August 21, 2022

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 The FBI Raid on Trump’s Home at Mar-a-Lago is an Act of War of the Government on its Citizens

Friends,

Since the August 8, 2022, FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, the American media has literally deluged us with story after story on what certainly is a pivotal point in modern American history. Every news outlet, every broadcast network, and most major political leaders have offered their take, their interpretations; as well, the courts have gotten involved, with Obama-appointed judges leading the way. And for all intents and purposes, whatever the real contents of those boxes of records turn out to be, assuredly we shall all be drenched over the remainder of this election season (and probably much longer) by the continual barrage of hysterically strident voices in the legacy media: hyped-accusations, chimerical charges, and spurious claims about how once again this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald J. Trump is a clear and present “threat to our democracy” and, according to the solemn judgment of former CIA director, Michael Hayden, must be executed for “high treason”!

Let me repeat that: one of the most significant members of our so-called “Intelligence agencies” is calling for the summary execution of a US president—and he is not the only senior official in the administrative managerial apparatus known as the Deep State to demand something similar.

The Mar-a-Lago raid, in fact, has nothing to do with classified records, and if you should take a government official aside, perhaps after several shots of Jack Daniels or Chivas Regal, he will privately admit that to you. In fact, probably everyone in “official” Washington knows that.

No; the raid has everything to do with preventing Trump from running for president in 2024. That is, this is the latest installment of vomiting up a continuous stream of ugly and largely fake odiferous bilge to hopefully damage him, slime him enough to keep him from once again entering 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But more than just stop the Donald, now he must be permanently silenced and exiled, put away where his larger-than-life presence is no longer felt in any significant facet of American life—and that may well mean locking him up in a high security prison, or even executing him. Like a wounded lion, he is too dangerous to the administrative managerial state, and to the politicos, seen and unseen, who run our country, to remain on the loose.

And not because he is actually cognizant of what his presence has meant or means. Indeed, one can argue that with his lack of familiarity with the vicious high stakes political war games that rule Washington, Trump’s major achievement was ironically as a “loose cannon,” that in some ways he was not under the complete control of the Deep State and didn’t totally hew “the party line.”

In America in the early 21^st century that is not permitted.

I have harshly criticized Donald Trump’s appointments during his four-year presidency, and his futile attempt to work—compromise—with the establishment GOP and the neoconservatives who dominate the so-called “conservative movement.” His disastrous appointments of a General James “Mad Dog” Mattis or a John Bolton to senior positions in his administration and his reliance on such figures as Jared Kushner and on the RNC have undercut much of whatever good that he has accomplished.

That “good” was, above all, for the first time an American president partially tore the mask from the horrifying face of the Deep State which has controlled our failing republic since at least the years of FDR, if not long before. For literally the first time, millions American citizens began to recognize that they were not masters of their own fate, that they did not really control what was occurring in their country, that our elections—and political candidates—were being bought and sold like cattle at an auction, that not only our politics, but our educational system and entertainment industry as well were deeply perverted and infected, and, lastly, that this nation’s big corporations and information/Internet conglomerates were in an incestuous relationship with big government: all working against us.

Despite coming up embarrassingly short in two miserably failed political impeachments based on fabricated and ideologically-crafted “evidence”—despite the abject and utter failure to establish what CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, et al, decried from 2017 until 2019 as “Trump collusion” with Vladimir Putin and the Russians to win the 2016 election—despite a farcical show trial, the “January 6 investigation,” which flagrantly violates both the established rules of the House of Representatives and the essential protections of the Constitution—despite all this, the mere specter of a return of Trump, and more so what he represents (in spite of himself) sends excruciating shivers up the backs of our fearful oligarchs.

Very simply, that was the real reason behind the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

But also it confirmed, perhaps as the denizens of the administrative managerial state did not actually intend, that those agencies of the federal government, once considered above political influence and ideological poison, have now fully succumbed to the same poisonous venom that infects most of Washington. Or, perhaps they felt entrenched and immune enough not to care that we would notice?

Many of us of a certain age can remember the popular television program, The F.B.I., which ran from 1965 until 1974, starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Then, we looked up to and admired the FBI—it protected us from Communist spies and subversion, the Mafia, and all sorts of ne’er-do-wells and miscreants who would harm and attack our country.

No longer. The FBI, like the CIA, has become a dedicated arm of increasing totalitarian control and suppression, the Deep State conglomerate that governs us, that emerged in view partially from the shadows when Trump, like a bull-in-a-china shop, came to town. Certainly not all FBI agents, certainly not all the rank-and-file; but yes, the administration and directors who command.

And this event—the Mar-a-Lago raid—is in a landmark sense a “crossing of the Rubicon,” a radical and very visible escalation of the war unleashed upon us by administrative managerial elites. As one writer commented: “This changes everything.”

*****

Prime time commentator Tucker Carlson summed all this up in his Monday night, August 15, 2022, opening monologue.

Carlson is practically the last person I watch on Fox; the rest for the most part have become part of the problem, swimming in the tweedle-dee/tweedle-dum of establishment American political “kulchur.” He, as well, suffers from serious gaps— misinformation—in how he approaches issues like the War Between the States or his consistent invitation to neoconservative hacks like Victor Davis Hanson to appear on his program. Nevertheless, his voice remains unique in its usual clarity and ability to note what is really occurring.

That monologue was a frightening augury of where we are, what the future portends, and a stark proclamation that there can be no peace, no collaboration with those who oppose us. They inhabit a counter-reality which is Satanic. This nation is irretrievably divided, and the other side is coming after not just Donald J. Trump but also all the rest of us who don’t conform to the enticements of the new Gulag. The “United” States of America no longer exists.

I have taken the transcript of Carlson’s monologue (it can be heard aurally by accessing the Internet address) and, with a few small grammatical edits, I offer it here:

 

No honest person could believe the Trump raid was a legitimate act of law enforcement

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-no-honest-person-could-believe-trump-raid-legitimate-act-law-enforcement

Tucker Carlson calls out the Trump Mar-a-Lago raid, says it's really about power

 By Tucker Carlson | Fox News August 15, 2022

We've had a few days to reflect on it and have concluded that no honest person could believe that the raid on Donald Trump's home last week was a legitimate act of law enforcement. It was not. Even the Biden administration didn't really bother to pretend otherwise. The official explanations that we have heard for the raid make no sense at all. It doesn't matter how forcefully they are repeated by the media, they're nonsensical. In case you've forgotten what they are, here's the very first explanation they gave us: 

 

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, HISTORIAN: Why did this guy have these ultra-classified documents in the basement of Mar-a-Lago unsecured, where they could be presumably broken in on or stolen or photographed and given to hostile foreign powers or conceivably even terrorists?  

 

Are you listening to this? So, it's not just classified documents in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, but according to Michael Beschloss, the pet historian of the halfwits who run our country, these are ultra-classified documents, the most classified kind, just sitting there helpless in boxes like maidens in bikinis, waiting to be photographed by terrorists. You just imagine al-Qaeda taking selfies with these documents, one after the other relentlessly, repulsive and terrifying. 

Is it true?  At this point, no one has provided proof that it is true, not that august historians like Michael Beschloss wait around for actual evidence before pronouncing final judgment on cable news shows. They just go ahead, but for the sake of argument on our show, we're going to say that it is in fact true and that Donald Trump did, in fact, have boxes of classified documents sitting in his cellar. What would it mean? Well, what it means depends in part on what the documents were. Did those documents contain meaningful information? Should they have been classified in the first place? Is there a good reason the rest of us should not have been allowed to see those documents? 

Now, you never hear those questions asked in public, but anyone who lives in Washington knows perfectly well they should be asked in public a lot, because in Washington, virtually anything can qualify as an official state secret and often does.  

In 2011, to name one of many examples, the CIA finally declassified a trove of documents from the First World War. These documents dated back to 1917, almost 100 years before. One of these documents, the most ultra-secret of them, contained a recipe for disappearing ink. Now, why would federal bureaucrats spend an entire century hiding an outdated recipe for ink that you can buy legally in any magic store for your fifth grader? Good question. No one asked it.  Instead, then CIA Director Leon Panetta issued a press release bragging about how he was giving the secret ink recipe to a grateful public. "These documents remain classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them," Panetta wrote. "When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people." 

There was no hint whatsoever that Panetta was joking when he wrote that. You're welcome, America. Here's your century-old ink recipe. Again, this was in 2011. So, think it through. You had to wonder what recent technological advancements was Leon Panetta talking about in the press release and just how recent were they? Was Panetta actually saying that CIA spies were still communicating in World War One era disappearing ink as of, say, 2010 or even as of 1950? Please. It was bizarre. Of course, it was another lie from the people in charge.  

Here's the truth. The documents have been classified for 100 years, not because disappearing ink was any sort of national security secret. They'd been classified because the government's default position in every case is that you have no right to see anything ever. It is their information. It is not yours. You're not a citizen. You're just the taxpayer. Shut up and pay for it all. To this day, there are large amounts of classified information remaining from World War II. These are documents written 80 years ago by people whose grandchildren are now old, but you still can't see it. You don't have the clearances. Sorry. 

So, when they tell you that Donald Trump had classified documents in his basement, those materials could be literally anything, but once again, for the sake of argument, we're going to stipulate that Trump did have possession of documents that were classified for some good reason. Documents that, for example, we legitimately would not want the Chinese government to see. If that is true, would it justify what happened? Would it justify sending a large team of federal agents to shut down the entire southern tip of Palm Beach to raid Mar-a-Lago on a weekday? No, it wouldn't. One of the laws they're telling you that Trump broke doesn't even have criminal penalties attached to it because it's not serious enough.  

Federal paramilitaries don't show up at your house when you violate the Presidential Records Act. In fact, as we later learned, the actual warrant for the raid was signed by an openly partisan judge—you couldn't make any of this up if you tried—who once represented Jeffrey Epstein's side in the famous underage sex case, that judge. That judge allowed the FBI to seize virtually every piece of paper in Donald Trump's house, whether or not it had ever been classified.  

They took Roger Stone's clemency order, for example. That had been on the front page of the Washington Post, so was therefore probably not a secret. Apparently, the feds even walked off with Donald Trump's passports preventing him from leaving the country. So, whatever else this raid was, this raid was not about the Presidential Records Act. That explanation is absurd. It's almost as ridiculous as the claim that the White House knew nothing about the raid before it happened. Right. Please. If they're going to lie to us, they ought to try a little harder. So, what was this raid about? Well, we're keeping track. So, here's the second explanation they gave us. 

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Now with Donald Trump, suddenly, when we're talking about the possibility of nuclear weapons, classified documents of the highest classified status being stolen from the White House and taken to Mar-a-Lago. 

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Just a reminder of why the Justice Department might be a little bit concerned about nuclear secrets knocking around Mar-a-Lago.  

SCARBOROUGH: Two words for you, my friend. Two words. "Nuclear secrets." 

 

What! Nuclear secrets? Nuclear secrets are the highest classified status. Ultra-secret nuclear secrets. Donald Trump stole those. Ladies and gentlemen, America is in danger tonight. That was their new explanation for the raid. Now, that revised storyline was leaked anonymously to an obedient press corps, which, as you just saw, repeated every word like it was verifiable fact. Once again, no one even bothered to explain what these nuclear secrets might be. What's a nuclear secret exactly and what did Trump plan to do with them? Did he plan to defect to Moscow, give the launch codes to Vladimir Putin, start his own rogue state in the Bahamas? Nobody said, but that didn't stop former CIA director Michael Hayden from suggesting that Donald Trump should be executed, fried to death in the electric chair, for committing these crimes, whatever these crimes were. We still don't know. 

There weren't a lot of facts floating around. There still aren't; but there was a reason for that. They couldn't tell you the whole story. They couldn't release all the documents because that would jeopardize American national security. So instead, you're just going to have to trust them and, of course, you're going to have to listen to their outrage. There was a lot of that. There was endless huffing on television about something called the rule of law and how absolutely no one is above that. No one. Not even a former president. 

We're informed of this by the same people who paid rioters to burn down our cities, the ones who eliminated bail, the ones who encouraged tens of millions of foreign nationals to ignore our federal immigration statutes and move to our country permanently at public expense as a reward for breaking our laws, but keep in mind, no one is above the law. That was definitely the word from Joe Scarborough, a man who was accused of committing murder while serving as a member of Congress, yet somehow moved seamlessly to the MSNBC lineup without being charged or even investigated. No one is above the law. Remember that. 

So, there was an awful lot of posturing in the days after the raid. But none of it was very effective because, again, it didn't make sense. Even propaganda has to add up. Two plus two equals nine doesn't convince anybody.  

Nuclear secrets? If the Biden administration really believed that, if they really thought Donald Trump possessed documents that posed an imminent danger to American national security, then why did they wait a year and a half to do anything about it? Why did they wait till 90 days before a midterm election, an election that polls suggest they will lose? It doesn't make, oh, wait, actually, it does make sense. 

In fact, the question answers itself. Despite superficial appearances, the raid of Mar-a-Lago was not an act of law enforcement. It was the opposite of that. It was an attack on the rule of law. It was a power grab. As Matt Boose put it recently, in American Greatness, the raid on Trump's home "was exactly what it looks like, a show of force against the opposition leader by the head of state and his personal bodyguards. If this happened in, any other country would immediately be denounced as the act of a dictator." 

That's true, but it's hard for American citizens to hear those words. As an American, you don't want to believe it and yet here are the essential facts. The same week the Biden White House announced that Joe Biden will definitely seek a second term as president, the same week, the Biden Justice Department launched an armed raid against Biden's main rival in that same presidential election. That's what happened. Pause for a minute. If The New York Times told you that something like that was going on in Chad or the Gambia, what would your reaction be? 

You'd probably say to yourself, "Thank God I don't live in a place like that, a country where politicians used armed men to cling to power." Oh, but you do live in a country like that. You do. The evidence is all around us. We just don't want to see it. A week to the day after Joe Biden was inaugurated, the FBI arrested a 31-year-old man from Vermont called Douglass Mackey. According to the subsequent DOJ press release, Mackey committed an extremely serious crime. Like Vladimir Putin, he conspired to subvert the 2016 presidential election.  

In a tweet, Mackey had suggested, but not explicitly said, but suggested, that it was possible to vote for Hillary Clinton by text message. This act, proclaimed acting U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme, was a grave felony, a felony punishable by ten years in prison. Mackey's tweet, DuCharme said, amounted to "misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote." Assistant FBI Director William Sweeney confirmed that Douglass Mackey had, in fact, committed "vote theft." So, as befitting a criminal of this magnitude, Mackey was handcuffed and hauled before a federal judge in Florida called Bruce Reinhart, as it turns out, the same magistrate who authorized last week's raid on Mar-a-Lago. Weird. Then, Mackey was hauled off to jail. 

Now, Mackey's arrest seemed like a significant story, but at the time, media coverage was relatively scant and almost uniformly credulous. The reporters who covered it simply clipped quotes from the DOJ press release and moved on to something else. Why? Well, The New York Times set the tone early by describing Mackey as "a far-right Twitter troll."  

"Far-right Twitter troll" is not a technical term. In fact, it has no agreed upon meaning of any kind. It is slang and slang is something that serious newspapers never include in news stories, but in this case, the term "far right Twitter troll" had a use. It sent an unmistakable message to the country and in particular, to the rest of the media, and it was this: Douglass Mackey is a dangerous person with unspeakably ugly views. He deserves to be locked up. And so he was.

There was no consideration of the merits of the government's case against Douglass Mackey. But there should have been, because the case was absurd. If Mackey's tweets were so threatening to our system of government, toward democracy, then why did the Department of Justice wait more than four years until the week Donald Trump left office to charge him? And if Mackey actually stole the votes of American citizens, as the FBI repeatedly alleged that he did, whose votes were stolen? Who exactly were the victims of Douglas Mackey's crimes? The media never asked. The Biden administration never said. As of tonight, the Justice Department has never identified a single person who was prevented from voting or from doing anything else by what Douglass Mackey tweeted because there weren't any such people. Those people didn't exist.  

Douglass Mackey was not a criminal mastermind running a conspiracy to commit voter fraud. Douglass Mackey was an Internet prankster. His job was to think up funny memes on his laptop in his bedroom. That's what he did. Here's one of his means on the screen hash: "#DraftOurDaughters." Mackey wrote that in what was very obviously a fake tweet from the Hillary Clinton campaign. "They are ready to go to war for her. Are you?" Pretty funny.  

Mackey was mocking Hillary Clinton. No one could miss that. He wasn't subverting elections. He was making fun of the candidate and in fact, no one did miss that. Not a single person in America actually believed that Douglass Mackey’s Twitter memes infringed on "one of the most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the right to vote." Absolutely no one believed that. No one could believe that because it's too stupid a claim to believe, and yet Nicholas McQuaid, who went to Columbia Law School and is now Joe Biden's assistant attorney general, made that claim anyway verbatim and did so with a straight face, "Douglass Mackey is a threat to democracy." So, he faces ten years in prison. The DOJ press release said.  

Three paragraphs later the same press release inadvertently acknowledged what was actually going on. In the run up to the 2016 election, the DOJ explained, Douglass Mackey had gained more influence on Twitter than either NBC News or (gasp) Stephen Colbert himself. Now the criminal complaint against Douglass Mackey actually spells that out. You can read it for yourself. It's still online.

The Biden administration argued that on Twitter people liked Douglass Mackey more than they liked NBC News or Stephen Colbert, and they may not seem bad to you. It may seem fine to have grown up as you did in a country where people were allowed to choose what they read, but according to the government Joe Biden now runs, that's a felony.

Now you don't have to be a right-winger to find that terrifying. In a free country, you have an absolute right to say what you think in public, period, and it doesn't matter who is offended by what you say. It doesn't matter if people consider your views ugly. Even if every person on the planet finds your opinions horrifying and beyond the pale, you still have the right to express them because you were born with that right. It's inherent. You cannot be sent to prison for your political views--ever. That is the core principle of the United States. That is the principle that Marines fought their way to the top of Mount Suribachi to protect.  

So, whatever you think of his means, Douglass Mackey’s freedom of speech was very much worth defending, but virtually nobody defended it. Aside from a few brave and honorable exceptions, even so-called conservative media stayed silent as Douglass Mackey’s life was destroyed by the Biden Justice Department. He's still in limbo, facing ten years. Why? Well, because The New York Times had called him a far-right Twitter troll, and no respectable person wanted to be anywhere near that. So, the purge continued. 

Douglass Mackey may have been the first victim of the new authoritarianism, but he was hardly the last one. Over the last 18 months, virtually every significant figure in the orbit of Donald Trump has been swept up by Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice. Their homes have been raided, their personal communications have been seized and leaked to the media. Some have been arrested and thrown in jail. Donald Trump's lawyers are the primary targets. Today, the DOJ subpoenaed Eric Herschmann. He represented Trump during the first impeachment. Herschmann never worked in the White House counsel's office.  

The Biden administration is going after him anyway because he gave legal advice to his client, Donald Trump. That used to be allowed. People used to be allowed to have lawyers and speak to them privately, but it's not allowed anymore. That's why the CIA seized attorney client records from Mar-a-Lago. It's also why the DOJ is now directly targeting Trump's most prominent personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. For years the feds have been going after Giuliani's associates, including a man called George Dickson. Dickson was working on a documentary about Hunter Biden. Last year, the FBI raided his home in California. The feds also broke into Giuliani's own apartment, as well as his office in New York. Then the FBI targeted a Giuliani associate called Igor Fruman because he dug up evidence of misconduct by Joe Biden in Ukraine. They sent Fruman to prison.  

Then the FBI seized the phone of prominent conservative attorney Victoria Toensing. She'd worked with Giuliani in 2020 to investigate election fraud. They raided her home. Today, the DOJ announced that Giuliani himself is a target of a federal investigation. Why exactly? Well, because like Toensing and so many others who are now under investigation or under arrest, Giuliani questioned the 2020 election outcome, in this case, in the state of Georgia. Really? Questioning the election outcome in the state of Georgia? Isn't that something Stacey Abrams has made a career of doing? Yes, but Republicans no longer have that right. 

Not long ago, more than a dozen federal agents swooped in for a pre-dawn raid on former Trump official Jeff Clark. They left him on the street in his underwear for maximum humiliation. Then they seized John Eastman's phone. Eastman was also a Trump attorney. He was approached by six agents at a restaurant in New Mexico while leaving dinner with his wife. They patted him down and forced him to provide facial biometric data to unlock his phone. Then the DOJ tried the same thing with Steve Bannon's lawyer, Bob Costello, trying to force him to surrender his privileged phone and email records. We could go on and on and on. The point is all of this is illegal. It violates the First Amendment and violates long-established attorney-client privilege, but it's happening right in front of us--a lot.  

The FBI has shackled former Trump official Peter Navarro as he was boarding a flight at Reagan National Airport. He was handcuffed, denied food and water, refused permission to make a phone call to his lawyer. Then because that wasn't terrifying enough, Biden's FBI went after a sitting congressman perceived as too close to Trump. His name was Congressman Scott Perry. A day after the Mar-a-Lago raid the feds seized Congressman Perry's phone while he was traveling with his family. They could have called his lawyer and set up something. They didn't bother. That just nabbed him in front of his family. These are the prominent victims of this crackdown on civil liberties being conducted by the Biden administration.  

Of course, in the wake of the January 6 election justice protests, more than 900 people have been arrested and charged with crimes arising from that day, 900, almost all of them nonviolent, almost all of them with no previous criminal record. More than 50 of them have been sentenced to prison so far, including one with terminal cancer. Her crime? Walking around the Capitol building for a few minutes, but that's just the beginning. There are another 500 cases to go. In fact, the DOJ is getting under $34 million, another 130 more employees, just to handle all those cases from January 6, from the election justice protests, which is what they were. Now, superficially, all of this is about Donald Trump and on some level, it is. Permanent Washington does not want Trump to run again. Of course, it's their greatest fear and they're doing all he can to prevent it. 

It turns out democracy is too important to let voters choose their own president, but if you take three steps back and consider what's actually going on, you'll see that none of this is really about Donald Trump, the man. It's about power and that means it's about crushing and humiliating anyone who gets in the way of people who want to retain power and that means anyone. How about Alex Berenson? Alex Berenson is a novelist and former New York Times reporter. He's got an Ivy League degree, lives in the Northeast. In no way does Alex Berenson fit the profile of your average Trump voter. Certainly not the stereotype.  

In fact, it's hard to believe that he voted for Donald Trump. We don't know and it doesn't matter. We do know that when Alex Berenson started to post fact-based challenges to the lies Joe Biden was telling about COVID and then the COVID vaccines, the White House commanded Twitter to silence Alex Berenson. Twitter soon did that, and we're not speculating about what happened. There are written exchanges that prove what happened. …the point is, this is illegal. No American government is allowed to collude with private business to silence its critics. Period. That is an unambiguous violation of the First Amendment. It's also a violation, of course, of Alex Berenson's human rights, and yet somehow this slipped beneath notice. The New York Times didn't write about it. Why would they? On some level, you understand…what happened to Alex Berenson has happened to many, many, many critics of the Biden administration in the past year and a half. They have been censored. They have been silenced at the direction of the White House. 

Think about what this means. These are acts of aggression and hostility aimed at Americans. No American president has ever done this. No American president has ever explicitly declared war on his own population, and yet for the Biden administration, it's a near weekly occurrence. Here's Joe Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, telling you that White supremacists, in other words, Trump voters, because that's what they mean when they say White supremacists, a term they've never defined, are the single greatest terror threat the United States faces. 

MERRICK GARLAND:  In the FBI's view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the White race.  

PRESIDENT BIDEN: According to the United States intelligence community, domestic terrorism from White supremacists is the most lethal terrorist threat in the homeland.  

 

So, not to be too literal, because this is on some level a news show, but that's a lie. None of what you heard is true. There's not a single statistic or piece of credible research to support what Biden or his attorney general just said. Again, all of it is a lie. The truth, as usual, is the opposite. These are the people who created the crime wave America is suffering under and now they're blaming you for it. For good measure they're disarming you because you cannot be trusted with guns because you're too dangerous. And just in case you missed the theme here, they're hiring another 87,000 armed IRS agents just to make sure that you obey. Got it? Got it? Is it clear? Amazingly, some Republican leaders still don't get it or pretend they don't get it. Here's [Governor] Asa Hutchinson [of Arkansas], still somehow the governor of Arkansas, in a holding pattern before he transitions to the Wal-Mart board, assuring that the FBI is completely on the level.  

ARKANSAS ASA HUTCHINSON: The FBI is simply carrying out their responsibilities under the law, a lawful search warrant that a magistrate has signed off on and they didn't go in there with FBI raid jackets. They tried to constrain their behavior carrying out that warrant. So, let's support law enforcement. Let's stand with them.  

 

Oh, the FBI is just simply carrying out their responsibilities. Of course, they are. "What? Well, you don't support law enforcement? There's nothing to see here." That's the line and no doubt Asa Hutchinson and [Senator] Mitch McConnell and [Republican Congressman] Dan Crenshaw and the rest of them will be telling you when the Biden Justice Department or some other state law enforcement agency under their influence finally does what you know they're going to do, which is indict Donald Trump. Obviously, they're going to do that. Who knows how.  

Maybe they'll produce surveillance video from Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, they've already subpoenaed that, and we'll spend next year talking about how it shows Trump mishandling classified information. Really? Remember the endless Russia collusion hoax? We're in for a lot more of that. They will scream about how Trump is a criminal, and if you express any support for him or any interest in retaining the rights of free speech and due process, you're a criminal, too. In fact, you are the threat. You're the threat, and just mentioning that you disagree with what is happening is an attack on our government. That's their style. 

Just the other day, after signing off on the Mar-a-Lago raid, your Attorney General, Merrick Garland, came on stage to whine about how actually he was the victim here. He's the victim. Apparently, some people disagreed with the raid, so the FBI, the most heavily armed domestic law enforcement agency in the world, is now under threat from you. Right. You're the criminal. Our critics are in jail, but I got anonymous threats on Twitter. Poor me.

 

Passive aggression is the defining characteristic of the left. If they started putting people in camps, NBC News would cheer them on and then attack you for complaining about it. "How dare you violate our norms. We've always had camps."

 

As if to prove it, in the hours after Mar-a-Lago raid, the usual jackals on Twitter began demanding that Donald Trump should release the warrant that justified the raid. "If you're not guilty, you'll show it to us," that's what they said. So, Trump did it. He gave the warrant to Breitbart News, which printed it. Then, when the second Breitbart piece went up, the very same jackals start screaming about how far right-wing extremists are putting the lives of FBI agents in danger since those agents were named in the warrant, which is a public document. In other words, "We're the victims here. We're the victims."  

 

It's always the same, except this time, unfortunately, it could be a little different. Indicting Donald Trump is a very big step, not simply because a lot of people like him and he's the former president, but because indicting him at this point would be to reveal that this entire thing—and by thing we mean our justice system--is just transparently political. It's just a means to an end, a means to power and people know that at this point. They've watched it. They understand what's happening. Even people who don't like Donald Trump, even people who didn't vote for Donald Trump and don't want to vote for him in 2024, they know and they cannot unknow. And that means that we are at this point on the edge of something unprecedented and something awful. You can feel it. Even Donald Trump feels it. 

Maybe for the first time in his life, Donald Trump seems sincerely interested in lowering the temperature, not just for his own sake, but for the country. He said that. He's never said anything like that. Maybe he doesn't mean it, but when has he ever said that? "Let's all calm down a little," he said the other day. "This isn't good." Yeah, he's right.  

 

It's not good and not just for him, but for all of us. This could get very bad, very fast, and the Biden people know that perfectly well. They know what could happen if they continue down this path of using law enforcement to cling to power. But they don't care because they're facing a repudiation from the voters. They're desperate, and they'll do anything, but at what cost? Pray they pull back before it's too late.  

                                                 July 31, 2022

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, and the Global Culture War

While in America we tear down monuments to Robert E. Lee, in Russia they tear down monuments to Lenin

 Friends,

The war in Ukraine is not really about Ukraine—it is not about Ukraine’s sacrosanct borders which have been supposedly violated by Russia. And it is most certainly not about the vaunted “defense of democracy,” as we constantly hear screamed in our ears by the media and by a broad panoply of American (and European) political and cultural leaders, from Nancy Pelosi to Lindsey Graham to Boris Johnson.

None of those rationales, none of those justifications for the fanatical involvement by the United States, its puppets in NATO, and the EU, explain why the conflict in that remote part of the world is so vitally important globally that it literally has the entirety of the “woke” American Left and the great majority of Republicans, in tow, literally standing on their chairs and desks to frantically applaud such charlatans as former X-rated comedian and authoritarian Volodymyr Zelensky (and his wife) as “champions of freedom and democracy.” The specter of Graham and Pelosi outdoing each other in the bellicosity of their rants against President Putin and Russia is only a little less sickening than their lascivious ideological embrace of each other.

There are two major reasons that war has come to eastern Europe, and they have very little to do with Ukraine or the horrible sufferings of the Ukrainian population.

But they have everything to do with Russia, its president, and Russia’s current position in the context of global politics and the heretofore inexorable advance of American globalist hegemony.

Since the end of the Second World War the United States has been involved in essentially two major global conflicts: the first was the Cold War waged against Soviet and world Communism. Most of us of any substantial age can remember the days when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union and its satellites “the evil empire.” We came of age when Nikita Khrushchev’s pledge “to bury” us was believed to be a real and present danger to our very existence. The United States, then, and its allies in NATO and in other alliances were seen as the champions of freedom and liberty, and essentially of Western civilization against the Soviet behemoth which threatened to extirpate what we held dear and enshrine a murderous tyranny worldwide in its place.

All the while during that conflict our own inherited Western and Christian-oriented cultural foundation was being progressively, at times imperceptibly, hollowed out. Some of our best writers and philosophers did notice—James Burnham, Sam Francis, a few others; but it took the man “with orange hair” to finally rip the mask off, if only haphazardly and for the most part unknowingly, of what was actually occurring and had occurred here in the USA and in Western Europe. The rhetoric defending “the West and its traditions” continued in our vocabulary, but the reality had radically changed. T. S. Eliot noticed what was happening in his 1948 work, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, that we in West were “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.”

The Communist threat ceased in 1989-1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolving of the Warsaw Pact and Eastern Bloc. And, surprisingly for many who controlled American foreign policy then and as they do now, what emerged in many cases in much of Eastern Europe and in Russia was not some efflorescence of “little democracies” based on the model of Big Brother America. In countries like Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and especially in Russia, it was almost as if a veil, a prophylaxis which had covered—and in a real sense, protected—these nations from the worst aspects of American “Coca-cola” culture, had been lifted, and they were back fifty years earlier, as if the Communist period were some bad fleeting dream or nightmare. And older religious and political beliefs, which had never been extinguished by decades of Communism, re-emerged. Nationalism and religious faith came out of from the catacombs to inspire millions.

Liberal democracy—the American model spread worldwide—was just one option for those countries and their citizens. And despite the zeal and hyperactivity of dominant American foreign policy and the aggressive inroads by the worst aspects of American “kulchur,” avariciously foisted off and spread infectiously by international corporate capitalism in partnership with the managerial state, resistance in the East was far more resilient than in Western Europe, where a half century of secularist indoctrination and destruction of traditions and historic religious belief had had its effects.  

This rude realization soon dawned on America’s foreign policy establishment, producing what in effect is a second global conflict—between those nations chained to the tentacles of secular globalism and those outside that increasingly totalitarian consortium.

Neoconservative zealot and Fox News icon, the late Charles Krauthammer, celebrated what he called the emergence of a “unipolar world,” where liberal democracy, secularism, globalism, and an international managerial class would reign supreme. But his hopes and the desires of American neoconservatives and establishment “conservatives” for an American-dominated world where Francis Fukuyama’s dream of “the end of history,” the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy, would be triumphant, were premature.

In the East, where Russia was emerging deeply scarred and battered from its nearly suicidal seven decades of Soviet statist tyranny, the global project hit a snag. Not at first, or so it seemed. For Russia after 1991, under Boris Yeltsin, sought accommodation and partnership with America and its NATO allies, even at one point, after dissolving the Warsaw Pact, pursuing some form of association with the Western alliance.

It was not to be, for Russia, given its position in the world, desired partnership and recognition of its own historic culture and independence. But the West, spearheaded by zealous unipolar globalists, particularly in the George W. Bush administration—think here of the role of characters like Paul Wolfowitz—desired only its subservience and integration into the New World Order.

After years of attempting some sort of equitable modus vivendi with the West, Russia realized that such an arrangement was out of the question. It would have to chart its own, independent course and find partners in the world where it might—perhaps with a formerly-hostile China, maybe with Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. And thus in 2009 the BRICS association—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was born as a loose economic and potential foreign policy alliance. But above all, it was a re-invigorated and re-assertive Russia under its President Putin that took the leadership. And it was Russia, geopolitically and strategically, that was seen as the major danger by far to advancing Western globalism.

This, then, is the first major reason for the conflict in Ukraine and the frenzied hyperventilation of the elites in Foggy Bottom and in the US Congress, and in Brussels and Geneva: the Russians, and especially their president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, have not acceded to the global project. The largest country in the world had not fallen into line like other American toadies in Western Europe.

Indeed, for nearly twenty years American foreign policy has been fairly consistent in its objective of forcing a recalcitrant Russia into one more pliant minion of a hegemonic American universal order, economically and politically.

Military conflict as an ultimate element, I suggest, was always on the table for the apparatchiks who run American foreign policy. Efforts to subvert the Russian state, to create conditions for another “color revolution” in Moscow, like the ones the US had successfully engineered in Kiev and elsewhere, including in Tbilisi, Georgia, had failed and been thwarted. American and George Soros-controlled NGOs had been expelled. American-groomed “opposition” leaders to Putin’s government, whether in the person of a Boris Nemtsov or more recently by Alexei Navalny, had failed to dent Putin’s popularity or produce a desired coup of some sort.

Since the American-sponsored coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014, deposing the popularly-elected (and Russia-friendly) president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, Russia believed itself gravely threatened. A newly-installed American puppet regime in Kiev began the persecution of Ukrainian ethnic Russians—approximately one-fifth of the population—closing Russian-language schools and media, banning the use of Russian in legal and public affairs, and persecuting native Russian Ukrainian political leaders and political parties. As a consequence, the largely Russian provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk announced their secession, and Russia occupied the heavily ethnic Russian Crimea (where the Russian Black Sea Fleet was anchored at Sevastopol). Crimea had never been historically part of Ukraine.

A bloody civil war ensued and continued until early 2022, when the Ukrainian government stepped up its anti-Russian military operations in what had become a bloody eight-year campaign that saw upwards of 14,000 Russian civilian casualties in the Russian ethnic Donbas region.

Ukrainian president Zelensky’s intention to potentially re-acquire nuclear weapons (a desire uttered in Munich a few days before the February Russian military incursion began) and his refusal to exclude Ukraine from future NATO membership, and thus under Article 5 of the NATO charter, to potentially involve NATO in required joint, on-the-ground military action against Russia, pushed the Russian bear to the limit. Putin viewed these actions as a last straw.

Whether or not President Putin should have committed Russia to military action in Ukraine certainly can be debated. Indeed, from one perspective Russian troops on the ground engaging in military action has given the zealous  neoconservative globalist hawks the very opportunity they have long desired: to “bleed Russia dry,” in the words of American Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, that is, to achieve on the battlefield what they were  heretofore unable to achieve economically and diplomatically since the fall of the old Soviet Union: the subjugation of Russia and its integration into the New World Order. Yet, from the Russian viewpoint, Russia had been pushed up against an unmovable wall, a continuous process documented by such astute observers as John Mearsheimer, Richard Sakwa, Stephen Cohen, Henry Kissinger, and George Kenan, and it could retreat no further. A hostile Ukraine, serving as a pawn for American “regime change” and a dagger aimed directly at Moscow a few hundred miles distant, could mean the dissolution of Russia itself.  Indeed, is this not the wish of fanatical neocon war hawks like Max Boot? Had not Joe Biden announced with a flourish that Russia’s president was a “war criminal” (with all the legal and not-so-legal baggage that entails)?

Ukraine, thus, becomes a Petri dish for minions of the New World Order to advance their broader goals, even if it means the death or maiming of every poor Ukrainian citizen and the total destruction of their country. Such “collateral damage” be damned; what is important above all is the triumph of the “globalist project” and success of the machinations of the European Union and the World Economic Forum (WEF), to which Volodymyr Zelensky has already acceded.

On this foundation the American political establishment, from Mitch McConnell, the National Review, and Brian Kilmeade on the so-called “right,” to Nancy Pelosi and the near totality of the national media (with a few exceptions, e.g., Tucker Carlson), on the Left, are fully united. That observation is self-evident.

There is, however, a second reason which runs through all the discussion of the Ukrainian conflict as a very real undercurrent, and it has much to do with what I would call the resurgence of Russian traditionalism and its historic Orthodox faith. It is the revival in Russia since the collapse of Communism of a militantly conservative Christian Russian Orthodoxy and the fact, evident in successive and broadly popular legislation enacted by the Russian Duma and public statements and proclamations by the nation’s leaders, that currently fashionable perversions and inverted moral and religious conditions now regnant in America and Western Europe, are not acceptable in Russia.

Back in 2014 I began documenting some of the new laws and provisions, the Russian government's support for Christianity (including the building of some 24,000 new churches since 1991), the encouragement by the State Ministry of Culture of art and films celebrating pre-Soviet and anti-Communist Russian history—even glorifying the heroic struggle of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in his campaign to defeat the Reds in 1919-1921, and  the sympathetic portrayal of Russia’s rich religious and non-Communist heritage in its educational system. President Putin, himself, has on several occasions bitterly denounced Vladimir Lenin and Communism, including at a visit to the site of the Katyn Massacre where he honored the 22,000 Polish military and civic leaders brutally executed by Soviet Communists during World War II.

Even more symbolically he has personally dedicated a large monument in honor of Tsar Alexander III, perhaps Russia’s most conservative—or “reactionary”—monarch of the 19^th century.  Putin has also publicly embraced the Russian Orthodox faith, a faith in which his mother secretly baptized him as a small child (cf. the detailed reporting carried by the Spanish international news service, EFE, as published by the journal, El Confidencial, March 22, 2013, as well as the book-length series of interviews, First Person: An Astonishing Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, New York, 2000).  Certainly, there are “doubting Thomases” aplenty who question the sincerity of such a profession of faith, but if we are to judge from public actions, the evidence seems to overwhelmingly confirm his affirmation.

But it is Putin’s support for traditional Russian Orthodox belief and moral stands on issues like same sex marriage and homosexuality that have provoked unbridled frenzy in the secularized West. Despite the intense hostility of the powerful international LGBTQ lobby, he makes no apologies for his views or the views of the Russian state in such matters. Over the past decade his statements and trajectory have been quite consistent…to the point that the American embassy in Moscow has flown a “Gay Pride” flag to flaunt the wide differences between the official American “view” and Russia’s position. How much more symbolically can those differences be demonstrated?

In October of 2021 President Putin gave a speech at the International Valdai discussion forum. It did not differ, on matters of culture and morality, from numerous other speeches and declarations he had made since assuming the office president of Russia twenty-two years ago. But as a summary, I believe it an excellent perspective on the intellectual framework and thinking of a man who, whatever we may think of him, now plays an extremely significant role in world history.

I quote a portion of it here (October 21, 2021):

“We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress…. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.

“…We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society – it would be more correct to put it this way – has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.

“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness…. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

“…the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour…. In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go – not only Communising chickens, but also Communising women. One more step and you will be there.

“Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts of male and female altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. ‘Parent number one’ and ‘parent number two,’  ‘birthing parent’ instead of mother, and ‘human milk’ replacing breastmilk because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder.

“Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life….is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.

“I have already mentioned that, in shaping our approaches, we in Russia will be guided by a healthy and strong conservatism…. Now, when the world is going through a structural disruption, the importance of reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed – precisely because of the multiplying risks and dangers, and the fragility of the reality around us.

“This conservative approach is not about an ignorant traditionalism, a fear of change or a restraining game, much less about withdrawing into our own shell. It is primarily about reliance on a time-tested tradition and religious faith, the preservation and growth of the population, a realistic assessment of oneself and others, a precise alignment of priorities, a correlation of necessity and possibility, a prudent formulation of goals, and a fundamental rejection of extremism as a method. And frankly, conservatism is the most reasonable line of conduct, as far as I see it….

“Again, for us in Russia, these are not some speculative postulates, but lessons from our difficult and sometimes tragic history. The cost of ill-conceived social experiments is sometimes beyond estimation. Such actions can destroy not only the material, but also the spiritual foundations of human existence, leaving behind moral wreckage where nothing can be built to replace it for a long time….”

A couple of years before his death in August 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the acerbic critic and Christian scourge of Western liberal democracy, praised the positions of Vladimir Putin. “NATO,” he said, “is in the process of encircling Russia and depriving Russia of its independence as a nation state…. [A]llying Russia to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization that uses violent force in various corners of our planet to plant the seeds of an ideology of modern western democracy will not expand Christian civilization, only terminate it.”

Is it any wonder that national columnist and author Pat Buchanan has wondered that in the immense culture war we are in, “which side is God now on”?

Which side, indeed.

                                              July 9, 2022

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Confederate Navy: Men Who Went to Sea for the Cause

                                                                   CSS Shenandoah

 

A Review of the Roster of North Carolinians in Confederate Naval Service: Confederate States Navy & Marine Corps. 

Compiled and edited by Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Sion H. Harrington III. Wake Forest: Scuppernong Press, 2021. 427 pp; Introduction, pp. III-IX; Appendices I-VII; Index of Geographical and Historical Place Names. Illustrations (b & w). Price: $50.00.

 

The monumental series, North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, began during the “Civil War” Centennial in 1961, under the direction of Dr. Louis Manarin, and has continued until recently, reaching now twenty volumes, covering artillery, cavalry, and sixty-eight regiments of North Carolinians who served in the Confederate forces. The last five volumes have been dedicated to Junior and Senior Reserves, Thomas’s Legion, Miscellaneous Battalions and Companies, and Generals, Staff Officers and Militia.

Lt. Colonel Sion Harrington (ret.), who was the North Carolina State Archives Military History Archivist (until his retirement in 2011) understood, however, that despite the enormous labor and work that had gone into the North Carolina Troops Roster—now in its sixtieth year—that there were thousands of additional combatants who served in Confederate naval and marine service who had not been properly counted in the original work.

Beginning in 2003, Colonel Harrington began his own thorough research into those naval Confederate veterans. And the work was painstaking and consumed much of his spare time. But with an excellent military and academic career, slowly he was able to accumulate accurate and comprehensive records for approximately 3,000 naval and marine personnel who were in some way connected to North Carolina, either as natives who volunteered from the Tar Heel State or who may have enlisted from North Carolina but were not residents.

Over the years, Colonel Harrington made contact with military historians, researchers and repositories that had collected archival material on naval veterans, as far away as Australia. And diligently he researched every type of document which might reveal naval service, including not just the accustomed archival sources and official records, but journals, private collections, correspondence, and other primary sources. The result is a superbly done, even elegant hard-back volume which does true honor to those men who served in naval service.

In addition to a complete alphabetical listing (including name spelling variations), each entry contains biographical information with citations as to the sources used. Harrington dedicates two appendices to his references, one listing his hundreds of sources and another giving abbreviations for those sources as used in the text. In some cases the information for an entry is voluminous and extends long after the war concerning the individuals’ later life (and information on an earlier career is also included). In other cases where the information is sketchy or questionable, we are presented with what is available, clearly referenced.

Several appendices add considerably to the usefulness of the volume. As a kind of complete glossary, Appendix IV, “Rank/Rates and Special Terms Mentioned in the Roster,” offers carefully defined and detailed descriptions of the naval and military terminology employed. Appendix V, “Confederate Ships and Floating Batteries Mentioned in the Roster,” includes significant historical material about hundreds of Confederate seagoing vessels, their service and final disposition—it is one of the most complete surveys of Confederate naval vessels I have seen.  There is also Appendix VI, “Confederate Naval Stations, Yards, and Activities Mentioned in the Roster,” an immeasurably helpful section assisting the reader in understanding and visualizing how and where the Confederate Navy operated under the pressure of war.

Harrington’s Appendix VII, “Interesting Tidbits from The Roster of North Carolinians in Confederate Naval Service,” offers us some truly fascinating material, some of it humorous, some incredible, some tragic about the four-year existence of the Confederate Navy and its personnel. Indeed, it is one of the more engrossing portions of the roster—and one that in many ways humanizes the men who served the cause of Southern independence against incredible odds.

There is also a very helpful place name index for geographical entities and locations, and other non-personal items mentioned in the volume.

On a personal note, let me add that as the North Carolina State Archives Registrar for nearly two-decades I worked down the hall from Si Harrington. In those years he almost single-handedly reorganized the Military History Collection at the North Carolina State Archives, making it a national model as a usable repository not only for fellow historians but also for interested citizens and genealogists.  His work was a tremendous contribution to the history of North Carolina.  And like his professionalism at the North Carolina State Archives, he invested the Confederate naval roster, completed in his off hours, with the same kind of professionalism, and dedication and devotion to our Confederate history and heritage.

Roster of North Carolinians in Confederate Naval Service, then, will interest not only descendants of North Carolinians who served in naval service, but also historians, genealogists, researchers, and anyone with an interest in a less studied aspect of our Confederate history.

[This review was originally published by Confederate Veteran magazine, July/August 2022, vol.80, number 4, and is reprinted with permission]

                                                  July 4, 2022

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

What Does the Declaration of Independence Really Mean?

Friends,

We celebrate July 4 each year as the anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. But for many Americans, the day has become little more than another holiday, a day off from work, and a time to barbecue with family and friends.

The Declaration of Independence and the day we set aside to commemorate it should make us reflect on the sacrifices of the men who signed it. Representatives from thirteen colonies came together to take a momentous step that they knew might land them on the scaffold or suspended by the hangman’s noose. They were protesting that their traditional rights as Englishmen had been violated, and that those violations had forced them into a supreme act of rebellion.

For many Americans the Declaration of Independence has become a fundamental text that tells the world who we are as a people. It is a distillation of American belief and purpose. Pundits and commentators, left and right, never cease reminding us that America is an exceptional nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Almost as important as a symbol of belief for many contemporary Americans is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It is not incorrect to see a purported link between these two documents, as Lincoln intentionally placed his short peroration in the context of a particular reading of the Declaration.

Lincoln bases his concept of the creation of the American nation in philosophical principles he sees enunciated in 1776, and in particular on an emphasis on the idea of “equality.” The problem is that this interpretation, which forms the philosophical base of both dominant “movement conservatism” today—neoconservatism—and the neo- or post-Marxist multicultural Left, is essentially false.

Lincoln’s opens his address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.…” There is a critical problem with this assertion. It was not the Declaration that “created” the new nation; the Declaration was a statement of thirteen colonies, announcing their respective independence from the mother country, binding themselves together in a close military and political alliance, and stating their bill of grievances. It was the Constitution, drafted eleven years later (1787), after the successful conclusion of the War for Independence, that established a new nation: a confederation of states, each ceding certain enumerated powers to a federal executive, while retaining the largest share for themselves. And, as any number of historians and scholars have pointed out, the American Framers never intended to cobble together a nation based on the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

A brief survey of the writings of such distinguished recent historians and researchers as Barry Alan Shain, Forrest McDonald, M. E. Bradford, George W. Carey, and, earlier authorities such as William Rawle (1759-1836), whose A View of the Constitution of the United States (1825) was considered a standard text on constitutional interpretation prior to the War Between the States and was used for many years at West Point, plus a detailed reading of the commentaries and writings of those men who established the nation, give the lie to that claim (See for example, Elliott’s Debates, a compilation of the debates over the new Constitution).

The Framers of the Constitution were horrified by “egalitarianism” and “democracy,” and they made it clear that what they were establishing was a republic in which the respective states continued to possess inherent rights not ceded to a central national authority. Each state maintained its own particular arrangements, including serious restrictions and limitations on voting and participation in government, considered as fundamental. Indeed, several states also had religious tests, and others had established churches, none of which were directly touched by the First Amendment, which was added to ensure that a national ecclesiastical establishment would not be effected. A quick review of The Federalist Papers confirms this thinking; and a survey of the correspondence and the debates over the Constitution add support to this anti-egalitarianism. Professor Bradford’s excellent study, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the American Constitution (1993) explores this fundamental understanding in detail.

Obviously, then, Lincoln could not found his “new nation” in the U. S. Constitution; it was too aristocratic and decentralized, with non-enumerated powers maintained by the states, including the implicit right to secede. Indeed, slavery was explicitly sanctioned, even if most of the Framers believed that as an institution it would die a natural death, if left on its own. Lincoln thus went back to the Declaration of Independence and invested in it a meaning that supported his statist and wartime intentions. But even then, he verbally abused the language of the Declaration, interpreting the words in a form that its Signers never intended.

Although those authors employed the phrase “all men are created equal,” and certainly that is why Lincoln made direct reference to it, a careful analysis of the Declaration does not confirm the sense that Lincoln invests in those few words. It is true that Enlightenment ideas regarding “natural rights” circulated in the Colonies. But, contextually, the authors at Philadelphia were mainly asserting their historic — and equal — rights as Englishmen before the Crown, which had, they believed, been violated and usurped by the British government, and it was to the king-in-parliament that the Declaration was primarily directed.

The Founders rejected egalitarianism. They understood that no one is, literally, “created equal” to anyone else. Certainly, each and every person is created with no less or no more dignity, measured by his or her own unique potential before God. But this is not what most contemporary writers mean today when they talk of “equality.”

Rather, from a traditionally-Christian viewpoint, each of us is born into this world with different levels of intelligence, in different areas of expertise; physically, some are stronger or heavier, others are slight and smaller; some learn foreign languages and write beautiful prose; others become fantastic athletes or scientists. Social customs and traditions, property holding, and individual initiative — each of these factors further discriminate as we continue in life.

None of this means that we are any less or more valued in the judgment of God, Who judges us based on our own, very unique capabilities. God measures us by ourselves, by our own maximum possibilities and potential, not by those of anyone else — that is, whether we use our own, individual talents to the very fullest (recall the Parable of the Talents in the Gospel of St. Matthew).

The Founders understood this, as their writings and speeches clearly indicate. Lincoln’s “new nation” would have certainly struck them as radical and revolutionary, a veritable “heresy” (see Bradford’s important essay, “The Heresy of Equality,” Modern Age, Fall 1976, pp. 62-77). Even more disturbing for them would be the specter of modern-day neoconservatives — that is, those who dominate the conservative movement and claim to rigorously defend what little remains of our constitutional republic against the abuses of the neo-Marxist multiculturalist left — enshrining Lincoln’s address as a basic symbol and foundation of American political and social order.

They would have understood the radicalism implicit in such a pronouncement; they would have seen Lincoln’s interpretation as a contradiction of the “First Founding” of 1787 and a revolutionary denial of its intentions; and they would have understood in Lincoln’s language the content of a quasi-religious and millenialist heresy, heralding a transformed nation where the Federal government would become the father and mother and absolute master of us all.

Thus, as we commemorate the declaring of American independence 246 years ago, we should lament the mythology about it created in 1863, and recall an older generation of 1787, a generation of noble men who comprehended fully well that a country based on egalitarianism is a nation where true liberties are imperiled and soon extinguished.