than their personal preferences, which are all that in fact lie behind the decision.” Berger noted that, just “as in the case of the Chinese ‘mandate from heaven’, we learn a right is ‘fundamental’ only after the Court attaches that label.” Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 25 that “every breach of the fundamental laws…impairs the sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breasts of the rulers towards the Constitution.” President George Washington, the American Cincinnatus, said it best in his Farewell Address: “If in the opinion of the People, the distribution or modification of the Constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an Amendment in the way in which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time yield.”

The judiciary now governs on behalf of the Egalitarian Regime as a panel of self-appointed Platonic Guardians with a narcissistic savior complex. As Justice Hand said, the Supreme Court cloaks its own whims and fancies for the “self-evident” beliefs of the Founders, a totemic appeal to an historical precedent that simply does not exist. Robert Bork, erstwhile Supreme Court nominee, said that the Court “regularly insists that its results…do not spring from the mere will of the Justices in the majority but are supported, indeed compelled, by a proper understanding of the Constitution…Value choices are attributed to the Founding Fathers, not to the Court.” As Bork observed, “The way an institution advertises tells you what it thinks its customers demand.” Donald Santarelli, Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Nixon Administration, spoke quite candidly on this matter: “The Constitution is flexible…Your point of view depends on whether you’re winning…The language of the Constitution is not at issue. It is what you can interpret it to mean in the light of modern needs. In talking about a ‘Constitutional crisis’ we are not grappling with the real needs of running the country but are using the issues for the self-serving purpose of striking a new balance of power…Today, the whole Constitution is up for grabs.”

Berger wrote that “to thrust aside the dead hands of the Framers is to thrust aside the Constitution. The argument that new meanings may be given to words employed by the Framers aborts their design; it reduces the Constitution to an empty shell into which each shifting judicial majority pours its own preferences.” “Constitutional law”, the cuckoo bird masquerading as the Constitution, is “given a ‘new look’ when a Warren succeeds a Vinson…The changes can be fateful. Vinson ‘held fast to the position that the judiciary should not be an aggressive instrument for invalidating school segregation.’ He was succeeded in the midst of the desegregation case by Warren, and…’in conference at least three Justices came close to dissenting until their new Chief put on all the pressure he could wield.’…Citations can be multiplied. Should what is ‘socially desirable’ for a nation of [350 million] people turn on such accidents? Should grave national policy be the sport of circumstance?” In Oregon v. Mitchell, Justice John Harlan II wrote that, “when the Court gives the language of the Constitution an unforeseen application, it does so…in the name of some underlying purpose of the Framers…[T]he federal judiciary…has no inherent general authority to establish norms for the rest of society…When the Court disregards the express intent and understanding of the Framers, it has invaded the realm of the political process to which the amending power was committed, and it has violated the constitutional structure which it is its high duty to protect.” Berger made the quite terrifying observation that “what the ‘national conscience’ is at any given moment depends on shifting personnel and the nature of the appointees. The replacement of one or two Justices may result in a complete reversal of the prevailing conscience, as when Warren succeeded Vinson. How can we put our trust in a conscience that changes color with every judicial succession, itself subject to shifting political winds?”

The Fourteenth Amendment has thus been replaced in the night with an alien body snatcher. Undeniably, its framers excluded both suffrage and segregation. “Incorporation” of the Bill of Rights against the States was not contemplated. The Amendment, as an embodiment of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was confined exclusively to the protection of the specifically enumerated “fundamental” civil rights of life, liberty, and property, against statutory and judicial discrimination by the States. The framers deliberately withheld “federal power to supply those rights where they were not granted by the State to anybody, white or black.” “Privileges or immunities”, “due process of law”, and “equal protection of the laws” were not “conveniently vague” “majestic generalities”, but were rather carefully chosen terms of art that expressed these limited aims; we must also remember that the framers were not motivated by abolitionist ideology, or even by anything resembling the egalitarianism and Civil Rights mania with which they have been retroactively imbued. As Berger put it, “Given the clarity of the framers’ intention, it is on settled principles as good as written into the text. To ‘interpret’ the Amendment in diametrical opposition to that intention is to rewrite the Constitution. Whence does the Court derive authority to revise the Constitution? In a government of limited powers, it needs always be asked: what is the source of the power claimed?” Justice Iredell confirmed that any law, or any government action at all, “not warranted by the Constitution…is bare-faced usurpation.” The Court has battered the Fourteenth Amendment far beyond the assumption of powers “not warranted”; the litany of ends to which the Amendment has been put “represent the arrogation of powers that the framers plainly excluded. The Court…has flouted the will of the framers and substituted an interpretation in flat contradiction of the original design”, which was to leave States’ Rights intact.

​Chief Justice Warren’s chilling assertion that “we cannot turn back the clock”, Berger remarked, “rejected the framers’ intention as irrelevant. On that premise the entire Constitution merely has such relevance as the Court chooses to give it, and the Court is truly a ‘continuing constitutional convention’, constantly engaged in revising the Constitution, a role clearly withheld from the Court. Such conduct impels one to conclude that the Justices are become a law unto themselves.” Judge Hand wrote that “if we do need a third [legislative] chamber it should appear for what it is, and not as the interpreter of inscrutable principles.” Berger asked, “How long can public respect for the Court, on which its power ultimately depends, survive if the people become aware that the tribunal which condemns the acts of others as unconstitutional is itself acting unconstitutionally?” Not long. Merely witness the political spectacle surrounding the Court today, as well as the ubiquitous habit of Americans to appeal to the Constitution; we deify the Court, hanging onto every last word as the Word of God. Indeed, Gerhard Casper noted that the “American concept of the legitimacy of government is closely tied to the Constitution [“the secular equivalent of the Bible”]. Its limitless manipulation may endanger the very legitimacy that has been the greatest accomplishment of American constitutionalism.” We cannot afford to “tolerate the spectacle of a Court that pretends to apply constitutional mandates while in fact revising them in accord with the preference of a majority of the Justices who seek to impose their will on the nation.” Berger admonished that we must not let it be said of us as Gibbon said of Rome, that “the image of a free Constitution was preserved with decent reverence.” The Western tradition does not blindly uphold “precedent” simply for the sake of precedent, but rather “seeks to rectify, not to build upon, mistakes.” As President William Taft urged us in 1911, “Make your judges responsible. Impeach them. Impeachment of a judge would be a very healthful thing in these times.”

In case we thought that President Donald Trump could not get any more “confused, ignorant, and incompetent”, as Clyde Wilson puts it, we need only witness his pathetic display at Mount Rushmore on July 3rd. President Trump opened his remarks by asserting that the Founding Fathers launched “a revolution in the pursuit of equality” and “human progress” by enshrining the “divine truth” that “all men are created equal”, thus setting in motion “the unstoppable march of freedom.” In typical fashion, the President went on to repeat Abraham Lincoln’s claptrap, “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Never mind that President Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, completely rewrote the American Founding as having sprung from the Declaration of Independence, fully formed as one nation as Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Never mind that the Declaration of Independence was a work of political rhetoric, not a Founding document or nationalist exposition; as Raoul Berger explained, “to import the Declaration into the Constitution is to overlook their totally different provenance. The Declaration was a product of rebels and revolutionaries; the Constitution came twelve years later, in no small part as a recoil from the ‘excesses’ of popularly controlled legislatures.” That Declaration was also drawn by the Continental Congress, “a league of independent States, each of which jealously guarded its independence.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is doubly fraudulent, for not only does it falsely trace the Founding to the Declaration, but it also totally misconstrues that document. Jared Taylor has time and again splendidly exposed what the Founders truly thought about race. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal”, he did not share the egalitarian definition of “equality.” This was an argument by Englishmen, directed at Englishmen, an argument that was directed upwards, not downwards as some sort of levelling. The American colonists were asserting their rights as Englishmen against the British Crown, to be treated as the Englishmen that they believed they were, rather than a second-class peonage. Additionally, even if we were to concede that the Second Continental Congress actually meant that “all men are created equal” — and they did not, certainly not according to our present “individual rights” fixation — this phrase still does not mean what the bipartisan Left would have us believe, for legal or civil equality was never understood as coextensive with social equality. The Founders did, however, believe that all men were created equal, with the vital understanding that “equal” in the eyes of God is not “equal” in the eyes of man.

President Trump went on to, yet again, cry, “Not on my watch!”, as all that he promises he will prevent happens before our very eyes. He proclaimed, laughably, that he “took decisive action”, that he is “deploying federal law enforcement to protect our monuments, arrest the rioters, and prosecute offenders to the fullest extent of the law”, and that “people who damage or deface federal statues or monuments will get a minimum of ten years in prison.” This is rich coming from the “law and order” President who cowered in the nuclear bunker while America burned. Does he intend to hold to account all of the thousands of egalitarian brownshirts who have run amok over the past month, raping, burning, and pillaging? Of course not. There will be no “justice” for the vandals. He is promising to “protect our monuments” weeks after they’ve already been toppled and desecrated.

The monuments that President Trump laments are of the tyrant Abraham Lincoln, the drunken lout “Ulysses S. Grant” (not his real name, by the way), and sundry abolitionists. Trump named Lincoln as “the savior of our union”, “the first Republican President” (because “Democrats are the real racists” is the new Republican platform, thanks to buffoons like Dinesh D’Souza) who “rose to high office from obscurity, based on a force and clarity of his anti-slavery convictions.  Very, very strong convictions.” Trump continued, “He served as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces during our bloodiest war, the struggle that saved our union and extinguished the evil of slavery.” Never mind that slavery not only was not the cause for the War of Southern Independence, it was not even a cause, serving only as a rhetorical weapon inflamed and exploited by Northern Radicals.

The President hit a new low and solemnly declared that, “at Gettysburg, 157 years ago, the Union bravely withstood an assault of nearly 15,000 men and threw back Pickett’s charge.” Pickett’s Charge, one of the greatest moments not merely in Southern history but in the history of Western Civilization, a testament to the very best men that our nation has ever produced, reduced to an evil attack that was blessedly vanquished. Trump went on with his authorized history of the United States, stating that “Lincoln won the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and led the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery for all time.” Never mind that the Emancipation Proclamation was a political document that, by design, freed not a single slave and served only to retroactively graft a grand moral narrative onto a war of ruthless conquest.

Trump cited the nonexistent “Judeo-Christian” Founding (would anyone care to tell me how many of the Founders were Jewish?), and decried the “radicals would tear down the very heritage for which men gave their lives to win the Civil War”, who “would erase the memory that inspired those soldiers to go to their deaths, singing these words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic: ‘As He died to make men Holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on.’” The Leftist revolution from above (this is important to note, as the blacks on parade in our streets are incapable of funding or organizing themselves, merely functioning as footsoldiers in a plot far greater than they could imagine), Trump continued, “would tear down the principles that propelled the abolition of slavery in America and, ultimately, around the world, ending an evil institution that had plagued humanity for thousands and thousands of years.  Our opponents would tear apart the very documents that Martin Luther King used to express his dream, and the ideas that were the foundation of the righteous movement for Civil Rights.  They would tear down the beliefs, culture, and identity that have made America the most vibrant and tolerant society in the history of the Earth.”

Evidently in an attempt to pursue Candace Owens’ will-o’-the-wisp, “Blexit”, Trump’s grand climax was that “we must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King, when he said that the Founders had signed ‘a promissory note’ to every future generation.  Dr. King saw that the mission of justice required us to fully embrace our founding ideals.  Those ideals are so important to us — the founding ideals.  He called on his fellow citizens not to rip down their heritage, but to live up to their heritage.” Right, because the Founders established America to secure transgender rights and install a black supremacist government, because American history is simply a linear progression of “fulfilling the Founders’ vision” by creating the “rights” of infanticide and mass immigration. Could this speech get any worse? Of course.

President Trump announced a new executive order, to establish a “National Garden of American Heroes.” Who are these “American heroes”? Susan B. Anthony. Frederick Douglass. Martin Luther King, a Communist agitator who, at the very least, stood by and chuckled as a woman was raped in the room with him. Abraham Lincoln, the pioneer of “total war” whose heathen commanders put the South to the sword and an enduring, crushing poverty. Christa McAuliffe is an American hero? She died a tragic death, sure, but how exactly is she an American hero? Jackie Robinson. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the demagogue whose grossly inaccurate polemic Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped fan the flames that led to the War for Southern Independence. The icing on the cake, however, is Harriet Tubman, an irrelevant nonentity to whom no serious historian would even devote a fraction of a footnote.

President Trump has neither any discernible ideology nor historical literacy, and almost certainly didn’t write this treacle himself. I’m sure that he really does believe “Dr.” Martin Luther King advocated for “colorblindness”, and that he deserves to share the honor with Jesus Christ of having a federal holiday on his birthday. I’m sure that the Republicans of Mississippi really do believe that the Confederacy was abhorrent. I’m sure that Republicans in the Senate really believe that Army bases should be renamed, that “Juneteenth”, a joke almost as hilarious as “Kwanzaa”, should replace Columbus Day; Mark Steyn is absolutely correct to predict that “Juneteenth” will simply be “the anti-Fourth of July” and eventually subsume our Independence Day.  I’m sure that Donald Trump believes his speech will secure the votes of his base, just as he believes will his cynically-timed pardon of Roger Stone. None of this is an excuse.

In conversation with me on the Fourth of July, Paul Gottfried discussed the disgusting scene in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, commenting quite accurately that “after the first ten minutes of the speech, I thought I was listening to Michelle Obama or, even worse, Rich Lowry.” Mr. Gottfried noted that, “after hearing Donald’s supposedly inclusive oration last night, it dawned on me that he and his neocon-GOP advisers consider Southern whites to be so worthless (except as voters) that they’ve decided to cancel their culture. Although there were multiple references to Lincoln’s struggle for equality and the speeches of MLK, and even mention of Harriet Tubman, there were no Southern white heroes except for Jefferson (as the author of the ‘All men are created equal’ phrase in the Declaration of Independence) whom Americans were urged to admire. I also had the impression that Trump was condoning the vandalization of Confederate monuments, which, it would seem from his speech, don’t belong to his neocon-MLK version of the ‘American heritage.’” By his unmitigated praise of everything except the South, President Trump, whether intentionally or not, bestowed upon Black Lives Matter terrorists the implicit right to perpetrate cultural (for now) genocide against Southern history.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board recently said as much, though more explicitly, writing that “this current anti-monument wave degrades what originated as a legitimate grievance: the presence of Confederate monuments, many erected during the Jim Crow era to perpetuate the Lost Cause myth and advance white supremacy. But that idea has been taken over now by what has turned into a mob intent on willy-nilly eradication of chunks of American history.” Here, we see the same legitimization of the vilification and eradication of Southern culture and history, the Journal advancing the absurd argument that the horde has only just now “turned into a mob” since it has turned its attention to more “mainstream” symbols of American, though, more specifically, white history. Make no mistake — now that the New York Times has turned the horde loose upon Mount Rushmore, it will be sandblasted in due course. Color me surprised that Stone Mountain wasn’t dynamited first.

The most crucial and underexamined aspect to this Cultural Revolution is the complete absence of any sort of counterrevolutionary pushback. We are in uncharted territory, as Newton’s Third Law of Motion has simply ceased to operate. To those of us sympathetic to separatism and secession, myself included, Mr. Gottfried asserts, honestly and unequivocally, that “there can be no secession if the Right continues to show signs of brain death. Since there is no pushback the Left has won by default.” There is no organized Right, just as there is no institutional Right; the American “conservative” movement, as Mr. Gottfried has emphasized throughout his entire academic career, is nothing but “an instrument of the Left intended to neutralize the Right.” As the great Southern Presbyterian R.L. Dabney wrote over a century ago, “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.”

Mr. Gottfried observed that, “from the utter indifference of most Southerners to the desecration of their history, one might think these denizens of the Southland are in perpetual hibernation, except for barbecues and football.” Football, of course, being an early mechanism by which the worship of blacks was facilitated on a large scale, as well as an Achilles heel that Leftists use to target Southern State legislatures. We can look forward to hearing the “black national anthem”, whatever that is, at NFL games now. Do we Southrons care about our heritage? I do, and my fellow compatriots in the Sons of Confederate Veterans do, I’m not all that convinced that the rest of the population does. The Solid South was suffocated long ago. It might sound cruel, even verging on victim-blaming, but Mr. Gottfried is correct, as ever, to observe that “white Southerners have brought this on themselves by allowing both parties and the conservative movement to spit in their faces, without reacting.” We did this to ourselves. Neoconservative shills like Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott vomit on a plate and we lick it up, asking, “Please, master, give us more.” We demand nothing in return.

The White House, Mr. Gottfried continued, “takes Southern white votes entirely for granted. In fact, it has begun to treat Southern whites like Nazis while assuming their votes will be there in November.” The President “thinks he can spit on Southerners and allow their monuments to be vandalized and torn down but these fools will vote for him anyhow.” If only he could spend one tenth the time on us that his campaign spends on interests that solely benefit blacks and harm whites, like “criminal justice reform.” Will we allow President Trump to get away with reverently speaking of Martin Luther King’s “promissory note”, thereby implying that we must pay some great debt, some unfulfilled promise, to “minorities”? If the recent past is any indicator, the answer to this will be yes, though there are signs that Trump is finally, rightfully, losing the white vote; as one writer has pointed out, these whites aren’t decamping for “Joe Biden” — they are simply dropping out. In the final analysis, the President used his speech to essentially sanction the destruction of Confederate monuments and the Stalinist erasure of Southern heroes from the pantheon of “American heroes.” I am surprised that Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and John Brown were not included in Trump’s Garden. In his bumbling as always attempt to condemn the Left, he legitimated the “1619” fallacy that lies behind its entire crusade.

Although Mr. Gottfried suggests that Southerners must make ourselves heard and prove that we do care about our history by writing a letter of protest to the Trump Administration, burnished with hundreds of signatories and indicating that “the undersigned are rethinking their decision to vote for the President after his insulting and demeaning speech”, I advocate a stronger course of action. In short, sans the wanton violence, we must emulate the Left. Look at how Black Lives Matter has been able to catapult the names of countless irrelevant black thugs from obscurity to international name recognition, all of whose victim narratives are almost wholly fraudulent. Our victims, the martyrs so gruesomely sacrificed upon the altar of Diversity, number in the tens of thousands. Our narratives are ironclad. We have God and His truth on our side. Why not start a mass protest movement? Why not call it “White Lives Matter”? Why not make our rallying cries, “Remember Wichita”, “Remember Knoxville”, and remember the tens of thousands of other names that people like Paul Kersey and Colin Flaherty have so painstakingly documented? Why not take up as our mantra the name of Jessica Whitaker, or the name of the legion of other innocents whose brutal murder as the propitiation of sin for their “white privilege” has been so brazenly ignored by the Lügenpresse? Afrikaner organizations such as AfriForum have adopted mass protest tactics to commemorate the memories of the legions of white South African farmers who have been mercilessly slaughtered there since the installation of black rule. We can easily do the same.

Finally, we must hearken back to something that Clyde Wilson said to me, the first time that we met, at Maurice’s Piggie Park in Columbia, South Carolina: “We must destroy the Republican Party.” As I have written (here, here, here, and here), the Republican Party exists only to coopt and neutralize any real Right before it can emerge. There is less than no reason to vote for the Republican Party, for until it is eviscerated and rebuilt to serve the interests of its constituents (not too much to ask, is it?), it is our enemy. An extension of the Trump Administration will not abate the Revolution. Fat lot of good “conservative” leadership has done the nation, with eight years of George W. Bush, one of the worst Presidents in American history, leading to another eight years of the mysterious Great Destabilizer Barack Hussein Obama, leading to the current latter-day James Buchanan unwilling to lift his eyes from Twitter to take meaningful action on behalf of his own supporters. What of those mythical “conservative judges” that the Trump campaign loves to talk about? Give me a break.

Donald Trump has proven that he is not our Savior, that he in fact never was and never could have been. To place our faith in President Trump again is to join Wovoka in the Ghost Dance. The recent primary victory of the airhead open Chamber of Commerce shill Tommy Tuberville (who, by the way, isn’t even from Alabama) over the original America First patriot Jeff Sessions is an awful portent. It reveals that the President is only concerned with his own ego, nothing more, nothing less. It also reveals that Paul Gottfried was correct: the white South no longer appears to care whether it lives or dies. As Tucker Carlson has observed, the senile “Joe Biden” is not the opponent, that role filled by the totalitarian Egalitarian Regime cynically using Biden as the first truly empty suit, a version of “Chauncey Gardiner” from Hal Ashby’s Being There. At least an open and avowed Leftist Administration, rather than the closeted Leftist GOP, would, as Mr. Gottfried suggested, “advance the contradictions of the system faster and culminate with some luck in a counterrevolution.” The coming totalitarian Left is just that, coming. It cannot be halted at this time, whether a Republican sleeps (and sleep he does indeed) in the White House or not. Rather than breed more “#WINNING” complacency, we may as well hit the gas and hope that it will finally force us to act. We might as well get it over with, for if the gambit fails, and we still don’t act, we wouldn’t have acted anyways. And in that case, we will deserve everything that’s coming.

​As we have seen, the Fourteenth Amendment cannot be said to be a part of our Constitution, as it was neither constitutionally proposed and submitted to the states nor constitutionally ratified. Even were we to push all of that aside and concede that the Amendment is constitutional, however, the past three-quarters of a century of jurisprudence has deliberately obfuscated the intended restrictive meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment by investing its specifically limited terms of art, “privileges or immunities”, “due process of law”, and “equal protection of the laws”, with infinitely expanding meanings to fit the policy goals of the Egalitarian Regime. Again, even were we to take the Fourteenth Amendment seriously as a piece of the Constitution, the past seventy years of result-oriented jurisprudence, employing strenuous mental gymnastics to reason backwards to preordained conclusions, has been patently incorrect. The late Raoul Berger’s Government by Judiciary[1] launched a blistering attack on the modern Supreme Court and its transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment from “civil rights” to Civil Rights ideology. Berger, it must be stated, was no reactionary; he had been a darling of the Leftist legal elite up until its publication. Berger had the “standard political principles of the moderate left of the Democratic party”, but, unlike his colleagues, simply had “no pretense of identifying them with constitutional mandates.”

Berger concluded, perhaps more accurately than he knew, that the Supreme Court of the United States “had been handing down decisions interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment improperly, willfully ignoring or willfully distorting the history of its enactment…the authors of the Amendment, far from contemplating a social and political revolution…intended only to protect the freedmen…the two key passages in the Fourteenth Amendment — privileges or immunities of citizens and due process of law — far from being vague and elastic…were ‘terms of art’ that had precise, well-understood, and narrow legal meanings. ‘Equal protection’, a new concept, was identified by the framers with the right to contract, to own property, and to have access to the courts.” By implication, then, nearly every case involving the Fourteenth Amendment, many of which irredeemably reorganized American society, had been “decided unconstitutionally, representing not law but the whims and values of the Justices of the Supreme Court.” Forrest McDonald, in his foreword to Berger’s work, noted that “so thoroughly did Berger rout his critics that, after a decade or so, they virtually stopped trying. Instead, advocates of judicial activism began to assert that neither the words of the Constitution nor the intentions of the Framers are any longer relevant.”

In 1985, Justice William Brennan declared that “the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.” In response to this abhorrent revolutionary mantra, we are well-served to recall Justice Scalia’s words in his Sebelius dissent: “The Constitution…enumerates not federally soluble problems, but federally available powers. The Federal Government can address whatever problems it wants but can bring to their solution only those powers that the Constitution confers.” Wallace Mendelson responded to Brennan’s statement by noting that the only “great principles” are “the consent of the governed, the diffusion of power, and the rule of law”, all of which have been undermined by the Supreme Court. Brennan’s acolyte, Justice Thurgood Marshall, better known as the lawyer for the NAACP in Brown, made a similarly grotesque statement at the 1987 bicentennial of the Constitution: “I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever ‘fixed’ at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start.’” Marshall continued that “several Amendments, civil war [sic], and momentous social transformation” were necessary before we achieved a truly “constitutional government.” This is merely shades of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who burned a copy of the Constitution on Independence Day 1854 and, in the pages of The Liberator, described the Constitution as “the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy ever exhibited on earth” and “null and void from the beginning”, and, “dripping as it is with human blood”, a “covenant with death” and “agreement with Hell.”

James Madison, the primary drafter of the Constitution, stated definitively that if “the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the Nation…be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for a consistent and stable government, more than for a faithful exercise of its powers.” The Fourteenth Amendment is the “case study par excellence” of the transformation of the federal judiciary into what Berger described a “continuing constitutional convention.” Masquerading as “interpretation”, the Justices of the Supreme Court have deformed the Constitution into a malleable and contentless open-source code, declaring that specifically limited terms of art are in fact “conveniently vague” sphinxes into which any contrivances may be injected. Rather than do its duty, solely “to police the boundaries drawn in the Constitution”, the Court has used the Fourteenth Amendment to legislate, rewriting the Constitution in order to achieve policy ends which the American public do not support. The exclusive method of amending the Constitution, the amendment process outlined in Article V, has thus been circumvented ad infinitum. The American people have been reduced to a state of peonage; the most controversial, life-altering decisions that have been made in the past seventy years — decisions that have drastically changed the face of our nation — have been made not by them, or even by their elected representatives, but rather by a panel of unelected attorneys whose power stems from pure historical accident. As Berger wrote, the Constitution “‘lies at the core’ of our ‘civil religion’; until it is changed by amendment, the people are free to govern their own destiny, not to be ruled by ‘Platonic Guardians’ who often are creatures of political accident, virtually irremovable and irreversible.”

The key to understanding the Fourteenth Amendment is that its framers were not interested in radical abolitionist goals of reorganizing society, but rather in maintaining and reinforcing Republican hegemony. Indeed, Berger remarked, “the North was shot through with Negrophobia” and was “far from anxious to embark on fresh crusades for the realization of still other abolitionist goals.” Witness the meaning of “civil rights” for Radical Republican Representative Henry Davis, for whom the Freedmen’s Bureau was “a cunningly devised machinery…that is itself a government”, a weapon to “keep up distrust and hostility between the black and white races in the Southern States…with the aid of our friends and accomplices, the officers and agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and their supporting police, we will be the cotton kings, and control the political power of the Southern States.”

The three clauses of section one, “privileges or immunities”, “due process of law”, and “equal protection of the laws, were three facets of “one and the same concern”, which was simply to secure for newly-freed blacks the “fundamental rights” of life, liberty, and property. As Sumner said, the freedman was to have “the shield of impartial laws. Let him be heard in court.” Berger elaborated, noting that this “shield…was expressed in ‘equal protection of the laws’; access to protection by the courts found expression in ‘due process of law.’ The framers…had no thought of creating unfamiliar rights of unknown, far-reaching extent by use of the words ‘equal protection’ and ‘due process.’ Instead, they meant to secure familiar, ‘fundamental rights’, and only those.” The Amendment was not written to reach segregation or suffrage, nor the voting qualifications attached to suffrage; indeed, “the proof is all but incontrovertible that the framers meant to leave control of suffrage with the States…and to exclude federal intrusion.” There exists not a whiff of evidence to suggest anything otherwise. Indeed, Justice Oliver Holmes would later warn that “we ought to remember the great caution shown by the Constitution in limiting the power of the States, and should be slow to construe…the Fourteenth Amendment as committing to the Court, with no guide but the Court’s own discretion, the validity of whatever laws the State may pass.” 

Berger called attention to a common error in judicial activist ideology; proponents of the infinite expansion of the Amendment “have assumed that advocates of a restricted construction have the burden of proving that the framers’ objectives were limited. The shoe is on the other foot; an interpretation that invades what had long been considered the exclusive province of the States…requires some justification. It is not enough in that situation that the words are capable of a broad meaning; the reservation to the States in the Tenth Amendment of powers not delegated to the federal government calls for a clear showing that the successor Amendment was designed to curtail those reserved powers.” Such a showing, as we shall see, cannot be made; indeed, quite the opposite. Judicial revisionism was anathema to the Founders, who had a “profound fear of judicial independence and discretion.” Influenced by the English Puritans’ concerns that legal meanings “could be twisted by means of judicial construction” and “the corruptive process” of interpretation, Madison and Thomas Jefferson attached great weight to the rule of originalism, a brake on judicial arrogation asserting that “a document is to be construed in light of the…original intention”, for “who knows better what the writer means than the writer himself?” In the words of John Selden, “A man’s writing has but one true sense, which is that which the author meant when he writ it.” Berger remarked that “to maintain the contrary is to insist that the reader better knows what the writer meant than the writer himself.”

The robed kritarchs of the Court believe just that; the Justices “have taken over from the people control of their own destiny, an awesome exercise of power.” The Justices have substituted their own meanings for those of the Founders, thereby displacing the choices made by the people in ratifying the Constitution and abrogating “the basic principle of consent by the governed.” This sordid state calls to mind the words of G.K. Chesterton, who wrote in his Orthodoxy that “tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.” To rewrite the Constitution by way of the invidious misconstruction of the Fourteenth Amendment is thus to desecrate the hallowed graves of all of those better men on whose shoulders we meagerly stand.

​The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended the “privileges or immunities” clause to be its central provision; the key to its meaning “is furnished by the immediately preceding Civil Rights Act of 1866, which…it was the purpose of the Amendment to embody and protect. The objectives of the Act were quite limited. The framers intended to confer on the freedmen the auxiliary rights that would protect their ‘life, liberty, and property’ — no more. For the framers, those words did not have the sprawling connotations later given them by the Court but, instead, [had] restricted aims that were expressed in the Act. The legislative history of the Amendment frequently refers to [the] ‘fundamental rights’ [of] ‘life’ liberty, and property.’” William Blackstone, widely read and respected in colonial America, defined “life” in terms of personal security, as the “legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs.” Blackstone defined “liberty” in terms of the freedom of locomotion, of “changing situations or moving one’s person…without imprisonment, or restraint, unless by due course of law”; “property” was defined in terms of acquisition, ownership, and disposition, as “the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land.” Blackstone’s “due course of law” and “laws of the land”, Berger explained, “did not enlarge…the ‘absolute rights’ of an Englishman, but rather marked the sole means whereby those rights might be diminished.” Blackstone’s formulation is important to understand, for, as Justice Joseph Story stated, “if the Framers used terms that had been defined at common law, that definition was ‘necessarily included as much as if they stood in the text.’”

The Fourteenth Amendment was designed to “constitutionalize” the Civil Rights Act of 1866 so as to “place it beyond the power of a later Congress to repeal.” By that act, “freedmen were to have the same enumerated rights (as white men), be subject to like punishment, suffer no discrimination with respect to civil rights, and have the equal benefit of all laws for the security of person and property. Patently these were limited objectives; the rights enumerated, said [Representative] William Lawrence…were the ‘necessary incidents of these absolute rights’, that is, of ‘life, liberty, and property’, lacking which those ‘fundamental rights’ could not be enjoyed. It was these ‘enumerated rights’…said [Representative] Martin Thayer…that were ‘the fundamental rights of citizenship.’” House Chairman James Wilson elucidated the Civil Rights Bill thus: “What do these terms mean? Do they mean that in all things, civil, social, political, all citizens, without distinction of race or color, shall be equal? By no means can they be so construed…Nor do they mean that all citizens shall sit on juries, or that their children shall attend the same schools. These are not civil rights and immunities. Well, what is the meaning? …I understand civil right to be simply the absolute rights of individuals, such as ‘the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right to acquire and enjoy property.’”

As to “immunities”, the framers meant that blacks should “not be subjected to obligations, duties, pains, and penalties from which other citizens are exempted…This is the spirit and scope of the Bill, and it does not go one step beyond.” Thayer asserted that the enumeration of the aforementioned “fundamental rights” of life, liberty, and property precluded “any possibility that the general words which have been used can be extended beyond the particulars which have been enumerated.” Thayer affirmed that the Bill was for “the protection of the fundamental rights of citizenship and nothing else”, no “greater than the rights which are included in the general terms ‘life, liberty, and property.’” He was opposed only “to any law discriminating against [blacks] in the security of life, liberty, person, property, and the proceeds of their labor. These civil rights all should enjoy. Beyond this I am not prepared to go, and those pretended friends who urge political and social equality…are…the worst enemies of the colored race.” Senator Lyman Trumbull, the principal drafter of the Bill, declared that it was “applicable exclusively to civil rights. It does not propose to regulate political rights of individuals; it has nothing to do with the right of suffrage, or any other political right.” The term “privileges or immunities” was borrowed from Article IV, Section II, of which Trumbull said signified that a citizen has “certain great fundamental rights, such as the right to life, to liberty, and to avail oneself of all the laws passed for the benefit of the citizen to enable him to enforce his rights.” Representative John Bingham affirmed that the “privileges or immunities” of the Fourteenth Amendment “did not add to the privileges or immunities” of Article IV, Section II.

In Bradwell v. Illinois, Justice Bradley wrote for the Court that the “privileges or immunities” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not bar States from prohibiting women from joining certain professions; to claim otherwise, Bradley argued, “assumes that it is one of the privileges or immunities of women as citizens to engage in any and every profession, occupation, or employment in civil life. It certainly cannot be affirmed…that this has ever been established as one of the fundamental privileges or immunities of the sex. On the contrary, the civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman.” If the “privileges or immunities” clause did not enlarge the rights of white women, how could it be said to have done so for black men? To reiterate, the purpose of the Amendment was to enshrine the Bill into the Constitution, and the purpose of the Bill “was to prevent discrimination with respect to enumerated, fundamental not political or social rights.” Justice Bushrod Washington, in Corfield v. Coryell, confirmed that “privileges or immunities” were confined to what are inherently “fundamental…Protection by the government, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject, nevertheless, to such restraints as the government may prescribe for the general good of the whole…The right of a citizen of one State to pass through, or reside in any other State…to claim the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; to institute and maintain actions of any kind in the courts of the state; to take, hold, and dispose of property…But we cannot accede to the proposition…that the citizens of the several States are permitted to participate in all the rights which belong exclusively to the citizens of any other particular state.”

Trumbull, along with Justice Bradley in the Slaughter-House Cases and many others, explicitly stated that “the pursuit of happiness” was understood to be synonymous with “property.” Property was, for the Founders, the source from which happiness flowed. Indeed, “property actually was more highly prized by the Founders than ‘civil liberties.’…For the Founders property ‘was the basic liberty, because until a man was secure in his property, until it was protected from arbitrary seizure, life and liberty could mean little.” John Adams believed that “property is as sacred as the laws of God.” At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison said that “the primary objects of civil society are in the security of property and the public safety.” As Anatole France remarked, “The poor are as free as the rich to sleep under a bridge.” For the Framers, “to be deprived of…private property would be a far greater and more deeply felt loss of liberty than to be deprived of the right to speak freely.” The “rights of Englishmen” that the Founders claimed were indeed “life, liberty, and property.” These were the “fundamental rights” that the framers of the Amendment intended to be secured, the very same rights described by Blackstone as “personal security, freedom to move about and to own property; they had been picked up in the ‘privileges and immunities’ of Article IV, Section II; the incidental rights necessary for their protection were ‘enumerated’ in the Civil Rights Act of 1866; that enumeration…marked the bounds of the grant; and at length those rights were embodied in the ‘privileges or immunities’ of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The framers again and again demonstrated that “privileges or immunities” was a term of art, with a specific and restrictive meaning. They deemed the Amendment to be “identical” with the Bill; Trumbull described these fundamental “privileges or immunities” as “the right to acquire property, the right to come and go at pleasure, the right to enforce rights, to make contracts” and noted that the Bill declared only that the rights of freedmen “should be the same as those conceded to whites in certain respects, which were named in the Act.”

The present obsession with “individual rights”, Berger asserted, “obscures the Founders’ concern in 1787 with the rights of the community rather than the individual.” The animating spirit of our Constitution was States’ Rights, not individual rights; the Constitution was written in order to protect the States from the federal government, with the details of the governance of the people almost wholly inhered in the States. Berger also pointed out that the Ninth Amendment is not a source of “rights” either; the purpose of the Ninth Amendment is to say that “what is enumerated is embodied in the Constitution; what is retained is not. Reservations are not grants of power to deal with what is retained…what is retained is excluded from the federal jurisdiction.” James Madison had said that “the great object in view is to limit and qualify the power of Government by excepting out of the grant of power those cases in which the Government ought not to act.” Quite obviously, the Ninth Amendment, along with the entirety of the Bill of Rights, was meant to curtail federal jurisdiction, not to expand it. Berger reinforced this by remarking that “the fact that Amendments One through Eight were meant to limit the powers of the federal government militates against a reading of the Ninth that would confer unlimited federal judicial power to create new ‘rights.’”

Notably, in the Slaughter-House Cases, the Supreme Court effectively neutered the “privileges or immunities” clause, which, it will be remembered, had been intended to be the operative provision of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court did this by differentiating between the “privileges or immunities of a citizen of the United States” and those of citizens of any States in particular, such that the “privileges or immunities” clause was only applied to the former. Justice Samuel Miller wrote in his opinion, “Was it the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, by simple declaration that no State should make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights which we have mentioned [citing Corfield], from the States to the Federal government? And where is it declared that Congress shall have the power to enforce that article, was it intended to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States? …these consequences are so serious, so far-reaching and pervading, so great a departure from the structure and spirit of our institutions…the effect is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress, in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character…it radically changes the whole theory of the relations of the State and Federal governments to each other and of both…to the people…We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed [the Amendment], nor by the legislatures of the States which ratified [it].” Thus, even the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment as drafted were deemed too radical and intrusive; how, then, could it be used for the extreme Leftism with which it has been used since? Furthermore, we must note that the Court, speaking through Miller, believed that by neutering the “privileges or immunities” clause, it was eliminating the abusive potentiality of the Amendment; this suggests that the Court read the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses as they had been written, i.e., as relatively harmless, which again belies the extraconstitutional engorgement of those two clauses in the present day.

​The “privileges or immunities” clause also serves as a window through which we may examine the doctrine of “birthright citizenship.” The “privileges or immunities” of Article IV, Section II, with which those of the Amendment are identical, was not intended to “control the powers of State governments over the rights of its own citizens.” Its sole purpose was to require that, of rights granted by State to its own citizens, “the same, neither more nor less, shall be the measure of the rights of citizens of other States within your jurisdiction.” The Civil Rights Bill, with which the Fourteenth Amendment was identical, merely meant to apply this right of migrant citizens to the freedmen; “birthright citizenship”, then, was meant only with reference to freedmen. Citizenship, along with suffrage, is a privilege, not a right. Trumbull had wished only to settle the matter of “whether the Negro is a citizen or not.” Justice Miller expounded upon this matter, writing that the first section of the Amendment “opens with a definition of citizenship—not only citizenship of the United States, but citizenship of the States. No such definition was previously found in the Constitution, nor had any attempt been made to define it by act of Congress… [Dred Scott] had never been overruled; and if it was to be accepted as a constitutional limitation of the right of citizenship, then all the negro race who had recently been made freemen, were still, not only citizens, but were incapable of becoming so by anything short of an Amendment to the Constitution. To remove this difficulty primarily, and to establish a clear and comprehensive definition of citizenship…the first clause of the section was framed…It declares that persons may be citizens of the US without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the US and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its…purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, ‘subject to its jurisdiction’, was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.” Regarding the current argument that the Amendment applies to all persons, and not citizens alone, Berger noted that, based on the records of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, “the minds of most framers were concentrated on the protection of citizens…they may not have appreciated that the word ‘persons’ was carrying them further.” In any case, “persons” were certainly not meant to have broader rights than “citizens.”

Berger concluded that black suffrage was “unmistakably excluded from the ambit of the Civil Rights Bill”, and is thus unmistakably excluded from the ambit of the identical Fourteenth Amendment. In fact, the very existence of the Fifteenth Amendment necessarily means that suffrage was not conferred by the Fourteenth. Moreover, the debates of the Thirty-Ninth Congress quite clearly manifest the fact that the framers of the Amendment held suffrage to be a “political privilege, not a civil right”, to be left to the States. The second section of the Amendment “provides that if suffrage is denied on account of race, the State’s representation in the House of Representatives shall be proportionally reduced. This constitutes the sole provision for federal intervention. Senator William Fessenden…explained that the Amendment ‘leaves the power where it is, but it tells [the States] most distinctly, if you exercise that power wrongfully, such and such consequences will follow.’ Senator Jacob Howard…said, ‘the theory of this whole Amendment is, to leave the power of regulating the suffrage with the people or legislatures of the States, and not to assume to regulate it.’” Berger explained that the issue of black suffrage was “crucial to the maintenance of Republican ascendancy…Such ascendancy, the mass of Republicans believed, was to be assured through the reduction of Southern representation in the House of Representatives in proportion as a State denied or abridged suffrage, the device embodied in section two…But it was more important…to limit Southern representation than to provide ‘that negroes anywhere should immediately vote.’”

In Reynolds v. Sims, Chief Justice Earl Warren argued that States cannot deny suffrage because “political equality…can mean only one thing — one person, one vote.” Notwithstanding the fact that Warren’s “one man-one vote” formulation “derogates from the exclusive control of suffrage that was left to the States”, as the framers had made “unmistakably plain”, Berger noted that Warren’s lofty “political equality” was most assuredly not the equality conceived of by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, Senator Garrett Davis said that “Negro suffrage is political arsenic. If it is not, why do not the free States open wide their throats and gulp down the graceful and invigorating draught?” In 1866, only five States gave blacks the right to vote, representing only six percent of the black population; another State gave blacks qualified suffrage. The year prior, three States rejected unqualified black suffrage. One of these, Colorado, was still admitted as a State; the same situation occurred with Nevada. Tennessee was “readmitted” after submission of the Fourteenth Amendment despite having denied blacks the right to vote. In the midst of the ratification process, Ohio overwhelmingly rejected black suffrage.

Most telling are the framers’ own statements. As Berger remarked, “If Negro suffrage was unacceptable to the great mass of Republicans, how can we read into the general term ‘equal protection’ the very grant they could not swallow?” Senator Edgar Cowan acidly lectured Senator Sumner that, “‘with but six percent of the Negro population’, New England’s advocacy of Negro suffrage came cheap: ‘he simply had no understanding of what it is to live in a community surcharged with an idle, dissolute, vicious, ignorant Negro population just emerged from slavery.’” Cowan ridiculed the notion that the “antipathy that never sleeps, that never dies, that is inborn, down at the very foundation of our natures” is “to be swept away by half a dozen debates and the reading of half a dozen reports from certain abolitionist societies.” Even the Radical Thaddeus Stevens said, “In my county are 1,500 escaped slaves. If they are specimens of the Negroes of the South, they are not qualified to vote.” This is the same Stevens whose “Negro mistress horrified the abolitionists” and who was portrayed as the face of Black Republicanism in Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Stevens was hated among his colleagues. No less than the lunatic William Lloyd Garrison “came out against the forcing of Negro suffrage upon the South.”

The members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress were deeply attached to State sovereignty — for their own States, if not the Southern States. Representative Bingham, in the vanguard of radical abolitionism, affirmed that “the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen…is in the States and not in the federal government. I have sought to effect no change in that respect.” Trumbull defended the Amendment after President Johnson’s veto, soon to be overridden, stating that it “in no manner interferes with the municipal regulations of any State which protects all alike in their rights of person and property.” Translation: suffrage excluded. Senator Doolittle, a friend to the cause of black suffrage, conceded that “the Federal Government had no right or constitutional power to impose on a State Negro suffrage…the right of a State to determine that question was one of the reserved rights of every State.” Stevens asked, “How many States would allow Congress to come within their jurisdiction to fix the qualification of their voters? …You would not get five in this Union.”

The purpose of the second section of the Amendment was “perfectly well understood…to deprive the lately rebellious States of the unfair advantage of a large representation in this House, based on their colored population, so long as that people shall be denied political rights. Give them the vote or lose representation.” In other words, this portion of the Amendment was written to preserve Republican hegemony by presenting the former Confederacy with an illusory “choice” — Republicans in Congress knew that the Southern States would not willingly confer suffrage upon freed blacks, so the animating mission of section two was quite baldly to deprive the Southern States, and by implication the Democratic Party, of their seats in Congress. Berger expanded upon this, stating that “most Republicans were politicians first and ideologues afterward. Not civil rights for blacks but the dreaded take-over of the federal government by the South was their obsessive preoccupation. Emancipation brought the startling realization that Southern representation would no longer be limited in the House of Representatives to three-fifths of the blacks, as Article I, Section III, provided. Now each voteless freedman counted as a whole person; and in the result Southern States would be entitled to increased representation and, with the help of Northern Democrats, would have, Thaddeus Stevens pointed out at the very outset of the 39th Congress, ‘a majority in Congress and in the Electoral College.’ With equal candor he said that the Southern States ‘ought never to be recognized as valid States, until the Constitution shall be amended…as to secure perpetual ascendancy’ to the Republican Party. The North had not fought and quelled rebellion in order to surrender the fruits of victory to the unrepentant rebels.”

As aforementioned, Berger emphasized that “the dominant purpose of the Thirty-Ninth Congress was to maintain Republican hegemony by reducing Southern representation; and only secondarily did they think to secure the ‘person and property’ of the Negro from oppression. There were repeated disclaimers of any intention to interfere with State sovereignty beyond those objectives. Moreover, while Negro suffrage was predominantly a Southern problem, reapportionment would invade long-established State practices with respect to white voters in the North…Republicans who shrank from interfering with State control of Negro suffrage in the South would scarcely have dared to impose on the North a radical reconstruction of white apportionment patterns…no such intrusion was contemplated; there is in fact striking evidence that malapportionment was an accepted practice.” Especially considering the ubiquity of malapportionment across the United States, “it is a strained assumption that by ratification they surrendered a right they had exercised from the outset, and of which surrender they were totally unapprised.” Contrary to the diktats of the Warren Court, then, apportionment is a political and thus nonjusticiable question, the determination of which inheres exclusively in the States.

To the judicial revisionist argument holding that suffrage is made “fundamental” by the guarantee of a “republican form of government” in Article IV, Section IV, we must recall the Supreme Court’s opinion in Minor v. Happersett: “All the States had governments when the Constitution was adopted…These governments the Constitution did not change. They were accepted precisely as they were…Thus we have unmistakable evidence of what was republican in form.” Berger noted that “unless some special magic was deemed to inhere in the words ‘equal protection’ [and there is not] …the evidence…that suffrage was excluded from the Amendment is all but incontrovertible.” The Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction stated conclusively that “the whole question” of suffrage was left “with the people of each State”; to reiterate, section one left suffrage untouched, while section two was nothing but a nominal inducement, “not so much a ‘remedy’ to enforce rights which section one had not granted as a mechanism to preserve Republican hegemony.”

The Warren Court, as alluded to, occasioned the large-scale intrusion of the federal government into the State power of reapportioning its electoral districts, a patently unconstitutional exercise of nonexistent power. Chief Justice Warren declared in Reynolds v. Sims that “the right to vote freely…is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.” The Founders, Framers, and framers of the Fourteenth Amendment could hardly have disagreed more with any statement. The Constitution was largely a reaction against popular democracy; as Berger stated, “Were Warren drafting a new Constitution that principle would be unexceptionable. But that was not the established principle at the adoption of the Constitution; nor was it embodied therein. On the contrary, Federalist No. 54 recognized that ‘in every State, a certain proportion of inhabitants are deprived of this right by the constitution of the State.’ In the Thirty-Ninth Congress itself, [Senator] Fessenden said that ‘everybody has admitted from the foundation of the Government down to the present day that the qualification of voters rested with the States.’”

Warren’s formulation is irredeemably problematized by his assertion that “the conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Amendments can mean only one thing — one person, one vote.” First, we must notice that Warren never once appeals to the original Constitution itself. More importantly, however, President Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, completely rewrote the American Founding as having sprung from the Declaration of Independence, fully formed as one nation as Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and instituted “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The Declaration of Independence was a work of political rhetoric, not a Founding document or nationalist exposition; as Berger put it, “to import the Declaration into the Constitution is to overlook their totally different provenance. The Declaration was a product of rebels and revolutionaries; the Constitution came twelve years later, in no small part as a recoil from the ‘excesses’ of popularly controlled legislatures.” That Declaration was also drawn by the Continental Congress, “a league of independent States, each of which jealously guarded its independence.”

The Gettysburg Address is doubly fraudulent, for not only does it falsely trace the Founding to the Declaration, but it also totally misconstrues that document. Jared Taylor has time and again splendidly exposed what the Founders truly thought about race.[2] When Thomas Jefferson Founders wrote that “all men are created equal”, he did not share the Regime definition of “equality.” This was an argument by Englishmen, directed at Englishmen, an argument that was directed upwards, not downwards as some sort of levelling. The American colonists were asserting their rights as Englishmen against the British Crown, to be treated as the Englishmen that they believed they were, rather than a second-class peonage. Additionally, even if we were to concede that the Second Continental Congress actually meant that “all men are created equal” — and they did not, according to our present “individual rights” fixation — this phrase still does not mean what the Regime has taught us. As we have seen, legal or civil equality was never understood as coextensive with social equality; we must also remember that the antebellum Southern planters did believe that all men were created equal. “Equal” in the eyes of God is not “equal” in the eyes of man. Perhaps even more than in the South, whites in the North were completely unprepared for and did not contemplate “reconstruction of their institutions to accommodate total Negro integration in the North.” We must remember that even those who were ardently opposed to slavery did not do so for any lofty theories of egalitarianism. They were just as equally opposed to racial equality, and most abolitionists supported black colonization, back to Africa. Only an infinitesimal lunatic fringe within the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party actually advocated for anything remotely approximating the Egalitarian Regime.

Let us consider a famous incident in which President Lincoln was visited by a black abolitionist group; Lincoln said to them, “Even when you cease to be slaves, you are far removed from being placed on an equality with the white man…I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact.” The Radical Senator Howard confirmed that, “notwithstanding the Declaration of Independence, it is the right of every organized political community to regulate the right of suffrage.” As Berger wrote, if there is any principle to be gleaned from the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, it is that “Congress and the people considered that express Amendments were needed to confer suffrage on Negroes and women, that absent these Amendments neither enjoyed ‘political equality.’” The Court made much the same point in Minor v. Happersett: “If suffrage was one of the privileges or immunities, why amend the Constitution to prevent its being denied on account of race? …Certainly, if the courts can consider any question settled, this one. For nearly 90 years the people have acted upon the idea that the Constitution, when it conferred citizenship, did not necessarily confer the right of suffrage.” The Court recognized in United States v. Cruikshank that the Fifteenth Amendment had “invested the citizens of the United States with a new constitutional right.” Even the Seventeenth Amendment, a great step towards the institution of popular democracy in our nation, provided that, with respect to the popular election of Senators, “the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature.” These “qualifications” were always under State control, and were left intact by the Fourteenth Amendment.

In support of his “one man-one vote” doctrine, Warren also wrote, “How then can one person be given twice or ten times the voting power of another person…merely because he lives in a rural area.” This appears to directly presage the present screeching and squalling to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College. Berger answered Warren by stating, “Given that discrimination in favor of ‘rural areas’ is historically deep-rooted, orthodox analysis would conclude: because the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments govern only ‘race and sex’, not ‘rural areas.’” Warren’s “pervasive error”, Berger remarked, was that which all judicial revisionists commit — the substitution of their will for that of the framers’, the maxim that whatever they favor must be “constitutional” and that everything else is “unconstitutional.” The faculties of the mind are compulsorily drafted into service to find some method, any method, by which their policy can be grafted onto the Constitution. As Justice Holmes quipped, “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.”

From the preceding discussion, then, it also follows that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unconstitutional. In fact, the Court ruled as such for a portion of the Act within the past decade, in Shelby County v. Holder. The Voting Rights Act was predicated upon both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; as we have and will continue to focus on the Fourteenth, we will focus our efforts here only on the Fifteenth. The Fifteenth Amendment states that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, and gives enforcement power to Congress. As we have seen, voting is a privilege conferred by the States, not a national “fundamental right.” The Voting Rights Act went far beyond the scope of the Fifteenth Amendment and gleefully trampled upon the reserved States’ rights of the Tenth Amendment; the Fifteenth Amendment says nothing about voting qualifications, nor does it make suffrage a “fundamental right.” The Amendment did not create a right where previously none had existed, but rather prohibited legislation denying suffrage explicitly “on account of” race and prior condition of slavery; to extend, as did the Voting Rights Act, this “on account of” to facially neutral laws was undergirded by an odious forerunner to discriminatory or “disparate impact.” “Disparate impact” is not a constitutional doctrine, but rather an artificial superimposition; it is the height of folly to believe that different outcomes, for example in school performance, are evidence of that great dragon that dare not rear its ugly head, the incantatory cry of “racism.” This is the consequence of blind faith in the Regime doctrine that there are no race or sex differences between people. The Regime would have us believe that if any results differ, the law, the institution, or “society” writ large must be to blame, serving merely as another vehicle for judicial usurpation and the intrusion into all nooks and crannies of American life. As with the Fourteenth Amendment, we must also examine the Fifteenth from the vantage point of the framers, best expressed as: “How can we maintain Republican hegemony?”

Before we proceed, we must again take care to state that the terms included in the Fourteenth Amendment were neither vague, nor general, nor “open-ended”, but were rather restrictive, specifically limited terms of art that the framers understood as common coinage. “Due process of law”, “equal protection of the laws”, and “privileges or immunities” each had an “historically limited content.” The postconstitutional Regime employs a “classic invocation to extraconstitutional power…to revise the Constitution under the theory that the framers gave a ‘blank check to posterity.’” This “open-ended” theory would have us believe that “the framers dared not submit Negro suffrage and the like to the electorate in 1866 and therefore discarded ‘specific’ terms, as Justice Brennan [Oregon v. Mitchell] put it, in favor of ‘far more elastic language…far more ‘capable of growth.’” By this logic, the framers were postmodernists, or perhaps absurdists, leaving us with contentless phrases that their successors, 150 years later, could invest with any meanings whatsoever. By this logic, the Constitution is an inscrutable sphinx. The “open-ended” theory also imbues the Thirty-Ninth Congress with conspiratorial purpose, positing that the framers “concealed the future objectives that they dared not avow, lest the whole enterprise be imperiled.” In other words, the nefarious uses to which the Court put their words almost a full century later were what the framers had actually meant. In a word, this is preposterous. Berger makes the crucial observation that ratification necessarily implies “that the principal knows what he is ratifying; without full disclosure there can be no ratification.”

Some Democrats at the time did fear that the language of the Amendment might be deployed for dastardly ends through the very chicanery that eventually did occur. A handful of Democrats worried that the “right to contract” incipient in the “equal protection” clause might be used as an end-run to circumvent anti-miscegenation laws, but Berger demonstrated that “to attribute to the framers an intention by the word ‘contract’ to authorize intermarriage runs counter to all intendments.” Representative Samuel Moulton explicitly denied that intermarriage was a “right”, and Berger further elucidated that, “although a contract of marriage, strictly speaking, is a contract, marriage is not in ordinary usage conceived in terms of contract. Given the stated purposes of the Bill, the association of contracts with other property rights, authority to contract could be read as a license for intermarriage only by a strained construction.” For good measure, President Johnson urged that miscegenation be specifically excluded; though he vetoed the Civil Rights Bill, later overridden, he “referred to ‘the enumeration of the rights to be enjoyed’ and noted that it did not repeal ‘State laws on the subject of marriage between the two races.’” There were similar concerns that the Bill would lead to the seating of blacks as jurors, to which we recall Chairman Wilson’s firm assurance that its limited objectives did not extend to “setting aside the school and jury laws.” Moulton denied “that it is a civil right for anyone to sit on a jury.” Representative Lawrence further reiterated that the Bill did “not affect any political rights, as that of suffrage, the right to sit on juries…That it leaves to the States to be determined each for itself.”

Opposition to the “readmission” of Tennessee on the grounds that its constitution excluded black suffrage was voted down in the Radical Congress by 125 to 12; over and over, the framers made clear that they “did not mean to confer Negro suffrage, present or prospective.” Senator Sumner, a pariah among his peers, proposed the addition of black suffrage to the Amendment and was rejected by 34 to 4. Senator Fessenden stated that “we cannot put into the Constitution, owing to existing prejudices and existing institutions, an entire exclusion of all class distinctions.” Senator John Sherman, during the ratification process, sold the Amendment to the people by assuring them that “we defeated every radical proposition in it.” To those who cite Representative Stevens’ statement that any “imperfections” in the Amendment may be cured by “further legislation” with “legislative wisdom”, we respond that Stevens was nearly as ostracized as Sumner, and that, as Berger pointed out, this call for “further legislation” is “hardly a warrant for judicial changes!” Likewise, those who point to the fifth section of the Amendment, which provides that “the Congress shall have power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article”, neglect to recall Ex parte Virginia, in which the Court held that “it is not said that the judicial power of the general government shall extend to enforcing the prohibitions and protecting the rights and immunities guaranteed. It is not said that branch of government shall be authorized to declare void any action of a State in violation of the prohibitions. It is the power of Congress which has been enlarged. Congress is authorized to enforce the prohibitions by appropriate legislation.” The judiciary is thus expressly disempowered from enforcing any of the Fourteenth Amendment. Regardless of what an infinitesimal minority of extremists may have desired, not one of the framers intended that the Fourteenth Amendment be a conferral of future powers, even if any of those future ends were contemplated — and the evidence that they were is scant at best. Numerous Radicals insisted that the Amendment only meant to embody the Civil Rights Bill, to permit blacks “to sue and be sued, to own property, to have process of court”; Berger again underlined the fact that “‘equal protection’…emerged from the framers’ intention to outlaw laws which discriminated against blacks with respect to the [very limited] ‘coverage of the Civil Rights Act.’”

We now arrive at Brown v. Board of Education, the “sacred cow of modern constitutional law.” Witness cocktail “conservative” Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, in which he called Brown not merely “inspirational”, but the “single greatest moment in Supreme Court history…the unanimity that Chief Justice Warren achieved, which is a great moment, the fact that it lived up to the text of the Equal Protection Clause, the fact that it understood the real-world consequences of segregation on African-American students who were segregated.” Kavanaugh’s entire statement, as we shall see, is ludicrous. Berger noted that the Supreme Court “had no popular mandate for its revolutionary decision but assumed the role of an Old Testament prophet, enhanced by the sanctions at its disposal.” To this, it will be argued that the Court needs no “popular mandate” to ascertain the constitutionality of a given issue, but we will shortly see that this is an exercise in futility. Leaving aside the fact that schools in the District of Columbia and the rest of the Northern States were segregated, we may look to House Chairman Wilson’s statement that “there is not today a square mile in the US where the advocacy of the equal rights and privileges of those colored men has not been in the past and is not now unpopular.” As Berger concluded, “Had the framers proposed to bar segregated schools in the North, such interference with State control of internal affairs would have imperiled enactment and adoption…Such a proposal was far from the framers’ minds, as is demonstrated by James Wilson’s assurance that the parallel Civil Rights Bill — regarded as ‘identical’ with the Fourteenth Amendment, whose purpose was to safeguard the Bill from repeal—did not require that all ‘children shall attend the same schools.’…segregation was left untouched by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

When Brown was first argued, Justice Felix Frankfurter assigned Alexander Bickel to compile the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, on which Frankfurter sought to rest his preordained conclusion. Bickel conceded that “it was preposterous to worry about unsegregated schools…when hardly a beginning had been made at educating Negroes at all and when obviously special efforts, suitable only for the Negroes, would have to be made…It is impossible to conclude that the Thirty-Ninth Congress intended that segregation be abolished; impossible also to conclude that they foresaw it might be, under the language they were adopting.” He wrote that the framers “who sponsored this [civil rights] formula assigned a limited and well-defined meaning to it”, namely, “the right to contract” and so on, “also a right to equal protection in the literal sense of benefiting equally from the laws for the security of person and property.” Bickel continued that, even with that restrictive language and repeated assurances as to its limited power, “it required potent persuasion, reinforced by the severest party discipline, to prevent a serious break in both Houses against the bill.” Berger observed that only four defectors in the Senate, as we have seen, would have defeated the Amendment. Bickel also noted later “the shift from ‘equal protection in the rights of life, liberty, and property’ to ‘equal protection of the laws, a clause which is plainly capable of being applied to all subjects of State legislation.’” In Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice Henry Brown concluded that “a statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races…has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races…The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation…do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally…recognized as within the competency of the State legislatures in the exercise of their police power.”

Segregated schools, Justice Brown continued, had repeatedly “been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of States where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.” He asserted that “the enforced separation of the races…neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws, within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment”, and that the desegregation argument “also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities…Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences…If the civil and political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Plainly, the Fourteenth Amendment was never understood to touch segregation, a point made especially clear given our determination that it did not touch suffrage. In light of this history, Berger underlined that “to import into the Civil Rights Act views of abolitionists and opponents that so plainly had been rejected, is to thwart, not to effectuate, the intention of its framers.”

Segregation was a deeply-ingrained part of American life, North and South. Plessy was based on long precedent and was “faithful to the framers’ design.” In 1871, the Ohio Supreme Court held that “equality of rights does not involve the necessity of educating white and colored persons in the same school.” This principle was affirmed by Nevada in 1872, and again in California in 1874. That same year, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that Congress was not empowered “to exercise…supervision over the States on the subject of education.” In 1887, future Supreme Court Justice William Woods affirmed yet again that segregation did not conflict with the “equal protection” clause. The Senate gallery of the Thirty-Ninth Congress was segregated, and, as Berger emphasized, “it is unrealistic to presume that a Congress which has plenary jurisdiction over [the District of Columbia] and yet refused to bar segregation there would turn around to invade State sovereignty, which the framers were zealous to preserve, in order to impose a requirement of desegregation upon the States.” The Radical Representative George Julian said that “the trouble is we hate the Negro.” Senator Sherman agreed, stating that “we do not like Negroes. We do not conceal our dislike.” It cannot be overstated that the Fourteenth Amendment was regarded by its framers to be “identical” with that which it was meant to constitutionalize, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866.

That Bill “banned discrimination with respect to the right to own property, to contract, and to have access to the courts, rights that the Supreme Court, after canvassing the legislative history, described in 1966 as a ‘limited category of rights.’” The Bill only secured “equality of protection in those enumerated civil rights which the States may deem proper to confer upon any races”, while 14A provided “equal protection to life, liberty, and property, to sue and be sued, to inherit, to make contracts. Thus was ‘equal protection’ wedded to the ‘limited category of rights’ enumerated in the Civil Rights Bill.” The framers employed “equal protection”, Berger explained, in order to “express their limited purpose: to secure the rights enumerated in the Civil Rights Act, and those only, against discriminatory State legislation. With respect to those rights there could no longer be one law for whites and another for blacks. The limitless objectives that Frankfurter read into the phrase were utterly beyond the contemplation of the framers.” Representative John Thomas said of the Bill that, “as a freeman, he is entitled to acquire and dispose of real and other property…to have his life, liberty, and person protected by the same laws that protect me…so shall he not only have the right to enforce his contract, but to that end shall be received as a witness in a court of justice on the same terms…I will go even further…and will vote for all measures to elevate their condition and to educate them separate and apart from the whites…but when it comes to placing him upon the same social and political level as my own race, I must refuse to do it.” A “no discrimination” clause had actually been deleted from the Civil Rights Bill, leading Bickel to conclude that it had been “amended specifically to eliminate any reference to discriminatory practices like school segregation”; indeed, Chairman Wilson expressly stated that “our amendment strikes out all of those general terms and leaves the bill with the rights specified in that section.” The exclusion of segregation from the ambit of the Amendment is further belied by the explanation of Senator Fessenden on its second section: It “should serve as an inducement to the Southern States to build schoolhouses…and educate their colored children until they are fit to vote.” Clearly, the Fourteenth Amendment did not authorize the Court to make its Brown decision; as we will see, Chief Justice Warren was well aware of that disquieting truth.

Brown was first argued before the Vinson Court. Justice Frankfurter, as alluded to, was eager for the opportunity to enact desegregation; he noted that Chief Justice Fred Vinson, as well as Justices Robert Jackson, Stanley Reed, and Tom Clark, were probable dissenters. Frankfurter thus decided to stall for time by working with Bickel to frame five questions for reargument in order to push the case to the next term. His gambit paid off, for Chief Justice Vinson suddenly and unexpectedly died just before reargument commenced. With glee, Frankfurter wrote that “this is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God.” William Coleman, the NAACP research coordinator, was a former Frankfurter clerk; he would later recall that his former boss “was for ending segregation from the very start.” Frankfurter arrived at his decision before even reading the case briefs, but he still agreed with Bickel that “the framers had not intended to outlaw segregation.” Justice Jackson, though he also agreed with desegregation as a matter of public policy, knew too that there was nothing to warrant “me in saying that it is required by the original purpose and intent of [the Fourteenth Amendment”; as such, Jackson promised to “file a separate concurring opinion” if the “Court feigned that the Justices were doing anything other than declaring new law for a new day.” Berger remarked that, in essence, this was asking the majority to admit that “there was no judicial basis for its decision”, that “it was acting in a frankly unjudicial way.” This would not do.

Jared Taylor has filled in more of the sordid details surrounding the Brown decision.[3] The oral arguments before the Vinson Court had gone horribly for the NAACP; its attorney, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, did not even attempt to make a legal argument. He knew there wasn’t one to be made. His case rested on the “harms and benefits” theory that segregation caused blacks to have psychological feelings of inferiority, relying on the doll studies of Kenneth Clark. Clark “reported that if he showed a pair of black and white dolls to black children attending segregated schools and asked them which doll they liked better, a substantial number picked the white doll. He argued to the Court that this proves segregation breeds feelings of inferiority. He failed to mention that he had shown his dolls to hundreds of blacks attending integrated schools in Massachusetts, and that even more of these children preferred the white doll. If his research showed anything, it was that integration lowers the self-image of blacks, but he deliberately slanted his findings.” John Davis, an attorney for the defense, “pointed out that Clark’s conclusions contradicted his own published results in the Massachusetts findings. Davis later told a colleague that the ruling would surely go his way ‘unless the Supreme Court wants to make the law over.’” Justice Jackson was wary of the fact that Marshall’s case “start[ed] and end[ed] with sociology”, and had no illusions about what was happening. He remarked, “I suppose that realistically the reason this case is here is that action couldn’t be obtained from Congress.”

As aforementioned, Frankfurter knew that Brown was doomed in the Vinson Court. As Taylor explains, “if the Court had decided the case immediately after oral arguments, Brown might have been decided the other way or at best, with a five-to-four majority that would have given it little authority in the South.” Philip Elman, an assistant to the Solicitor General at the Department of Justice, was another former Frankfurter clerk, and “was in constant communication with his old boss about Brown.” Though the Eisenhower Administration had wanted to stay out of the proceedings, Elman “told the Solicitor General that a Supreme Court invitation to comment on a case was like a command performance, and he offered to handle the case.” Elman and Frankfurter engaged in wildly unethical collusion, whereby “one side of the case…had utterly improper inside knowledge about what every justice thought, and could craft arguments specifically to appeal to them.” Taylor notes that “Elman conceded that what he did ‘probably went beyond the pale’ but, he added, ‘I considered it a cause that transcended ordinary notions about propriety in a litigation.’ He wrote that he and Frankfurter kept an appropriate professional distance on all other cases, but made an exception for Brown. To them, ending school segregation was so important it justified unscrupulous maneuvering.” The two men spoke in code over the phone and sometimes met in person; “William Douglas was Yak because he was from Yakima, Washington. Stanley Reed was Chamer, because it means dolt or mule in Hebrew, and Reed thought desegregation was a political and not a judicial matter.” Elman considered Marshall to be beneath contempt, and “wrote that Marshall made bad, ineffective arguments, but that Elman’s collusion with Frankfurter had so rigged the Court in favor of desegregation, it made no difference: ‘Thurgood Marshall could have stood up there and recited ‘Mary had a little lamb,’ and the result would have been exactly the same.’”

As aforementioned, very shortly after Chief Justice Vinson died, Frankfurter and Elman made despicable remarks in celebration; as Taylor recounts: “‘I’m in mourning’, [Frankfurter] said with a huge grin. ‘Phil, this is the first solid piece of evidence I’ve ever had that there really is a God.’ Elman writes that ‘God takes care of drunks, little children, and the American people’, and showed His concern for America ‘by taking Fred Vinson when He did.’ The new Chief Justice was Earl Warren, an ambitious former Governor of California, who saw his job not as interpreting the Constitution but as a chance to exercise power.” Because Bickel had discovered incontrovertibly that segregation was light-years away from the purview of the Fourteenth Amendment, Frankfurter simply “began to urge that original intent did not matter, and that the Amendment’s language should be reinterpreted according to the needs of the time. He reported to Elman that Warren and some of the other justices were sympathetic to this view, so not surprisingly, when the Justice Department filed Elman’s 600-page brief in December 1953, it too argued that the language of the Amendment was broad enough to be reinterpreted.” During the reargument of Brown, Marshall rehashed Clark’s shoddy doll studies, of which evidence was suppressed, and Frankfurter “wrote long memos to the other justices insisting that the law must respond to ‘changes in men’s feelings for what is right and just.’” Justices Jackson and Reed were the final holdouts, both of whom had a deep-seated (though clearly not too deep-seated) abhorrence to judicial activism. Another curious deus ex machina occurred — Jackson suffered a serious heart attack. Debilitated and in hospital, he was visited by Chief Justice Warren, who persuaded Jackson to sign on to his newly-drafted opinion. Warren then “cornered Reed, telling him he would be all alone if he did not go along. Reed, who never agreed with the ruling, bowed to pressure and joined the majority.”

Despite all of the foregoing evidence that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment expressly did not mean to touch segregation, either then or at any point in the future, and despite Bickel’s research proving the same, Warren wrote that, “although these sources cast some light, it is not enough to resolve the problem…At best, they are inconclusive…What…Congress and the State legislatures had in mind cannot be determined with any degree of certainty.” As aforementioned, the Court conceded that separate schools could in fact be equal, and that many, if not most, were equal; although this should have closed the issue, Warren said, “Our decision, therefore, cannot turn on merely a comparison of…tangible factors…We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education.” As previously stated, Warren made the outrageous declaration that “we cannot turn back the clock to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted…We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.” Warren asked, “Does segregation of children in public schools…deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” With literally nothing to support the decision but the extremely dubious and tainted doll studies, Warren simply wrote, “We believe that it does.” He continued that, contrary to nearly a century of precedent, “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and thus violative of the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because “to separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.” Warren implied that the “due process” clause would also be violated, but declined to elaborate.

Caldwell remarks that Brown “was not just a landmark decision but an unusual one. It was brief to the point of curtness: Shorn of footnotes and case references, each of its two parts ran about the length of a newspaper column. It was less a judicial argument than a judicial order…in constitutional terms, the decision was arbitrary and open-ended [and] granted the government the authority to put certain public bodies under surveillance for racism…there was no obvious limit to this surveillance…the Civil Rights Act introduced into the private sector this assumption that all separation was prima facie evidence of inequality.” Warren ignored the Fourteenth Amendment, tying his farcically, flimsily supported conclusion to the Amendment simply by declaring a connection. In truth, Warren’s opinion is a castle in the sky; the Fourteenth Amendment had nothing at all to do with the ruling, and was wholly disconnected from it — the doll studies had been the only basis for the decision. As Taylor put it, “because the Court could find no Constitutional justification for overturning the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’, it based its ruling on then-fashionable sociological theories. These theories were wrong.” Indeed, Taylor emphasizes, “it should not require pointing out that whether segregation makes blacks feel inferior is not a Constitutional issue. Even if the evidence that segregation did have that effect had been solid — and it was not — it did not justify reinterpreting the Constitution.”

Inexplicably, as if self-evident, Warren said that, because of “intangible considerations” and “qualities which are incapable of objective measurement”, separation “is usually interpreted as denoting” inferiority. Caldwell notes that the Court thus rewrote the Constitution and transformed American society “on the authority of vague pronouncements about the way things are ‘usually interpreted.’” Taylor gives us a glimpse of the social carnage wrought by Brown: “…integration orders were among the most intrusive and damaging ever issued by American courts. Judges took over the most minute school-related decisions as if they were one-man school boards. Mandatory racial balancing — usually accomplished by busing — provoked white flight that in many cases left schools even more segregated than before. Beginning in 1991, the Court eased its requirements for mandatory busing, but by then it had already caused incalculable dislocation and had turned most big-city school districts into minority ghettos.” Warren’s remark that “we cannot turn back the clock”, Berger explained, was “a veiled declaration that the intention of the framers was irrelevant and that the Court was revising the Constitution to meet present-day needs…Stated baldly, what the framers meant by the words they employed is not binding on the Court; the Court lays claim to power to revise the Constitution to meet present needs.” Berger noted that Warren “did not merely ‘shape’ the law, he upended it; he revised the Fourteenth Amendment to mean exactly the opposite of what its framers designed it to mean, namely, to leave suffrage and segregation beyond federal control, to leave it with the States, where control over internal, domestic matters resided from the beginning.”

As Taylor briefly touched upon, Justice Frankfurter wrote that the Constitution “was ‘made for an undefined and expanding future’” and “is not a fixed formula…The effect of changes in men’s feelings for what is right and just is equally relevant in determining whether a discrimination denies the equal protection of the laws.” Berger aptly replied that, “although the framers were well aware of the nation’s ‘expanding future’, they nonetheless…rejected suffrage, ‘present or prospective.’…Buried in Frankfurter’s fine phrases is a confession that the people could not be trusted to reflect the ‘changes in men’s feelings’ by an Amendment, and that in consequence the Justices had to rewrite the Constitution.” As Americans, it is one of our foremost duties to interrogate each and every action taken by the government; we must trace each exercise of power to its source. Often, we find, as we have thus far, that there either is no source, or that the given source bears no relation to the power exercised. Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee III, hero of the War of Independence and father of the gallant General Robert E. Lee, warned us to be vigilant; at the Virginia Ratification Convention, he said, “When a question arises with respect to the legality of any power, exercised or assumed”, the question will be, “Is it enumerated in the Constitution? …It is otherwise arbitrary and unconstitutional.” Justice Holmes further warned that “the criterion of constitutionality is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good.” Taylor made what is perhaps the best statement on Brown: Its final reckoning “has yet to be made, but it is a ruling to be mourned, not celebrated.”

In response to Brown, “massive resistance” in the Southern States was initiated. This is not the space to examine white resistance to Brown and the ensuing Civil Rights movement, but it is worth remembering the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, better known as the Southern Manifesto. Senators Harry F. Byrd, Sr., Strom Thurmond, and Richard Russell drafted the rallying cry, an announcement of a Solid South unified in resistance, signed by 101 Congressmen. They wrote that Brown “climaxes a trend in the Federal Judiciary undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people”, and that “the original Constitution does not mention education. Neither does the Fourteenth Amendment nor any other Amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly show that there was no intent that it should affect the system of education maintained by the States.” They noted, as have we, that “the very Congress which proposed the Amendment subsequently provided for segregated schools in the District of Columbia. When the Amendment was adopted…Every one of the 26 States that had any substantial racial differences among its people, either approved the operation of segregated schools already in existence or subsequently established such schools.” They declared that segregation, which did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment, “became a part of the life of the people of many of the States and confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life. It is founded on elemental humanity…for parents should not be deprived by Government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children.” They asserted that, “though there has been no constitutional Amendment…changing this established legal principle almost a century old, the Supreme Court, with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise [its] naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.” They stated that “this unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected”, and that, “without regard to the consent of the governed, outside mediators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public-school systems. If done, this is certain to destroy the system of public education in some of the States.” Finally, they said, “We decry the Supreme Court’s encroachment on the rights reserved to the States and to the people, contrary to established law, and to the Constitution.” How right they were.

​I have probably mentioned some form of the “vitiation of the Tenth Amendment” a dozen or more times by now. The poor Tenth Amendment is like Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree, the tree that gives, and gives, and gives, until there is nothing left to give. Perhaps another analogy is a dying man, bleeding out on the street as bystanders rush by, on their way to bigger and more important things. The Tenth Amendment has been under sustained assault essentially since the birth of the Republic, and at this point essentially no longer exists. The last bullet in its riddled body was the doctrine of incorporation, conjured through yet another “interpretation” of the Fourteenth Amendment, whereby the Bill of Rights has been applied to the States. Most of us simply take it for granted that the Bill of Rights are “national”, applicable to every person within the United States, and that it has always been so. This could not be further from the truth. As Berger summarized, “Invocation of the Bill of Rights against the States is of fairly recent origin, whether it be regarded within the older framework of ‘adoption’ or the more recent theory of ‘incorporation.’ From the First Amendment’s ‘Congress shall make no law’ may be gathered that it was to apply exclusively to Congress, and it was held in Barron v. Baltimore that the Bill of Rights had no application to the States, as in fact the First Congress, which drafted the Bill, had earlier made clear. Justice Harlan spoke truly in stating [in Duncan v. Louisiana] that ‘every member of the Court for at least the last 135 years has agreed that our Founders did not consider the requirements of the Bill of Rights so fundamental that they should operate directly against the States.’…for a long time the Supreme Court found that the Fourteenth Amendment had made no change in this respect. By means of ‘selective’ incorporation or adoption the Court has worked a ‘revolutionary change.’”

For the entirety of American history, the people “have relied upon the States for protection, and such protection was afforded before the Constitutional Convention by a Bill of Rights in virtually every State constitution. It was not fear of State misgovernment but distrust of the remote federal newcomer that fueled the demand for a federal Bill of Rights which would supply the same protection against the federal government that State constitutions already provided against the States.” The modern phenomenon whereby the people look to the omnipotent federal Leviathan for protection is just that — modern, i.e., without any historical precedent whatsoever. It is a way for the favored puppets of the Regime to have their way with the States that would protect the American people from them. This arose in parallel with the erosion of State sovereignty by such instruments as the Seventeenth Amendment, as the American Republic was incrementally pushed toward the chasm of popular democracy. Justice Hugo Black was the architect of “incorporation” in his dissent in Adamson v. California, reading into “privileges or immunities” the idea that “henceforth the Bill of Rights shall apply to the States.” In response, Berger pointed to the undeniable fact that the two concepts are wholly estranged from one another, “of entirely different provenance and [dealing] with quite different matters.” “Privileges or immunities”, as we have seen, is grounded in Article IV, Section II, “which requires States to accord certain privileges to citizens of a sister State.” The Bill of Rights, by contrast, was designed to protect the rights of States against the federal government. Berger noted that “the debates in the First Congress contain not the faintest intimation that ‘privileges or immunities’ of Article IV were being enlarged, or…that the Bill of Rights was in any way related to ‘privileges or immunities.’ And, when Justice Bushrod Washington later enumerated those ‘privileges or immunities’, he too made no reference to the Bill of Rights. To read the Bill of Rights into ‘privileges or immunities’ is therefore no more ‘reasonable’ than to read a ‘bill of attainder’ into ‘habeas corpus.’”

Justice Black cited Representative Bingham’s proposal to “incorporate” the Fifth Amendment, allegedly inspired by abolitionists who advocated the “incorporation” of the First and Fourth Amendments, as well as Senator Howard’s proposal to “incorporate” the First through Eighth Amendments. As to Bingham’s proposal, it was shelved immediately, with Bingham its only advocate. After the proposal was rejected, Bingham never mentioned it again, making no reference to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights during the debate on the final draft of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Berger examined Bingham’s often self-contradictory statements on many issues during the Thirty-Ninth Congress, and came to the unavoidable conclusion that the man was “a muddled thinker”, a “careless, inaccurate, stump speaker.” As Representative Stevens said of his colleague, “In all this contest about Reconstruction, I do not propose to listen to his counsel, recognize his authority, or believe a word he says.” Howard explained the Amendment to the Senate only “by caprice of fortune — the sudden illness of Chairman Fessenden.” Howard was another pariah, “one of the most…reckless of the Radicals”, who had “served consistently in the vanguard of the extreme Negrophiles.” Howard and Representative Elihu Washburne were the only members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress to advocate for black suffrage until the bitter end. Howard proposed his addition of the first eight Amendments into the Fourteenth as one casual sentence in an exceedingly long speech, almost as an aside; it was completely ignored by the members present, and clearly did not represent a majority, or even a minority, opinion.

Senator Luke Poland affirmed that “privileges or immunities” “secures nothing beyond what was intended by the original [Article IV, Section II] provision in the Constitution.” Representative William Wisdom described the Fourteenth Amendment thus: “Your life shall be spared, your liberty shall be unabridged, your property shall be protected.” Moreover, Berger noted, “there is the remarkable fact that the cases which followed on the heels of the Fourteenth Amendment continued to hold the Bill of Rights inapplicable to State action, without mentioning the Amendment. Oversight will not account for the omission…they would not be oblivious to the revolution worked by the alleged incorporation of the Bill of Rights.” When James Madison proposed that the First Amendment protection of “free speech” be applied against the States, he was rebuffed; the lesson from this, Berger emphasized, was clear: “That which the Framers rejected cannot be regarded as part of our tradition.” To reiterate, the understanding which pervaded the Thirty-Ninth Congress was that the sole purpose of the Amendment was to constitutionalize the Civil Rights Bill. The framers were attached to the sovereignty of their States, and indeed believed that only the targeted South, not the North, would even be affected by the Amendment. All of this, Berger asserted, unites “to repel an inference that the framers intended to interfere with State conduct of its own affairs otherwise than is described in that Act.”

Again, “no trace of a purpose to reconstruct Northern institutions for the protection of white inhabitants against the State will be found in the debates; the frequent expressions of jealous regard for [their own] State sovereignty repel such a purpose.” Justice Black’s so-called “incorporation” was never discussed in the Joint Committee on Reconstruction which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment. “Incorporation” was never even debated on the floor of that Congress, or any other, for that matter; if “incorporation” had been intended, this fact would constitute “an extraordinary omission given the vast incursion on State sovereignty by the Bill of Rights. Indeed, the North was given to understand that it was unaffected by the companion Civil Rights Bill, the Bill that was considered on all sides to be ‘identical’ with the first section of the Amendment. Plainly, the provisions of ‘due process’, ‘privileges or immunities’, and ‘equal protection’ did not disclose that the Bill of Rights was incorporated therein.” We must never forget what the term “ratification” means — it is a voluntary compact, much like the United States were a voluntary compact. This means that, even “if there was a concealed intention to go beyond the Civil Rights Act, it was not ratified because…ratification requires disclosure of material facts…and…a surrender of recognized rights may not be presumed but must be proved.” “Incorporation”, then, is yet another facile bastardization through which the Fourteenth Amendment has been fundamentally transformed. In this transformation, Berger declared, “the Court has soared beyond the confines of the Bill of Rights to fashion a congeries of individual rights undreamed of by the Founders.”

​When seventeenth-century scholars, to whom the Founders looked, referenced “fundamental rights or laws”, they meant “the rights which the existing law gave them”, not the “rights” which a ruling class antithetically opposed to all that they held dear might fashion. When Samuel Adams claimed “the primary, absolute, natural rights of Englishmen”, he listed the aforementioned Blackstonian trio of “Personal Security, Personal Liberty, and Private Property.” “Liberty” was defined as “unrestrained freedom to come and go.” The Bill of Rights was a direct response to British atrocities before and during the War of Independence; this is the source of the Framers’ desire, itself hotly debated, for protection of the States from the federal government for “free speech, quartering of soldiers, unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to bear arms, and sundry procedural provisions to ensure fair trials. How activists can conjure out of these facts provision for illimitable individual rights passes understanding.” The remaking of American history into a utopian struggle for ever-greater “individual rights” to the final pyrrhic frontier is without precedent; indeed, “the modern individual ‘rights’ created by the Court are without foundation in the Constitution.” Judicial revisionists, handmaidens to the Regime, “outdo one another in urging the imposition of constitutional constraints on the basis of ‘rights’ whose origins cannot be traced to either the constitutional text or the structure it created.”

​As our investigation has proven, “the framers meant to outlaw discrimination only with respect to enumerated privileges. Even the abolitionists shrank from complete equality.” They carefully and deliberately chose the words that they felt most “aptly expressed, and throughout were wedded to, their limited purposes…there is virtually no evidence that the framers meant by resort to those words to open goals beyond those specified in the Civil Rights Act and constitutionalized in the Amendment.” Equal application of the law is a long and well-established doctrine of Anglo-American jurisprudence; this, and only this, was the purpose of the Civil Rights Bill which the Amendment meant to embody. That Bill, it bears repeating, “secured to blacks the same right to contract, to hold property, and to sue, as whites enjoyed, and the ‘equal benefit of all laws for security of person and property.’ ‘Political rights’ were excluded. In describing these aims the framers interchangeably referred to ‘equality’, ‘equality before the law’, and ‘equal protection’ (but always in the circumscribed context of the rights enumerated in the Bill), so that it is reasonable to infer that the framers regarded these terms as synonymous.” Equality before the law, the framers insisted time and again, is not social equality. Representative Thomas Davis agreed that blacks “must be made equal before the law, and be permitted to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness [property]”, but he was against “the establishment of perfect equality between the colored and the white race of the South.” “Equal protection of the laws” was a particularized expression of the framers’ central object, aside from maintaining Republican hegemony: “to prevent statutory discrimination with respect to the rights enumerated in the Civil Rights Act.”

The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment “sought only to secure to blacks the same specified rights as were enjoyed by whites; if whites did not have them there was no State duty to supply them to anyone, still less a Congressional power to fill the gap.” In other words, the Amendment did not create any “rights”, but only sought to restrict States from discriminating against blacks with respect to extant “rights.” The “equality” that was to be protected was a Statewide standard, “within its jurisdiction”, not a national standard. Representative Samuel Shellabarger evinced this when he said that the Bill secures “equality of protection in these enumerated civil rights which the States may deem proper to confer upon any race.” A State statute might be “unequal” when placed in comparison with another State’s, but “if it is impartial, uniformly applied to all within the State, it satisfies the meaning of ‘equal.’” The framers repeatedly stated that their purpose was “to prevent one law for blacks, another for whites. It was a ban on such discrimination that was expressed in ‘equality before the law’ and ‘equal protection’ — not a mandate that the States must confer rights not theretofore enjoyed by any citizen.”

The first section of the Amendment, wherein the three operative clauses are located, was agreed-upon to be a restriction on the States, not a conferral of new power onto Congress, let alone the judiciary. The Congressional power of section five was extremely limited to corrective measures addressed to specific unequal application of State laws, not expansive general national legislation. Future President James Garfield explained at the time that Congress had rejected “a clear grant of power to Congress to legislate directly for the protection of life, liberty, and property within the States” in favor of the final form that “limited but did not oust the jurisdiction of the State over the subjects.” In United States v. Cruikshank, Chief Justice Morrison Waite denied the “incorporation” doctrine that the “equal protection” clause has been distorted to create, writing, “For their protection in its [the First Amendment protection of the right to assemble against “encroachment by Congress”] enjoyment, therefore, the people must look to the States. The power for that purpose was originally placed there, and it has never been surrendered to the United States.” Justice Bradley concurred, asking, “How can a prohibition…be enforced until it is violated?” He elaborated that “to convert ‘No State shall deny’ into ‘Congress shall make’ does violence to the text. The distinction between a prohibition of action and a grant of power was well understood by the Thirty-Ninth Congress.” Bradley continued that “surely Congress cannot guaranty to the colored people admission to every place of gathering and amusement. To deprive white people of the right of choosing their own company would be to introduce another kind of slavery… [The Civil Rights Bill] has already [guaranteed] to the blacks the right of buying, selling, and holding property, and of equal protection of the laws. Are these not the essentials of freedom? Surely a white lady cannot be enforced by Congressional enactment to admit colored persons to her ball or assembly or dinner party…does freedom of the blacks require the slavery of the whites? And enforced fellowship would be that.”

​In 1787, Alexander Hamilton declared at the New York Assembly that “the words ‘due process’ have a precise technical import, and are only applicable to the process and proceedings of the courts of justice; they can never be referred to an act of the legislature.” Berger confirmed that “no statement to the contrary will be found in any of the Constitutional Conventions, in the First Congress, nor in the 1866 debates.” The concept of “due process of law” can be traced back to the 29th chapter of the Magna Carta, which provided that “no man should be deprived of his life, liberty, or property, except by judgment of his peers or the law of the land. Edward Coke stated that ‘by the law of the land’ was meant ‘by the due course and process of law’…both related to judicial procedures preliminary to the described forfeitures.” Berger noted that “due process” was “conceived in utterly procedural terms, specifically, that a defendant must be afforded an opportunity to answer by service of process in proper form, that is, in due course.” As conceived, “process” was by indictment or writ, served “in ‘due course’, that is, in regular course, if the ‘appropriate’ writ was employed. ‘Due process’ should therefore be regarded as shorthand for Coke’s ‘by the due course and process of law’ in judicial proceedings…due process was not a catchall for all the other safeguards the Bill of Rights provided to a defendant; it had a special and limited function: to insure through service of proper, that is, ‘due’, process that a defendant would be given a chance to answer.”

Given the extreme prominence to which “due process” has been elevated by judicial “construction” of the Fourteenth Amendment, Berger remarked that “it is surprising how scanty were the allusions to the clause in the debates of the Thirty-Ninth Congress. It was altogether unmentioned in the Civil Rights Bill; instead the Bill spelled out the concrete rights ‘to sue, be parties, and give evidence’; and it inclusively provided for the ‘equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property.” The conversion of the “due process” clause into the behemoth that it is today has turned the Amendment on its head, such that its framers would hardly recognize it. As aforementioned, “the original design was to make ‘privileges or immunities’ the pivotal provision in order to shield the ‘fundamental rights’ enumerated in the Civil Rights Act…Intertwined with that enumeration was repeated emphasis on the enjoyment of the ‘same rights’, and ‘equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property.’” Senator Trumbull stated clearly that the Bill “contains but one single principle…to establish equality in the civil rights of citizens.” We have already examined at length just what those “civil rights” were — a far cry from engorged Civil Rights. Representative John Farnsworth said that the Amendment “might as well in my opinion read, ‘No State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws’”, as the rest was “surplusage.” For the framers, Berger concluded, “the three clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment were a trinity, three facets of one and the same purpose.” In summary, “privileges or immunities” protected the substantive civil rights of the freedmen, through the medium of two ancillary rights, the first of which being the impartial and “equal protection” under and application of State laws to prohibit statutory discrimination with respect to those enumerated civil rights, and the second of which being judicial “due process” to prohibit judicial discrimination of the same enumerated rights.

The framers, Berger asserted, “were content to bar discrimination, to assure blacks that they would have judicial protection on the same State terms as whites, no more, no less… ‘due process of law’ was not meant to create a new, federal criterion of justice. Like State laws at which ‘equal protection’ was aimed, State justice had to be nondiscriminatory.” Representative Stevens explained that “due process” meant only that “whatever means of redress is afforded to one shall be afforded to all.” In Hurtado v. California, Justice Stanley Matthews wrote that “due process” as written in the Fourteenth Amendment “refers to that law of the land in each State…’Each State prescribes its own mode of judicial proceeding.’” Berger continued that the framers were even less of a mind “in requiring nondiscriminatory laws and equal judicial process to create a fresh congeries of rights that ranged beyond those enumerated. Having in mind that the Amendment was designed to constitutionalize the Civil Rights Act, it is clear that the ‘equal protection’ and ‘due process’ clauses were merely a compressed version of the original design…these clauses simply echoed the Blackstonian formula that the ‘fundamental rights’ could be diminished only by ‘due course of law’ or by the ‘laws of the land’, by which was meant general laws that would apply to all alike.” Chairman Wilson stated that “it is not the object of this Bill to establish new rights.” For the protection of the enumerated “fundamental rights” of “life, liberty, and property”, which we have seen are specifically limited terms of art, “the framers fashioned impartial access to judicial process and nondiscriminatory legislation. They did not seek to supplant State proceedings and lawmaking, but only to insure…that an oppressed race should have the ‘equal benefit of all laws for security of person and property’ ‘as is enjoyed by white citizens.’” The Court has ignored all of the foregoing discussion, and has chosen instead to substitute its whims for the careful deliberation of the framers.