The Raid In Rio, Pt. I

At least they didn't call the log cabin in rural Wisconsin a “compound.”

That's most likely because the anticipated standoff didn't occur. If if had, then the farmhouse in the photo above would have been transformed into an "armed compound," in keeping with the tacit but strictly enforced rules governing mainstream media accounts of armed confrontations involving federal enforcement agencies.

The fact that nobody was hurt or killed is the only positive thing one can say about the paramilitary raid – involving sheriff's departments from three counties, a SWAT team, and agents from the ATF and FBI – on the Rio (RYE-oh) Wisconsin [actually, Wyocena -- correction courtesy of an alert reader] homestead of 64-year-old Lester Sundsmo and his 56-year-old wife Lilac.

The joint federal-local attack on the Sundsmo home involved more than 100 agents swarming the property, and a roadblock that shut down state Highway 16 [in fact, contrary to initial media reports, it was Highway 51 -- thanks again to my courteous and well-informed reader.] The couple themselves were arrested without incident at a traffic stop roughly a half-mile from their property.

A total of four (4) firearms were found on their property; the invaders also took note of a network of underground tunnels that were immediately (and predictably) described as evidence of preparations for a confrontation with law enforcement, but are more likely intended to serve as a storm shelter.

Why was it necessary to deploy practically a brigade-strength force against a retirement-age couple accused of a non-violent offense?

“That was required because of past intelligence,” insisted Chief Deputy Michael Babcock of Wisconsin's Columbia County. “The intelligence that was secured by multiple law enforcement agencies indicated that there was likely going to be some type of confrontation if we had to go to the door of the residence.”

The “intelligence” refers to thus far undocumented suspicions that the Subdsmos, who possess some exotic beliefs concerning sovereign citizenship, are affiliated with the “Posse Comitatus” movement or some other “anti-government” group.

Any sentient human being possessed of so much as a molecule of decency should be “anti-government.” The Sundsmos, who were scheduled for eviction from their home as a result of thousands of dollars in unpaid property taxes, had decorated their property with signs advising parasites from various appendages of the Regime to stay away.

They didn't conceal their contempt for the bureaucrats who infest their community and the thugs in their employ, so it was hardly an intelligence coup to learn that the Sudsmos didn't much care for government. Babcock summarized those views thusly: “They question the legitimacy of the Constitution, of the legislature and government processes.”

I'd wager platinum to potato chips that the Sudsmos do not question the legitimacy of the Constitution, but rather the constitutional legitimacy of actions taken by the state legislature and carried out by county officials. But hey, “close” is good enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and arrest warrants to be served by armed gangs against non-violent eccentrics in rural Wisconsin.

Babcock said he was “relieved” that no injuries resulted from the raid. Well, the same could be said by any decent person, who would probably add: “Given your perverse determination to deploy a military strike team against the couple, it's something akin to a miracle that you didn't get anybody hurt or killed, you tax-devouring cretin.”

The militarized assault, following established customs in the embryonic American Reich, was conducted to “serve a warrant” charging the Sundsmos with “criminal slander” against various local officials. The ten-count criminal complaint is devoid of any alleged violations of federal law – which means that the use of federal assets in staging the raid was a crime against the Constitution, a fact that once meant something.

The “slander” in question consisted of liens filed against various officials, including the former sheriff and district attorney, as well as officials of a local bank, all of whom were involved in the tax foreclosure of the couple's property. These instruments were transparently bogus, and utterly unenforceable.

But because of the diligent efforts of totalitarian-minded groups like the so-called Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, false liens of this kind are now categorized as “paper terrorism” -- which means that those who file them are treated as kindred to hijackers and car-bombers, rather than desperate, misguided people lashing out in frustration at a corrupt system, and choosing a spectacularly ill-advised way to do so.

More will be published about this case as details become available.

P.S. --

(There has been some speculation that the body of Beth Kutz, who was murdered by her estranged husband several years ago, may be buried on the Sundsmo property; if this proves to be the case, it wouldn't necessarily mean that the couple had anything to do with that hideous crime -- and if they did, they were extravagantly foolish to bring attention to themselves.)

Be sure to visit The Right Source for your "anti-government" news and commentary.

Confronting the Latter-Day Reich: When Insubordination is a Moral Duty

This was a man: Helmuth Hubner was executed on October 27, 1942, at the age of 16, by the Hitler regime. His "crime" -- for which he was excommunicated from the Mormon Church -- was circulating anti-Reich leaflets with the help of two young friends.

One of the noblest moral examples I was taught as youngster was that of an insubordinate officer in the Missouri Militia.

Principled insubordination: Alexander William "Will" Doniphan, seen in this primitive portrait, refused to carry out the execution of a civilian convicted of being an "unlawful enemy combatant" by a military tribunal in Missouri.

Alexander William Doniphan served under Maj. Gen. Samuel D. Lucas during Missouri's “Mormon War” of 1838. The conflict was a grace note (perhaps “graceless” note would be a better description) to decades of bloodshed. (By the end of the War Between the States," "Missouri" was a proverb alluding to the bestial violence of unrestricted guerrilla warfare.) The Missouri civil war grew out of an irreconcilable cultural dissonance between the Mormon settlers – who arrived in Jackson County in 1831 and announced that God had given them the land to build “Zion” -- and the state's established settlers.

(The most comprehensive, even-handed, and nuanced treatment of this conflict, in my view, is Stephen LeSeur's book The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri.)

By 1838, following numerous incidents of mob violence and persecution, some Mormon leaders organized a covert force commonly called the “Danites,” an oath-bound proto-terrorist group intended to plunder the church's enemies and intimidate its internal dissenters. This followed a July 4 oration (.pdf) by Sidney Rigdon, the Mormon Church's second-in-command, in which he spoke of a “war of extermination” between the Mormons and their enemies (including internal dissenters).

Over the next several months the conflict waxed bloody, with the Mormons getting the worst of it -- particularly in the abominable mass murder committed at Haun's Mill. That atrocity followed the Mormon attack on Missouri militiamen at Crooked River, which prompted Governor Lilburn Boggs to issue an executive order designating the Mormon population en toto as (in effect) unlawful enemy combatants to be “exterminated or driven from the state.”

After the massacre at Haun's Mill, which demonstrated that literal extermination of the Mormons was an acute possibility, Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith and his top associates were forced to surrender to the state militia at the town of Far West. They were arrested, run through a burlesque of a trial under Maj. Gen Gen. Lucas, and sentenced to be shot at dawn.

Lucas issued a written order to Colonel Doniphan commanding him to carry out the execution:

"Sir: You will take Joseph Smith and the other prisoners into the public square at Far West, and shoot them at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning."

Doniphan, to his eternal credit, refused the order and more or less gave Lucas anatomically explicit instructions regarding its proper disposal.

"It is cold-blooded murder,” Doniphan wrote to Lucas. “I will not obey your order. My brigade shall march for Liberty [Missouri] tomorrow morning, at 8 o'clock; and if you execute these men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God!"

Consider how this situation – additional relevant details of which I'll share – appears today, in the sixth year of an open-ended “war on terrorism”:

Joseph Smith, as the civilian leader of an armed insurgency, had been arrested and tried by a military commission in the midst of a literal war. His closest aide had threatened to “exterminate” those who didn't belong to his sect; his movement included an oath-bound, violent secret society, some members of which had killed state militiamen. And defectors from Smith's movement had testified, under oath, that Smith had promised “he would yet tread down his enemies, and walk over their dead bodies; and if he was not let alone, he would be a second Mohammed to this generation, and that he would make it one gore of blood from the Rocky mountains to the Atlantic ocean; that, like Mohammed, [his] motto in treating for peace was `the [Koran] or the Sword.'”

Alexander Doniphan, by contemporary conservative sensibilities, would have to be considered a traitor for insisting that the sectarian extremist named Joseph Smith was entitled to due process of law, rather than being summarily executed after a perfunctory trial before a military commission.

As a youngster raised in a Mormon home, I was taught to revere Doniphan as a man of principle – not just because he had saved Joseph Smith's life (or at least deferred his death for nearly six years), but because he defended the rule of law at considerable risk to himself. I hold that view now as an adult who has left Mormonism and – much more importantly – come to trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.

My opinion of Doniphan has been shared by others outside the Mormon faith, among them the producers of the television serial based on Profiles in Courage, adapted from the book of the same title ghost-written for John F. Kennedy by Theodore Sorenson.

I have no reason to doubt that Doniphan's story was well known to Jay Bybee, Timothy C. Flanigan, and Kyle Sampson – all of whom are Mormon attorneys who served in key positions under George W. Bush, and all of whom played critical roles in the creation of a Leader State in which the rule of law is subordinate to the will of The Decider.

Jay Bybee, as I've pointed out elsewhere, signed the notorious 2002 torture brief commonly called the “Yoo Memorandum” after its chief author, John C. Yoo – proponent of totalitarian presidential power and defender of the president's supposed right to order the sexual mutilation of innocent children ( children as innocent as those murdered and mutilated at Haun's Mill, Mr. Bybee). After putting his imprimatur on a memo claiming broad discretionary power on the part of the president, and his designated agents, to commit acts of torture and even homicide, Bybee was rewarded with a post as a federal appellate judge.

Timothy E. Flanigan, who served both Bushes, was one of the Republican litigators deployed to Florida just hours after the Bush-Gore deadlock was announced in November 2000. Appointed as a deputy to Alberto Gonzalez when the latter was Chief White House Counsel, Flanigan was reportedly the first to propose the creation of “military commissions” for accused terrorists (military commissions like the one that ordered Joseph Smith's execution, Mr. Flanigan).

“Military commissions, [Flanigan] thought, would give the government wide latitude to hold, interrogate, and prosecute the sort of suspects who might be silenced by lawyers in criminal courts,” reported the New York Times on October 24, 2004. More importantly: “[The commissions] would put the control over prosecutions squarely in the hands of the president. To act pre-emptively against al-Qaeda, the authorities would need information that defense lawyers and due-process rules would discourage suspects from giving up. Flanigan framed the choice starkly: `Are we going to go with a system that is really guaranteed to prevent us from getting information in every case or are we going to go another route?'”

In defiance of his oath to uphold the Constitution – which, as a Mormon, he was taught was a divinely inspired document – Flanigan helped the Bush regime find “another route,” albeit one well-trod by its predecessors in Moscow, Baghdad, and Berlin.

(Flanigan, incidentally, would likely be Alberto Gonzalez's deputy AG today were it not for his connections to Jack Abramoff.)

A bespectacled young man of unexceptional stature, Kyle Sampson is saddled with an ironic surname. But his unprepossessing appearance belies his ambition and cynicism he revealed by facilitating the White House scheme to purge from the ranks of federal prosecutors those US Attorneys deemed inadequately loyal to The Decider and insufficiently submissive to his will. This plan would exploit a provision in the updated version of the so-called Patriot Act permitting the Attorney General to replace US Attorneys without Senate approval.

Prior to his resignation two days ago, Sampson was chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. Last December 7, as recently revealed e-mails document, Sampson composed a “Plan for Replacing Certain United States Attorneys,” which instructed Justice Department officials in how to evaluate prosecutors and how to justify the firing of those deemed unsatisfactory.

The criteria outlined by Sampson (or by Bush and Gonzalez by way of Sampson) included a positive answer to the question of whether a given prosecutor had “exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general.” That “loyalty,” it is now clear, would be displayed by using prosecutorial power in the service of Republican partisan interests by pursuing politically useful investigations of Democratic politicians (or by refraining from pursuing Republicans – the supposed offense that led to the termination of Carol C. Lam).

In a section entitled “Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval,” Sampson provided talking points to placate elected representatives and others who would be angered by the summary and unjust termination of the federal prosecutors.

As Paul Craig Roberts and others have pointed out, federal prosecutors have become a besetting plague to our nation. Had the Bush White House implemented its original plan and fired the entire lot of them, our nation would be better off – provided that they were not replaced. But the objective was to make the entire prosecutor corp an instrument of The Decider's will and a partisan asset of the Republican Party – and Sampson eagerly abetted that criminal undertaking.

Bybee, Flanigan, and Sampson each had opportunities to emulate Alexander Doniphan's admirable example: They could have refused to participate in the Bush Regime's assault on the rule of law, due process, and separation of powers; they could have acted as whistleblowers; they should have been true to their constitutional oath.

Because the leader they served was destroying the rule of law, insubordination was a moral duty. Instead, they consecrated their time and talents to the building up of the Leader State and the establishment of a latter-day Reich.

Be sure to visit The Right Source for news, opinion, and talk radio from a freedom-centered perspective.

National ID: Wearing the State's Brand

Rudy Giuliani -- the Stasi Years? Not quite: It's Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) of the East German Ministry for State Security in the recent film "The Lives of Others."

Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

Martin Luther

(The relevance of this quote is discussed as a postscript to the following essay.)

Leave it to the Brits to make utterly clear that which our own rulers are trying to obfuscate.

According to the Daily Mail, the British government is “planning to charge companies around 60p a time to check details held on the giant `big brother' database” of personal information collected through that country's national ID card program. “The data which banks, financial institutions and others will be allowed to access includes names, addresses, any second homes and National Insurance numbers.”

Not surprisingly, “a top firm of headhunters” -- of the corporate rather than cannibalistic variety, I assume, although those cohorts are largely interchangeable -- “is already working for the Government, seeking a consultancy expert to market the benefits of the database to the private sector. Firms will be told that the scheme will cut millions from their annual fraud bills and save them hefty fines for employing illegal immigrants. Officials believe it will be cheaper for companies to confirm identity through the [government] database than by using current methods such as bills and driving licenses.”

What this means, of course, is that “the Government will be selling information which the public has had to pay to hand over – like it or not.”

“The government is trying to pay for its compulsory ID scheme by turning a buck on the very same personal information it forces you to hand over,” observes Phil Booth of the NO2ID campaign. “Charging others to check your personal details is the thin end of a very dangerous wedge. When employees of tens of thousands of officially-accredited companies are allowed to make checks, how much easier will it be for dodgy investigators and identity thieves to find out your information?”

Booth's last comment is the needle-fine point of this entire matter:

The single biggest threat where identity theft is concerned is the State, either as the chief offender or the key accomplice.

By requiring subjects to surrender personal information in exchange for a national ID (such a demand would not be made of true citizens), the State is claiming title of ownership over them. That is, quite literally, identity theft, particularly when those who are not in the system have no “legal identity” and are subject to impediments on critical personal freedoms.

By corralling that information in a single database, the State is making things much more convenient for data rustlers. And as Booth points out, the likelihood of such pilferage increases exponentially as the State authorizes access to sub-contractors of various kinds – in addition to the population of socially inept and morally dissolute rejects the State directly employs.

The Bush Regime's REAL ID act, which was originally scheduled for implementation by 2008, requires states to create biometric, computer-readable driver's licenses that conform to a national standard. This would be a de facto national ID card, the first in our history.

The REAL ID law, notes Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, “requires states to enter information about their drivers into databases to which all other states will have access. Identity thieves will have much greater opportunities to get their hands on drive information nationwide. And a uniform `machine-readable technology' on the licenses themselves will make it easier for governments and businesses to scan licenses and compile storehouses of data about our whereabouts and activities.”

The national ID would be a key element of a universal system of “human inventory control,” as well as creating multiple information storehouses just waiting to be plundered by identity thieves – who will be over-represented in the system's bureaucratic enforcement apparatus.

One of the few relatively encouraging recent developments on the American political scene has been the growing grassroots opposition to the Bush Regime's REAL ID proposal. The revolt began in Maine, and as the Cato Institute's Jim Harper points out, the counter-revolution has begun with Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins.

“Working with Senator Collins,” writes Harper, the Department of Homeland Security “has now moved the deadline for complying with REAL ID back more than a year and a half, from May 2008 to December 2009.” This tactical “concession” is intended to give time for the bribes to work: “DHS says it will start allocating Homeland Security Grant Program funds for REAL ID while implementation is delayed. That gives incentive to the ultimate recipients of the funds to start lobbying rebellious state lawmakers.”

Every politician who supports this scheme, and every lobbyist who agitates for it, should be viewed by the public as an identity thief.

Hideous as the REAL ID program is, the evils it would inflict on us are consigned to a still-indefinite future. Many of those same evils will be wrought through the regime's e-Passport program, which is already underway.

As I have written elsewhere, the supposedly secure e-Passport can be cracked quite easily, and the biometric information stored on its embedded RFID chip can be harvested with relatively little effort.

Security experts Ari Jules, David Molnar, and David Wagner warned the State Department years ago that stolen e-Passport data can be used in some terrifying ways. For example, that captured data could “enable the construction of ‘American-sniffing’ bombs, since U.S. e-passports [do] not use encryption to protect confidentiality of data.” Another “unpleasant prospect,” as the authors delicately put it, is the advent of an “‘RFID-enabled bomb,’ an explosive device that is keyed to explode at [a] particular individual’s RFID reading.”

These are just some of the terrifying possibilities that emanate from the State's efforts to mark and brand us like cattle.

About that Luther quote....

It takes a special gift to assess a roiling and bloody battlefield, recognize its most strategically important point, and rally the troops to engage the enemy there. That's called leadership.

It takes a peculiar variety of talent to recognize where that critical battle is being fought and then to take special care to avoid it, while maintaining the frenzied pretense of fighting. This could be called creative cowardice.

This treatment of the subject of identity theft very usefully illustrates the latter approach. I can't believe that this is because of any shortcomings on the part of the author, who is exceptionally well-qualified to write about computer security (as well as ballot-related issues, father's rights issues, and a number of other subjects).

Given what the author knows, and what is known by the editorial collective in charge of The New American magazine, it seems impossible to believe that they could publish a lengthy and detailed treatment of the issue of identity theft while avoiding, almost entirely, the State's central role as both facilitator and perpetrator of that crime.

For all of the interesting and useful detail about identity theft provided in that cover story, The New American flinched from indicting the State, and candidly describing the intentions of those who control it.

The first half of the familiar quote from Luther cited above is the following:

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him.”

In a similar fashion, those who profess to work on behalf of freedom everywhere except at those points where it is most acutely under attack by its enemies are effectively collaborating in freedom's demise.

Note to TNA: The point of putting out the magazine is “that freedom shall not perish,” not to make its affiliated organization more marketable to those who are killing freedom.

Be sure to check out The Right Source – we don't flinch in the face of the enemy.

Beltway Conservatism: The Diaper Dangles

There are occasions when Washington reminds me of a overstuffed diaper that has grown dangerously pendulous because of parental inattention. At any second – in response to any random gyration of the blissfully oblivious toddler wearing it – the nappy may over-stress its fasteners, releasing to public inspection the malodorous mass contained therein.

As I said, there are times that this image offers a suitable metaphor for our ruling elite.

Deborah Palfrey, the 50-year-old former proprietor of the Pamela Martin & Associates Escort Service in the Imperial Capital, has been arraigned on various prostitution, racketeering, and money laundering charges. This seems like a churlish thing to do to someone who has serviced the carnal needs of the political Establishment for 13 years. One would think that the whores laboring in the public sector would display a hint of professional courtesy toward their colleagues in the private sector, but such isn't the case.

Seeking to raise money for her legal defense (a difficult thing to do given that the feds have attached her assets – sorry, this story is a minefield of double entendres – for forfeiture), Ms. Palfrey floated the idea of selling the telephone records and other details that would reveal the identities of her former customers.

Palfrey's suggestion was characterized by federal prosecutors – a group not generally noted for deference to the rights and reputations of those incriminated in prostitution cases – as something that “could be considered veiled threats to cause embarrassment to former customers and employees.” So the prosecution in Palfrey's case filed a motion seeking a “protective order” that would suppress public disclosure of that information and permit its use only in preparing her defense.

It was a little less than a decade ago that Bill Clinton, facing impeachment over only the most trivial of his manifold crimes against the Constitution and public decency, used White House spokes-nebbish George Stephanopolous to warn that he might deploy the “Ellen Romecsch Strategy” if the threat to remove him from office became acute.

That phrase refers to an East German spy with whom John F. Kennedy had an concealed extramarital affair, and it connoted a clear threat to render transparent all of the opaque glass houses in which Washington's preening poseurs reside. The Clinton junta's illicit possession of confidential FBI files made this threat plausible.


Deniable disclosures soon appeared in the press about the sexual transgressions of conservative Republicans – such as Reps. Henry Hyde, Don Burton, and Helen Chenoweth. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, compromised by his own concupiscence, resigned after the 1998 mid-term election, as did his immediate successor, Louisiana Representative Bob Livingston, shortly after being appointed Speaker.

(Please forgive a brief digression. The late Rep. Chenoweth, a lovely and principled woman whom I was honored to call a friend, explained to me that the affair had taken place decades ago, when she was unmarried, and before her Christian conversion. We had that conversation while I was soliciting her help to deal with a vindictive IRS enforcement action against me that she said was unambiguously a form of retaliation for my involvement in a national campaign to impeach Clinton.)

All of this offered critical hints regarding the extent to which the Republican leadership and rank and file were morally compromised. And this represents only those caught in acts of conventional adultery.

What are we to make of the more repulsive possibilities suggested by the examples of high-profile Republican rent-boys James Gannon and Matt Sanchez?

“Jeff Gannon” (nee James Guckert) is the homosexual prostitute who posed as a White House reporter for a GOP-aligned outlet called the Talon News Service; in that capacity his job was to tee up softball “questions” for Scott McClellan, thereby acting as a lifeline when the administration spokesliar was under assault by actual reporters.

In addition to being an oft-touted source for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Gannon appears to have enjoyed extraordinary White House access before he received credentials as a “reporter.”

Matt Sanchez is a former homosexual porn star and gay prostitute who has demeaned himself even further by becoming a partner in a New York marketing firm. Given his background it should not be surprising that Sanchez is utterly shameless and adept at self-promotion.

Sanchez (given his previous occupation, his surname represents another potential land mine) is currently a 36-year-old Marine Corps Reservist and a non-traditional student at Columbia University. His self-marketing as a stalwart Reaganite Republican besieged by heartless “anti-war zealots” paid off with television appearances on various Fox “News” programs, and during the most recent version of the annual Nuremberg Rally called CPAC he was given the purportedly prestigious Jeanne Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award. He also received the honor – if that's the correct term – of posing for a photo with Ann Coulter, the right-wing pundette I've taken to calling the Missing Winter Brother.

(Continues below...)

Hey, kids -- it's the musical Winter Brothers!


Here's Edgar belting the blues...








... heeere's Johnny, tearing up a beautiful 'burst Les Paul ...











... and here's "Annie," leading a sing-along of the Horst Wessel Song! "Flag high, ranks closed, the SA moves with silent, solid tread..."

Oddly enough, one would think that Sanchez would be ostracized by the Legion of Decency that is the Beltway Conservative Movement. But the disclosures about his past appear to have made him a more sympathetic figure on the Right -- or even lent him a certain cachet.

What does it say about the conservative movement that figures like Gannon can embed themselves in it so easily (did I just hear another mine going off)?

Once it's understood that the conservative movement is simply a support mechanism for the Republican Party, it becomes easier to put this whole matter in perspective.

The two “mainstream” parties are entirely interchangeable, both in form and function – two cheeks of the same diaper-enshrouded derriere, happily wallowing in the feculence that is their natural habitat.

Be sure to check out Pro Libertate - the e-zine, which is available through The Right Source website.

The New Conservatism: Chekists and Collaborators

A multi-use facility: One of the newly constructed immigration detention centers that could very easily be used to pen protesters, dissidents, or draft resisters.

Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, a Republican presidential hopeful, is the House's most conspicuous advocate of border enforcement. He is also a stalwart defender of the Warfare/Homeland Security State.

Last September, Tancredo voted in favor of both the Military Commissions Act – which destroyed the habeas corpus guarantee – and a “reform” of the Insurrection Act that gives the president the power to use the National Guard as his personal army. Interestingly, Tancredo is also a devoted supporter of Iran's so-called Iranian People's Mujahadeen (MEK), a bizarre terrorist cult whose official ideology is a fusion of Marxism and Sufism. The Warmakers in and around the Bush Regime have embraced the MEK as an ally in the low-intensity war underway between Washington and Tehran.

It seems to me that people genuinely concerned about border security would be wary of cultivating foreign wars, which inevitably generate streams of refugees and an appetite for retaliation – both of which are bad for the cause of secure borders. Thus it appears to me, at least, that Rep. Tancredo's positions are in conflict – unless his focus is on empowering Washington at all hazards, in which case his apparently contradictory positions would make some sense.

I've made this point before, but it bears repeating: The movement-wide conservative obsession with immigration reflects a successful effort to seduce “limited government” activists into supporting the creation of a garrison state -- and Tom Tancredo embodies that order of priorities perfectly.

Former Congressman Bob Barr recently made the same point in a Washington Times op-ed column referring to efforts by Tancredo and other House Republicans to pass legislation “prohibiting financial institutions from extending mortgages to anyone who cannot establish their bona fides by producing a valid Social Security number.”

Does anybody else remember – perhaps through a glaze of sepia-tinted nostalgia – that bygone era when conservative Republicans opposed the use of Social Security numbers as a de facto national identification number? Barr does, and he criticized Republican congressmen for trying to compel “private financial institutions to do the heavy lifting of combating illegal immigration because government has failed in its responsibility to properly police and monitor our borders.”

“Where, for example, will the mandates they seek – forcing businesses to determine if a person is in this country lawfully before extending credit or selling a product for which that person is otherwise eligible – be next applied?” continues Barr. “Will a bill be introduced that prohibits automobile dealers from selling a motor vehicle to anyone who cannot produce a valid Social Security card? Will landlords be forced to rent their property only to those who possess a Social Security card? Would it not make just as much sense for these advocates to require presentation of a Social Security card prior to bedding down for the night at a local Marriott?”

What Barr is describing through illustration here is a foundational principle in every surveillance society: The government must compel its subjects to act as the eyes and ears of the State. Embraced with a passion by most of the Establishment-led Right after 9-11, that principle is attracting new converts now thanks to concerns over border security.

Likewise, many of those limited government conservatives who kept their wits about them when 9-11 inspired calls for creation of an even larger “national security” leviathan have surrendered now that the police state pretext du jour is the immigration crisis.

The Denver Post points out that the new “immigration control” campaign has led to “the biggest border prison boom in decades [and created] the federal government's larges enforcement arm” -- the latter being the expanded Border Patrol, which is now an appendage of the Department of Homeland Security.

Dozens of new federal prosecutors are being hired to prosecute immigration cases. Thousands of armed federal enforcement agents are being hired and trained. Huge sums of taxpayer money are being sluiced into the coffers of the Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group Inc., and other penal system profiteers.

All of these assets and personnel, it should be remembered, are fungible. The newly hired federal prosecutors targeting Mexican agricultural workers today could very easily be tasked tomorrow to prosecute American citizens for violating some arcane provision of the tax code or some exotic permutation of the Patriot Act. Border Patrol Agents could be seconded to other federal agencies – say, the Marshals Service in the event that muscle is needed to back up the Selective Service when the draft is reinstated. Prison spaces now filled by immigrant families could come in quite handy if the Regime decides it needs to deal roughly with dissidents or draft resisters.

For supporters of the new border initiatives, “it's a long-overdue effort to establish the rule of law,” notes the Post; “for foes, it's a slow militarization built on prison shackles and razor wire.”

Which view is accurate? That depends on whether we assume that it's possible to cast out Beelzebub by the power of Beelzebub, since the same regime that has brought us torture, military tribunals, executive rule through “signing statements,” illegal domestic surveillance, and other garrison state innovations is building the new “border security” regime.

Not your Daddy's idea of Border Security: U.S. Coast Guard Port Security Unit 311 trains at Camp Lejune, N.C.

It is irrational to believe that the same Leviathan state that waging war on liberty both at home and abroad can be trusted to use these expanded powers only for the purpose of securing our borders. We should view the DHS as America's embryonic Cheka, an assumption fully warranted by both its structure and widespread corruption. It's worth recalling, once again, that the Soviet Cheka had a large, well-armed, and very competent Border Guards Directorate – and the Soviet Union had no problem with illegal immigration.

Too many on the Right – I'm irresistibly tempted to call them Chekist Conservatives – are abetting our descent into unalloyed despotism in the name of border security. That cohort includes, alas, some people for whom I've had great respect and affection.

Shortly before I underwent an involuntary career change last October, one of my associates – a JBS official who is involved in defining that organization's agenda – explained to me in an e-mail why fighting the creation of an American Reich simply wasn't a priority for the Society:

“If a police state happens in America, and we are unable to stop it, which version do you think will be worse: 100 million Americans armed to the teeth within a walled-in country fighting against a corrupt regime? Or a tri-national police state [through the so-called North American Union] that has folded in the Mexican government and drug cartels ... into the Department of Homeland Security, with more terrorists flowing in across Latin American borders from elsewhere? Which one would you prefer taking your chances with? We don’t want either, but I go back to what I said to you elsewhere. We have a chance at winning the immigration issue and in the process drawing a lot of people to our ranks (even if the Repubs are cynically exploiting it to their own advantage), which will allow us to have more influence to stop the police state from fully blossoming.”

Why a "walled-in" police state would permit us to keep our firearms to fight the "corrupt regime" it was created to protect, my friend didn't say. Nor did he explain how it would be possible to "win" on "the immigration issue" -- as "victory" is currently defined -- without actively abetting the growth of the very police state that would suffocate what remains of our liberty. If we lose on the police state "issue," we get all of the horrors my friend describes -- and others too gruesome to describe.

It must be said: The statement quoted above (which wasn't shared with the Society's membership at large) is the authentic voice of collaboration. Every collaborator insists that he is working within the system to bring it down, and disavows the actions of more radical elements who actually take the fight to the enemy.

Most collaborators have surrendered after the State has begun to exercise its consolidated powers; in this case we see preemptive capitulation as a cynical marketing strategy. What is really painful about this particular example is that we still have a chance (an infinitesimal one, to be sure) to abort the creation of an American Reich before it comes to term, and the only alternative to outright servitude would be a gallant but doomed recourse to arms.

Chekist conservatives are more interested in building up the State than in preserving constitutional freedom. And the sad truth is that you can't expect leadership for freedom from collaborators.


Please be sure to visit The Right Source -- a collaborator-free zone for freedom-centered news, commentary, Kevin Shannon's radio program, and -- brand new! -- our Action Agenda for citizen activism.

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

“That's what they, they start when you're young, y'know. When you're little they, at school they, they Baden-Powell all the boys and they Betty Crocker all the girls and they, then they air condition ya' and put ya' in the Heat N' Bake Oven and ya' can't breathe any more.”

Jerry Fletcher, describing collectivist social conditioning, in Conspiracy Theory.

To understand the critical difference between the commendable impulse called patriotism, and the murderous group psychosis called nationalism, it's useful to think of the contrast between the organic reality called family ties and the silly fiction called “school spirit.”

While the terms patriotism and nationalism can refer to the same thing – the love of one's native country – in practice they have acquired very different meanings. Nationalism, in practice, describes not to the love of a country but rather the veneration of its central government.

Patriotism is not built on zero-sum assumptions: It is quite possible to love one's country ardently, while recognizing and respecting the love that patriots of other countries display for their homelands. I am convinced that one result of a global pandemic of genuine patriotism would be a general abatement of warfare, since people who really love their country would spare it the horrors of war in all but the most exigent of circumstances.

Authentic patriots thrust into combat against each other would be likely to seek the earliest possible end to conflict, as well as to pursue a just and sustainable peace. The objective, after all, would be to preserve what's best for one's own country, not to impose the will of one's government on another country.

As historian John J. Dwyer notes, nationalism is a degenerate impostor of patriotism. “The patriot says, `I love my country,' works for its good, and defends it if necessary – against enemies within and without,” writes Dwyer. “He strives and prays not primarily that God will bless his country, but that his country will bless God. The nationalist, meanwhile, says, `My country is better than yours.' `My country is the greatest there has ever been.' `The greatest nation on God’s green earth.' `They hate my country because it is so good.'”

Nationalism focuses on the State, rather than the community. It is unambiguously based on zero-sum assumptions about power, and nationalists define victory in terms of imposing their will on others.

It takes relatively little prompting to teach an individual to love his country. It requires a considerable investment of time and effort to indoctrinate him into the love of the State that rules him. The former can be taught in the home by parents who have a decent grasp of their country's history and culture. The latter, however, requires the efforts of the state's paid clergy..

Typically, an individual doesn't need prompting to love his family, even if there are some within it he doesn't like very much. Familial affection is not the product of ritualized peer pressure, like pep rallies and similar liturgies.

“School spirit,” by way of contrast, is an entirely synthetic pseudo-emotion. Public schools are about as organic as polystyrene, and the “communities” they create are the product of geographic accidents and arbitrary government decisions. They have those traits in common with the “nations” brought into being by the Power Elite after World War I.

Like those artificial “nations,” public schools compensate for their lack of community authenticity through the cynical propagation of convenient myths and the state-managed manufacture of ersatz enthusiasm.

Last fall (for reasons I'll explain below), my wife and I found it necessary to put our three oldest children into the local government school, whose mascot is the Pirate (an appropriate choice for a government-run institution). As a result we became aware of the school district's incessant efforts to instill “school spirit” in them – through competitions involving the sale of Pirate t-shirts, or classroom participation in “Pirate Fridays” by wearing the school colors.

None of this has anything to do with athletic competition; we're discussing an elementary school here. So why is there such an effort underway to confect “school spirit”?

I suspect that teaching students to revere their school is the first stage of indoctrinating them in the state-worship called nationalism. “Be true to your school” is the first line of a catechism that concludes with some variation on the theme of der staat uber alles.

As Gary North observes, this is nothing new: “Throughout the West after the rise of Napoleon, nationalism became the State's substitute for organized religion. The public schools universally inculcated some form of State-deifying nationalism.” What North describes is Rousseau's Civil Religion, in which the State -- as the instrument of collective human power -- is treated as "God."

Since the State is an abstraction, it is the most visible representative of the central government – in our case, the president – who is deified as the State Incarnate. As in the early Roman empire, our presidents are generally deified after death: Witness, for example, the revoltingly blasphemous depiction of Washington' apotheosis (literally, “ascent to godhood”) in the national Capitol, or the routine depiction of Lincoln as “the martyred Christ in democracy's passion play,” as neocon Walter Berns puts it.

In this, as in so much else having to do with executive despotism, the beady-eyed, slack-jawed, bloody-handed, illiterate little troll in the Oval Office has turned over new ground: He claims to commune with the Shekinah, or divine presence.

Recounting a recent White House lunch with Bush, British commentator Irwin Steltzer reports:

“The president divulged with convincing calm that when it comes to pressure, `I just don’t feel any.' Why? His constituency, he feels, is the divine presence, to whom he must answer. Don’t misunderstand: God didn’t tell him to put troops in harm’s way in Iraq; his belief only goes so far as to inform him that there is good and evil. It is the president who must figure out how to promote the former and destroy the latter. And he is confident that his policies are doing just that.”

How much of this is narcissism, and how much is a serious psychological disorder (I do not say that flippantly), it is difficult to say. The truly terrifying thing is that the purpose of government schools is to catechize the young in an official religion that would make them accept such grandiose claims without so much as a tremor of critical thought.

Postscript

So the question must be asked: Given what I describe above, why are my children in government schools?

The answer is this: My wife Korrin is seriously and chronically ill. She has been hospitalized four times since last April, and – my soul is grieved to report – she appears to be headed there again. Her condition makes it necessary for me to work at home, in order to care for both her and our children; this severely limits my career options.

"Fairest of form was this queen, glinting and grey of eye; No man could say he had seen A lovelier, but with a lie": Korrin and I on our wedding day, January 10, 1997.

There are other schooling opportunities available, but they were cost-prohibitive, even before I was fired by the, ahem, heroes currently running the John Birch Society for no defensible reason (thereby losing both a steady income and our family's health insurance coverage).

We don't plan on keeping our boys in school for any longer than necessary. I have no idea how long that will be, but – God willing – it won't be much longer.

Please forgive me for bringing up personal matters of this sort. Out of a desire to avoid being a hypocrite, I'd largely avoided writing about the government school system until now.

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