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  • Features
    • Book Bench
    • Charlottesville
    • COVID Commentary
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    • Links
    • Magnolia Muse
    • Matters of Faith
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    • Southern History
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  • Contributors
    • Full List
    • Mark Atkins
    • Al Benson
    • Carolina Contrarian
    • Enoch Cade
    • Boyd Cathey
    • Dissident Mama
    • Ted Ehmann
    • Walt Garlington
    • Gail Jarvis
    • Gene Kizer, Jr.
    • Neil Kumar
    • Perrin Lovett
    • Ilana Mercer
    • Tom Riley
    • H.V. Traywick, Jr.
    • Clyde Wilson
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Neil Kumar

The Dark Before Dawn, Part 2

6/30/2020

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When it rains, it pours. After Charleston was put to the sword, all of its wealth was plundered and expropriated, its citizens imprisoned or impressed into British regiments throughout the far-flung Empire; as Simms described the degradation, “Nothing was forborne, in the shape of pitiless and pitiful persecution, to break the spirits, subdue the strength, and mock and mortify the hopes, alike, of citizen and captive.” At the Battle of Waxhaws near Lancaster, less a battle and more a massacre, Colonel Abraham Buford and his force of Virginian Continentals were mercilessly slaughtered while attempting to surrender by the dastardly villain, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, and his brood of Loyalists. After this wholesale butchery, “Tarleton’s Quarters”, that is, no quarter whatsoever, became an embittering rallying cry for the Patriots. Following so closely behind the sack and occupation of Charleston, the defeat of Buford, along with the only regular force of Continentals remaining in the State, crippled the hopes of the Patriots. As Simms continued, “The country seemed everywhere subdued. An unnatural and painful apathy dispirited opposition. The presence of a British force, sufficient to overawe the neighborhood…and the awakened activity of the Tories in all quarters, no longer restrained…seemed to settle the question of supremacy. There was not only no head against the enemy, but the State, on a sudden, appeared to have been deprived of all her distinguished men.” Moultrie languished in prison, while Governor Rutledge, Thomas Sumter, Peter Horry, and thousands of other Patriots withdrew to North Carolina and the other Northern colonies to join the Patriot cause there.

Marion, meanwhile, still incapacitated, “was compelled to take refuge in the swamp and forest” as a fugitive, constantly on the lam. Still recovering, Marion embarked upon the road to North Carolina to join with a Continental force under Baron de Kalb, later superseded by the pompous Major General Horatio Gates. On his journey, Marion encountered Horry, who lamented that their “happy days were all gone.” Marion, stout-hearted as ever, replied, “Our happy days all gone, indeed! On the contrary, they are yet to come. The victory is still sure. The enemy, it is true, have all the trumps, and if they had but the spirit to play a generous game, they would certainly ruin us. But they have no idea of that game. They will treat the people cruelly, and that one thing will ruin them and save the country.” Gates’ Continentals ridiculed and sneered at Marion’s motley band of irregular partisans. Luckily for Marion, and very unfortunately for Gates, our hero was summoned to command the Whigs of Williamsburg, and thus determined to penetrate into South Carolina. In Marion’s absence, Gates led the Continentals to ruin. At the Battle of Camden, the site of which today is a nice pine stand right off of my favorite country lane, Flat Rock Road, the Americans suffered a devastating rout. Under Gates’ command, the Continental Army suffered its greatest loss of the entire War, thus precipitating that failure’s replacement with Major General Nathanael Greene. Marion, Simms noted, “was one of the few Captains of American militia that never suffered himself to be taken napping.”

Just as Marion had predicted, British General Henry Clinton treated the people despicably. First, Clinton had issued a proclamation proffering “pardon to the inhabitants”, with few exceptions, “for their past treasonable offenses, and a reinstatement in their rights and immunities heretofore enjoyed, exempt from taxation, except by their own legislature.” Simms wrote that “the specious offer…indicated a degree of magnanimity, which in the case of those thousands in every such contest, who love repose better than virtue, was everywhere calculated to disarm the inhabitants. To many indeed it seemed to promise…security from further injury, protection against the Tories who were using the authority of the British for their own purposes of plunder and revenge, a respite from their calamities, and a restoration of all their rights.” However, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Clinton reversed course twenty days later and thereby galvanized the Southern Patriots. His second proclamation, Simms explained, required the people of Carolina to “take up arms for His Majesty, and against their countrymen…a hopeful plan by which to fill the British regiments, to save further importations of Hessians, further cost of mercenaries, and, as in the case of the Aborigines, to employ the Anglo-American race against one another. The Loyalists of the South were to be used against the patriots of the North, as the Loyalists of the latter region had been employed to put down the liberties of the former.”

Promoted to General, Francis Marion took command of the country, donning a leather cap emblazoned with a silver crescent, inscribed with, “Liberty or Death!” Marion was simple, modest, taciturn, a man who taught by example rather than oratory, who “secured the fidelity of his men by carrying them bravely into action, and bringing them honorably out of it.” His watchword was activity, his anathema indolence. His first order of business upon assuming command was to supply some desperately needed provisions for his men. The first effort made on this front was to sack the sawmills, where “the saws were wrought and hammered by rude blacksmiths into some resemblance to sabers.” Thus provided, Marion set his men into action, launching a series of perfectly-orchestrated ambush attacks on Loyalist partisans, striking hard and then melting away into the backwoods as quickly as they had appeared. In an all too familiar refrain for Southrons past, present, and future, Marion was badly-equipped, often entering engagements “with less than three rounds to a man — half of his men were sometimes lookers-on because of the lack of arms and ammunition — waiting to see the fall of friends or enemies, in order to obtain the necessary means of taking part in the affair. Buckshot easily satisfied soldiers, who not unfrequently advanced to the combat with nothing but swan-shot in their fowling-pieces.”

We must remember that Marion’s band of partisans was the only body of American troops in the State of South Carolina that dared openly oppose the triumphal ascendance of the British. Simms elaborated that “the Continentals were dispersed or captured; the Virginia and North Carolina militia scattered to the four winds; Sumter’s legion cut up by Tarleton, and he himself a fugitive, fearless and active still, but as yet seeking, rather than commanding, a force.” At Nelson’s Ferry, Marion’s scouts alerted him to a British guard detachment approaching their position, with a large cohort of American prisoners from Gates’ disaster in Camden in tow. Near the pass of Horse Creek, Marion ambushed them and freed all 150 Continentals, of which only three could be bothered to join him. Simms, somewhat sardonically, noted that “it may be that they were somewhat loth to be led, even though it were to victory, by the man whose ludicrous equipment and followers, but a few weeks before, had only provoked their merriment.” Earl Charles Cornwallis, falsely portrayed nowadays as a saintly gentleman, enforced severe and ruthless punishment for any Patriots or Patriot sympathizers, including the expropriation of all of their worldly belongings. Amidst widespread British and Tory atrocities, Marion ran the Enemy ragged, cutting supply and communication lines while denying the darkness any sense of security. Marion was so successful that Cornwallis sent Tarleton on an ultimately futile search and destroy mission to assassinate the Carolinian.

Marion, as all great leaders do, loved his men dearly. His force was in constant flux, as his men, citizen soldiers, “had cares other than those of their country’s liberties. Young and tender families were to be provided for and guarded in the thickets where they found shelter. These were often threatened in the absence of their protectors by marauding bands of Tories, who watched the moment of [their] departure…to rise upon the weak, and rob and harass the unprotected.” If at all practicable, Marion granted all requests for leave; the loyalty of his men was such that their return was certain. Eventually, Marion’s band of backwoods freedom fighters was forced to temporarily retreat in the face of Tarleton’s contingents of Tories; it was with incredible reluctance that they left their communities unprotected, completely exposed to the vindictive cruelties of the British and their Tory lapdogs, “which had written their chronicles in blood and flame, wherever their footsteps had gone before.” Bitter though this was, Simms wrote that “it was salutary in the end. It strengthened their souls for the future trial. It made them more resolute in the play. With their own houses in smoking ruins, and their own wives and children homeless and wandering, they could better feel what was due to the sufferings of their common country.” Though at first glance, this might be one bridge too far in attempting to put a positive spin on the wholly negative, Simms raised an interesting question; can we truly fight for that which we love if we have not experienced its loss? Can we understand the suffering of our countrymen if we have not ourselves suffered? Must we? Comfort does, after all, breed complacency; it must be noted that, obviously, comfort encompasses much aside from material luxury. It is a truism that we cannot appreciate what we have until it is lost to us.

Scouts brought Marion the devastating news that, just as he and his men had feared, the Tories, under Major James Wemyss, had in their absence “laid waste to the farms and plantations”, in a broad swathe of desolation, “swept by sword and fire.” Indeed, “on most of the plantations, the houses were given to the flames, the inhabitants plundered of all their possessions, and the stock, especially the sheep, wantonly shot or bayoneted. Wemyss seems to have been particularly hostile to looms and sheep, simply because they supplied the inhabitants with clothing…Presbyterian churches he burnt religiously, as so many ‘sedition-shops.’” The General thus led his men homewards again, and they routed a large Loyalist force at the Battle of Black Mingo, driving them from the country. Though the attack still came off according to plan, Marion’s surprise was ruined when his horses crossed a wooden bridge, the sound of their hooves alerting the Enemy; from that point forward, Marion made sure to lay blankets down across bridges to muffle his horses’ hooves. Black Mingo was followed up with another successful ambush at Tarcote, in which some of the treacherous Tories, who had been gambling and reveling in camp, were slain with their cards still clutched in their hands in a macabre tableau.

Cornwallis declared that he “would give a good deal to have him taken”, writing to Clinton that “Marion had so wrought on the minds of the people…that there was scarcely an inhabitant between the Santee and the Pee Dee, that was not in arms against us. Some parties…carried terror to the gates of Charleston.” Why was Marion so successful? The guerrilla warfare which he pioneered and mastered was “that which was most likely to try the patience, and baffle the progress, of the British commander. He could overrun the country, but he made no conquests. His great armies passed over the land unquestioned, but had no sooner withdrawn, than his posts were assailed, his detachments cut off, his supplies arrested, and the Tories once more overawed by their fierce and fearless neighbors.” Marion’s notoriety was an inspiration to the scorched and defiled yeomen of South Carolina, responsible for the birth of countless other small partisan bands, their unrecorded exploits now lost to us. Simms continued that “the examples of Marion and Sumter had aroused the partisan spirit…and every distinct section of the country soon produced its particular leader, under whom the Whigs embodied themselves, striking wherever an opportunity offered of cutting off the British and Tories in detail, and retiring to places of safety, or dispersing in groups, on the approach of a superior force.” Tarleton, unable and unwilling to carry on his fruitless and now swamp-arrested pursuit of our hero, was recalled to hound Thomas Sumter. During this withdrawal, Tarleton spoke his most famous words: “Come, my boys! Let us go back. We will soon find the Game Cock [Sumter], but as for this damned Swamp Fox, the Devil himself could not catch him.”

The Southern Theater of the War of Independence had a far more savage character to it than the war in the North, notwithstanding the Hessians’ penchant for mounting decapitated Patriot heads on pikes, as “motives of private anger and personal revenge embittered and increased the usual ferocities of civil war; and hundreds of dreadful and desperate tragedies gave that peculiar aspect to the struggle.” Greene wrote that “the inhabitants pursued each other rather like wild beasts than like men”; indeed, “in the Cheraw district, on the Pee Dee, above the line where Marion commanded, the Whig and Tory warfare, of which we know but little beyond this fact, was one of utter extermination. The revolutionary struggle in Carolina was of a sort utterly unknown in any other part of the Union.” Few men escaped the struggle for liberty unscathed. At Georgetown, a party of Loyalists shot Gabriel Marion’s horse out from under him, and, as soon as the young Marion, the General’s nephew, fell he was executed, with “no respite allowed, no pause, no prayer.” Simms wrote that “the loss was severely felt by his uncle, who, with no family or children of his own, had lavished the greater part of his affections upon this youth…who had already frequently distinguished himself by his gallantry and conduct.” Marion grieved to himself, yet was consoled by saying that he “should not mourn for him. The youth was virtuous, and had fallen in the cause of his country!”

After this latest depredation, Marion retired to his legendary swamp fortress on Snow’s Island, along the Pee Dee in present-day Florence County. “Retired” is perhaps not the proper word, though, as Marion kept up the fight, continuing operations from his new, perfect, and secure headquarters. As Simms wrote, “The love of liberty, the defense of country, the protection of the feeble, the maintenance of humanity and all its dearest interests, against its tyrant — these were the noble incentives which strengthened him in his stronghold, made it terrible in the eyes of his enemy, and sacred in those of his countrymen. Here he lay, grimly watching for the proper time and opportunity when to sally forth and strike.” Simms described the natural fortress beautifully, writing that “in this snug and impenetrable fortress, he reminds us very much of the ancient feudal baron of France and Germany, who, perched on castled eminence, looked down [as] an eagle from his eyrie, and marked all below him for his own.” Though “there were no towers frowning in stone and iron”, there were better towers, “tall pillars of pine and cypress, from the waving tops of which the warders looked out, and gave warning of the foe or the victim.”

Marion did very little to “increase the comforts or the securities of his fortress. It was one, complete to his hands, from those of nature…isolated by deep ravines and rivers, a dense forest of mighty trees, and interminable undergrowth. The vine and briar guarded his passes. The laurel and the shrub, the vine and sweet-scented jessamine, roofed his dwelling, and clambered up between his closed eyelids and the stars…The swamp was his moat…Here…the partisan slept secure.” He camped in “one of those grand natural amphitheaters so common in our swamp forests, in which the massive pine, the gigantic cypress, and the stately and ever-green laurel, streaming with moss, and linking their opposite arms, inflexibly locked in the embrace of centuries, group together, with elaborate limbs and leaves, the chief and most graceful features of Gothic architecture. To these recesses, through the massed foliage of the forest, the sunlight came as sparingly, and with rays mellow and subdued, as through the painted window of the old cathedral, falling upon aisle and chancel.”

Tarleton had not named Marion the Swamp Fox for nothing; he was its master. In the swamp, on the Enemy’s own ground, “in the very midst” of the Crown and its minions, he made himself a home. Aside from pure audacity, Marion lived among the Enemy for another reason, for his maxim was that it was always better to live upon the resources of foes than of friends. In his swamps, “in the employment of such material as he had to use, Marion stands out alone in our written history, as the great master of that sort of strategy, which renders the untaught militiaman in his native thickets, a match for the best-drilled veteran of Europe. Marion seemed to possess an intuitive knowledge…He beheld, at a glance, the evils or advantages of a position.” Marion “knew his game, and how it should be played, before a step was taken or a weapon drawn. When he himself, or any of his parties, left the island, upon an expedition, they advanced along no beaten paths. They made them as they went. He had the Indian faculty in perfection, of gathering his course from the sun, from the stars, from the bark and the tops of trees, and such other natural guides, as the woodman acquires only through long and watchful experience.”

​Total secrecy was one of the keys to his success; before jaunting off on another expedition, the only way for the men to ascertain the distance of their mission was to observe Marion’s cook to see the quantity of foodstuffs he packed. The General “entrusted his schemes to nobody, not even his most confidential officers. He…heard them patiently, weighed their suggestions, and silently approached his conclusions. They knew his determinations only from his actions. He left no track behind him…He was often vainly hunted after by his own detachments. He was more apt at finding them than they him.” When Lieutenant Colonel Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee sought Marion before a joint raid on Georgetown, he could not locate the partisan; eventually, one of Lee’s scouts made contact with a small provisioning party of Marion’s, and even then, his own men spent several hours locating their commander.
Though Major General Greene and his Continentals were necessary to restore South Carolina and Georgia to the American confederacy, they were not sufficient; they could not have been victorious without the “native spirit” of the partisans of the backwoods. When Greene arrived at Hicks’ Creek, he found a country “laid waste. Such a warfare as had been pursued among the inhabitants, beggars description. The whole body of the population seems to have been in arms, at one time or another…A civil war, as history teaches, is like no other. Like a religious war, the elements of a fanatical passion seem to work the mind up to a degree of ferocity, which is [far beyond] the usual provocations of hate in ordinary warfare.” He wrote that “the inhabitants pursue each other with savage fury…The Whigs and the Tories are butchering one another hourly. The war here is upon a very different scale from what it is to the northward. It is a plain business there. The geography of the country reduces its operations to two or three points. But here, it is everywhere; and the country is so full of deep rivers and impassable creeks and swamps, that you are always liable to misfortunes of a capital nature.” While Marion never hesitated to fulfill his duty, he was always averse to “those brutal punishments which, in the creature, degrade the glorious image of the Creator.” General Moultrie wrote that Marion “always gave orders to his men that there should be no waste of the inhabitants’ property, and no plundering.” In the punishment of those of his own men who disgraced both him and the Patriot cause, he favored a scornful mercy, merciful insofar as he preferred not to execute men whom he did not have to, yet scornful in that he essentially shunned them with the utmost contempt, a punishment which usually sent them well on their way.
Lee, the father of our General Robert E. Lee, adroitly described Marion; unerringly and “enthusiastically wedded to the cause of liberty, he deeply deplored the doleful condition of his beloved country. The common weal was his sole object; nothing selfish, nothing mercenary soiled his ermine character.” Lee continued, “Fertile in stratagem, he struck unperceived, and retiring to those hidden retreats…in the morasses of Pee Dee and Black River, he placed his corps, not only out of the reach of his foe, but often out of the discovery of his friends.” Throughout the arduous course of war through which Marion passed, “calumny itself never charged him with molesting the rights of person, property, or humanity. Never avoiding danger, he never rashly sought it…he risked the lives of his troops only when it was necessary.” He was “never elated with prosperity, nor depressed by adversity.” At dinner one evening, Marion was made aware that a group of Lee’s men were hanging Tory captives; instantly, he “hurried from the table, seized his sword, and running with all haste, reached the place of execution in time to rescue one poor wretch from the gallows. Two were already beyond rescue or recovery. With drawn sword and a degree of indignation in his countenance that spoke more than words, Marion threatened to kill the first man that made any further attempt in such diabolical proceedings.” Even after the War, Marion was merciful to the defeated Tories, declaring, “Then, it was war. It is peace now. God has given us the victory; let us show our gratitude to Heaven, which we shall not do by cruelty to man.” When word reached the Swamp Fox of a British officer abusing some of his men in captivity, he wrote the Redcoat that “I have treated your officers and men who have fallen into my hands, in a different manner. Should these evils not be prevented in future, it will not be in my power to prevent retaliation.” To another British commander, he wrote that “the hanging of prisoners and the violation of my flag, will be retaliated [for] if a stop is not put to such proceedings, which are disgraceful to all civilized nations. All of your officers and men, who have fallen into my hands, have been treated with humanity and tenderness, and I wish sincerely that I may not be obliged to act contrary to my inclination.” Though Marion never wished to sully himself with such excesses, he certainly would if his hand was forced.
Marion and his ensemble of yeoman Patriots endured grinding poverty and privation for years, all for the sake of their, and our, liberty. Indeed, Marion himself went over a full year without the meager luxury of a blanket when he slept. His men often trekked seventy miles per day, with nothing to eat but a handful of cold potatoes and a single draught of cold water, clothed only in hair-thin homespun. On one occasion, one of his officers sought to reassure the Swamp Fox that their ammunition situation was not as dire as he feared, telling Marion that “my powder-horn is full.” Marion smiled gently, and replied, “Ah…you are an extraordinary soldier; but for the others, there are not two rounds to a man.” We cannot overstate the destitution of the Patriots, and particularly those Patriots of our Southland. Congress was bankrupt, South Carolina likewise without means. For three years, Simms noted, “South Carolina had not only supported the war within, but beyond her own borders. Georgia was utterly destitute, and was indebted to South Carolina for eighteen months for her subsistence; and North Carolina, in the portions contiguous to South Carolina, was equally poor and disaffected.” How then, was the War to be carried on? Marion’s men “received no pay, no food, no clothing. They had borne the dangers and the toils of war, not only without pay, but without the hope of it. They had done more — they had yielded up their private fortunes to the cause. They had seen their plantations stripped by the enemy, of negroes, horses, cattle, provisions, plate…and this, too, with the knowledge, not only that numerous Loyalists had been secured in their own possessions, but had been rewarded out of theirs.”
Simms explained their condition well, writing that “the Whigs were utterly impoverished by their own wants and the ravages of the enemy. They had nothing more to give. Patriotism could now bestow little but its blood.” And yet, as Marion well understood, that blood of patriotism was capable of so much more than just itself. He vowed that, were he “compelled to retire to the mountains”, he would, alone if necessary, “carry on the war, until the enemy is forced out of the country.” To a man, his partisans swore to remain at his side until the bitter end, pledging themselves to “follow his fortunes, however disastrous, while one of them survived, and until their country was freed from the enemy.” To this display of devotion, our hero merely replied, “I am satisfied; one of these parties shall soon feel us.” This iron constitution, this ethereal determination, is no mystery; as Greene wrote to Marion, “Your State is invaded — your all is at stake. What has been done will signify nothing, unless we persevere to the end.” If they did not hold fast and keep up the fight, if they did not seize victory, all that had come before, all of the pain, suffering, and trauma, was for naught. If we do not take back our country, the last two and a half centuries are forever smothered. Greene praised the South Carolinian, continuing, quite rightly, that “to fight the enemy bravely with the prospect of victory, is nothing; but to fight with intrepidity under the constant impression of defeat, and inspire irregular troops to do it, is a talent peculiar to yourself.” Even simpler than that, however, is the simple truth that we are impelled to do whatever it takes to protect and preserve hearth and home; we cannot help but recall that classic of American action, Red Dawn, and its most valuable line: “Because we live here.”
Our first War of Independence was no grand triumphal narrative, but an incredibly bitter war of attrition. At its close, the British were finally worn down, their will to carry on pulverized and crumbled to dust. Marion’s men “were not yet disbanded. He himself did not yet retire from the field which he had so often traversed in triumph. But the occasion for bloodshed was over. The great struggle for ascendancy between the British Crown and her colonies was understood to be at an end. She was prepared to acknowledge the independence for which they had fought, when she discovered that it was no longer in her power to deprive them of it. She will not require any eulogium of her magnanimity for her reluctant concession.” Now, the British Army withdrawn from Carolina, “the country, exhausted of resources, and filled with malcontents and mourners, was left to recover slowly from the hurts and losses of foreign and intestine strife. Wounds were to be healed which required the assuasive hand of time, which were destined to rankle even in the bosoms of another generation, and the painful memory of which is keenly treasured even now.” South Carolina, along with all of her sisters, including those already sharpening their knives for her demise, was free. America emerged from its baptismal blood, breaking the chains of Empire, an unprecedented victory achieved in no small part due to the labors of our Swamp Fox, Francis Marion.
The partisan par excellence, Marion was the grand master of strategy, the wily fox of the swamps impassable but to him, “never to be caught, never to be followed — yet always at hand, with unconjectured promptness, at the moment when is least feared and is least to be expected.” Historian Sean Busick writes that Marion “kept alive the hope of patriots in the Southern States when victory and independence were most in doubt — after the fall of Charleston and the rout of the Continental Army at Camden. In the darkest hours of the Revolution, when the Continental Army had been run out of South Carolina, Marion and his small band of citizen soldiers took the field against the British Regulars. By keeping up a constant harassment, they made sure the British were never able to rest after their victories in South Carolina, and helped to drive them from the State and toward their final defeat at Yorktown.” When the cause of liberty was uniformly considered hopeless, when all was believed lost, when the blackest shadow fell and threatened to engulf our flickering flame, the consecrated fire was yet kept alive.
Simms elaborated that it is to him, more than any other, whom “we owe that the fires of patriotism were never extinguished, even in the most disastrous hours, in the lowcountry of South Carolina. He made our swamps and forests sacred, as well because of the refuge which they gave to the fugitive Patriot, as for the frequent sacrifices which they enabled him to make, on the altars of liberty and a becoming vengeance.” Marion’s name “was the great rallying cry of the yeoman in battle — the word that promised hope — that cheered the desponding patriot — that startled, and made to pause in his career of recklessness and blood, the cruel and sanguinary tory.” At the moment of defeat, in the putrescent slough of despond, the dark before dawn, the people of South Carolina merely waited for the reanimation that only Marion could provide. Simms noted that “the very fact that the force of Marion was so [numerically] insignificant, was something in favor of that courage and patriotism.” Busick affirms that, as we have seen, time and again, the success of the South Carolina Patriots was “due more to the sacrifices of the humble than to the decisions of the famous.”
Marion, our Carolinian Cincinnatus, happily returned to the agrarian life which he cherished, but it would not be with ease, as the world was “to be begun anew.” The Revolution left him “destitute of means, almost in poverty, and more than fifty years old.” His small fortune “had suffered irretrievably. His interests had shared the fate of most other Southern Patriots, in the long and cruel struggle through which the country had gone. His plantation in St. John’s, Berkeley…was ravaged, and subjected to constant waste and depredation.” Furthermore, again sharing the fate of all of his compatriots but the upper echelons of the Patriot command, the Swamp Fox “received no compensation for his losses, no reward for his sacrifices and services.” The Congress voted to award the hero, who had sacrificed so much for the new nation, a gold medal; whether or not the medal was actually given to him, though, is up for debate. Before we begin celebrating this honor, Simms cautioned us to understand that “cheaply, at best, was our debt to Marion satisfied, with a gold medal, or the vote of one, while Greene received ten thousand guineas and a plantation. We quarrel not with the appropriation to Greene, but did Marion deserve less from Carolina? Every page of her history answers, ‘No!’” The duty of the warrior is often a thankless one. He was returned to the State Senate by the people of St. John’s, and was later awarded a modest sinecure; his ultimate reward, however, was his legacy. The early Republic revered the Swamp Fox. In our present age of deracinated ignorance, it must come as a surprise that there are more places named for Francis Marion than for any other soldier of the War, aside from President George Washington; as Simms declared, “His memory is in the very hearts of our people.”
Upon his retirement from public life and the resignation of his commission in the State Militia in 1794, an assembly of the citizens of Georgetown addressed him thus: “Your achievements may not have sufficiently swelled the historic page. They were performed by those who could better wield the sword than the pen — by men whose constant dangers precluded them from the leisure, and whose necessities deprived them of the common implements of writing. But this is of little moment. They remain recorded in such indelible characters upon our minds, that neither change of circumstances, nor length of time, can efface them. Taught by us, our children shall hereafter point out the places, and say, ‘Here, General Marion…made a glorious stand in defense of the liberties of his country…’ Continue, General, in peace, to till those acres which you once wrested from the hands of a rapacious enemy.” It would without a doubt strike these men as poisoned barbs into their very souls, were they to see the noxious depths to which the education of our children has fallen, were they to discover that, in relatively few generations, the memories which they believed to be so indelibly recorded have faded away. Many of the irreplaceable primary documents regarding the life of Marion were incinerated when Simms’ home, including his Alexandrian library of ten thousand books and manuscripts, was put to the torch when General William Sherman’s rabid horde of fiends sacked and razed his Woodlands plantation. As the gentlemen of Georgetown said, the Patriots of the Carolina backcountry were not learned men, and were in any case too busy bleeding to bother with documenting their exploits. Their tales of unparalleled heroism need not have been written to be remembered; this barely scratches the surface of our failure to live up to their standards, to the shining examples their lives set for ours.
A devout Christian, “an humble believer in all the vital truths of faith”, Marion was ready to meet his Maker; he declared, “Death may be to others a leap in the dark, but I rather consider it a resting-place where old age may throw off its burdens.” As he was peacefully translated from our world to the next, he spoke his last words: “For, thank God. I can lay my hand on my heart and say that, since I came to man’s estate, I have never intentionally done wrong to any.” He could die in that sublime satisfaction that he had done his duty, that he had risen to the occasion, just as we now must rise to the occasion and defend to our last that which his generation secured for ours, all of these long years later. We should savor and echo the words of Major General George Pickett, written to his wife one day after his Charge, doomed to fail but destined for enshrinement in the most hallowed annals of Western man: “My brave boys were full of hope and confident of victory as I led them forth…and though officers and men alike knew what was before them, knew the odds against them, they eagerly offered up their lives on the altar of duty, having absolute faith in their ultimate success. Over on Cemetery Ridge, the Federals beheld a scene never before witnessed on this continent, a scene which has never previously been enacted and can never take place again — an army forming in line of battle in full view, under their very eyes — charging across a space nearly a mile in length…moving with the steadiness of a dress parade, the pride and glory soon to be crushed by an overwhelming heartbreak. Well, it is all over now. The battle is lost, and many of us are prisoners, many are dead, many wounded, bleeding, and dying. Your Soldier lives and mourns and but for you, my darling, he would rather, a million times rather, be back there with his dead, to sleep for all time in an unknown grave.” Pickett signed as “your sorrowing Soldier.”
As we approach ever-nearer to the precipice, to what appears and threatens to be a danger graver than any that we have ever faced, it is easy to fold, to crumple under the tremendous weight of it all. As John Derbyshire writes, we live in “an occupied nation, dominated by a bizarre cult of anti-white totalitarianism, against which we dissenters have no organization, no leadership, and almost no public voice. It is hard to think that this will end well.” We are, by design, made to feel completely alone. But we are not. While our dismal condition is on the path to eclipse that which faced our Confederate ancestors, and while we stand on the cusp of a terrible darkness, a palpable evil permeating the air in our dying land, all is not lost. We must carry the fire, just as that great South Carolinian Francis Marion did, holding his hands cupped around the embers of faith, keeping hope kindled in the bosoms of his people, our people. Make no mistake — while, now, the Enemy tears down and casts asunder our monuments, our physical memories serving as proxies for the cultural memories that we have failed so spectacularly to inculcate in our brainwashed children, memory is not their ultimate target. No, their target is us. When we see our monuments defiled and obliterated, know that it is mere sublimation. This is what they desire for us, our monumental marble nothing less than transubstantiated blood. And yet, they cannot succeed while one of us lives; Donald Livingston, President of the Abbeville Institute, recently likened our position to that of monks, preserving our sacred texts against the darkling gloom, for a brighter day ahead. This is of course, however, the worst-case scenario, only the case if we have not taken our stand in time to prevent ruin.
In these deflating days, the fires apparently too numerous to extinguish, my spirits were immeasurably lifted upon being blessed to attend the 147th Confederate Memorial Day at the Confederate Cemetery in Fayetteville, Arkansas. This idyllic patch of land, lost in time, is maintained solely by the devotion of the Southern Memorial Association, a group of valiant Southern women, our great treasure as always. How heartening it was to see these women, and their many supporters, spend their time and money to honor our ancestors, to preserve their beautiful resting-place; for a century and a half, these proud Southrons have gathered to remember their forefathers of the Trans-Mississippi and the selfless deeds which they wrought, echoing in our hearts even now.
These are the men whom we must emulate; their golden example, itself following that of our Swamp Fox, must be our beacon in the roiling gale now overtaking us. Each unmarked grave, most holding the bones of men lost at the disastrous Battle of Pea Ridge, was adorned with a brilliant battle-flag, the sight of which never fails to fuel the fire within. A lovelier sight we have yet to behold. Several dozen people turned out; though the mood was certainly somber, we drew strength from one another, and cut a scene that could not have been any different from the anarchy reigning in cities across the “United” States of America. After some speechifying from representatives of the Association, the Sons, and the Daughters, we dedicated new markers for each section of the cemetery, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Louisiana, and laid wreaths at the foot of the gorgeous, pristine monument at its center. The marker for the Arkansawyer veterans reads, “Weep, for richer blood was never shed.” On the monument is inscribed, “These were men whom power could not corrupt, whom Death could not terrify, whom defeat could not dishonor.”  
 
The band played Dixie. 
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The Dark Before Dawn, Part 1

6/25/2020

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We have just witnessed Kristallnacht for traditional America. We are no longer welcome in the land that we love, the nation that our, and only our, forefathers built from nothing — the only home, not only that we have ever known, but that we will ever know. This is one more turn in the revolutionary spiral, and perhaps the opening shot of hot civil war, if our Cause can even muster up a quorum. A friend of mine, about half a century my senior, remarked that this is not the country that he grew up in; indeed, I replied, this is not the country that I grew up in, not all that long ago. Our riven homeland burns, convulsing in the throes of revolutionary political and racial violence. The arsonists that set fire to our cities, to countless unknown and weeping American Dreams, are but the brownshirts of the Egalitarian Regime; far from “resisting” the System, they are its craven handmaidens, supported in defilade by all of the money in the world. They are chess pieces, acting out the inorganic revolution from above which has been so perfectly planned and plotted for at least the last eighty years; for those eight long decades, as the Right was censored, crushed, fragmented, and scattered to the winds, the Left, largely through the assistance of its Republican houseboys, has grown ever-more exorbitantly financed and hardened, as it captured all of our institutions, one by one.

As Paul Gottfried warned almost twenty years ago, the Protestant Deformation of the twentieth century has resulted in a system of Puritan fervor wholly disconnected from God, a truly secular theocracy which features its own “original sin”, soteriology of perpetual ethnomasochistic atonement, clerical hierarchy, excommunicative social mechanism, millenarian-utopian eschatology, and even a system of human sacrifice, as the unborn are offered up to the Moloch of “Progress” every single day. The throngs of savage and insatiable rioters, backed up by legions of groomed and manicured apologists, are the only logical consequence of indoctrinating an entire generation or two into the perverse conviction that white men are the root of all evil, that blacks and transgenders built America, that the United States were founded for the express purpose of oppressing “minorities.” From the oak-paneled corridors of that bottom of the barrel so speciously called “the Ivy League”, all the way down to the bloody streets has trickled variations of that dreadful call, “Kill the Boer.” Our Cause faces unprecedented repression, repression which will only escalate into something far worse.

What of the business owners across the realm who, already crippled by the patently unnecessary and wrongheaded lockdowns that have been so transparently abandoned by the ruling class amidst the chaos fomented by their egalitarian brownshirts, awoke to the sight of their life’s work in ashes, to their community reduced to a smoking ruin that can no more stand being, as Gregory Hood put it, “papered over with money, drugs, alcohol, and television to fill the empty hole that used to be a country”? How much more anarcho-tyrannical humiliation can we bear? Will we simply go quietly into our corners, drink ourselves into a stupor, inject ourselves with heroin, and die gently in the black night, or will we rage against the dying of the light? We put all of our heroic ancestors to shame. Not one soul, nary a one of their descendants was there to defend any of their monuments as they were defiled and toppled. Our absurdly heavily militarized police stood by as America was put to the torch. Our “law and order” President, the latter-day James Buchanan, cowered in his bunker, just as he has for four years as his supporters have been incessantly harassed, beaten, and brutalized in the streets. He will lose this election, and he deserves to. The Republican Party, which must be destroyed and rebuilt, exists to harness the Southern spirit and redirect it straight into the ground. Our Cause has suffered as never before under the Trump Administration.

Two of my friends accurately embody an all-too-common sentiment that I see expressed in the former Confederacy today; one simply said that sitting on the lake with his family was more rewarding than anything else, better than “trying to control the uncontrollable.” His eyes are fixed totally on eternity with our Lord and Savior, rather than the here and now; he would rather enjoy the simple things than participate in the filthy game of politics. Similarly, another friend, somewhat wryly, told me that all that he desires is his forty acres and a mule, his shady lane, his little piece of Heaven on earth, surrounded by a moat and protected by the Castle Doctrine. He “cannot take the rhetoric anymore, regardless if it is yours, mine, or Satan’s.” I responded by stating that “everything is politics”, to which he compared me with the Leftist thugs remaking our world in the image of the Marquis de Sade. I clarified, explaining that I do not mean that everything must be political, but rather that everything is political, for everything that we hold dear is under the gun, staring a rifle barrel in the face. For example, take our families, or a simple chipmunk on the Buffalo. When we are with them, when we are out in the natural world, nothing else matters. None of our earthly concerns seem significant. And yet, at these very moments in which we are most at peace, evil forces gather with the sole purpose of taking from us all that we love. We are compelled by duty, compelled by God, to hold fast to these things by fighting for them, these things that would otherwise seem to be apolitical. Thus, we are forced to conceptualize everything in political terms. Stated differently, we may not want war — but war wants us.

Christ made clear to us that “he that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.” (Matthew 12:30) The time for fence-sitting, if there ever was one at all, is long past; Christ knows “thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:15-16) Until Christ returns, there is no one coming to save us. It is we alone who must reclaim our birthright. We must remember that a minority, albeit a sizable minority, of the American colonists joined the Patriot cause; the tomes of history tell us that nations are often fundamentally transformed and dragged into revolution by tiny minorities, a fact which should both terrify and invigorate our Cause. We need not gain a majority of those of our fellow citizens who have strayed from the path and fallen under the ephemerally glimmering song of the siren. Gideon should serve as our example, annihilating with God the wretched Midianites, overcoming a vast army with only three hundred men whose rallying cry was, “The sword of the Lord!” (Judges 6-8)

In order to understand our condition, we must understand the Enemy, the totalized, totalizing, alienated, and alienating Egalitarian Regime. A wonderfully sober approbation of the situation is elucidated in the brilliant film Ride with the Devil, accurately portraying the brutal partisan war of extermination waged between the Bushwhackers and Jayhawkers in Missouri during the War for Southern Independence. A friendly Confederate sympathizer who has opened his home to a band of patriots has the following exchange with one of the partisans:
 
And why, if you do not mind my askin', did you not join the regular army?
 
Army? Well, we thought of it. I suppose we decided this fight has got to be made in our own country, not where some general tells us it should happen.
 
It soon will be everywhere. My family and I, we will be quittin' this house in the spring. As soon as the roads are clear, we're gonna be tryin' for Texas. About half of Missouri's went to Texas. Now, the whole state's thick with invaders. We cannot drive them away.
 
We have different thoughts. I still want to fight. I reckon I'll always want to fight them. Always.
 
Have you ever been to Lawrence, Kansas, young man?
 
No, I reckon not, Mr. Evans. I don't believe I'd be too welcome in Lawrence.
 
I didn't think so. Before this war began, my business took me there often. As I saw those Northerners build that town, I witnessed the seeds of our destruction being sown. The foundin' of that town was truly the beginnin' of the Yankee invasion. I'm not speakin' of numbers, nor even abolitionist trouble-makin'. It was the schoolhouse. Before they built their church, even, they built that schoolhouse. And they let in every tailor's son and every farmer's daughter in that country.
 
Spellin' won't help you hold a plow any firmer. Or a gun either.
 
No, it won't, Mr. Chiles. But my point is merely that they rounded every pup up into that schoolhouse because they fancied that everyone should think and talk the same free-thinkin' way they do with no regard to station, custom, propriety. And that is why they will win. Because they believe everyone should live and think just like them. And we shall lose because we don't care one way or another...how they live. We just worry about ourselves.
 
Are you sayin', sir, that we fight for nothin'?
 
Far from it, Mr. Chiles. You fight for everything that we ever had. As did my son. It's just that we don't have it anymore.
 
Mr. Evans, when you get back from Texas, it'll all be here waitin' for you. Jack Bull and me, we'll see to it.
 
Well...yes. Thank you, son. Well, enough of this war talk.
 
Our Enemy is unified around one goal — to remake the world in its own image. While we worry about our families and ourselves, they are consumed with the basest hatred; they envy us, for our existence is an affront, a reproach to their misery. They are driven to destroy what they could never create. All of the centuries of blood and toil that we have spilt and spent to carve out our splendid niche can be undone in a matter of minutes, for as we must now realize, Heaven is far away, but Hell can be reached in a day. It often seems as if they have won, as if the war was lost before it was given a chance to begin, as if we have squandered each and every opportunity until finally it is too late. I must confess to feeling discouraged and disheartened on occasion, and to the shedding of tears in morose lamentations of doom and gloom. A friend recently sent me a video, a clip from some BBC nature documentary, which nourished that foundering fire in my heart. In the video, a noble, gallant, and solitary lion attempts to fight off a horde of vile hyenas; alone, despite his virtue, despite the fact that he is so much better than they can ever hope to be, he does not stand a chance. Our hearts in our mouths, we watch aghast as the despicable beasts wear him down. Yet in his hour of greatest need, in his direst straits, a fellow lion sees him in his travails and gallops to his aid. Now, the odds have changed; even for twenty hyenas, a pair of lions is too much to take on. As the hyenas tuck tail and dissipate, the lions bond, brothers in arms. We must unite in this, our darkest hour yet, for together we stand, and in isolation we fall, quickly and quietly.

We must also remember that it is always darkest before dawn, and in this spirit, must look to the shining light of Brigadier General Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, who alone fed the degraded and persecuted Patriots of South Carolina the steady diet of hope that was their sustenance when all truly appeared to be lost in our first War of Independence. There is much in Marion’s life and in his glorious guerrilla campaign from which we may glean vital tactical lessons, and, more importantly, to give us the inspiration that we so desperately need. Of Huguenot stock, Marion first cut his teeth in the ways of war in 1759, during the Cherokee War in South Carolina, a conflict that occurred in the midst of the French and Indian War, itself a theater of the Seven Years’ War. That tribe of Amerindians was returning from service in a British campaign against the French, when hostilities commenced with the Southern colonists; as William Gilmore Simms, Marion’s finest biographer, described, “The whole frontier of the Southern Provinces, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, was threatened by the savages, and the scalping-knife had already begun its bloody work upon the weak and unsuspecting borderers.” In this strife, Lieutenant Marion served under the immediate command of William Moultrie; in one spectacular engagement, Marion led the vanguard to dislodge the Cherokee from their stronghold atop a hill near the town of Etchoee. By sheer determination, a preview of the attritional warfare which he would later pioneer, he succeeded in driving the merciless savages from the field.

In the tumultuous year of 1775, Marion was sent by his community to serve as a delegate to the Provincial Congress of South Carolina, as a member from St. John’s, Berkeley, at which the proud people of South Carolina were committed to the Revolution. Marion was subsequently made a Captain in the Second Regiment, of which Moultrie was made its Colonel. As aforementioned, though, the Patriot cause was by no means ascendant; in fact, their condition, especially in the Southern colonies, was much the opposite. The Loyalists, Simms explained, “carried with them the prestige of authority, of the venerable power which time and custom seemed to hallow; they appealed to the loyalty of the subject; they dwelt upon the dangers which came with innovation; they denounced the ambition of the patriot leaders; they reminded the people of the power of Great Britain — a power to save or to destroy…They reminded the people that the Indians were not exterminated, that they still hung in numerous hordes about the frontiers, and that it needed but a single word from the Crown, to bring them, once more, with tomahawk and scalping-knife, upon their defenseless homes. Already, indeed, had the emissaries of Great Britain taken measures to this end…What was the tax on tea, of which they drank little, and the duty on stamps, when they had but little need for legal papers?”

Ambition and Mammon-lust have driven our pharisaical ruling class, the institutional barons of the Egalitarian Regime, to treason. The deplorable traditions which we so bitterly cling to are nothing but obstacles in their reductive vision of conquest; they have gleefully abandoned duty, faith, and permanence in so many short sales, exchanged for ephemeral power and prestige. Satan reigns in earthly corruption, and his mortal world hates us. Unlike the engorged, opulent, respectable cocktail conservatism of David French and “Pierre Delecto”, our Cause constantly teeters on the verge of poverty; as such, we must follow the lead of Marion’s ragtag band of brothers, for whom “faith and zeal did more…and for the cause, than gold and silver.” We, as dissidents, must understand that the path ahead is not an easy one, that the falling night is dark and full of terrors. Loyalists also tried to instill fear into the colonists by implanting the seed of doubt, that perhaps the Empire was just too powerful, too big to fail; we cannot allow our insecurities to be manipulated. As we saw with the Chinese coronavirus, our rulers are willing to exploit any situation to solidify power and strip us of our most fundamental liberties; witness the Faustian bargain that was made in the aftermath of 9/11, whereby our privacy was forever surrendered, never to return. What else are we to make of the Regime’s simultaneous efforts to both generate bloody chaos on the streets, releasing criminals from prison and weakening law enforcement, and to deprive us of our means of self-defense from that artificial bedlam?

The Enemy imposes the emotional, physical, and even sexual isolation of social ostracism as a highly effective weapon as well, one that many men, and even more women, cannot withstand. We must reckon with the fact that not all men can bear this burden; fortitude is a rare gift. Even in the midst of pitched battle, Simms noted, “no man is equally firm on all occasions. There are moods of weakness and irresolution in every mind, which is not exactly a machine, which impair its energies and make its course erratic and uncertain.” An important thing to remember here, though, is that Christ warned us that we would be hated, that we would be persecuted for his name; if we were receiving the plaudits of the damned, the honors of the dishonorable, we would be doing something horribly wrong. One of Marion’s greatest skills was his ability to foster a strong camaraderie among his men, thereby neutralizing the Achilles heel of the militiaman, the fact that, unlike regular troops, “they never forget their individuality. The very feeling of personal independence is apt to impair their confidence in one another. Their habit is to obey the individual impulse…So far from deriving strength from feeling another’s elbow, they much prefer elbow room. Could they be assured of one another, they were the greatest troops in the world. They are the greatest troops in the world—capable of the most daring and heroic achievements — whenever the skill of a commander can inspire this feeling of mutual reliance.” Marion transformed his untrained farmer-partisans into a quasi-männerbund, the ideal cultural unit of the Indo-European Germanic warrior.

The most seductive argument employed by the Loyalists, aside from that of security, was their appeal to the base self-interest that holds our population under the yoke; why care about the tax on tea or the duty on stamps if they do not affect us? This is the very jaundiced individualism that persuades otherwise patriotic men to capitulate, to go along to get along, to live on their knees. Men who fall prey to this mentality abandon their communities, their ire only aroused when they themselves are affected. These are the neoconservatives who, when challenged on the Patriot Act, respond, “If you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about.” The Regime draws much of its power from an undermined and coopted morality, a belief system fluid in all but its annihilation of life and its elevation of death, its erasure of civilization and advancement of barbarism. The sicker, the more perverse, the better. Our rulers are thus compelled to signal their virtue by making ever-increasingly pathetic acts of penitence and propitiation; they are good, moral, and virtuous, while we are “intolerant”, “irrational”, and “bigoted.” It is thus imperative that we restore the Christian morality upon which our nation was built, that we replace the secular theocracy and reconquer the moral landscape. As part of this optical struggle to win the narrative war, we must be careful as to how our aims are expressed; while we must remain true to our words, we must remember our audience. For example, in the earliest phases of the War of Independence, the Patriots were cautious to use only the language of absolute necessity, alongside vague assurances of fealty to the Crown. Quite tellingly, despite the fact that this fooled approximately nobody, as large numbers of Patriots certainly already entertained and enjoyed the idea of national independence, the Patriots still felt that, as Simms wrote, “the people were not prepared for such a revelation — such a condition; and appearances were still to be maintained.”

Promoted to Major, Marion was ordered to Fort Sullivan, then little more than an outline. The fort was not even half-finished, made of palmetto logs, with a hastily-constructed palisade and one completed sand-filled wall. Upon the appearance of a British fleet, General Charles Lee urged retreat, calling the unfinished fort a “slaughter pen”; thankfully, South Carolina President John Rutledge did not concur. During the ensuing Battle of Sullivan’s Island, the palmetto logs, laid over sand, withstood the British naval bombardment. One MacDonald was killed, his last words, “Do not give up; you are fighting for liberty and country.” Fort Sullivan was renamed Fort Moultrie, after its defender, and Marion was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel for his service in the victory. The Battle of Sullivan’s Island thus provided the Patriots of the South a wonderful morale boost, piercing and then tarnishing the aura of British invincibility, as well as staving off the invasion of Carolina for another three years. The most lasting legacy of the battle, however, is the noble flag of South Carolina. At the behest of the Revolutionary Council of Safety, Moultrie designed the “Liberty Flag” for South Carolinian troops, consisting of a white crescent in the upper left corner of a blue field, the word “liberty” written in the crescent. First flown at Fort Johnson, on James Island, this is the flag that flew over Fort Sullivan during its defense. Shot down, Sergeant William Jasper braved enemy fire to retrieve and raise it until it could be mounted again; the Moultrie Flag thus became the Revolutionary standard in South Carolina, the first American flag to fly in the South. In 1861, over one century later, the independent State of South Carolina created its secession flag, adding the palmetto tree to the Moultrie Flag, in honor both of Moultrie’s defense of the fort, and of the palmetto logs that had absorbed British fire so well.

In the winter of 1778, and then in the spring of 1780, the Southern strongholds of Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, fell to British rule. It was sheer luck, or perhaps, we believe, something greater than fortune, that Marion’s services were not lost to us in the fall of Charleston. Shortly before its capture, he had marched into the city from Dorchester, and, “dining with a party of friends at a house [on] Tradd Street, the host, with that mistaken hospitality which has too frequently changed a virtue to a vice, turned the key upon his guests, to prevent escape, till each individual should be gorged with wine. Though an amiable man, Marion was a strictly temperate one. He was not disposed to submit to this too-common form of social tyranny; yet mot willing to resent the breach of propriety by converting the assembly into a bull-ring, he adopted a middle course…Opening a window, he coolly threw himself into the street. He was unfortunate in the attempt…the height [was] considerable, and the adventure cost him a broken ankle.” His injury totally disabled him from service, and, pursuant to an order of General Benjamin Lincoln for “the departure of all idle mouths”, Marion quite unhappily departed the city on a litter, while passage still remained open. Though the warrior was presently out of action, his services lost as he convalesced at home in St. John’s parish, his present misfortune spared and secured him for future glory. His best was yet to come.
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Foundations of the Egalitarian Regime, Part 2

6/22/2020

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​The Commerce Clause and the Civil Rights Act 

Ostensibly, the commerce power of Congress traces its source to Article I, Section VIII, of the Constitution: “The Congress shall have power…To regulate Commerce…among the several States.” The judicial misconstruction of “commerce” forms the basis of Congress’ supposed authority to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and, by extension, all of the Civil Rights acts that have followed; it is thus imperative that we understand how this misconstruction was invented. In Hammer v. Dagenhart, Justice Day quite presciently warned of the vast potential for abuse of the commerce power; he asserted that “the grant of power to Congress over the subject of interstate commerce was to enable it to regulate such commerce, and not to give it authority to control the States in their exercise of the police power…The grant of authority over a purely federal matter was not intended to destroy the local power always existing and carefully reserved to the States in the Tenth Amendment…if Congress can thus regulate matters entrusted to local authority by prohibition of the movement of commodities in interstate commerce, all freedom of commerce will be at an end, and the power of the States over local matters may be eliminated and thus our system of government be practically destroyed.”

In Carter v. Carter Coal Company, Justice Sutherland elaborated that warning further, writing that “the proposition, often advanced and as often discredited, that the power of the federal government inherently expands to purposes affecting the Nation as a whole…and the related notion that Congress, entirely apart from those powers delegated by the Constitution, may enact laws to promote the general welfare, have never been accepted but always definitely rejected by this court…[The Framers’ Convention] declined to confer upon Congress power in such general terms; instead…it carefully limited the powers which it thought wise to entrust to Congress by specifying them, thereby denying all others…It made no grant of authority to Congress to legislate substantively for the general welfare…Every journey to a forbidden end begins with the first step; and the danger of such a step by the federal government in the direction of taking over the powers of the States is that the end of the journey may find the States so despoiled of their powers…as to reduce them to little more than geographical subdivisions of the national domain. It is safe to say that if, when the Constitution was under consideration, it had been thought that any such danger lurked behind its plain words, it would never have been ratified…As used in the Constitution, the word ‘commerce’ is the equivalent of the phrase ‘intercourse for the purposes of trade.’”

It was during the New Deal that the Supreme Court bastardized “commerce.” In NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin, the Supreme Court held that local activities are regulable by Congress so long as they have a direct and substantial effect on “interstate commerce”. This newfound exercise of the commerce power to interfere within the States was expanded further in U.S. v. Darby, in which Congress’ commerce power was deemed to be plenary, “complete in itself”; the Tenth Amendment was dismissed as a mere “truism”, completing its vitiation, initiated so long ago by Chief Justice John Marshall. Following Marshall’s 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden expansion of the definition of “commerce” to mean anything and everything affecting “commerce”, in the circular logic of unlimited power, the Court found its groove in the specious Wickard v. Filburn, in which Roosevelt’s 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act was upheld to penalize a farmer for growing wheat over his allotment. In other words, a farmer was told what quantity of what crop he was permitted to grow, extending even to consumption by his own family. Commerce, it was thus established, meant anything that Congress said it did. At ever-increasing levels of abstraction, you see, everything affects the economy; all activities may be held to be “economic”.

Herein lies the absolute absurdity of the “reasoning” Congress used to imbue itself with the authority to pass the Civil Rights Act, affirmed time and again by the Supreme Court. Gerald Gunther wrote to the Department of Justice shortly before the bill was passed, stating with aplomb that “the proposed end-run by way of the Commerce Clause seems to me ill-advised in every respect…of course…the commerce power is a temptingly broad one. But surely responsible statutory drafting should have a firmer basis than…some of the loose talk in recent newspaper articles about the widely accepted, unrestricted availability of the Commerce Clause to achieve social ends…the substantive content of the Commerce Clause would have to be drained beyond any point yet reached to justify the simplistic argument that all intrastate activity may be subjected to any kind of national regulation merely because some formal crossing of an interstate boundary once took place…The aim of the proposed anti-discrimination legislation…is quite unrelated to any concern with national commerce in any substantive sense. It would…pervert the meaning and purpose of the Commerce Clause to invoke it as the basis for this legislation.” In this vein, Senator Strom Thurmond noted that, rather than aiming “to regulate economic affairs of life”, the Civil Rights Act was designed “to regulate moral and social affairs.”

Attorney General Robert Kennedy outlined the entirety of the Johnson Administration’s argument — discrimination had a “very adverse effect on our economy.” Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall elaborated that “discrimination burdens Negro interstate travelers and therefore inhibits interstate travel. It artificially restricts the market available for interstate goods and services…It inhibits the holding of conventions and meetings in segregated cities…And it restricts business enterprises in their choice of location for offices and plants, thus preventing the most effective allocation of national resources.” The Supreme Court used a greater quantity of words to convey the same prima facie obtuse reasoning. In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, Justice Clark affirmed that the Commerce Clause conferred upon Congress “ample power” to rewrite the Constitution, based on testimony that “millions of people of all races travel from State to State; that Negroes in particular have been the subject of discrimination in transient accommodations, having to travel great distances to secure the same [this may or may not have even been accurate]; that often they have been unable to obtain accommodations and have had to call upon friends to put them up overnight; and that these conditions had become so acute as to require the listing of available lodging for Negroes in a special guidebook which was itself ‘dramatic testimony to the difficulties’ Negroes encounter in travel…This testimony indicated a qualitative, as well as quantitative, effect on interstate travel by Negroes. The former was the obvious impairment of the Negro traveler's pleasure and convenience that resulted when he continually was uncertain of finding lodging. As for the latter, there was evidence that this uncertainty stemming from racial discrimination had the effect of discouraging travel on the part of a substantial portion of the Negro community.”
  
Justice Clark repeated these extraordinarily vigorous mental gymnastics, working backwards to a preordained conclusion, in Katzenbach v. McClung, arguing that the proffered testimony was “replete with…the burdens placed on interstate commerce by racial discrimination in restaurants. A comparison of per capita spending by Negroes…indicated less spending…in areas where discrimination is widely practiced…This diminutive spending springing from a refusal to serve Negroes and their total loss as customers has, regardless of the absence of direct evidence [emphasis mine], a close connection to interstate commerce. The fewer customers a restaurant enjoys, the less food it sells and consequently the less it buys…Likewise…discrimination deterred professional, as well as skilled, people from moving into areas where such practices occurred and thereby caused industry to be reluctant to establish there. [this is not even accurate, and is the precursor to the specious arguments today about the supposed economic benefits of diversity, which is demonstrably nothing but a detriment in every respect] We believe…the conclusion that established restaurants in such areas sold less interstate goods because of the discrimination, that interstate travel was obstructed directly by it, that business in general suffered and that many new businesses refrained from establishing there as a result.” Need we expound upon this result-oriented “jurisprudence”? It strains credulity to argue that segregation by private entities is within the purview of “commerce.” By this logic, just as Justices Day and Sutherland warned, everything comes under the yoke of Congress. In both Heart of Atlanta and Katzenbach, Justices Black and Goldberg implied that Congress would also have the power to pass the Civil Rights Act under the Fourteenth Amendment; this is patently false, though, for not only can the Fourteenth Amendment only be employed against State action, rather than private action, but that Amendment itself, as we shall see, did not and does not prohibit segregation.

As part of the long attack on Maurice Bessinger, the Court held in Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises that “this court has a mandate…to conclude that all products sold to defendant as food by its producers which have moved in interstate commerce into this state in some form, even though they may have been slaughtered or otherwise processed after arrival here, are to be considered as food which has moved in commerce…by including all foodstuffs served by the defendant during the periods under consideration which have moved in interstate commerce the court has concluded that at least forty percent of the same has moved in commerce and unquestionably constitutes a "substantial" portion of the total food which it serves in all of its six locations…the direct evidence produced by plaintiffs that defendant serves or offers to serve interstate travelers is slight, unimpressive and inconclusive; however, from all the circumstances before the court there is no doubt but that defendant has served and is serving interstate travelers…it employs no reasonably effective means of determining whether its customers are inter- or intra-state travelers. The court, therefore, concludes that defendant serves or offers to serve interstate travelers at all of its locations.” To reiterate, the Court believes that if our lives involve anything that has ever left our State, it is regulable.

The late Justice Scalia expounded wonderfully upon the potential omnipotence with which the Court has invested Congress’ commerce power in his dissent in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the “Obamacare” case. Scalia recognized that “it is true that, at the end of the day, it is inevitable that each American will affect commerce and become a part of it, even if not by choice. But if every person comes within the Commerce Clause power of Congress to regulate by the simple reason that he will one day engage in commerce, the idea of a limited Government power is at an end…[The Court] treats the Constitution as though it is an enumeration of those problems that the Federal Government can address…The Constitution is not that. It 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.” The Constitution does not have as its maxim that revolutionary incantation that “the ends justify the means.” For any and all government action, it is our solemn obligation to ascertain precisely from whence in the Constitution it draws its power from. Powers must be traced to their source.

Justice Thomas, in his concurrence in United States v. Lopez, ably summarized the rotten core of Congress’ commerce power. Thomas wrote that “our case law has drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause…At the time the original Constitution was ratified, ‘commerce’ consisted of selling, buying, and bartering, as well as transporting for these purposes…when Federalists and Anti-Federalists discussed the Commerce Clause during the ratification period, they often used trade (in its selling/bartering sense) and commerce interchangeably…The Constitution not only uses the word ‘commerce’ in a narrower sense than our case law might suggest, [but] it also does not support the proposition that Congress has authority over all activities that ‘substantially affect’ interstate commerce. The Constitution does not state that Congress may ‘regulate matters that substantially affect commerce…among the several States…’ In contrast, the Constitution itself temporarily prohibited Amendments that would ‘affect’ Congress’ lack of authority to prohibit or restrict the slave trade…Clearly, the Framers could have drafted a Constitution that contained a ‘substantially affects interstate commerce’ Clause had that been their objective…[The Court’s] construction of the scope of Congressional authority has the additional problem of coming close to turning the Tenth Amendment on its head. Our case law could be read to reserve to the United States all powers not expressly prohibited by the Constitution.” Thomas was slightly mistaken in noting that one could read the Court’s precedent as making that shocking declaration — that is exactly how the Court has come to brutalize the Constitution.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, with only the flimsy foundation of a nonsensically expansive definition of “commerce” as “anything and everything with any potential economic impact whatsoever”, has revolutionized the United States of America. As we shall see in our examination of the Fourteenth Amendment, the “civil rights” understood by our forebears has no connection at all with Civil Rights ideology; this definitional transformation has fundamentally deformed American society. Christopher Caldwell[i] explains that the Civil Rights Act inseminated an immense machinery of enforcement, concretizing a giant leap for the Egalitarian Regime and incentivizing “bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the ‘eyes and ears’…the foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement. Over time, more of the country’s institutions were brought under the act’s scrutiny. Eventually all of them were. The grounds for finding someone or something guilty of discrimination expanded.” It is perhaps no coincidence that the creation of this edifice occurred in conjunction with the massive injection of federal money into the university system.

As Civil Rights “hardened into a body of legislation, [it] became…the model for an entirely new system of constantly churning political reform. Definitions of what was required in the name of justice and humanity broadened…There was something irresistible about this movement. The moral prestige and practical resources available to the American governing elite as it went about reordering society were almost limitless.” This comprehensive reorganization of America was not an addition to the Constitution, Caldwell argues, but was rather “a rival constitution, with which the original one was…incompatible…Much of what we have called ‘polarization’ or ‘incivility’ in recent years is something [graver]—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure Constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional…legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.”

Civil Rights was not merely an esoteric constitutional theory, but rather “proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen…the largest undertaking of any kind in American history.” Every aspect of our society was forever altered; the original Constitution was devoured by the new, for, as Caldwell accurately states, “rights cannot simply be ‘added’ to a social contract without changing it. To establish new liberties is to extinguish others.” Every other right, including the truly fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property, was subjugated under the harness and whip of Diversity. American history was recast for generations of schoolchildren, the new “history” reinforced with each successive year. Race, Caldwell notes, “is the part of the human experience in which American schoolchildren are most painstakingly instructed. Their studies of literature, of war, of civics, are all subordinated to it. Race was invested with religious significance. It became an ethical absolute…the civil rights movement…became a doctrinal institution…there was something new…about the way the U.S. government sought to mold the whole of society — down to the most intimate private acts — around the ideology of anti-racism.” The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is emblematic of the new American history. According to the authorized Regime history, now made our official doctrine, the story of America is that of “the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded…This was the route followed by the dissident tendency within the American constitutional tradition that culminated in Civil Rights. But now Civil Rights was no dissident tendency. It was the American constitutional tradition.” The Constitution, and the Republic built upon it, were vulgarized as “a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human rights.”

As aforementioned, the Regime utilizes merciless censorship to further strengthen its stranglehold on American life, discrediting and ruining any dissident, no matter how slight his transgression; this censorship is to some extent governmental, but its most effective use is outsourced to private entities. This privatization of the Diversity inquisition “was an institutional innovation [that] grew directly out of Civil Rights law. Just as affirmative action in universities and corporations had privatized the enforcement of integration, the fear of litigation privatized the suppression of disagreement, or even of speculation. The government would not need to punish directly the people who dissented from its doctrines. Boards of directors and boards of trustees, fearing lawsuits, would do that…Americans in all walks of life began to talk about the smallest things as if they would have their lives destroyed for holding the wrong opinion…Cant was the only way a sensibly self-protective person would talk about race in public—and when it came to civil rights, every place was public. Because there was no statutory ‘smoking gun’ behind it, this new system of censorship was easily mistaken for a change in the public mood, although it remained a mystery how a mood so minoritarian could be so authoritative.” With respect to Silicon Valley, Michael Rectenwald has termed this enforcement mechanism “the digital gulag.”

Unconstitutional though the Civil Rights Act was and is, the American people were shanghaied. Caldwell demonstrates that all of what we have been drilled by “conservatives” to see as deviations from the core goodness of Civil Rights ideology are in fact not deviations at all; what we understand as a departure from the “colorblind” ideal that was used to foist the Act upon the public was always “baked in the cake.” The present sordid state of our civilization was always the logical consequence of the Civil Rights Act. Caldwell implies what we have long known, that traditional America was deceived into unilateral disarmament. Outside of the South, whose people understood precisely what was at stake, whites “seemed to believe it would be a simple matter to get rid of segregation, as if a system…so intricate and ingenious that it had taken three-and-a-half centuries to devise could be dismantled overnight — by sheer open-minded niceness, at no price in rights to anyone. The country could solve [the problem] without altering any of its institutions.” Moreover, Caldwell writes, “whites did not suspect they would see the vast increase in federal government oversight that would become the sine qua non of civil rights. The Congressional debate leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is filled with outright mockery of those who warned of some hitherto unimaginable federal government infringement…All sorts of constitutionalist and libertarian fears, chuckled at and pooh-poohed on the floor of the Senate, came to pass. Those who opposed the legislation proved wiser than those who sponsored it.” For example, when Senator George Smathers gave voice to concerns about forced busing, Senator Hugh Scott scoffed. Less than a decade later, busing was nationwide.

Essentially, the American people simply did not grasp that they had just been placed into the bloody talons of an insatiable Leviathan; they believed the nascent Regime when it told them that all it sought was legal equality. After that initial goal was achieved, it was “now deemed insufficient by both civil rights leaders and the government. Once its ostensible demands had been met, the civil rights movement did not disband. It grew.” Everything “would be racialized. No one would be permitted to sit back and just allow social change to happen. Every American had to be enlisted as a zealous soldier in the war on racism.” The federal government thus empowered itself to “disrupt and steer interactions that had been considered the private affairs of private citizens…It could interfere in matters of personal discretion…the government was now authorized to act against racism even if there was no evidence of any racist intent. This was an opening to arbitrary power. And once arbitrary power is conferred, it matters little what it was conferred for.” Civil Rights ideology initiated a crude new politics that uses “lawsuits, shaming, and street power to overrule democratic politics.” The Civil Rights Act, Caldwell notes, thus “wrought a change in the country’s constitutional culture [and] had given progressives control over the most important levers of government, control that would endure for as long as the public was afraid of being called racist…The Civil Rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions…Civil Rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted…winning what its apostles saw as liberation after liberation.”
[i] Caldwell, Christopher. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
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Foundations of the Egalitarian Regime, Part 1

6/14/2020

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​The United States of America are ruled by a hostile parasitic elite, a ruthlessly extractive ruling class which demonstrably hates its subjects, the benighted and deplorable “bitter clingers”, the American kulaks. As Tucker Carlson has said, “We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.” Perhaps the greatest symbol of our present condition is the cover of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, a dazzling champagne flute atop a crushed beer can. This hostile elite is a self-perpetuating oligarchy, enforcing its vicious rule through a hubristic kritarchy and an engorged corporatocracy, all of the members of which attended the same universities and promulgate the same fashionable opinions. Indeed, Ron Unz has noted that this class has “been produced largely as a consequence of the particular selection methods adopted by our top national universities in the late 1960s.” The academic system provides these rulers with a meritocratic façade, just as the robed tyrants of the judiciary issue diktats from behind the veneer of constitutionalism. This managerial class largely operates through a system of anarcho-tyranny and panoptic schadenfreude, cowing the populace by eroding communities and reducing the human experience to crude devil-terms like “racism.” The hagiographic and perhaps apocryphal tale of Pavel Morozov serves as their guiding light.

The “American” ruling class swept into power during the technocratic regimes of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and fully enshrined itself in 1954 and 1964, the coup de grâce arriving in 1965. These three key death knells, by which the original Constitution was consumed by a new one spun out of whole cloth and a new population ordained, were Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Hart-Celler Immigration Act. The Immigration Act is beyond our purview, aside from noting that New York Representative Emanuel Celler drafted and introduced the Civil Rights Act and authored the Immigration Act. Brown, and almost seventy years of egalitarian jurisprudence since, is based upon a malevolent misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which itself is not actually a part of our Constitution, while the Civil Rights Act is a gross abuse of the Commerce Clause. After elaborating upon what, precisely, the ruling elite and its Egalitarian Regime are, we will demonstrate that the Civil Rights Act is manifestly unconstitutional and that it represents a naked usurpation by Congress. We will then examine why the Fourteenth Amendment cannot truly be said to be a part of the Constitution, having been neither properly proposed nor ratified, and that even if we were to let that go, the Amendment has still been twisted into knots by almost seventy years of deliberate misconstruction. We will also briefly investigate the origin of the “hate crime” designation, as an example of further Regime malfeasance. Thus, we will expose the cracked foundations of the Egalitarian Regime — which it is high time that we destroy. As the late Samuel Francis wrote, what we must recognize is that “the forces that have destroyed [our] civilization are the same forces that rule its ruins and whose rule brought it to ruin. Not until those forces are themselves displaced from power will [we] be able to recover the legacy [our] ancestors created and left for [us].”

The Egalitarian Regime

The late Samuel Francis[i] employed the classical theory of elites, in conjunction with James Burnham’s concept of “the managerial revolution”, to explain the formation of what I term the Egalitarian Regime. The ruling class is wholly dependent upon totalized bureaucratization, an insatiable Leviathan and metastasizing Blob which seeks ever-greater consolidation. This class is united in “its need to extend and perpetuate the demand for the skills and functions on which its power and social rewards depend.” The older, American elite “must also be displaced as the ruling class of the larger society and their ideology and cultural values discredited and rejected.” Francis saw much of the mid-to-latter twentieth century as that “protracted social and political process by which the emerging new managerial class displaces the old ruling class of traditional capitalist or bourgeois society. On the institutional level this process consists of the replacement of the constitutionalist parliamentary or congressional form of government favored by the old elite with the new centralized state controlled by the bureaucracy of the new class. The new kind of state that emerges takes on new functions that increasingly require the kind of skills only the managerial bureaucrats and technocrats can provide — economic regulation, social engineering, public welfare, and scientific, administrative, and cultural functions unknown to the older states of the capitalist era.”

Elected politicians are displaced by and placed in gleeful subservience to “the managerial bureaucrats of the new state and the political managers who run the new, far more complicated political parties and organizations.” Think-tanks, nongovernmental organizations, and interest groups take the place of the legislature, such that we may now be said to live in a postconstitutional administrative state. In the corporate sector, the traditional business model is subsumed in new functions, such as the “‘scientific management’ of production, highly technical economic projections and development, specialized management of personnel and consumers, as well as social, political, and cultural functions not directly related to their business activities and interests.” This vast scheme of consolidation is particularly visible with respect to entertainment and “news” media. Monstrous legions of faceless automatons, given comic reference by the “Non-Player Character” meme, operate the levers of power.

The ascendant elite is animated by hatred for traditional America, and Western civilization more generally. The natural conservatism of the displaced class “emphasized States’ Rights, the power of Congress over that of the presidency, loyalty to and identity with the nation and national interest rather than international or global identities, and the interests of smaller, privately owned and operated companies against larger, managerially controlled corporations. It also championed traditional religious and moral beliefs and institutions, the importance of the patriarchal family and local community, and the value of national, regional, racial, and ethnic identity, as well as the virtues of the capitalist ethic — hard work, frugality, personal honesty and integrity, individual initiative, postponement of gratification.” Francis observed that, “like any new elite, the managerial class needed a political formula that expressed and justified its group interests against those of its older rivals in the capitalist elite” and thus developed a Statist system of welfare and warfare “that claimed to be more ‘progressive’, more ‘liberated’, more ‘humanistic’, and more ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ than the culture defined by the older social and moral codes of traditional capitalism. The managerial ideology also demonized the old elite and its institutions and values as ‘obsolete’, ‘backward’, ‘repressive’, ‘exploitative’, and ‘narrow-minded.’”

The old elite was deeply, indeed inextricably, entwined with traditional America; it “passed on its property and wealth, the basis of its power, through inheritance, and therefore it had a strong vested interest in maintaining both property rights and what are today called ‘family values.’ The family indeed, as well as the local community, religious and ethnic identities, and the cultural and moral codes that respected and legitimized property, wealth, inheritance, social continuity, the personal virtues that helped people acquire wealth and property, and small governments that lacked the power to threaten these things, all served as power bases for the traditional elite and as major cultural and ideological supports for its interests.” The new elite, in order to wrest power from the old, had to eviscerate all of those traditional institutions which stood as stumbling-blocks in its path to the throne. Egalitarian universalism, expressed today by the Regime as Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, was the weapon with which they accomplished this. Faith, family, and community, the “moral and social bonds” of the old fabric of society, meant “virtually nothing to managers, who… tend to depend on families far less than the older elite and therefore to value the family and the moral codes that reflect and reinforce it far less also. The culture the managers seek to build places more value on individual achievement and ‘merit’ (defined largely as the ability to acquire and exercise managerial and technical skills) than on family inheritance, on sexual fulfillment than postponement of gratification and the breeding and rearing of children, on social mobility and advancement rather than identification with family, community, race, and nation.” These are nothing but obstacles to be annihilated, “barriers against which the managerial state, corporations, and other mass organizations are always bumping, and the sooner such barriers are leveled, the more reach and power the organizations, and the managerial elites that run them, will acquire.”

Employing Samuel Huntington’s discussion of the “denationalization of elites” into “Dead Souls [who] abandon commitment to their nation and their fellow citizens and argue the moral superiority of identifying with humanity at large”, Francis noted that “someone whose loyalties, identities, involvements are purely national is less likely to rise to the top in business, academia, the media, the professions, than someone who transcends these limits. Outside politics, those who stay home stay behind.” Just as nonintervention is demonized as isolation, as independence is recast and pathologized, the Egalitarian Regime eschews “ideologies such as nationalism that justify and reflect national sovereignty, independence, and identity, as well as any ideology or belief that justifies any particular group identity and loyalty — national, regional, racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious. The managerial class therefore tends to disengage from the nation state as well as from these other identities. Its interests extend across many different nations, races, religions, and cultures and are transnational and supra-national, detached and disengaged from — and actually hostile to — any particular place or group or set of beliefs that supports particular identities.” The egalitarianism of the Regime is not truly egalitarian per se, but rather a sort of hydrochloric acid used as a weapon to destroy the barriers embodied by traditionalism; hence, it is not a contradiction that all ethnic identities are accentuated and valorized by the Regime except white identity. These foreign identities are merely used as cudgels with which traditional white America can be subjugated and wiped away.

Following this logic of the Great Replacement, not only of a vanquished class but the vanquished people which that class represented and defended, “the managerial elite has a proclivity toward as well as a material interest in adopting and promoting ideologies of universalism, egalitarianism, cultural relativism, behaviorism, and ‘blank slate’ environmental determinism.” Francis thus elucidated the seeming mystery of “why the American ruling class betrays its race and civilization.” It is no mystery, but rather a necessary condition of its reign of mediocre supremacy, as “the need of the new elite to formulate a new ideology or political formula and reconstruct society around it provides an explanation of why the dominant authorities in these countries today continue to support the dispossession of whites and the cultural and political destruction of the older American and Western civilization centered on whites and of why they not only fail to resist the anti-white demands of non-whites but actively support and subsidize them. These policies on the part of the new elite are not the result of ‘decadence’ or ‘guilt’ but of the group interests of the elite itself, imbedded in and arising from the structure of their power and position and rationalized in their consciousness by the political formula of managerial liberalism. It is in the interests of the new elite, in other words, to destroy and eradicate the older society and the racial and cultural identities and consciousness associated with it (not race alone, but also virtually any distinctive traditional group identity or bond, cultural, biological, or political). To those (‘conservatives’) who continue to adhere to the norms of the older society, of course, managerial behavior appears as decadence, degeneracy, cowardice, appeasement, pandering, or guilt, but what is an evil, misguided, or suicidal pathology to the ‘conservative’ forces who are still shaped by the older codes and institutions in fact reflects the interest and the health of the forces centered around the creation and control of the new society. The interests of the managerial elite, in other words, are antagonistic to the survival of the traditional racial and institutional identity of the society it dominates.”

Francis discussed another wrinkle wrought in the cultural devastation of the Egalitarian Regime; because the self-elect “rejects and destroys the mechanisms of the old elite that excluded other ethnic, racial, and religious groups, such groups are often able to permeate the managerial power structure and acquire levels of power unavailable to them in pre-managerial society and to advance their own interests and agendas by means of the managerial instruments of power. These ethnic forces, articulating their own strong racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious consciousness, invoke managerial liberal slogans of ‘equality’, ‘tolerance’, ‘diversity’, etc., to challenge traditional white dominance but increasingly aspire to cultural and political supremacy themselves, excluding whites and rejecting and dismantling the institutional fabric of their society.” As aforementioned, “while explicitly white racial identity is virtually forbidden and strictly punished by the managerial elite, institutions that reflect explicit nonwhite or anti-white identities are tolerated and encouraged. Groups such as the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Council of La Raza (‘The Race’), and any number of professional, student, and political organizations, the names, membership, and agendas of which are explicitly racial, are not only tolerated but are often the recipients of millions of dollars in grants and philanthropy from the managerial state and managerial corporations and foundations.” A prime example of such a group is the National Black Law Students Association, whose chapter logo at my law school features the fist of Black Power clutching the scales of justice.

In summation, egalitarianism, Francis argued, “has become an unofficial and increasingly an official ideology of the system in which we live, the government, the dominant culture, and even the economy of the United States and the Western world.  Egalitarianism has become an ideology that protects, serves, and rationalizes the interests of the elites that hold power in Western society, just as doctrines like the Divine Right of Kings served the interests of monarchies and aristocracies before the French Revolution.” The hostile elite that we subsist under the yoke of today is unique in that it has a vested interest not in preserving society, but in revolutionizing it into abyss, in “managing and manipulating social change” to destroy the society which it rules. As such, “traditional institutions can be depicted not only as ‘unequal’ and ‘oppressive’ but also as ‘pathological’, requiring the social and economic therapy that only the ‘knowledge elite’ is skilled enough to design and apply.  The interests of the knowledge elite in managing social change happen to be entirely consistent not only with the agendas of the hard left but also with the grievances and demands of various racial and ethnic groups that view ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’ as obstacles to their own advancement, so that what we see is an alliance between the new elites and organized racial and ethnic minorities to undermine and displace the traditional institutions and beliefs of white Euro-American society, which just happen to be the power centers of older elites based on wealth, land, and status.  This process of displacement or dispossession is always described as ‘progressive’, ‘liberating’, or ‘diversifying’, when in fact it merely helps consolidate the dominance of a new class and weaken the power and interests of its rivals.”

Equipped with this proper translation of “egalitarianism”, we may perceive things as they really are, from greater heights than “conservative” pundits. It is important that we remember the words of the theologian R.L. Dabney, that “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” So, Francis said, “when we see university deans and presidents ‘caving in’ to the demands of the hard Left, they are not really displaying traits of weakness and appeasement. Universities are the breeding grounds of egalitarianism and its applications to society by the elites, and hence they occupy a special and strategic place in the functioning of the system.  If the ideology of egalitarianism were abandoned, many of the functions that universities now perform in the way of research and much of what their faculties do in designing egalitarian social programs and therapy would become obsolete.  When the universities ‘cave in’ to the Left, therefore, they are simply pursuing their own interests, which are to preserve the political ideology of egalitarianism intact and suppress or silence those who dissent from it, and they are in fact behaving like any elite, like the French aristocracy of the 18th century, for example, when it punished Enlightenment writers who challenged aristocratic ideologies. Their behavior appears to be weak or degenerate or renegade to us because we look at their conduct from the point of view of those who believe the consequences of egalitarianism are harmful and have to live with those consequences and also because most of us continue to harbor the illusion that the elites that now prevail in this country and much of the Western world are still in some sense ‘our’ elites, that they represent us, when in fact they mainly represent themselves and their class interests and the ideology and agendas that serve those interests.”

Angelo Codevilla has also examined the strategies of the Egalitarian Regime, especially its transformation of the judiciary into mendacious kritarchy, recognizing that, indeed, “the Republic established by America’s Founders is…gone.” When the ruling class is rarely “asked what gives them the right to do such things they have acted as if the only answer were Nancy Pelosi’s reply to whether the Constitution allows the government to force us into Obamacare: ‘Are you kidding? Are you kidding?’” Today, the ruling class merely does whatever it wishes; its primary tactic, as we shall see, is to appeal to the Constitution through the Supreme Court. When that is inconvenient, however, they simply dispense with that nominalism altogether. Codevilla notes that “executive orders, phone calls, and the right judge mean a lot more than laws. They even trump State referenda. Over the past half-century, presidents have ruled not by enforcing laws but increasingly through agencies that write their own rules, interpret them, and punish unaccountably—the administrative state. As for the Supreme Court, the American people have seen it invent rights where there were none—e.g., abortion—while trammeling ones that had been the republic’s spine…The Court taught Americans that the word ‘public’ can mean ‘private’ (Kelo v. City of New London), that ‘penalty’ can mean ‘tax’ (King v. Burwell), and that holding an opinion contrary to its own can only be due to an ‘irrational animus’ (Obergefell v. Hodges).”

“Constitutional law” is now taught in place of the Constitution, and has essentially overwritten it; indeed, as will be further examined, “when the 1964 Civil Rights Act substituted a wholly open-ended mandate to oppose ‘discrimination’ for any and all fundamental rights, it became the little law that ate the Constitution…the Act pretended that the Commerce Clause trumps the freedom of persons to associate or not with whomever they wish, and is being taken to mean that it trumps the free exercise of religion as well…This arbitrary power, whose rabid guard-dog growls and barks: ‘Racist! Sexist! Homophobic!’ has transformed our lives by removing restraints on government. The American Bar Association’s new professional guidelines expose lawyers to penalties for insufficient political correctness. Performing abortions or at least training to perform them may be imposed as a requirement for licensing doctors, nurses, and hospitals that offer services to the general public.” One of the most egregious innovations of the Regime is the bipartisan practice “of rolling all of the government’s expenditures into a single bill. This eliminates elected officials’ responsibility for any of the government’s actions, and reduces them either to approving all that the government does without reservation, or the allegedly revolutionary, disloyal act of ‘shutting down the government.’” I am often bemused to see that, during these oh-so-odious “shutdowns”, all “nonessential” federal workers are furloughed; if they are not essential, why should they be employed at all?

Indeed, the situation is further complicated when we recognize that Congress itself is no longer the Legislative Branch. In fact, we no longer have a Legislature; what the Seventeenth Amendment did not destroy, the administrative state has. Congressional abdication has created a situation in which our elected politicians vote on bills that are thousands of pages long and that they have not read, but are rather summarized by the unelected army of Leftist attorneys and bureaucrats who actually wrote them. In other words, completely unaccountable, nameless, faceless tyrants write legislation that “legislators” sign off on without deigning to look at and then farm the implementation of said legislation back to the same administrative attorneys and technocrats. To reiterate, by conferring massive commerce power to Congress, we are crowning unelected and entirely unaccountable “men without chests”, to use C.S. Lewis’ term, with the power to legislate every breath we take.

Codevilla, echoing Francis, notes that “all ruling classes are what Shakespeare called the ‘makers of manners.’ Plato, in The Republic, and Aristotle, in his Politics, teach that polities reflect the persons who rise to prominence within them, whose habits the people imitate, and who set the tone of life in them. Thus, a polity can change as thoroughly as a chorus changes from comedy to tragedy depending on the lyrics and music.” The Egalitarian Regime is a system by which “a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens…If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class’s chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.” If, however, we find ourselves on the wrong side of the Regime, we are depersonalized and persecuted, our slightest transgression from the doctrine of Diversity punished to the fullest extent of the “law.”

As a consequence of the coup d’état outlined by Francis, “people and practices that had been at society’s margins have been brought to its center, while people and ideas that had been central have been marginalized. Fifty years ago, prayer in the schools was near universal, but no one was punished for not praying. Nowadays, countless people are arrested or fired for praying on school property. West Point’s commanding general reprimanded the football coach for his team’s Thanksgiving prayer. Fifty years ago, bringing sexually explicit [material] into schools was treated as a crime, as was “procuring abortion.” Nowadays, schools contract with Planned Parenthood to teach sex, and will not tell parents when they take girls to Planned Parenthood facilities for abortions. Back then, many schools worked with the National Rifle Association to teach gun handling and marksmanship. Now students are arrested and expelled merely for pointing their finger and saying ‘bang.’ In those benighted times, boys who ventured into the girls’ bathroom were expelled as perverts. Now, girls are suspended for objecting to boys coming into the girls’ room under pretense of transgenderism. The mainstreaming of pornography, the invention of abortion as the most inalienable of human rights and, most recently, the designation of opposition to homosexual marriage as a culpable psychosis—none of which is dictated by law enacted by elected officials—is enforced as if it had been. No surprise that America has experienced a drastic drop in the formation of families, with the rise of rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites equal to the rates among blacks that was recognized as disastrous a half-century ago…and the social dislocations attendant to all that.”

The revolutionary logic of the Regime holds that “America’s constitutional republic had given the American people too much latitude to be who they are, that is: religiously and socially reactionary, ignorant, even pathological, barriers to Progress. Thankfully, an enlightened minority exists with the expertise and the duty to disperse the religious obscurantism, the hypocritical talk of piety, freedom, and equality, which excuses Americans’ racism, sexism, greed, and rape of the environment. As we progressives take up our proper responsibilities, Americans will no longer live politically according to their prejudices; they will be ruled administratively according to scientific knowledge.” The technocratic Regime is even more dangerous when we consider what Patrick Michaels has termed “scientocracy”; as Codevilla explains, “truth” is coopted by the mutant bastard of “normative pull”, or “what furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given time.” In other words, “because rejecting that true and false, right and wrong are objectively ascertainable is part of this class’s DNA, no corpus of fact or canon of reason restrains it or defines its end-point. Its definition of ‘science’ is neither more nor less than what ‘scientists say’ at any given time. In practice, that means ‘Science R-Us’, now and always, exclusively. Thus has come to pass what President Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1960 farewell address: ‘A steadily increasing share [of science] is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.… [T]he free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution…a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.’ Hence, said Ike, ‘The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded.’ The result has been that academics rise through government grants while the government exercises power by claiming to act on science’s behalf. If you don’t bow to the authority of the power that says what is and is not so, you are an obscurantist or worse.”

Thus, Codevilla’s description of the Regime is very similar to that of Francis; the self-installed ruling class “includes, most of the bureaucracies of federal and state governments, the judiciary, the educational establishment, the media, as well as major corporate officials…it…separated itself socially, morally, and politically from the rest of society, whose commanding heights it monopolized; above all that it has contempt for the rest of America, and that ordinary Americans have no means of persuading this class of anything, because they don’t count…The rulers are militantly irreligious and contemptuous of those who are not…They distrust elections because they think that power should be in expert hands—their own. They believe that the U.S Constitution gave too much freedom to ordinary Americans and not enough power to themselves, and that America’s history is one of wrongs. The books they read pretend to argue scientifically that the rest of Americans are racist, sexist, maybe fascists, but above all stupid. For them, Americans are harmful to themselves and to the world, and have no right to self-rule.” The 2016 election symbolized the reawakening of the Middle-American Radicals, to use Francis’ term; with Candidate Donald Trump as our empty avatar, the Regime has been driven to lower its mask and reveal the nightmarish vacuum within.

The Regime utilizes “reductio ad Hitlerum” to suppress us, and for the past four years, “since the beginning of the Trump administration, some federal district court judge somewhere has either stayed or outright declared every action of his and his subordinates unconstitutional, dictated remedies, and passed that off as the rule of law. Thus do such judges exercise the powers of the president and Congress. At a minimum, fighting such obstruction through the appellate courts (panel and then en banc) and then to the Supreme Court takes months or years. And since the Supreme Court has been the Left agendas’ chief legitimizer, holding on to it by any and all means has been a priority… The revolutionary import of the ruling class’ abandonment of moral and legal restraint in its effort to reverse election results cannot be exaggerated. Sensing themselves entitled to power, imagining themselves identical with legitimacy, ‘those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity’ — here the US Constitution and ordinary civility — are small stuff to them…Unattainable, and gone forever, is the whole American Republic that had existed for some 200 years after 1776. The people and the habits of heart and mind that had made it possible are no longer a majority. Progressives made America a different nation by rejecting those habits and those traditions. As of today, they would use all their powers to prevent others from living in the manner of the Republic.”

This dissolution, both of national identity and the Republic itself, is nicely encapsulated in the regnant cosmology espoused within the film Network by Arthur Jensen, the chairman of the CCA conglomerate, to a terrified Howard Beale, in subliminal rapture as the scales are lifted from his eyes. Beale had galvanized populist opposition to the purchase of CCA by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate; in response to Beale’s torpedoing the lucrative deal, chairman Jensen sits Beale across from an infinitely receding conference table and proclaims the Egalitarian Gospel: “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale! And I won't have it! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no Third Worlds, there is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! AND YOU WILL ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.” Beale replies, “I have seen the face of God.”
[i] Francis, Samuel T. (Ed.) “Why the American Ruling Class Betrays Its Race and Civilization,” in Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press, 2006).
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    Author

    Neil Kumar is a Republican candidate for U.S. Congress, representing Arkansas's Third District. He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Sons of the American Revolution, with blood that has been Southern since the seventeenth century. His work can also be found at the Abbeville Institute, American Renaissance, Identity Dixie, Lew Rockwell, The Political Cesspool, Truth to Power, The Unz Review, and VDare.

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