For the benefit of our new Three Percenters - Welcome

I am seeing a trend of people that are familiar with the III% and even this blog, but that are not familiar with the concepts of the movement or why it was started.  

Don't mistake me, I think this is absolutely wonderful.  It means that more people are coming here for the first time and that means that new eyes are being opened.  This is my one goal: seeing the movement grow to dizzying heights and still remain true to the founding principles.

To that end, I am reposting "A Brief Three Percent Catechism -- A discipline not for the faint-hearted."

The original can be found here.

Catechesis is an education in the faith of children, young people and adults which includes especially the teaching of Christian doctrine imparted, generally speaking, in an organic and systematic way, with a view to initiating the hearers into the fullness of Christian life. -- Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 5 (quoting John Paul II).

Wikipedia tells us that "in the early church, new converts . . . were instructed (catechized) in the basic elements of the faith such as the Apostles' Creed, Lord's Prayer, and sacraments in preparation for baptism." Although I'm a Baptist, this always struck me as a useful tool to make sure that all of the folks who professed a creed actually understood the faith. Catechism hardly contains all the elements of a particular belief system, but it puts the newbie on the right path of study. I have been convinced for some time that the Three Percent needed a catechism of our own, since there are a number of folks who seem to want to reinterpret (if not hijack) the original concept for their own purposes. To quote Obi Wan Kenobi, "It takes strength to resist the dark side. Only the weak embrace it!"

The Three Percent idea, the movement, the ideal, was designed to be a simple, powerful concept that could not be infiltrated or subjected to agents provocateurs like many organizations that I observed in the constitutional militia movement of the 90s. In this I was both correct and dead wrong, as I have been battling folks almost since the beginning who have misunderstood, deliberately or not, what the Three Percent was in history, what it is today and what its aims are for the future.

What is a "Three Percenter"?

During the American Revolution, the active forces in the field against the King's tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists. They were in turn actively supported by perhaps 10% of the population. In addition to these revolutionaries were perhaps another 20% who favored their cause but did little or nothing to support it. Another one-third of the population sided with the King (by the end of the war there were actually more Americans fighting FOR the King than there were in the field against him) and the final third took no side, blew with the wind and took what came.

Three Percenters today do not claim that we represent 3% of the American people, although we might. That theory has not yet been tested. We DO claim that we represent at least 3% of American gun owners, which is still a healthy number somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million people. History, for good or ill, is made by determined minorities. We are one such minority. So too are the current enemies of the Founders' Republic. What remains, then, is the test of will and skill to determine who shall shape the future of our nation.

The Three Percent today are gun owners who will not disarm, will not compromise and will no longer back up at the passage of the next gun control act. Three Percenters say quite explicitly that we will not obey any further circumscription of our traditional liberties and will defend ourselves if attacked. We intend to maintain our God-given natural rights to liberty and property, and that means most especially the right to keep and bear arms. Thus, we are committed to the restoration of the Founders' Republic, and are willing to fight, die and, if forced by any would-be oppressor, to kill in the defense of ourselves and the Constitution that we all took an oath to uphold against enemies foreign and domestic.

The Doctrine of the Three Percent in a few sentences.

The Three Percent are the citizens the Founders counted on to save the Republic when everyone else abandoned it. And we will. There will be no more free Wacos and no more free Katrinas. For we are the Three Percent. We will not disarm. You cannot convince us. You cannot intimidate us. You can kill us, if you think you can. But remember, we’ll shoot back. We are not going away. We are not backing up another inch. And there are THREE MILLION OF US. The next move, if any, is up to the aspiring tyrants among the domestic enemies of the Constitution.

This is not to say that all politics, even in the rigged, corrupt game played by both political parties today, is futile. It isn't. The Founders did not cede that ground to the forces of the King until forced to do so and we must not. Indeed, this is one way that we make the local contacts and build the local networks so key to the Founders' concepts of the militia as the guardian of, and the true expression of the will of, the people. There is a place then, for all who adopt the Three Percent ideal, regardless of age, sex, fitness, infirmity. Resistance is an expression of a determined minority, but that minority comes from everywhere and contributes what it can, where it can.

One other point. The Three Percent idea, being an idea, is internalized and finds expression in action when required without any top-down organization issuing orders. This was on perfect display at the Bundy Ranch stand-off when Three Percenters from everywhere flocked on their own to the Bundy's defense, interposing themselves between the Bundys and the Feds. No call was issued, they just came because they understood the concept of "No More Free Wacos." The Feds were shocked -- first into inaction and then into retreat. Indeed, the Bundy confrontation may be seen as the proof of the successful weaponizing of the idea of the Three Percent.

The Three Percent as a modern expression of the Founder's model.

The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they chuse and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society, that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure, by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making; whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence. -- John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Chapter XIX, Of the Dissolution of Government, Sec. 222, 1690.

The Founders, it must be remembered, thought of themselves as Englishmen who were merely seeking their rights under the English Constitution from the depredations of a corrupt monarchy and its ministers. In this they were guided by the philosophy of John Locke's social contract theory. Locke declared that under natural law, all people have the right to life, liberty, and estate, further, under the social contract, the people could resist the government by force of arms when it acted against the interests of citizens and could replace it with one that served the interests of citizens. Such armed resistance, in Locke's mind, was an obligation which acted as a safeguard against tyranny. The language and reasoning of the Declaration of independence come straight from Locke.

Not only is the moral basis of the modern-day Three Percent movement the same as that of the Founders, but the tactics and strategy of resistance that was used by them, including the Sons of Liberty, the Committees of Correspondence and Safety and the Minutemen, are fully applicable to today's struggle. First, as I wrote over six years ago, Three Percenters recognize that with such a declaration of resistance comes responsibility:

"Take not counsel of your fears." In the coming period many rumors will sweep the blogosphere. Imminent danger will perceived from a million different directions. But here is how we should conduct ourselves.

"Wilson, I'm a damned sight smarter man than Grant; I know more about organization, supply and administration and about everything else than he does, but I'll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight but it scares me like hell." -- William Tecumseh Sherman as recalled by James Harrison Wilson, in Under the Old Flag.

Now Sherman wasn't saying that Grant should fail to seek through intelligence-gathering or scouting what the dispositions and the intentions of the enemy were. He was saying that you don't let your fears affect how you fight the enemy in front of you. Sherman also recalled that Grant worried less about what the enemy was going to do him and more about what HE was going to do the the enemy. As Three Percenters, we must only react to what we see and know and not some rumored threat. Above all, we must not lose our cool. We must always remain under control, and ready.

We must not react to, or repeat, disinformation, for this is the principal way the domestic enemies of the Constitution have used to discredit us over the years. As Three Percenters we must always be the adults in the room. We do not have the luxury of reacting out of emotion, fear or hatred. This is made easier by the discipline of building deterrence.

Again, from six years ago:

Work on the credibility of your deterrence. Deterrence only works if it's credible. We must ready ourselves for whatever comes. That means training, physical fitness, building up logistical bases, more training, marksmanship competence, organization, more logistics, more training.

We have our enemy's promises that they will negate any possibility of our using the standard methods of politics against them. They have won the "majority vote" decision. Fine. But if we are to avoid conflict, we must convince them of how little this actually buys them in the way of power. We do that by building up the armed citizenry, one three-man buddy team, one six-man fire team and one squad at a time. Don't advertise. Friends and neighbors will do nicely. And remember, you're doing this in case the deterrence doesn't work. This is as real as it gets, folks. Act like it.

This is a major component of the discipline of the Three Percent. If you are focused on readiness you will be less likely to jump at shadows, less likely to take counsel of your fears. When in doubt about what is going on around you, train, organize, forge yourself and your teams into the sort of "well regulated militia" the Founders first created in the period leading up to 19 April 1775 and then later codified in the Second Amendment.

"Don't fire unless fired upon." -- Captain John Parker, Lexington Minutemen, 19 April 1775.

As Three Percenters we are bound by an ironclad commitment to no first use of force. We call this, "No Fort Sumters." From six years ago:

No "Fort Sumters." This means exactly and precisely what it says. We must not fire first.

Neither were the leaders of the Confederacy eager to start a war. Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, sitting in their offices in Montgomery (Alabama), much preferred to negotiate until they got their way. They always had, after all. In fact, Southerners in general considered Northerners to be incapable of standing up to them. They had seceded thinking the North would "just let them go." Should it come to civil war they were confident that the great European powers, desperately needing cotton for their mills, would intervene on the side of the Confederacy. The one possibility the South never considered was the one that actually happened: that the North would actually fight an all out civil war rather than let the Union be shattered and that England and France would not come to the aid of the South. Lincoln's adroit handling of the matter left Montgomery with few choices. If they attacked Fort Sumter, they'd lose both their moral high ground and their Northern allies. -- Joe Wheeler, Abraham Lincoln, Howard Books, 2008

We don't fire first, nor second, nor perhaps even third. This does not mean we can't defend ourselves. We must.

What it does mean is that the rest of don't react until everyone understands that it is collective self-defense. We must not cede the moral high ground.

If the Confederacy had not fired on Sumter, what would Lincoln have done? Whatever it was would have cost him the moral high ground and political legitimacy. And for the brave new world of imperial presidency that he was embarked upon, that might have led to an entirely different result. Division in the North, perhaps even impeachment. It is our enemies who are the revolutionists and the aggressors.

Take a stand on familiar ground and their appetites will do the rest. They will come to us. Just be ready. Then when it is apparent, ACT, at once and collectively, on familiar ground of our own choosing and in enlightened self-defense on a large scale seeking only the criminally culpable.

This absolute tenet of the Three Percent concept comes in for the most criticism from those who would have someone (someone, significantly, NOT themselves) take the first shot out of fear or other motives which may or may not be their own. It is in the interest of the domestic enemies of the Constitution to get us to go to proactive violence. The solution then is to refuse to do so. Their own tyrannical hungers combined with impatience at our defiance, like that of the Founders', will in time force them to cede this vital point or, far less likely, to give up the game. But it must be their choice and their action. Again, here it is vital not to take counsel of your fears and to assign some supernatural powers to the enemies of liberty. They cannot sweep down and bag the lot of us, as some Chicken Littles fear. We have them out-numbered by a long shot. If some of us are killed to make the point that THEY are the aggressors in Locke's "war against against the people," then we must recognize that this is what we signed up for when we took our oaths.

The other moral absolute that you sign on to when you become a Three Percenter is no targeting of innocents. We call this "No Oklahoma City bombings." And this includes the innocents who make up the non-combatants on the enemy's side. If you claim to fight monsters, it is important not to become one yourself. They target innocents in retributive terror operations like Waco, we do not. We are also criticized by some for this "weakness." It is, rather, not only a strength but our greatest strength. It is what defines us as defenders of liberty and the people. It is also what the tyrants most fear -- if innocents are taken off the target list, only the guilty remain. And the one thing the war-makers and decision-takers of tyranny fear is a Fourth Generation civil war targeted solely and precisely at THEIR miserable existence. It is the only thing they cherish, the only real thing they believe in -- their own existence and the power that existence gives them to feed their hunger off other people's liberty, property and lives. If the order-givers start to disappear, through death or desertion, the orders do NOT get given. With no Eichmanns to make up the schedules, no cattle cars depart to the East for "Arbeit Macht Frei." This strategy also takes advantage of our greatest strength -- our rifle marksmanship. The accurate rifle in the handle of a trained marksman is our "precision guided munition." Millions of such rifles, properly targeted, by people with the will to use them, amounts to utter defeat for any would-be tyranny, and death for any would-be tyrant.

These four principles -- moral strength, physical readiness, no first use of force and no targeting of innocents -- are the hallmarks of the Three Percent ideal. Anyone who cannot accept them as a self-imposed discipline in the fight to restore the Founders' Republic should find something else to do and cease calling themselves a "Three Percenter."

This is by no means a complete exploration of the subject and I will have more as time progresses. I invite comment and criticism.

Mike Vanderboegh, 29 June 2014.

Southern Preposterous Lie Center's complete penetration of the highest levels of "Justice" Department policy. Resurrecting the DTEC Frankenstein.

Meet Southern Poverty Law Center's Lackey at Main Justice (and the federal bureaucrat who has the greatest likelihood of committing another Waco and touching off the next American civil war): Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin.

This is the announcement that roused me from my three-day siege of chemotherapy indolence and got me back to the keyboard: "Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin Delivers Remarks on Domestic Terrorism at an Event Co-Sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security’s Program on Extremism." It begins:

It is an honor to be at this event, co-hosted by the George Washington University’s new Program on Extremism and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The partnership between SPLC and GW serves as a reminder that violent extremism is neither a new phenomenon, nor one that is limited to any single population, region or ideology. Since its creation in 1971, SPLC has been an important voice on the wide range of extremist groups throughout this country.

Now let's stop right there for a moment. Anyone who actually believes what Carlin said is either completely out of touch with the serial lying and factual conflation that SPLC has practiced over the years (see the many liberal critiques of their operations as well as the academic deconstruction of SPLC's "Brown Scare" of the 1990s presented in Professor Robert Churchill's To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement) or a dangerous political hack who ignores the facts in order to accomplish an anti-constitutional agenda.

As long as it merely uses its lies to pimp donations from the credulous, SPLC's conflations are, if not innocuous, then at least not likely to turn deadly. When they are embraced by the so-called "Justice" Department with hordes of paramilitary secret political policemen at their beck and call, well, that's what Wacos and civil wars are made of. Carlin's big sloppy French kiss to SPLC in this speech comes with an iron boot for the rest of us, in the form of the resurrection of the Frankenstein monster of the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee. Carlin:

The DTEC was originally launched by Attorney General Janet Reno in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing with the goal of ensuring that those combating domestic terrorist activity had a forum to share information and coordinate efforts. It met regularly and it was scheduled to meet on Sept. 11, 2001, but due to the events of that day, that meeting never took place.

Fortunately, in recognition of the importance of combating domestic terrorism, the department re-established the DTEC last June. Today, the DTEC consists of senior officials from NSD, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney community, the Civil Rights Division and the Tax Division, among others, as well as other federal law enforcement agencies who work on domestic terrorism matters. As it did many years ago, it provides a national-level forum for information sharing at the department’s leadership level and within the federal law enforcement community.

The DTEC helps to ensure national-level coordination. But our local U.S. Attorney’s offices, FBI field offices and Joint Terrorism Task Forces, working closely with our nation’s police officers, district attorneys and local community officials, are the country’s eyes on the ground.

At NSD, in order to ensure that we are gaining the benefits of the information and input from those eyes on the ground from around the country, and in recognition of a growing number of potential domestic terrorism matters around the United Sates, we have created a new position to assist with our important work in combatting (sic) domestic terrorism. Just this week, we appointed a new Domestic Terrorism Counsel to serve as our main point of contact for U.S. Attorneys working on domestic terrorism matters. The new DT Counsel will not only help ensure that DT cases are properly coordinated, but will also play a key role in our headquarters-level efforts to identify trends to help shape our strategy, and to analyze legal gaps or enhancements required to ensure we can combat these threats. The new counsel will also play an important role with the DTEC by providing its members with insights from cases and trends from around the country.

A couple of things leap out from re-reading the entire statement and then making reasonable interpretations of what's behind the specific phrases. First, it is obvious that Carlin wants to expand the laws regarding "material support of terrorism" to domestic "radicals," although how he's going to get around the First Amendment for that is also not explicitly addressed. Second Carlin makes much of so-called "white supremacists" but doesn't mention "Black Lives Matter" activists who have killed cops. I suppose the fact that they get invited to the White House to get their marching orders from Valerie Jarrett excludes them from consideration.

Following the SPLC meme, Carlin considers "domestic extremists" even more dangerous than ISIS and Al Qaeda, even going to the leap of logic to assign to Tim McVeigh the moral responsibility for Jihadi attacks because he thought up a truck bomb (which by the way comes straight out of The Turner Diaries):

The full spectrum of violent extremism shares a number of common elements, and our approach to disrupting them must recognize these connections. As just one example, earlier this year, two women were charged in New York with conspiring to build a bomb to conduct an attack in the United States. While these women were motivated by Islamic extremist ideology, they allegedly conducted research into the type of bomb used in the Oklahoma City bombing, demonstrating the continuing resonance of that attack.

Of course the FBI would know how much of a threat NeoNazi and Klan groups pose, I suppose, since they have fully infiltrated almost all of them right up to the command level. The swastikas and sheetheads are as much convenient cat's paws for the militarized federal police as anything else.

In short, if there is another Waco leading to civil war, you can put Carlin's face on the puppet that starts it. But behind Carlin are the puppetmasters of the Southern Preposterous Lie Center. Something for the victorious survivors of the fratricide to recall when it comes time for the war crimes trials of 2018.

Report and reflections on the strange not-peace.

Thanks to the generous readers of this blog, our A/C was fixed this week. Don't ever let anyone tell you that God doesn't answer prayer, for He certainly does. It turned out to require a new fan motor, among other things. Without it, this week would have been a greater struggle than it was, and it's been plenty challenging. I did finally get the MRI done yesterday morning, so I'm waiting to find out about those two pesky liver tumors. My anemia continues to dog me, but not to the point where the docs can justify a blood transfusion. Mostly I'm treading water on the other issues. The aggravating thing is that it has gotten in the way of continuing the fight on a number of fronts.

Events crowd in, threats to the cause of liberty multiply and I'm not the only one who believes that all of our times in this strange not-yet-war-but-not-peace -- in our country and the world -- are coming to an end more evil than we have seen in 70 years.

Yet, I am painfully aware that I'm closer to the end of my personal fight than the beginning, and I'm frustrated that the fronts grow in number even as my ability to assist in them decreases. I begin to feel hopelessly inadequate to the task at hand. I can't say that I've ever considered it that way before, even when they told me I likely wouldn't make it through the stomach surgery three and a half years ago. I've always had a deep belief that God wasn't through with me yet. I still feel that way, but I am afraid that I'm letting Him -- and you -- down by not accomplishing more with the time I have.

That said, I feel even more strongly that I have neglected my family in the process. Why Rosey has stuck with me these past thirty years with all the threats that I have invited into our lives is beyond me. I ache when I consider that I haven't even seen my son's new family in Germany and may never do so. I ache that Matt's first wife has largely prevented my oldest grandson from seeing his father and his grandfather, raising him without reference to his history, his blood -- breaking that mystical tie in a selfish bid to erase us from her own guilty memory. Rosey and I sit and talk nights about how we'll get out of this hole that my disabilities, physical and economic, have dug for us these past 15 years, about our dreams of leaving behind this ramshackle house and moving up to Chandler Mountain, to raise goats and keep bees, knowing all the time that events intrude and we're likely not going to make it.

But these are the trade-offs that I have made with my eyes wide open. Looking back on the years since Waco, there are things that I would have done differently, mistakes that I made that I wish I could unmake, but not the one decision that mattered then and still matters today.

The murder of the Branch Davidians and all their kith and kin by a feral federal government was evil of the sort that any thinking being with an ounce of moral feeling had to fight. I may regret some of the steps I took, but not the road I set out on. I could not do otherwise and look myself in the mirror. Even now, when I do look myself in the mirror, cognizant of my serial failures, it is with the sense that for all the costs I have not done enough.

And the tax-paid murderous criminals of Ruby Ridge, of Waco, of Oklahoma City and Katrina, of Fast and Furious and the perpetrators of the other wholesale depredations of liberty in the past three administrations have gone unpunished, hardly even inconvenienced by the evil they committed. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," and I believe that. But when I look at the even bloodier, ghastlier evils that are rolling inexorably downhill at us now, at innocent people who just want to be left alone to live their lives, to love and work and raise their families in peace, I cannot help but despise the tyrant wannabes who start the stinking wars with their own insatiable appetites for other people's liberty and property and lives. I despise them at the same time I chafe at the poor showing I have made in trying to oppose their designs. Always we fight, a despised tiny minority of us, with inadequate resources, against an enemy far more powerful, it seems, than we have any hope of successfully opposing.

And yet.

And yet, we do what we can with what we have, for God commands us to stand. He doesn't command us to win, but he does expect us to fight. In the end, He will do the fighting and the winning of the ultimate victory. So, in the words of my son, quoting a maxim of his beloved 101st Airborne, we "drink water and drive on," through whatever the future brings until God calls us home. In the end, perhaps, my family, my friends, and you, my readers, will forgive my failures if I continue to try to do my best. I hold onto that thought. For your support, in your prayers, with your advice and your contributions, I thank you all. Please keep me in your prayers as I thankfully keep you in mine.

Foxes guarding the henhouse. Don't expect too much from the Hillary Clinton "investigation" -- it's the same old Clinton cover-up cast of characters from the 90s.

Here we go again.

Clinton cover-up queen Beth Wilkinson with her husband, discredited NBC employee David Gregory.

The other day I received this email from a long-time DC observer:

Hey, Mike -- saw this mentioned yesterday, and today that a federal judge has countermanded the attorney's instructions to her client (MBV: Hillary aide Cheryl Mills) to not retain electronic copies of emails at issue -- ol' Beth Wilkinson continues to stalk the corridors backrooms of power in Versailles along the Potomac... she did so much good for the Republic in OKBOMB!!

And who, those of you with scant memory of the 90s might ask, is Beth Wilkinson?

Beth Ann Wilkinson is a Washington, D.C. lawyer, and partner in the New York City-based law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. She works in the firm's Washington, D.C. office focusing on white collar criminal defense. Wilkinson is known for successfully arguing for the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. She has also been a critic of unfair administration of the death penalty. In April 2012 she was hired as outside counsel by the Federal Trade Commission to lead an antitrust inquiry into Google. . . She is married to David Gregory, the former moderator of NBC News' Meet the Press.

Deputy Attorney General James Cole (on the left), instrumental in the cover-up of the true circumstances of the Fast and Furious scandal, and Robert S. Litt, Office of Director of National Intelligence and equally complicit in the cover-up of the true circumstances of the FBI's torture murder of Kenny Trentadue in 1995, compare notes during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, 17 July 2013.

Not long after, I received this heads up on Robert S. Litt:

Litt is key player now deciding how USG will deal with HRC email/server issue. (Please) note his "service" 1994-1999 at highest levels and most sensitive issues in Clinton DOJ. Documentation proves he was a key participant in Clinton DOJ obstructing justice re Aug. 1995 murder of Kenneth Trentadue by DOJ officials in Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Facility. Given his corrupt history in this torture/murder case, do you think he'll hesitate to see that this "relatively" minor issue does no damage to his former bosses?

From Litt's official Justice Department bio:

Robert S. Litt was confirmed by unanimous consent by the Senate to serve as the second General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on June 25, 2009.

Before joining the ODNI, Mr. Litt was a partner with the law firm of Arnold and Porter, LLP. He served as a member of the governing body of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section and a member of the Advisory Committee to the Standing Committee on Law and National Security.

From 1994 to 1999, Mr. Litt worked at the Department of Justice where he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division and then as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. His duties at DOJ included FISA applications, covert action reviews, computer security and other national security matters.

Mr. Litt started his legal career as a clerk for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the Southern District of New York and Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1978 to 1984, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He also spent one year as a special advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs.

Mr. Litt holds a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.A. and J.D. from Yale University.

So, Wilkinson and Litt, old co-conspirators from the Clinton DOJ scandals, are working -- supposedly -- on opposite sides now. Does anyone expect a different result than when they were working hand in glove? Especially on a Clinton scandal? Gimme a break.

Gee, I wonder why we didn't hear about this one in the anti-firearm press.

Witness Pulled Gun On Burglary Suspect Who Was Beating OKC Officer

New information is coming out regarding the rookie Oklahoma City police officer who was beaten by a suspect with his own baton following a burglary on the northwest side of the metro. An armed witness may have been the only thing that kept that officer from a more serious beating, or worse.

I expected better from Judy Thomas.

Judy Thomas of the Kansas City Star writes: "Where are they now? Tracking militias and others who surfaced after Oklahoma City."

Now, I used to talk with Judy during the OKC bombing private investigation quite a lot. Of all the so-called "mainstream" media, she had a pretty good head on her shoulders. But as David Codrea comments, "So Much Conflation-- So Little Truth The Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists drag out Vanderboegh as the menace we should all be horrified over." Knowing Judy I wouldn't exactly call her a "Fifth Columnist," but characterizing me as "a leader in the anti-government Patriot movement" and plopping me down conflationary style in article with people who were mostly enemies of the Constitution in the 90s. . . well, it most charitably could be said to be sloppy, imprecise and frankly lazy.

An anniversary to remember my "Benedict Arnold period."

Six years ago, I first wrote on the subject, A Missed Anniversary: "Vous les Americains Sont Pires que les Francais." I present it here without changes. It is a memory of which I am not proud, but I wouldn't be who I am today, doing what I do, without the shame and regret it brought me.

29 April 1975

April is a month of bittersweet anniversaries. 19 April of course marks Lexington and Concord, the Warsaw Ghetto, Waco, Oklahoma City, and in certain drunken ATF debaucheries, the birthday of their patron saint, Elliott Ness. The picture above marks another event, the fall of Saigon in 1975. This photo was taken 29 April. Saigon fell the next day on the 30th. Phnom Penh, Cambodia had fallen about two weeks before.

I missed marking this anniversary this year. I don't know why. The memories always hang heavy on my heart. This is not merely because it was hardly my country's finest hour, but because I bear personal guilt for it. You see, as the NVA gradually overran South Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge overran Camodia, I cheered the fall of every province, marking them on a map. This was during my Benedict Arnold period, when I was a communist and an avowed enemy of the constitutional republic of the United States. As a member first of the peacenik anti-war movement which I joined in 1967, then later the Students for Democratic Society, the Young Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers Action Movement and finally the Maoist Progressive Labor Party, I had demonstrated, leafleted, marched, rioted, been tear gassed, billy clubbed and briefly, arrested (but later released without charges), eight years of street-level radicalism, all with an eye toward this day.

Toward the end, I became a member of the PLP's "secret party," dropped from public view and on instructions began to organize a "worker's militia" in central Ohio. We'd start out vetting new members by having them break into National Guard armory parking lots and slash vehicle tires. In the end, we'd rob dope dealers to raise the money to buy weapons, all kinds of weapons. We were very good at what we did. And very, very lucky. Don't believe me? Most of my "Benedict Arnold" period papers are part of a collection at the Ohio Historical Society. Look it up. You can look up the statute of limitations too. Nobody died. Like I said, we were very, very lucky.

So when Cambodia and South Vietnam fell, I was one of the happiest traitorous bastards around. I just hoped "the Revolution" would start here in my lifetime. Yeah, I was that stupid.

I suppose I would have continued on being terminally stupid until I became stupidly dead, if it hadn't been for a kindly old ex-Wehrmacht surgeon named Richter who, at the end of his life, decided to wrestle the devil for my soul.

My day job, when I wasn't buying or stealing guns for the communists, was as a hospital aide at University Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. I was on my first marriage, then, though my son Matt had not yet been born. Richter (I am ashamed to say that at this remove I am not even absolutely certain that was his real last name -- I always addressed him as "Herr Doktor" and what few papers, reading lists and so that he had given me were apparently discarded during the split with my ex-wife) was a patient of mine, come to OSU to get a second opinion from an American neurosurgeon he trusted.

It was the two weeks between Christmas, 1976, and the New Year, 1977 that this occurred. Nothing much happened over the holidays, and here he was, stuck in another country, far from the Germany he loved. I wonder now if he saved me because he was bored and had nothing better to do. He knew that I needed saving because he was a major fan of the United States system, which had just that year seen its bicentennial. That was the question that he posed to me first, I know.

"What," Herr Doktor asked in that slightly accented and very precise English that he spoke, "did you think of the 200th anniversay of your independence?" He always had this half-smile, but with a professorial air that demanded manners. I had a Czech refugee for a history professor once before (1971) who had the same mein. Like Vlad Steffel, Herr Doktor commanded respect.

I blew him off, though, with a stupidly shallow answer about America as a force for evil in the world which would, I was sure, soon be turned back by the forces of, I probably used the commie term "people's war." Herr Doktor was mildly amused and offered to dissuade me of that theory if I would just show him the courtesy of reading some books and articles and discussing them with him during and after my shifts. I agreed. It was the unintentionally smartest thing I ever did in my life.

We began with The Road to Serfdom by Hayek. I have always been a quick reader, but my mind rebelled at the points where Hayek's analysis diverged from my own adopted dialectical materialism, which is to say, everywhere. The first time I tangled with Herr Doktor was in the cherished notion I had that it was Soviet Communism that defeated the Nazis. The Communists were the real heroes of World War II, didn't he know that?

Herr Doktor brought me up short with the observation that he had seen that conflict up close and I was dead wrong. For two days, I think, we went back over the events of his life. His German Catholic family, always doctors or academics for hundreds of years. The decadent Weimar Republic, the street fighting, the longing for order, Hitler's rise, the early clashes between the Nazi Party and the Catholic Church, the sellout of the German Catholics by the Pope, how he missed the Hitler Jugend because of his age but was impressed into the Wehrmacht as a surgeon in 1939, all of these were mere prelude to his vivid description of the tragedy of millions of young men dying in the snow, killing each other for two sides of the same collectivist coin. His escape from Stalingrad on one of the last Junkers to leave the kessel. The crimes of the Nazis. The crimes of the Soviets, and later of the East German communists. "Two parties, same faces," he pointed out. Any Nazi who wanted to live in the new system had merely to declare his conversion to Marx, Lenin and Stalin and become what Eric Hoffer dubbed a "true believer." Hoffer was another title Herr Doktor recommended.

We got fairly well along in my conversion before he left to go home to Germany to die. It was ironic that it took a foreigner to teach me how little I really knew about my own country's history. I dove into his reading list, putting it together with things in the press, things I'd observed, first as a radical then as a communist. This wasn't trading one commissar for another gauleiter or vice versa. It was becoming educated in the Anglo-American concepts of individual liberty, property, commerce and polity. It was being reminded of the Judaeo-Christian roots of all of it. It was from Richter that I realized first that while a man cannot choose the time he lives in, he can choose how he lives up to that time. And yes, Herr Doktor's reading list included Rand, Locke, Adam Smith, Tolkein and C.S. Lewis.

No one analysis fit the reality of the world, said the Doktor, you must evaluate the facts and the truth, which is sometimes unsupportable by mere facts, and make your own judgments.

The sum total of what Herr Doktor taught me subverted completely my belief in communism, which from my own experiences had become somewhat cynical and jaded anyway. I handed off my assignment and, more's the pity, the arms dumps, to my second in command. If I hadn't he probably would have killed me. He wanted to anyway, me being a traitor to the class struggle and all. (That, plus the fact that I had in my head enough evidence to send about six men and three women to federal prison for a very long time.)

Of course I didn't tell them that this was because I had a crisis of conscience. I lied and told them I was just burnt out and that my wife was about to divorce me. This was more or less true, but still a lie. However, the first thing you're taught when you get to be a killer tomato (red thru and thru) is that it is OK to lie to anybody about anything if it advances the party's goals. So given that, lying to liars was even expected, in a way.

Anyway, I got out and never looked back. That didn't mean I wasn't constantly haunted by the reality of what I had done.



Chieu Hoi and Hoi Chanh.

Flip back up to that first image above, the evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon. Consider the awful reality of two countries left to people who were hardly little Jeffersonian democrats, and who set about proving that in the worst possible ways after our choppers had gone.

I once did a radio show with Dr. Russ Fine, who then had the evening call-in show on a certain station here in Birmingham. David Horowitz' book Radical Son had just come out, about his conversion from being a red diaper baby into a real American. David was pimping his book and Russ was happy to talk about it and to have someone experienced from that period of history to chat with Horowitz as someone with similar background.

After exchanging bona fides about the extent of our previous sins, I asked him the question that had, since my encounter with Herr Doktor Richter, most preyed on my own mind:

"David," I asked, "do you ever feel Benedict Arnold looking over your shoulder?" He was quiet for a moment, you could hear the slight crackle of that long phone line to California. Then he said, slowly, solemnly, "Yes."

"But if you're like me, you'll never get caught on the wrong side of your faith or the Constitution again, will you?"

"No," he replied firmly, "I won't."

"Chieu Hoi," I replied, "Hoi Chanh."

David understood the reference.



Chieu Hoi means "open arms" in Vietnamese, the name of a program designed to recruit ex-communists to the South's anti-communist fight. Someone who entered the Chieu Hoi program became a Hoi Chanh, a returnee. In Vietnam, many became Kit Carson scouts and worked alongside American and South Vietnamese troops.



And believe me, there is no greater anti-communist than an ex-communist. We know all the lies, first hand.

We also know that we can't go back.

We have burned our bridges and will live or die on the ground we have chosen. Of course twelve-step ex-leftists like Horowitz and me aren't brave at all compared to the Kit Carsons, nor did we recant in the expectation that we were joining a losing side like George Orwell or Whittaker Chambers. THOSE guys changed sides in the belief that while it was the right thing to do, they were probably joining a losing cause. Both were under the impression that either Sovietism or fascism was going to win in the end. But still they denounced the lies and stood on the truth, expecting death at the wall or in a ditch rather than reward. (Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and Chambers' Witness were both on Herr Doktor's list.)

And one other thing. As near as I can tell without a god-like glimpse into other men's souls we are all, we ex-communists, motivated by guilt at what we did in the name of totalitarianism. This guilt we must expunge by our every action for the rest of our lives. We cannot backslide, we cannot be fooled, or fool ouselves, into believing the lies ever again.

Don't believe me? Let me give you an example of the depth of my own guilt, something I am reminded of often, but particularly on anniversary days in April.

"Vous les Americains Sont Pires que les Francais."



"Vous les Americains Sont Pires que les Francais" is the title of Chapter 27 of Never Fight Fair!, an oral history of the SEALS by Orr Kelly. Chapter 27 is a reminiscence of William G. "Chip" Beck, who served as an advisor with the Cambodian Army as it fought a desperate battle against the Khmer Rouge rebels from January 1974 until that fatful April 1975. Beck tells the story of the heroic resistance of the anti-communist Cambodians and especially of one man, Khy Hak who most exemplified and personified that resistance. An excerpt:

I was an advisor to the 11th Cambodian Brigade at the time. I was the only American in Kompong Thom, this little town in central Cambodia. There were two other foreignrs there -- a Norwegian doctor and a French priest. He had been there twenty-eight years and spoke Cambodian like a native. We used to call his congregation "the Christian soldiers." After he said Mass, he would go out and show them how to put up a machinegun emplacement with effective cross fire.

I had responsibility for an area between Kompong Thom and siem Reap, where Ankgor Wat is. I used to travel back and forth in that whole northern area.

I started out based in Siem Reap but I was so impressed by the quality of the officers and what they were doing with the men in Kompong Thom that I went back to the embassy and told them they needed a full timer down there with the 11th Cambodian Brigade. They agreed.

The provincial governor was also a general whose name was Teap Ben. He was the political provincial advisor and senior military person. The man in charge of most of the combat forces was Col. Khy Hak, probably one of the two military geniuses I have met in my life. The guy didn't go to school until he was eleven years old and ended up completing the national military academy at age eighteen at the top of his class.

Khy Hak had studied everything from Napoleon to Mao Tse Tung. In his library I found these huge books on the Napoleonic battles. There were maps where he had drawn in red and blue where the troops had gone and where they had made their mistakes. He could think in strategic terms. He could send massive troop units going out but also have his men infiltrate into the Khmer Rouge as guerrillas. He could fight as a guerrilla or a major tactician.

When the war started, these two guys were at Siem Reap, a little outpost. They were maybe a major and a captain at the time. That became one of the few places where, when the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge started running over Cambodia, they didn't get very far. They were not guys who sat in there offices and worried about their next corruption deal. They would go out and fight with the troops.

Khy Hak got wounded, for the first time in his life, during the battle for Ankgor Wat. Instead of being evacuated, he had his men put him on a door amd carry him into battle while he was still bleeding. It was an incredible battle because Khy Hak has a sense of history. He didn't want to use heavy artillery to take out the North Vietnamese because he was afraid of destroying the historic ruins of Ankgor wat. So he had his men go in and fight hand to hand, tactical, down and dirty.

Kompomg Thom had been overrun and almost taken by the Khmer Rouge in 1973, the year before I got there, and when they sent Teap Ben and Khy Hak, literally, the Khmer Rouge were in downtown Kompong Thom. The helicopter flew these two guys in, wouldn't even land, as the troops were fighting to get back into the city. Literally, they retook the city house by house.

By the time I got there, the Khmer Rouge were still surrounding the town and attacking it, if not every day, every week. I was just so impressed by what was going on I decided to make my own headquarters there. The longer I stayed and saw what they were doing, the more impressed I got.

At one point in the dry season, Khy Hak had had enough of being surrounded by the Khmer Rouge and said he was going to take back the territory beyond the town perimeter. . . Khy Hak decided he and his brigade, under cover of darkness, would walk out of Kompong Thom along Highway 5 and wreak havoc among the Khmer Rouge. And they did. In the course of three days they walked a hundred miles and they brought back 10,000 people from among the Cambodian population. By the time a month and a half was finished, they had brought back 45,000 people from the communist zone, brought them back into a little town that previously had only 15,000 people in it.

When Khy Hak went out there, he didn't force the people to come back at gunpoint. He would get up on a tree stump or a chair and talk to the villagers.

He told them, "Look, there's corruption in the government, there's corruption in the army. But if you come back I will try to protect you. The Khmer Rouge willl try to stop you from going. I will help you get back. Once you reach safety in Kompong Thom, they will try to attack us and kill you. I will try to protect you. It's going to be hard to feed you. You will have to grow your own crops. We can't count on anybody but ourselves. But you know what it's like out here under the comminists. Choose. Make your choice."

And they made their choice, by the thousands.

I flew out in a chopper after the operation got going and I couldn't believe my eyes. . . I stayed out there with troops for three days. I really wasn;t supposed to but Khy Hak challenged me, "How do you know that I won't lie to you? Or someone will ask you if I'm lying. See for yourself. You can tell them the truth." so I stayed there . . . As Khy Hak had predicted, the more refugees we got into the town, the more of a political embarrassment it was for the Khmer Rouge. They intensified the pressure on Kompong Thom in March and April of 1974. . .

(Short of rice for the refugees and unable to get enough from USAID, Khy Hak staged a raid out into the countryside)

. . . in an area where the Khmer Rouge had been stockpiling rice they had taken from farmers. . . As we were pulling out, some mortar rounds started falling. Khy Hak got on the radio -- the Khmer Rouge had the same radios he had -- and issued a challenge: "This is Col. Khy Hak. Here is my precise position. I will wait here for one hour. There is no need for you to shoot at unarmed civilians who can't defend themselves. If you want to fight somebody, fight me. I will wait. If you are not here in an hour, I will figure you are too afraid to do it."

They didn't come. . .

(Beck tells the story of the bloody and heroic defense of Kompong Thom against overwhelming numbers of Khmer Rouge.)

The day the seige of Kompong Thom was broken, with three hundred Khmer Rouge left dead on the battlefield, the headlines in the world press, one major newspaper -- I can't remember which one -- said: "Rebel rockets hit Phnom Penh; Three Killed."

These defenders had killed three hundred to one thousand enemy soldiers in bloody combat but there was never a story told about this.

For the rest of the dry season, things were pretty calm there. Khy Hak was promoted to general the final year, in 1975, in the final months in Phnom Penh.

He and I had worked out a plan where I would take his wife and children and set them up on an escape route I had set up in northern Cambodia for the civilians.

I didn't know when Operation Eagle Pull (the American evacuation) was going to go. When I found out, I was several hundred miles away from his family. I couldn't get to them directly. I had somebody else go over to the house to ask Mrs. Khy Hak to leave with them. She refused. She didn't know her husband wanted her to leave.

By the time he was able to get back to Phnom Penh, to the center of town as the perimeter was falling, there was no way to get her out. He put his wife and his five children -- beauitful little children, from four years old to eight -- in a jeep. The Khmer Rouge caught them approaching the airport and took them over to a pagoda.

One of my Cambodian soldiers who went back in and talked to witnesses said they killed the little kids. They executed the children, then they shot his wife. After making him witness that, they executed him. So they got their revenge on him.

Chip Beck's sketch of General Khy Hak.

We then started hearing of many atrocities being committed. (After Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 16 April 1975, as many as four million Cambodians were slain by the victors over the next two years.) The Khmer Rouge would get on the single sideband radios that had been part of the military network. After the Americans had made the evacuation in Eagle Pull, the Khmer Rouge would get on the radio and hold the key so you could hear the office people being tortured and murdered on the air. . .

Unlike Vietnam, the Cambodians could have held out. We, the advisors, were told we could supply the Cambodian army as long as they could fight. That's what we told them. After we evacuated the country, that order was rescinded.

The French died at Dien Bien Phu. They were soundly defeated but they fought and we just went out the back door.

We, the advisors who had lived with these people, sometimes for years, had to sit there and listn to them on the radio calling to us, saying, "Where are our supplies? We're still fighting. We're holding out."

Finally they ran out of ammunition. That's the only thing that made many of these people surrender and then they were executed by the Khmer Rouge.

One of the last transmissions -- the last transmission I ever heard out of Cambodia -- was a Cambodian colonel, just before they killed him. You could hear them breaking down the door. You could hear him say, "Vous les Americains Sont Pires que les Francais." -- you Americans are worse than the French.

Recovering your conscience too late.

Yes, we were. And I was among the worst. I CHEERED the murderers on. I did my best to make THIS happen.



And THIS.



And THIS.



Do you begin to understand the guilt for someone who has recovered his conscience too late? The blood of Khy Hak's family is on my hands, just as the blood of Russian kulaks was on Whittaker Chambers' hands. When you recover your conscience, the only thing you can do is make sure, to the best of your ability, that it never happens again.

We do not choose the circumstances of the world we live in, yet we must react as best we can to its challenges. For me, I have no choice. I must continue to walk along the path Herr Doktor Richter showed me more than thirty years ago in that hospital room on Nine East. My fate was set, and my Master selected, when I turned my face from pagan collectivist evil under the patient tutelage of a wise, slight-statured old man with a perpetual smile and white hair.

I can never and will never go back.

So when somebody whispers in your ear, "Well, you can't trust him, he used to be a communist," think twice. For he may be the only one who sees clearly enough to point your way through the minefield of bad choices that collectivism -- any and all collectivism -- represents.

And when I cross over to that place my Master has chosen for me, I can only hope Khy Hak is there, so I can finally beg his forgiveness for the sins of my youth. Until then, I will think of him and the millions like him every April, when spring reminds me of my guilty complicity in collectivist mass murder.

Little has changed at Elohim City, including the beliefs of the residents

Since it became notorious 20 years ago with suspicions about links to the Oklahoma City bombing, Elohim City seems frozen in time. But none of the suspicions swirling around the village is true, say John and David Millar, sons of the community’s late founder and patriarch, Robert Millar.

Part Two of Roger Charles' Exclusive: Oklahoma City Bombing Breakthrough.

The way J.D. Cash told me, there was a meeting in Tulsa where ATF was told by FBI with participants from Main Justice, "Hands off, Elohim City, that's OUR operation."

My friend LTC Roger Charles, USMC, Ret'd, breaks an exclusive: Oklahoma City Bombing Breakthrough. Meanwhile, I consider dropping in on the diseased bunch at Elohim City.

Go across this bridge, take a right down the dirt road on the other side and find the "hive of scum and villainy" where the OKC bombing was hatched.

I knew this was coming. You know, in a later post I will talk about my stop at Sequoyah's Cabin Historical Park in Sallisaw, Oklahoma yesterday. Well, if you go out of the parking lot there and turn right, proceeding down 101 through the Belfonte community you will come up on the Arthur and Gladys Baker Memorial Bridge over Lee Creek. Just before the bridge you'll see a dirt road on your left. Take that and you'll come to Elohim City, Oklahoma, where Andreas Carl Strassmeier, federal provocateur and OKC bombing conspirator was "security director" during the run-up to 19 April 1995. McVeigh, you may recall, phoned "Andy the German" just two days before the bombing. The Aryan Republican Army operated out of EC, as did the murderous Kehoe brothers and "Prophet of the Most High Yahweh Willie Ray Lampley, a loon that I once crossed swords with. In addition, the stinking remains of cop-killer Richard Wayne Snell are buried there in a grave of honor. Snell, who killed a pawn shop owner he mistakenly thought was Jewish (nobody ever said these guys were particularly bright) also killed a cop and was executed by the state of Arkansas on 19 April 1995. Before he went to Satan, he watched the reports of the OKC bombing on prison TV and laughed like hell. There is speculation that the bombing was moved up from 20 April (Hitler's birthday) to 19 April just to give Snell a nice send-off present. (EC is also where later FBI SAC of the OKC office, Thomas Kukor, used to go to sing in the choir in what he described as "community outreach.") Well, I took the opportunity and visited the perimeter of that nest of decades-old murder yesterday. I didn't stop at the gate and introduce myself but I did make a gesture or two. (Yeah, that was me, you pukes, in the red Dodge mini-van. I still remember 19 April 1995 and your complicity even if no one else does. Oh, and be sure to tell Mike Brescia I haven't forgotten his ass, either.)

Chase and Colton Smith. It would be simple truth to write this epitaph: "Innocents murdered by a criminal conspiracy emanating out of Elohim City."

Back when I was working with Glenn Wilburn (who lost two step-grandsons in bombing, Chase and Colton Smith) and J.D. Cash on the private investigation of the OKC bombing, we three swore an oath that one day, when the truth was out and all the conspirators at EC were jailed or dead, we would travel there and piss on Snell's grave. Well, both Glenn and J.D. are gone now, and with the successful FBI cover-up of the true circumstances of the bombing, I doubt that I'll ever be able to deliver on that promise either. And, equally unfortunately, I didn't have the time with a long drive ahead of me back to Alabama to drop in and say hello to the descendants of the mercifully dead FBI informant "Reverend" Robert Millar, who founded the place and is buried next to Snell. Hell, I'd piss on his grave too if I got the chance. But then again, never say never:

The attack on the Murrah Federal Building was said to be the work of Timothy McVeigh and two confederates, described as right-wing extremists with an anti-government agenda. McVeigh was executed by lethal injection and Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier were given prison sentences.

Now, however, major cracks have appeared in the federal government’s story—a story long considered by some victims’ families to be little more than a stonewall of mendacity and distortion. New revelations suggest that the government may be covering up prior interactions between intelligence services and the accused. In this way, Oklahoma City poses some of the same questions raised by 9/11 and the Boston Marathon Bombing—other national security traumas where Washington has worked hard to block potentially devastating disclosures.

Probably the most significant new development is multiple confirmations of past allegations that a German intelligence operative with ties to one or more US agencies, Andreas Strassmeir, aka “Andy the German,” had a close and extensive relationship with McVeigh.

Based on 19 years of active investigation by this reporter—including hundreds of interviews, over two score field trips, and unique access to critical documents—information presented herein leads to a hugely important finding: the FBI was aware of the Strassmeir–McVeigh relationship and was monitoring McVeigh’s activities at a never-before-revealed level approaching “close surveillance.”

It will be interesting to see if these new revelations can reinvigorate the civil suit of the OKC survivors. Maybe I'll get a chance to piss on those graves for Glenn and J.D. yet.

My poster that the constitutional militia papered Philadelphia with that caused the FBI to finally arrest ARA terrorist and bank robber Mike Brescia.

If these DHS guys knew sh-t from shinola, they'd be dangerous. (Oh, wait, they don't know sh-t from shinola and that makes them MORE dangerous.)

"He says he's from military intelligence." Rocky: "Don't use contradictory terms."

The latest conflationary propaganda from DHS (masquerading as "intelligence"): Twenty Years after Oklahoma City Bombing, Domestic Extremism Remains a Persistent Threat

"The Moral Work of Gun Control."

Meet Adam Gopnik. You've probably heard of this Julius Streicher of gun control before. He writes screeds for the New Yorker like The Simple Truth About Gun Control. He's also one of the collectivist propagandists who blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on Rush Limbaugh and the NRA.

Now this "Kapo for Kristallnacht" (to use David Codrea's phrase) brings us: "The Newtown Lawsuit and the Moral Work of Gun Control." Among other things, he decries something he calls the "death-by-gun lobby." He is not referring, of course, to the hundreds of millions of innocents killed by firearms in the hands of governments in the last century, although if there is a "death-by-gun-lobby" that is it -- collectivism.

However, John Hinderaker has this deconstruction of Gopnik's latest:Liberals Can’t Argue, They Can Only Bully.

The Unintended Ironical Hypocrisy of the Collectivists on Full Display in NYPD Killings.

Turn on the television and you will see the clips of marchers in NYC chanting "What do we want?" Answered by "DEAD COPS!" Followed by "When do we want it?" "NOW!" These clips are followed by much hand-wringing by the collectivist talking heads that people are making a connection between the anti-police rhetoric and actions of Eric Holder and the mayor of NYC (dubbed "Big Bird" by his critics) and the assassination of the two policemen.

"Wait," they demand, "you can't blame our First Amendment expressions for cold-blooded murder. The one has nothing to do with the other." Of course these are the same people who blamed Rush Limbaugh and the militia movement for Timothy McVeigh and the OKC bombing. They are the same people who blamed me for the Georgia Waffle House geezers whose "deadly plot" was conveniently uncovered by an FBI snitch.

So which is it? If they are not guilty, then I am not guilty. If Eric Holder is innocent in the present circumstance then so was Rush Limbaugh and the militia movement at the time of Oklahoma City. It is one or the other. If I am guilty then they are guilty. Or not. Pick one, you lying collectivist bastards, and own it.

Of course the larger question is not either/or nor is it a zero sum game. As I have written before, it is possible to criticize the militarization of police without embracing race rioting as a proper response. But the deliciousness of the collectivists' current discomfiture is marvelous for those of us who have been the victim of their lying propaganda for years.

"Of course it was Rahm Emanuel's idea. . . 'Never let a good crisis go to waste.'" Clinton Presidential Library document dump details an aborted legal attack on the militias in the wake of the OKC bombing and what they were REALLY afraid of if they did.

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." -- Rahm Emanuel.

I noted in my comments last night on this article, that I would post the documents I received from another source on Scribd. Exhausted as I was from a day at the gun show, I didn't pick up on the fact that they were already posted here.

As the article notes, in the aftermath of the OKC bombing elements within the Clinton administration wanted to use the excuse to suppress the constitutional militia movement by measures that would have demanded -- with all the force of the federal government backing it up -- that we publish our memberships lists, required us to register as "paramilitary organizations" with the Feds and to get permission from them before doing any training.

On 6 Oct 1995, the Clinton political operative Dick Morris wrote in a memo to White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, as well as Deputy Chiefs of Staff Erskine Bowles and Harold Ickes:

“The public overwhelmingly supports a significant expansion in the FBI’s ability to investigate militia groups. If you and the Justice Department believe such an expansion would be in the public interest, I would recommend that we go ahead with it with a high profile announcement.”

A careful reading of the documents, however, indicates that by that time the idea was long dead, killed by resistance at the FBI and DOJ as well as by the brutal description of the "realpolitik" of the power grab's likely unintended consequences by then White House counsel Abner Mikva in a 25 May letter to Panetta, Ickes and Rahm Emanuel, then serving as Assistant to the President for Political Affairs. Emanuel was the architect of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban that was widely credited (including by Bill Clinton himself) with costing the Dems the 1994 midterm elections and returning the GOP to control in the House.

The proposal obviously scared the political crap out of Mikva. In letter from Jennifer O'Connor, who worked for Panetta, to Janice Enright, assistant to Ickes at the time, there is this:

The Justice Department has stopped working on the terrorism question, Thy say this is because Ab (Abner Mikva) instructed them that this is not something that should be on paper. Justice says they are caught between two White House offices saying opposite things and they need us to sort it out.

The letter was written the morning of 25 May. Mikva's letter followed later that afternoon. It is worth citing in full:

SUBJECT: · Regulation of Militias or Terrorist Groups

Two weeks ago, you asked White House Counsel to provide a "quick" legal judgment as to the constitutionality of several proposals to regulate militias. Our provisional opinion was reflected in a memo of May 10, which was forwarded to Leon and a copy of which is attached. To summarize, we concluded that one of the proposals--to require militias to publish membership lists-was almost surely unconstitutional, while others--such as to require militias to register with the federal government--raised less serious constitutional issues, which probably could be surmounted.

More recently,' you asked DOJ to provide, by this weekend, definitive judgments about the constitutionality of several similar proposals to regulate "organizations that support terrorism." These questions may yield different answers from those that we gave with respect to regulating "militias." But, in any event, it is not possible for DOJ to give definitive answers to these questions quickly, since many of the questions are ones of first impression and will require surveying a number of relevant but not dispositive constitutional cases and then determining their likely application to the proposals now under review. Given the time and effort this will require, both our office and the lawyers at DOJ thought it would be advisable at the outset to share our policy views about the proposals under review.

All of the lawyers analyzing these proposals (in this office and at DOJ) strongly believe it is a serious mistake--as a policy but especially as a political matter-~to impose militia controls of the type now being discussed, even if they would be constitutional.

* As a policy matter, such controls are of doubtful necessity, given that 41 states already have laws that ban either the creation of private military organizations or private paramilitary training that threatens civil disorder. Nor does it seem likely that the proposed federal controls would enhance federal law enforcement, given DOJ's reinterpretation of the terrorism investigation guidelines and Congress' expected passage of an anti-terrorism bill. Rather, the most·likely effect of the proposed controls would be to greatly increase fears about government encroachment on individual freedom and thus, paradoxically, to fuel public sympathy for militia organizations. A recent Gallup poll found that 39% of Americans already believe the federal government "has become so large and powerful it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens."

* It follows, in our judgment, that as a political matter the proposed controls would be extremely ill-advised. The President's anti-terrorism legislation has already brought about an unprecedented alliance on legal issues between groups like the ACLU and the NRA, who have issued a joint public statement warning that an overreaction to the bombing will jeopardize "basic freedoms." If the President were now to call for registration of militias, for publication of their membership lists, or for reporting of their activities, he would likely prompt these and other groups on the left and right to join together in even stronger opposition, with renewed calls for investigation of Waco and so on. A recent Los Angeles Times poll found that, among those who owned guns or who described themselves as "conservative" or "white fundamentalist Christians," substantially more people ,were "concerned that government would excessively restrict the average person's civil liberties" than were worried that government "would fail to enact strong new anti-terrorism legislation." Only respondents describing themselves as "liberals" disagreed.

Thus far, we believe the President's statements and actions in the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy have placed him just where he should be: a) with a clear record of responding to a new threat with sensible new policies, and b) with an equally clear record of sensitivity to the rights of individuals. We worry that further proposals of the type now being discussed could be depicted in very menacing terms to average citizens and could tip the political balance against the President.

Re-read this sentence for the money quote: "If the President were now to call for registration of militias, for publication of their membership lists, or for reporting of their activities, he would likely prompt these and other groups on the left and right to join together in even stronger opposition, with renewed calls for investigation of Waco and so on."

The GOP, remember, had just taken over the House and promised hearings into Waco and Ruby Ridge. THIS was what scared Mikva and the professionals at DOJ and the FBI. The last thing in the world they wanted was to provide more incentive to those who were trying to find out the truth about those massacres, large and small. The opposition to these unconstitutional measures did not come from any principled critique but from bald self-interest and fear of the truth being discovered.

I called a source who has long experience in DC and was there at the time. I asked him, "Given that even the Clintonistas knew by that time that McVeigh (their designated patsy) wasn't a militia guy, that there was no 'militia connection' to OKC -- that he had been asked to leave militia meetings -- why the crackdown on militias? Whose bad idea was this? Emanuel's?"

"Of course it was Rahm Emanuel's idea," he replied. "Why do you think he was copied on Mikva's letter? Mikva knew where this was coming from." And, I pointed out, by that time everybody understood that a previous bad idea of Emanuel's, the Assault Weapons Ban, had led them to staring the prize pig of disaster in the face -- a GOP congress sniffing for the truth of Waco, something they feared above all things.

I also pointed out that I had been told early on in the Fast and Furious investigation in 2011 that the idea for that fiasco had originated in Rahm Emanuel's office. "Hey," he replied ironically, if somewhat misquotingly, "'Never let a good crisis go to waste.'" "Too bad," I responded, "that somebody didn't sit on Rahm for THAT one." But, my source said, "By that time HE was White House Chief of Staff. He held all the keys to the kingdom." "Some kingdom," I replied. "Yeah," he agreed, "some kingdom."

Oklahoma City bombing video trial to begin next week in Utah

Color Eric Holder unhappy.