Flags, Both True and False. My speech at Belchertown MA upon the occasion of Flag Day, 14 June 2014.

It is an honor for me to be here in Western Massachusetts today, in the shadow of the Springfield Armory, on ground trod by the men of Shay's Rebellion, on this anniversary of Flag Day.

You know, as we stand here today in the Northeast, we are at ground zero of the greatest, the grimmest battle for Second Amendment rights in the country's history since 1775. And it is appropriate that this is taking place on the same ground as the Founders struggled and fought and bled and died on. This is, to the rest of us in the country, wholly unexpected. We in the South and West long ago wrote off your states -- Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York -- as hopelessly overrun with collectivist nanny staters. And yet, since Sandy Hook, you have shown the rest of us how to fight, how to face the enemy, how to resist. In a very real sense you are behind enemy lines. And yet . . .

And yet, with your own futures on the line you have refused to knuckle under to the people who have made you criminals in hostage to their tyrannical appetites for your liberty, your property and your lives. In the face of becoming felons, the firearm owners of Connecticut have achieved an 85% non-compliance rate. EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT. In New York, the non-compliance rate may be as much as ninety-five percent. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT!

AND THE POLITICIANS DON'T KNOW WHETHER TO DEFECATE OR GO BLIND. Governor Malloy has blinked -- they are not enforcing the law because they are afraid of what will happen if they do. As Ben Franklin once said, paraphrasing Dr. Johnson, "Nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully as the prospect of being hung in the morning." And the minds of these tyrant wannabes ARE being concentrated BY YOUR ACTIONS!

Now I admit that I have tried to do my part by publishing the home addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of the people who voted for this Intolerable Act on my blog, Sipsey Street Irregulars -- and I discovered something odd. These people like to put YOU on lists but they are made distinctly nervous when people put THEM on a list. But I am here to thank you for their fear. For they are not scared of me -- THEY'RE SCARED OF YOU. And the rest of us in the country thank you for that. Give yourself a hand. You earned it.

This June 14th also marks the 239th birthday of the United States Army, when the Continental Congress assumed authority for the militia army that then surrounded the British in Boston in 1775 after Lexington and Concord. But you know other countries also mark the 14th of June with solemnity but more in sorrow than celebration. For the people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the 14th of June is known as a day of commemoration and mourning because it was on this day in 1940 that the Soviet Russians arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of their citizens at gunpoint and shipped them to Siberia in cattle cars in a brutal internal exile in which tens of thousands of them lost their lives. These deportees included almost the entire political and military leaderships of their respective countries along with many ordinary people people, including Jews, who were viewed by Stalin's secret police as "politically unreliable." The last of the surviving deportees weren't released until 1963, long after Stalin's death.

It is proper and pertinent for us as Americans to remember these atrocities as well, for they remind us of what ALWAYS happens when governments rule over disarmed people and possess a "government monopoly of force." So as we stand here today in celebration of our own Flag Day, let us remember these victims of government tyranny. Let us remember not only their now-extinguished lives but also let us pray that we have the wisdom to never follow in their footsteps.

Now our own Flag Day marks the date in 1777 when our first national colors, the Betsy Ross flag, was adopted by the Continental Congress. This was not the first flag carried into battle by the revolutionaries in their battles with the King, however. Throughout our colonial history, militia units had sported their own colors -- the oldest of which still surviving today is the flag of the Bedford minutemen carried at Concord, showing a mailed arm emerging from a cloud grasping a sword with the Latin motto meaning "Conquer or Die." The Boston Liberty Flag which flew over the Liberty Elm in Hanover Square in Boston where the Sons of Liberty met consisted of nine alternating white and red stripes. Other flags were flown with images from beavers to pine trees to rattlesnakes and bearing such mottoes as "Hope," "Liberty," "An Appeal to Heaven," and, most recognizable today, "Don't tread on me."

The rattlesnake of the Gadsden flag was considered by many colonists to be particularly appropriate. Wrote one in December 1775:

"I recollected that her eye excelled in brightness that of any other animal, and that she has no eye-lids. She may, therefore, be esteemed an emblem of vigilance. She never begins an attack, nor, once engaged, ever surrenders. She is, therefore, an emblem of magnanimity and true courage."

But it was the Stars and Stripes and not the rattlesnake flag that the Continental Congress adopted that day so long ago and that we all recognize as our national colors today -- albeit with a field of 50 stars now rather than a circle of 13. It is the banner of the stars and stripes that has flown over battlefields as far flung as Ft. McHenry, Germany, the A Shau Valley, the Chosin Reservoir, Bataan, Corregidor and Iwo Jima. In our hearts and around the world it is the stars and stripes, whether worn on a uniform, displayed from a vehicle antenna, painted on the side of an aircraft, or printed on a pallet of relief supplies that proclaims to all: "HERE is America."

It is the stars and stripes that have been carried by all sides in every protest movement throughout our history -- for every point of view wants to proclaim that it, and not the other side, is the AMERICAN point of view -- no matter how true or false that proposition might be. It is the stars and stripes with which we bury our war dead and our veterans. It is the stars and stripes that our courts permit to be burned in protest because we recognize that the reality of free speech is that such an act represents is more important than the piece of cloth that represents it, that symbolizes it.

Yet throughout our history we have died defending that symbol, rescuing it with acts of unbelievable bravery, tearing it into pieces when an enemy threatened to capture it. Men and women have died, and will continue to die, for that symbol because it represents something much larger than ourselves -- our liberty, our unity, our history -- and we all believe it represents our future and that of our children's children's children.

But as I have said before in other places and at other times, we are today in fact two nations --- as they were in 1775 -- divided by the answer to this fundamental question: Does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government? Whatever the individual issue that we fight over these days, the answer always boils down to that. Who serves whom? Do we serve the government of does the government serve us as the Founders intended?

Yet however we answer that question it is certainly true that both sides embrace the same flag. Yet how can that be, when we try to fold it around such mutually contradictory beliefs? If one side or the other is right about who serves whom, then one side represents the true nature, the true philosophy, behind that flag and the other does not.

Throughout our history, all sides have claimed her -- have wrapped their causes in her. The same flag carried by civil rights marchers in the 60s was brandished by Klansmen at rallies and even lynchings in both South and North. Did the flag truly represent both? Either? Scoundrels and would-be tyrants throughout our history have wrapped themselves in her, disguising their evil intent as affected patriotism, in "Americanism," however they wanted to define that term and regardless of whether the Founders would have recognized it. Indeed, by claiming as it does to represent ALL of us regardless of our mutually exclusive beliefs, in times like these it comes close to representing NONE of us. In the end, the stars and stripes will represent whichever side wins the argument of the answer to that question -- does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government? The flag, in the end, will either continue to represent liberty and the Founders' Republic or it will represent a masked tyranny hateful to the Founders' intent.

These are sobering thoughts on this Flag Day but they are true nonetheless. We must answer that question at the end of history -- which country does the stars and stripes represent? For in the end it certainly cannot represent both.

The Gadsden flag, with its threatening rattlesnake and bold warning "Don't tread on me" is perhaps more plainly honest, more unambiguous, than the stars and stripes. Freed of the burden of being the national colors which seem to be saddled with the necessity of being all things to all people, the Gadsden flag is plain in its declaration of free men and the rights to our own liberty and property and lives. Don't threaten me, it warns. Or, in the words of some of this generation -- "Don't start nothin', won't be nothin'." It is not as blunt as the Gonzales flag of Texas liberty with its image of a cannon and the challenge "Come and take it," but it is close enough, as they say, "for government work."

This is why the Gadsden flag is so popular at rallies of today's liberty movements -- from the Tea Party to the protesters of the Federal land grab at the Bundy Ranch and elsewhere in the west to Second Amendment activists of today -- the message is clear: There is a line, Mr. Government Bureaucrat, that you cross at your own deadly peril. "Don't tread on me." DON'T TREAD ON US!

It is for this reason that the collectivists -- the domestic enemies of the Founders' Republic -- are made somewhat angered, if not deranged, by the Gadsden flag. Its sentiment is plain -- it cannot be polluted or corrupted or co-opted. They must therefore do their best to demonize it, to discredit it, to profane it, and to lie about those who fly it. We have seen that very clearly in their reaction to the Miller meth-head murderers' misuse of the Gadsden flag in their Nevada rampage. The flag is itself "anti-government" they proclaim and proof that the Millers represent the rest of us "anti-government types."

Now I don't know about you, but I'm not "anti-government," although the Southern Poverty Law Center has been calling me that for two decades now. I am in fact pro-government of the kind the Founders would recognize. I am pro small government, safe government -- a government of limited powers -- a government that supports the rule of law AND OPERATES WITHIN IT. When our enemies -- those domestic enemies of the Constitution that the Founders warned us about -- call us "anti-government" what they really mean is that we are anti-"do-it-our-way-or-we'll-kill-you" government. Of course they're right about that, but they cannot honestly admit it to others that they are trying to convince, so they call us "anti-government" and hope the lie sticks.

But flags are symbols. They are shorthand for who you are and what you represent. And what you love. So if they can discredit one symbol and co-opt another to their purposes they are more than halfway down the road to their victory of the collective over the individual. For there is nothing more effective, more dangerous, than a lie accepted as fact. I hold in my hand proof of that statement.

You know I met the Millers briefly at the Bundy standoff when they came up to volunteer. They struck me as a danger to the mission of protecting the Bundys at first glance. Jerad projected all the ambience of the methamphetamine addict that his neighbors later said he has. He was heavily tattooed and admitted under questioning that he was a convicted felon despite the fact that he was packing a semi-auto pistol on his hip, I counseled Stewart Rhodes of Oath Keepers and Jerry Delemus who ran the security operation that they be sent on their way and they were. The Millers later complained on their Facebook page that they had been turned away. Of course, we had no inkling that the Millers would later turn violent, nor could we have. These facts have not prevented the collectivist media from tying the Millers to the Bundys, or to us, or, according to this official document of the New York State Police, to, well, me.

Now this is "New York State Counter Terrorism Bulletin # CTB 14-07" entitled "Recent Spike in Violence Targeting Law Enforcement." It was issued two days ago by the New York State so-called "intelligence center." Its use of loaded language, conflation and what I call "guilt by disassociation" makes it a minor classic of the big lie.

It mentions, among others, the Millers and claims "evidence at the scene and further investigation revealed that the Millers embraced a far-right militia ideology." Now I've been in and around the constitutional militia movement for 20 years. I am the founder of the national Three Percent movement. While Three Percenters pledge to resist any further attempts at firearm confiscation we are also based on the bedrock principles of no first use of force -- we call this "No Fort Sumters" -- and an absolute prohibition on the targeting of innocents or acceptance of what is called "collateral damage" -- we call this "No Oklahoma City Bombings." In this of course we are considerably more fussy than past and present federal administrations but we believe that it is vital not to become the monster that you claim to fight. Given that, it is impossible for the Millers to have "embraced a far-right militia ideology." They were not members of any militia, their acts were contrary to every understanding I have -- and the Founders had -- of militia, but this does not keep an official state police agency from claiming it to be so.

The report mentions the Millers draping one of the slain officers with a Gadsden flag, admits that "Jerad Miller had a decade-long criminal history in multiple states, including misdemeanor battery and drug trafficking" and further admits that they were were turned away from the Bundy Ranch. But this "intelligence report" saves the worst for last.

"In both the (Canadian) and Miller cases, the perpetrators were concerned with common far-right conspiracies involving government seizure of private firearms. With the passage of the NY SAFE Act, in January 2013, a growing number of far-right extremists -- particularly militia and sovereign citizens -- may view NYS as a more attractive target to further their agenda."

Now, note what's happening with this extraordinary statement -- First, these official representatives of the state of New York conflate militia folks with the evil boogeymen of "sovereign citizens." Second, they're saying, "Because we're trying to confiscate their firearms with the SAFE Act these dangerous people have concluded that we are trying to confiscate their firearms." Okay, so now the New York state police have determined that you're paranoid even if someone IS trying to kill you. Well, of course. YOU PARANOIDS, YOU!

And the Number One Paranoid in the eyes of the New York State Police? Well, that would be me.

"Michael Brian Vanderboegh, a longtime militia member and founder of the III Percent Patriot Movement which was supported by Jerad and Amanda Miller . . ."

Now let's stop right there for a second. First of all, I don't know where they get the "Three Percent Patriot Movement" business because there is no "patriot" in anything I've ever written because the term was so abused and misused by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the 90s to tar by claimed association different groups that had nothing in common with each other. As far as the Millers being my "supporters," David Codrea of the War on Guns blog who helped me break the Fast and Furious story back in 2010 has been all through the Miller's Facebook postings and tells me that he can find no evidence of this assertion. As I said, the only interaction I ever had with the Millers was to see to it that they were thrown out of the Bundy security operation. The report then notes that I "traveled to NYS at least once in 2013 to speak to the Liberty Oath Keepers meeting in Monticello New York." Now that's perfectly true. What they fail to mention is that the subject of that impromptu talk was how collectivists use the art of the lie to serve their purposes. Kinda ironic, huh? I can see why they wouldn't mention THAT.

The report continues, "The Three Percent Patriots" (there's that "patriot" crap again) "are a militia group comprised primarily of guns rights extremists who believe in the need to use violence against the government to prevent what they believe to be an impending seizure of all private firearms."

Now the Three Percent Movement is just that -- a movement. It is an idea, It is not a militia. It is not an organization that can be infiltrated, provoked or broken up. It is an IDEA -- an ideal, really -- and it cannot be killed. Insofar as the enforcers of the SAFE Act calling us "extremists" for fearing that someone might enforce the SAFE Act -- well, the irony which was plenty thick already is approaching the thickness of the Earth's crust here. The report continues:

"The Oath Keepers is an organization comprised of current and former military and law enforcement personnel who take a pledge 'not to obey any unconstitutional orders such as orders to disarm the American people, to conduct warrantless searches, or detain Americans as enemy combatants.'"

Ooooh. Now that sounds "extreme." All true and taken straight off the Oath Keepers' website. Then the report intones ominously:

"There have been multiple observed instances of overlapping membership in the Oath Keepers and the Three Percent . . . and the Oath Keeper's founder has spoken supportively of the Three Percent . . . Movement."

Hey! I guess they're right. I see some of you folks out there. Now don't raise your hands and make these addled armed bureaucrats' jobs too easy now. YOU know who you are and that's just fine by me.

But here's the thing. This is the last paragraph of this "Unclassified/For Official Use Only" document that is circulated to ALL federal. state and local police agencies.

"The recent attacks serve to highlight a trend of growing violence by far-right extremists that is likely to continue in the near term . . . law enforcement should remain vigilant to any indicators or suspicious activity related to the persistent far right extremist threat. As always, observance of suspicious individuals and activities should immediately be reported to the New York State Intelligence Center -- Counter Terrorism Center, Terrorism Tips Line at 1-866-SAFE NYS (1-866-723-3697)."

Now if any of you want to report me as a suspicious person -- or want to self-report yourself -- see me after the speech and you can write down the number.

Okay, let's recap: The Millers are linked to the Bundys -- except they're not. The Millers were supporters of Vanderboegh, the guy who had them ejected from the Bundy security operation -- except they weren't. They embraced militia values -- except they didn't, The Three Percent movement is a militia -- except it isn't. And the Three Percent are paranoids for believing that the New York state cops are going to seize semi-auto weapons -- except they are.

Other than that, this is a totally accurate report. Does that clear things up for you?

Now that's funny -- except it isn't. You know Governor Coumo's finest were nice enough to footnote their various assertions. You know the source of everything they wrote about me? The ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center (although down in Alabama we call them the Southern Preposterous Lie Center). Did you know that the FBI recently announced that they were no longer accepting SPLC "intelligence reports" because of political bias and factual errors? Unfortunately that word doesn't seem to have penetrated to the New York state political policemen of the so-called "intelligence center."

It kinda reminds me of that old joke from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Moose and squirrel are standing beside some garbage cans looking for Captain Peachfuzz when out of one of the cans pops a guy in a hat and trenchcoat who announces "I'm from military intelligence." Rocky fixes him with a penetrating gaze and replies, "Don't use contradictory terms."

Like I said, it's funny but it's not. This report goes out to police everywhere. Many are going to accept it as gospel. And who do you think they're going to be reporting? You, with the Oath Keepers tee shirt. You, with the Three Percent patch. You, with the Gadsden flag out in front of your house or the "Don't tread on me" sticker on your pickup truck. Because everyone now "knows" because of sloppy propaganda like this piece of trash that the Gadsden flag equals Three Percent equals Oath Keeper equals domestic terrorist equals meth-head cop killer.

And so, on this Flag Day, remember that the real flag of liberty is the one you wear in your heart and in your head. Remember that symbols like the stars and stripes can be co-opted by evil men and symbols like the Gadsden flag can be profaned by murderers like the Millers and distorted for political purposes by liars-for-money like the SPLC -- and uncritically repeated by tax-paid idiots in the New York state police.

Wear your flag in your heart. But don't let the domestic enemies of the Constitution have the outward symbols of our ancestors' sacrifices in blood and tears. Don't let them wrap their lies in the stars and stripes without a fight. We say in the pledge of allegiance that it is to the flag AND to the republic for which it stands. We best honor the flag by preserving that republic and by fighting its enemies on whatever battlefield we find them with determination and the truth.

Thank you.

AP report on SPLC's latest lies. My response

I received this email from an AP reporter in Montgomery this morning:

Mike: This is Bob Johnson at the Associated Press in Montgomery. The Southern Poverty Law Center is at 11 a.m. issuing their annual report on dangerous groups and militias. I wante to see if maybe I could get some comments from you when it comes out. Looking for someone who can give the other side for the SPLC.

Bob Johnson

Here is the resulting story.

Now I had difficulty finding the report at first and asked Johnson to send it to me, He sent me a rough draft of his story. My responses are interspersed throughout.

-----Original Message-----

From: Johnson, Bob bjohnson@ap.org

To: GeorgeMason1776 GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

Sent: Tue, Mar 5, 2013 12:40 pm

Subject: Emailing story: BC-US--Extremist Groups, 1st Ld-Writethru

Here’s what we already have on the wire about the SPLC report. Please send me your comments and how you would like to be referred to in the story.

Researchers report dramatic rise in ‘patriot’ groups after school shooting sparks gun debate

By BOB JOHNSON, Associated Press

Dateline: MONTGOMERY, Ala.

President Barack Obama's administration and the gun control debate after the Connecticut school shooting have led to surging numbers of anti-government “patriot” groups, according to a civil rights group that tracks extremist groups.

The language used -- "anti-government 'patriot' groups -- is itself a lie. Only the wildest of anarchists are "anti-government." The Constitutional militia movement, of which I have been a leader for more than twenty years, is not "anti-government." We are pro-government, of the sort that the Founders would recognize -- small, of limited powers, reflecting the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights that merely secure and codify natural, inalienable and God-given rights. In our view the present administration and its supporters inhabit a fundamentally alien world view to that of the Founders and ourselves -- they believe that the people serve the government whereas we believe that the government should serve the people. To the extent that the present administration continues to exhibit appetites for our liberty, property and lives we certainly oppose them, and organize with an eye to confront them if forced to, but we are NOT "anti-government." What we seek is not to coerce anyone to our point of view but merely to be left alone. Since the growing tyrannical appetites of the Obama administration (and others before it) as demonstrated by the so-called "Obamacare" law and the current rush to disarm the citizenry are evident for all to see, it is hardly an accident that people who they seek to victimize would object and organize themselves to resist.

The second part of the lie is to characterize a grab-bag of groups with contradictory aims and methods (even groups that consider each other as philosophical enemies) -- into one so-called movement. By conflating people and groups together as "extremists" with an alleged common purpose, SPLC gets to exaggerate, for the purposes of fund-raising, a threat which does not exist.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported the rising numbers on Tuesday in its annual report on extremist groups.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. For the reasons set out above, there certainly is a rise in self-defense militias around the country, but the SPLC hasn't got a single clue as to how deep and broad that movement is because no one with any sense, after the experiences of the 1990s, is using the old paradigm of publicly-announced militia formations. Today's groups are small, quiet, made up of friends, relatives and neighbors on a local, even neighborhood, basis, and thus are immune to federal snitches, agents provocateur and even knowledge of the FBI or of SPLC. Actually, SPLC knows this but since it does not fit with their fund-raising strategy, they pretend an omniscience that simply does not exist.

The number of anti-government patriot groups, one category tracked by the center, rose dramatically over the past four years, from 149 groups in 2008 to 1,360 today, researchers reported. That was up about 7 percent from the 1,274 active in 2011.

This is a wild under-estimation.

The election and re-election of the nation's first black president and the rugged economy have fueled their growth, said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC. “The anger, angst, frustration, fear surrounding the economy have very much poured fuel on this fire,” Potok said.

This fits with the collectivist sociology theories of SPLC and its intellectual brethren but how does it explain the growth of black self-defense militias? There is certainly concern that the present untenable government spending and printing of money will collapse into social chaos, but Obama being half-black has nothing to do with the growth of the armed citizenry. This is one more example of how present-day so-called progressives are reflexively obsessed themselves with race (and why they feel it necessary to conflate true racist terrorist groups like the Klan and NeoNazis with groups like ourselves who believe that the Constitution extends to everyone regardless of race, creed, color or religion). In their obsession with race, SPLC and others would put a 1930s Nazi gauleiter of Lower Swabia in the shade. It is their ultimate weapon, when out-argued, to cry racism and point fingers.

On gun control, the debate following the Newtown, Conn., mass murder of schoolchildren has led to “a kind of white-hot rage unleashed on both the radical right and also within more mainstream political circles,” he said.

"White-hot rage"? I don't see it. The administration has declared its appetite for more of our property and liberty. It is natural to oppose this grab but we cannot afford "white-hot rage." We're lining up to flout their new laws with carefully considered armed civil disobedience. If we were motivated into a "white hot rage" professional liars like Potok could not walk the streets of Montgomery in safety.

In the week following the Dec. 14 school shooting, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it conducted more background checks for firearms sales and permits to carry than it has in any other one-week period since 1998.

Yes, certainly. And what do you conclude from this fact? Do the advocates of citizen disarmament believe that we are buying all these weapons and billions of rounds of ammunition merely to turn them in with the passage of the next law? We are not.

Some critics believe the SPLC is too broad in labeling hate and extremist groups, to the point of including legitimate political organizations that oppose illegal immigration, gun control, gay rights and other issues. The center's researchers say they use a variety of methods to track anti-government groups and compile their list from field reports, patriot publications, law enforcement sources and news reports. Potok said only active groups are included. “We are not just looking at one man and a computer,” he said.

The SPLC's symbiotic relationship with the militarized federal police agencies is a matter of record -- and it is a relationship which they profit from by numerous so-called "hate group seminars" that propagandize their world view to federal, state and local law enforcement. You may recall that SPLC defended the ATF at the time of the "Good O' Boys Roundup" scandal, when Alabama militia exposed their racist get-togethers which involved disgusting conduct such as the issuance of "nigger hunting licenses" and skits like one entitled "The Birth of the Black Race" which involved the "magical" appearance of a black baby doll from inside a watermelon. Disgusting stuff, but Morris Dee, in a story by Fox Butterfield in the New York Times, alleged that the Gadsden Minutemen's videotape was a forgery. It wasn't, as later proven by the FBI lab, but it WAS proof that SPLC is a willing handmaiden to government racists when it suits their agenda. Pretty ironic, huh?

The report states: “Generally, Patriot groups define themselves as opposed to the 'New World Order,' engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme anti-government doctrines.”

"Groundless conspiracy theorizing" such as the Fast and Furious scandal, for example? Under the SPLC definition of "extreme anti-government doctrines," the Founders would have made their list.

The FBI defines military extremists as anti-government groups often organized into paramilitary groups that follow a military-style rank hierarchy and typically engage in wilderness, survival, or other paramilitary training, according to a September 2011 FBI report on domestic terrorism.

Yeah, well under that definition local search and rescue teams are "military extremists."

Along with the rise of extremist groups, Potok said there have been several home-grown terrorist plots against government buildings and leaders in recent months. He compared the climate to time leading up to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The propaganda of collectivists like SPLC is certainly the same, as is the government's militarized police actions, brought to fever pitch by the last three administrations and the so-called "war on terror." The only difference this time is that there will be no more free Wacos. SPLC and the administration know this and they are counting on SPLC's lying narrative to prepare the battlefield of a civil war they are apparently seeking in national and world opinion. The SPLC thus remains one of the most faithful lapdogs of federal tyranny.

The report cites several cases, including one centered on a Georgia Army base involving a group known as F.E.A.R. (Forever Enduring Always Ready). Federal prosecutors maintain that F.E.A.R. was led by active-duty soldiers at Ft. Stewart who also plotted bomb attacks in Savannah and aimed to poison apple crops in Washington state.

So far I haven't seen an updated story with my reaction in it.

Defiance: The Armed Civil Disobedience Movement. "How many of us are they willing to see dead?" Speech, Alabama Firearms Freedom Conference, 21 February 2015.

You know, I was glad to hear Jan Morgan from Arkansas. My second (and last) wife Rosey is from Arkansas and she told me very quickly when I met her thirty years ago that Arkansas girls don't divorce, they commit homocide, so I'm with her 'til I die, one way or the other.
 
I am here today to brief you on the national firearm rights movement -- on where we are and where we’re headed and the news is not good.  What I am about to say is unpleasant and many of you will not like it.  I don’t like it myself.  The only thing I can tell you is that it is the unvarnished truth.  If you feel better being spoon-fed horsecrap and wishful thinking, you should have invited someone else.  Wayne LaPierre or Alan Gottlieb, maybe.  I’ll try to wrap this up as fast as I can so that we might have time at the end for your questions.  If not I'll try to hang around after the last speaker.

You may thank the Lord that you are Alabamians by birth and Southern by the grace of God.  This accident of lineage and location has shielded your liberty, your property and your lives from a predatory state government.  We have had the luxury here today of discussing how to move the cause of firearm rights forward in our state – if, that is, we can just get past the Boss Hoggs and Roscoe P. Coltranes of the Alabama Sheriff’s Association who are more concerned about preserving their petty powers and the gravy train of the permit system than they are about our God-given liberty and the constitutional oaths that they swore before the Almighty to uphold.

Count yourselves lucky.  For the last two years I have been traveling behind enemy lines to states whose citizens are not so lucky.  And “behind enemy lines” sounds like a comic exaggeration but believe me, it is not.  In such states as CT, NY, MD, CO and, most recently, WA state, the authorities have passed a series of Intolerable acts banning and registering firearms and magazines and, yes, even registering their owners – for that is what permits and background checks are really all about.  Why worry about registering firearms when you can register their owners?  After all, it’s those potential trouble makers the government is really interested in controlling – not crime and not criminals, oh, no – they are interested in controlling you – us – ALL of us – In controlling us and stripping us of our means to resist their appetites for our liberty, our property and yes, our lives.

You know, Rudy Guiliani got in trouble the other day for daring to say that he didn’t believe Barack Obama loved his country.  Now I don’t pretend to know what evils reside in the innermost being of Barack Obama.  Only God knows that.  But I will venture to defend the President on this point: I think Barack Obama loves his country – No, I really do.  The problem is that HIS country and OUR country are two DIFFERENT countries.  Oh, we share a common border and (mostly) a common language but we are divided along the lines of the answer to this eternal question – does the government serve the people, or do the people serve the government?  In Barack Obama’s country the people exist to serve the government. 

In our country, the government exists to serve the people – mostly by staying out of our way and leaving us the heck alone.  This is how the Founders intended it.  It is why they gave us a constitutional republic of limited powers securing the rule of law -- NOT the rule of man -- NOT the rule of A man -- no matter how many of his fellow citizens consider him a demi-god and blindly vote his tyranny into power.

We are two countries, ladies and gentlemen, and the sooner you recognize that fact the clearer everything else becomes.  Barack Obama loves his country.  We love our country.  The only question is which vision – which country – which answer to that existential question is to prevail?

Do the people serve the government or does the government serve the people?  What do you think?

And if we are honest enough to admit that we inhabit two different countries with two mutually exclusive world views, then let us be honest enough to call the people on the other side by their proper description in language that the Founders would understand–-- indeed, in their own words that they left us with so long ago.

When someone declares his appetite for your liberty and your property at the threat of naked government force against your very life – and takes steps to make that happen -- in contradiction to the Constitution and the rule of law which the Founders crafted -- then such people should be called what they plainly are – DOMESTIC ENEMIES OF THE CONSTITUTION.   Let us be that honest, at least, for there is no other way to accurately describe them.

The people who pass these laws hateful to God-given, natural and inalienable rights know EXACTLY what they are about.  They know what they want regardless of whatever soft lie of the moment they wrap their naked ambition in -- no matter what velvet glove they cover the iron fist of predatory government with --  What they want is power.  Power over you and power over me.  Power to tell the rest of us what to do, how to act and even what to think.

But standing in their way, as the Founders intended, is US -- the armed citizenry of the Republic of the United States.  And so they have to set out disarm us -- to strip us of our weapons if they can, but in any case to persuade us that resistance is futile.  For if we swallow that lie we will have lost the battle before it begins and the weapons we own mean nothing without the will to use them.  So the first battleground of this war between the collectivists and ourselves is between our own ears – where lies attack the truth and fears can immobilize principle.

“We have the power,” they say.  “We won an election, so we have the power.  Do what we say, or else.”  To which I would reply, “Or else what?”  For the truth is that the rule of law protects THEM from US far more than it protects US from THEM and they should try to remember that when democracy turns to tyranny, the ARMED CITIZENRY STILL GETS TO VOTE!

They are learning this enduring truth -- these domestic enemies of the Constitution -- in states such as CT.  They are being taught this lesson by a determined minority of their own citizens who have declared that will NOT comply with unconstitutional laws.  They will not comply no matter what promise of state violence threatens them for their non-compliance.

How do I know this?  Because these same people from CT & MA, NY, CO and WA state invited ME into their homes.  They take me in, letting me spend the night, KNOWING that they will all be moved up on the list they're already on -- or that they will be placed on another list --  They do it KNOWING it may cost them everything AND THEY DO IT ANYWAY.

THEY WILL NOT COMPLY.   And you know what?  The proto-tyrants who issued their diktats don’t know whether to defecate or go blind.  A good example of this is CT and after numerous trips up north behind those particular “enemy lines,” I am still amazed at these new practitioners of the art of armed civil disobedience.  They are few, they are brave, they are magnificent in their defiance.  Who knew that Yankees still had it in ‘em?  But they do.  The Founders would be proud.

You may recall that right after Sandy Hook, the state legislature up there passed a law mandating the registration of all semi-automatic rifles and even their magazines – and we’re talking hundreds of thousands of rifles and literally millions of magazines.  The penalty for non-compliance was a Class D felony.  And what happened?

Two years ago this April, in the aftermath of that law, I spoke at a huge rally on the steps of their state capitol and told those assembled that if the state wanted to make them criminals that they should embrace that fact and try to be the best, most successful criminals they could be.  I urged them to “Defy, resist, evade and smuggle” in resistance to that law.  As evidence of my seriousness of purpose, I announced to the crowd that I myself had smuggled in thirty-round AR-15 magazines in defiance of the ban.  I dared the authorities to arrest me.   Of course surrounded as I was by thousands of armed CT citizens, that probably wasn’t the smartest thing they could have done, so they didn’t.

But I had the luxury of flouting their law and then coming home to the great free state of Alabama.  My audience didn’t.  They were stuck behind enemy lines.  And what happened?
 The deadline for registration came and went and it was estimated that there was an EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT NON-COMPLIANCE RATE!  EIGHTY- FIVE PERCENT.  Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand CT firearm owners – perhaps more – simply refused to comply. 

They said, like Leonidas at Thermoplyae and the Texans at Gonzales, “Come and take them.”

The state government blustered, made threats of gun raids and then did, exactly, nothing.  Of course part of their calculation may have been that yours truly published a list of the legislators who had voted for this Intolerable Act on my blog --- along with their home addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.  And you know what?  They didn’t react well to that.  No, not one little bit.  It seems -- and it’s a funny thing -- – but it seems that people who like to put people on lists don’t like to BE on lists themselves.  Go figure.  Of course they did open a criminal investigation on me for that and for my continuing smuggling activities in defiance of their law.  However, late last year I went back to CT to attend a gun show and, frankly, to give them the chance to arrest me.  And you know what happened?  Exactly nothing.  I’m probably going back there this coming April, marking the two years since the beginning of the armed civil disobedience movement in CT.  So they will have another chance to arrest me.

But here’s the thing.  Since the enactment of the law, the state government has been looking at one hundred thousand of its citizens over rifle barrels -- those of the state police and those of their previously law-abiding citizens -- and beyond empty promises to the firearm confiscation lobby and occasional growling, the “authorities” have not dared to enforce their diktat.

Has that stopped their appetite for their fellow citizens’ liberty and property?  Oh, hell no.  Here is a portion of the final report of the Sandy Hook Commission.  It just came out last week.  And what do they further demand?   Why, the registration of ALL firearms, the banning of all so-called “assault weapons” and their magazines, the state screening of all firearm owners, and here’s my personal favorite on Page 59: “require that any shell casing for ammunition sold or possessed in CT have a serial number laser etched on it for tracing purposes.”  I kid you not.

But of course, this begs the question: “If your state government is afraid to enforce the hateful laws you already have on the books, what is the point of passing more onerous laws?”  The firearm owners of CT have already nullified these laws by armed civil disobedience.  Is it the intention of this state commission to actually enforce even more onerous and unconstitutional laws to provoke a civil war?  How many of our lives, and those of our families and other innocents, is it worth to these collectivists to enforce their appetites upon us?  A thousand?  A hundred thousand?  A million?  Six million?  Ten?  How many of us are they willing to see dead?

And the armed citizens of CT -- who are yet free and intend to remain so -- live with this question every day, wondering what the answer will be.  Every day they go home, they have to wonder if their home has been invaded, their property confiscated while they were away.  Every night they go to sleep, they have to wonder if tonight is the night that the state will send armed men -- paid by their own tax dollars -- to work the tyrant’s will upon them and their innocent families.  So, like I said, consider yourselves lucky to be living in Alabama.  These questions need not trouble your sleep, but they should.  They should because what happens in CT, or in any other state now “behind enemy lines,” will not STAY in CT.  It will, in a short time, come here, to visit you.

For if the state of CT should decide to go to war with its own citizens, then the “authorities” will find out quickly what was like for Custer at Little Big Horn.  And they will have but one alternative: to call  upon the federal government to send its militarized police and indeed, the military itself, to come help them attack their own people.  And then?

This is not entirely unexplored territory.  Back in the 90s when I was in Constitutional militia movement, the FBI in the aftermath of the OKC bombing and with the Freemen standoff happening in Montana, became extremely solicitous of the intentions of those of us who had sworn there would be no more free Wacos.  In the middle of this, the FBI Special agent in Charge of the Albuquerque NM field office met with a good friend of mine, Bob Wright of Lea County NM.  Bob was a militia leader of national reputation and commanded the 1st Brigade, New Mexico Militia.  After some preliminary fencing, the SAC got down to the question he needed to know the answer to:  “Bob, if this Montana thing turns out badly like Waco, would you really take your unit up there to fight us?”

Now, we had no love for the Freemen.  In our eyes they were petty criminals who had victimized their neighbors.  But we also determined -- we had sworn to ourselves and to our God -- that the federal government would enjoy no more free Wacos.  We viewed the Freemen as proper subjects of state police enforcement and for us the FBI poised to carry out another Waco was intolerable.  So when the FBI SAC asked Bob if he would take his unit to Montana if things “went south,” Bob looked him in the eye and said, “Why would I want to do that?  There’s plenty of you Federal sonsabitches around here.”

Now this was an aspect to the situation that the FBI man had apparently not previously considered, and witnesses report that his eyes grew wide and his jaw dropped a bit.  In the end, we didn’t have to find out.  Just like at the Bundy Ranch this past April we didn’t have to find out, although that was much more of a close run thing.  But the Bundy situation bore all the hallmarks of Waco --– federal militarized police abuse, the demonization and isolation of the intended target -- and that is why it got the response from an aroused armed citizenry that it did.  Those of us who went out to Bunkerville NV didn’t necessarily believe that Bundy was right.  But we knew that whatever his conflict with the federal government, it didn’t excuse another Waco.  That we got another Freemen result and not a Waco result, however, was, as I know from being there, mere chance.  For we are, as I said, two countries.  And that question has yet to be answered.  But just like Bundy Ranch, a shooting war in CT, or Co, or NY, or Washington state, would not be a local affair.  It would start a bloody civil war in the entire nation and that civil war would, in short order, come to visit us all here.

These are not pleasant thoughts.  They are the reality that has been growing in this country for some time, although it has hardly been reported by the so-called “mainstream media.”  But then the Fast and Furious scandal, which I had the humbling duty and honor to break the story with the help of my friends back in December 2010 was largely ignored by the media as well.  That didn’t mean it wasn’t the truth.

And the truth is that civil war is possible precisely because the possibility of such a conflict is not being reported -- precisely because people -- especially people on the other side -- do not think it is possible because, well, this is America in the 21st Century and things like that can’t happen anymore, can they?  I assure you that they can.  To believe otherwise is to whistle past the graveyard of our own history.  I am currently reading a remarkable book, An Empire on the edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by the English historian Nick Bunker.  Bunker points out that while Lexington and Concord came as a surprise to many, there were a small number of both American colonists and Britons who foresaw the possibility and would not shrink from it.  Nathaniel Greene, later one of Washington’s best generals, wrote as early as July 1774: “Soon very soon expect to hear the thirsty earth drinking in the blood of American sons.  This was a full nine months before Captain Parker’s demonstration of armed civil disobedience on Lexington Green led to the “shot heard ‘round the world.”  Commenting on Nathaniel Greene’s prediction, Bunker writes:


In the eighteenth century, treason could take many forms, with the sword or with the pen.  Long before . . . general (Gates) arrived in Boston, and even with the war a year away, we find young patriots in America already committing lines to paper that might have sent them to the gallows if any british spy had read them.

You know, I am reliably informed that Eric Holder’s Justice Department has had a sedition investigation going on me since before I broke the Fast and Furious scandal story.  The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has called me an “insurrectionist” and the Southern Poverty Law Center -- a misnamed and misbegotten bunch of liars for money if there ever was one -- has long had me on their list of dangerous folks.  I have even been the subject of an 18 and a half minute rant by Rachel Madcow on MSNBC and Bill Clinton, that paragon of moral virtue, has denounced the Three Percent movement that I founded in a speech on national television.  Well, as my friend Kurt Hofmann, says, “It is better to be despised by the despicable than admired by the admirable.”

But the fact of the matter is that this cold war I describe between the federal government and its citizens has been going on for 20 years now, and I am proud to say that I have been on the enemies lists of the last THREE White Houses, irrespective of party.  I am at least an equal opportunity gadfly.  But despite the name calling by the other side, I am not seeking an “insurrection” nor soliciting civil war but I am trying to prevent one.  The men and women behind enemy lines who, now that every other means of defending their essential liberties have failed, and have turned to armed civil disobedience are trying to prevent one as well.  Only by convincing the other side of the seriousness of our purpose and the credibility of our deterrence will we avoid one.

Again, these are dark and bloody thoughts but they are not new for some of us.  Back in January 2009, I had been working on the David Olofson case and other ATF scandals when one day, in my post office box, I received an anonymous envelope.  It was postmarked from somewhere in Oklahoma. It said this in handwritten block letters:

“Sir,

I have read you on the internet and believe in what your doing. One day the ATF will come to count coup on you & take your head. I promise to take One hundred heads for yours.

Cheyenne 0317/8541”

There was a small, delicate ink drawing on the bottom of the sheet, showing what appeared to be a coup stick crossed with a tomahawk and over-arched with eagle feathers. 0317/8541, for the uninitiated, are the current and former MOS numbers for a Marine Scout/Sniper. 

One hundred heads. I sat in the car, reading and rereading this piece of paper, touched and frankly shaken by its simple sincerity. I had no doubt the man meant what he said. It is a token of the power of the written word to evoke such a response.  I also had no doubt that a Marine scout/sniper had the skills to take a hundred heads if, God forbid, this should come to guns. I shared this with a friend at the time and he had only this blunt comment: "A hundred heads properly targeted could finish this thing." Indeed.

Now I did with this what I always do, I wrote about it on my blog, Sipsey Street Irregulars, and it became somewhat of a dark running joke, albeit a deadly serious one and it picked up a life of its own.  One reader embraced the idea and crafted a teeshirt reading “100 Heads Life and Casualty Company,” with a little mound of skulls in the center.  And then, stranger still, I would go places, speeches, rallies, gunshows, even the NRA convention, and people would come up to me, shake my hand and say, “One hundred heads, sir,” and then walk away.  It wasn’t a discussion they were seeking, it was a declaration of intent.  It wasn’t approval they were looking for, it was just, well, a valediction.  For the honoree this is quite a two-edged sword for the action promised, you may recall, is predicated upon his own – MY own – demise.  Yet it is somehow strangely comforting that my life has been insured these past six years by the entirely voluntary and absolutely free of charge One Hundred Heads Life and Casualty Company.  Who knows, maybe it is one reason I’m still alive.  We have since, by popular demand, begun selling “One Hundred Heads Life Insurance” ball caps in order to raise money for the armed civil disobedience campaign.  Some of them are on sale over at my table here, along with these "Fight Tyranny, Shoot Back" hats -- IF you are looking for headgear that comes with a free personal FBI file at no extra charge.  But I offer this story -- which like all the best stories has the advantage of being true -- as evidence that some of us, like Nathaniel Greene and his contemporaries of the Founders’ generation, have been thinking about this sort of thing for a while.  If a civil war breaks out in CT, or in Washington state, tomorrow, we at least will not be surprised.  Horrified, saddened, like everyone else.  But not surprised.

I mention Washington state because that is where the latest front of armed civil disobedience has been opened.  Back in November, you may recall, Michael Bloomberg and some other millionaires bought themselves a mandatory background check law by referendum, called I-594.  Now, the so-called mainstream gun rights organizations had only themselves to blame for this fiasco because they couldn't restrain their petty jealousies and refused to work together lest the other group get the credit for the win -- and I’m talking here about the NRA and Alan Gottlieb’s bunch.   The only thing was, they lost.  Immediately there sprung up an “I Will Not Comply” organization that held a rally on the 13th of December to not only protest the new law, but to break it, and dare the state authorities to do anything about it.  They were initially granted then denied a permit.  They said, “fine, we don’ need no steenking permits.  We’re still going to have our rally.”   “Well arrest you,” the state police threatened.  They told the state police, “hey, do what you gotta do.  We’ll do what we gotta do.  Your move.”

I was honored to be invited to speak in front of a group that I estimated at 2,000 folks (the WSP said it was more like 1800, but that still made it one of the largest firearm rights demonstrations ever held in the state).  We gathered, armed, we broke the law and . . . nothing happened.  We were even congratulated by the state police for the professional manner with which we carried out the protest.  Last month, I went back to Olympia to help with another armed civil disobedience action after the state legislature banned firearms from the galleries.  Again they threatened to arrest us.  Again we said, “Fine, do what you gotta do.”  And what did they do?  They locked the gallery doors on us.  In a word, they wimped out.  So we trooped, about a hundred of us who gathered on a day of awful weather, through the state house, served our list of grievances by taping them to the gallery and governor’s office doors and then marched over to the governor’s mansion where we startled a gate guard by presenting the same petition and then, having knelt in prayer, adjourned.

Now in the process of all this law-breaking, the Washington activists presented me with this.  All firearms being female, meet Mrs. Bloomberg.  I call her Charlotte when nobody’s listening.  She is named for Michael Bloomberg’s mother.  It seemed only fitting that if I was breaking Bloomberg’s law that I give at least a tip of the boonie hat to the nanny state fascist who motivated me to do so.  It is my intention to tote Charlotte around to every other armed civil disobedience event and speaking engagement that I attend from now on.  And the next one in Washington state ought to be a doozy.

You see, the armed civil disobedience resisters out there are hosting an arms expo late in June -- a background check free gun show --– and they are again daring the authorities to do anything about it.  I’ll be there, toting Mrs. Bloomberg, and daring right along with them. 

Armed civil disobedience has a long, honorable history in America.  From Captain Parker to the Battle of Athens TN in 1946 to the Deacons for Defense and Justice during the civil rights movement to the Bundy Ranch standoff, Americans have been opposing government-sanctioned violence by putting their own bodies on the line with determination in their hearts and firearms in their hands.

This is no surprise to black Americans who, like Condoleeza Rice’s father stood armed guard over Martin Luther King while that advocate of Gandhian non-violence slept, made safe from Klan violence and Sheriff Bull Connor’s Klan-member deputies by their .38 revolvers and .45 automatics.  Throughout our history Americans have been a practical people and when the regular means of sustaining our rights and our liberties have failed, we have always turned to our own resources.

Is it dangerous?  You bet.  Is it desirable?  No way.  But it is sometimes required.  You live in a free state.  But there are people in this country who do not.  There are people who, thanks to the domestic enemies of the Constitution in their states, now live behind enemy lines.  You may disagree with them.  You may condemn them.  They may make you nervous.  They may make the authorities nervous.  Heck, they make me nervous.  But they are meant to.  As Jefferson observed, where the people fear the government there is tyranny.  Where the government fears the people, there is liberty.

But remember, whatever you think of them, these armed civil disobedience activists, you sleep safe at night, safe from the arbitrary exercise of government violence.  They do not.  But however you react to them, they are there, they are not going away, and the conflict that their oppressive state governments force on them will likely come to your door anyway -- if it happens, accidentally or intentionally, it will come to all of our doors.  This is the new reality, the new paradigm.  This is the state of our two countries, the one that Barack Obama loves and the one that we love.  And they will tell you, they will say to anyone including Barack Obama if he asks, that if you don’t like it you’d better ease up out of their faces, get your hands out of their pockets, off their property and liberty as the Founders intended  before something goes wrong.  “Be careful what you wish for,” they will quote the old Chinese adage, “because you may get it.”

As for me, I am honored to stand beside them, these brave men and women behind enemy lines.  I am honored and I am humbled but I will stand with them until God, according to his own plan, calls me home.

Thank you.

And remember folks -- Fight tyranny, shoot back.

Media Matters poster gets irked at my characterization of them as collectivists.

"Danielsangeo" over at MM wrote:

Mike, we don't care if you're an ex-communist. We're not communists either. You're way off base.

To which I replied:

You are ALL collectivists though, certainly. There are many varieties of collectivism, from Marxist-Leninists and National Socialists through fascists and socialists to racists, tribalists and religious collectivists. The only difference between a socialist and a communist is that the socialist hasn't found his AK-47 yet and worked up the guts to use it. An old German surgeon once told me that all political systems should be judged by their results -- principally in terms of how much individual liberty they allowed and how many bodies they stacked up. Viewed thusly, the political continuum is not a line, but a circle, with communism and National Socialism cheek-by-jowl down at the bottom and lesser virulent forms of like collectivisms arrayed up the two arcs of the circle until you get to the apex of the Founder's Constitutional Republic of the rule of law and limited government power enhancing the ability of free men and women to experience the "pursuit of happiness" of liberty, property and life. When you use government power to extort -- by government violence -- compliance for a purpose you find laudable but they do not (and what federal law these days does not come with that steel fist at its core?) you invite defensive violence on the part of people who decline to be extorted. Herr Dokter Richter knew what he was talking about, and he suggested that I read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, followed by Hoffer's The True Believer. He knew the collectivist big lie, having seen the monumental crime of millions of young men killing each other in the snows of Russia for murderous causes hardly much more different than the faces of the leaders. That chance meeting caused me to rethink everything I thought I knew.

We -- that is the folks who I represent a small sliver of a sample of -- and you here at the laughably named "Media Matters" (as well as the larger populations we agree with) are divided upon the answer to the fundamental question -- does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government? Which is to be superior? The collective or the individual? I stand on the side of individual liberty. This is not a question whose answer can be finessed or negotiated for the answers are mutually antagonistic. Historically such conflicts are almost always settled by violence for that very reason. Your "reasonable regulation" is our "intolerable act." From our point of view, we've been pushed back from the free exercise of our God-given and inalienable rights for many years now. You should not be all that surprised that some of us have decided to warn you that we can shove back.

And let's get one thing straight, at least, since everyone here seems to think within the straight-jacket of party politics, this has nothing to do with that false dichotomy. I am not a member of the GOP, nor are most of my friends. I'm proud to say I've been on the enemies lists of the past three White Houses. Mostly that is because I'm a big believer in the antiseptic qualities of sunlight on government conduct. The ATF whistleblowers came to us in spite of our philosophical differences because they knew we shared that principle and that our past track record proved we couldn't be bullied off of it.

I find it ironic -- but perfectly understandable given the propensity of all collectivists to embrace cognitive dissonance -- that y'all spend so much effort defending the bureaucracy of federal law enforcement agencies just because they now temporarily serve the nominal commands of your Dear Leader (anybody remember COINTELPRO?). This puts the lie to your perception of yourselves as "defenders of civil liberties." (They same goes for so-called neo-Cons.) Civil liberties for thee but not for me. I get it. What you don't get is that if somebody decided to start making the trains run to "Arbeit Macht Frei" camps in a future America and fill them with Nancy Pelosi and her ilk (yea, even Media Matters' uncomprehending and foul-mouthed mokes), it would be me and my despised friends who would be blowing up the tracks, cutting the wire and shooting the guards to free you. That is the cost of unbending principle.

Try it sometime.

Mike Vanderboegh

"We hold these truths to be self-evident" -- Various ruminations upon Independence Day.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Toby Harndon, writing in the London Telegraph, rightly reports that "the mood is dark" in America this Independence Day, calling us "the United States of gloom."

The last comparable Fourth of July was probably in 1980, when there was a recession, skyrocketing petrol prices and an Iranian hostage crisis, with 53 Americans being held in Tehran.

Frank Luntz, perhaps America’s pre-eminent pollster, argues that his countrymen are much more downbeat now than in 1980. “The assumption with the Carter years was that it was a failure of the elites, not the system. We thought the people in charge screwed up. We didn’t blame ourselves.” Remarkably, many Americans think things will only get worse and the good times will never return.

Peter Mallory is "Reflecting on the strength or lack thereof of the Constitution on the 4th of July."

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, it gives us time to pause and consider the watering down of what is probably the finest political document of its kind ever written by man: the U.S. Constitution.

The people who wrote it are probably the smartest and most well informed group ever assembled for the purpose of forming a government.

Unfortunately, many Americans do not grasp the concepts that are embodied in the Constitution and have therefore little or no understanding of what is in the Constitution or why it was written the way it was.

Daniel Greenfield asks "What do we celebrate when we celebrate the Fourth of July?"

Is it the independence from being ruled by an out of touch government thousands of miles away, taxed at their pleasure, and told to be grateful for it?

Is it home rule under our own elected officials who can’t be trumped by the decision of some political appointees whom we never voted for?

A victory won by militias that don’t exist anymore, on behalf of freedoms that are constantly under assault from the nation’s own capital?

Michael Goodman is equally pessimistic, saying that we are "Forgetting Founders' tough love."

Yet all around us, traditional values of independence and hard work, based on modest expectations and personal humility, are being eroded. In the "culture of me," everybody is a star.

Should you dare protest, you are attacked as greedy. Insist that failure must have its consequences, and you are scolded for lacking compassion.

Never mind that you lived with the old values, that you sacrificed and worked and saved for what you have. Now you must pay and pay again for those who didn't. Oh, and shut up about it, too.

That is the fault line of America's culture war in 2011. Pray that the spirit and wisdom of the founders prevails. Otherwise, our nation won't.

I wish I could write something uplifting this Independence Day.

I cannot.

I wish I could say that all the pessimism reflected above is unwarranted.

It is not.

Abraham Lincoln, who was so very wrong about the Constitution and many other things was right about this: no nation can long exist half slave and half free. It must eventually become one or the other. It is more than a little ironic that Lincoln cynically used slavery to attack the Founders' conception of liberty and to vastly expand the power and reach of the Federal government, yet in the largest sense Lincoln was correct. A country is either dedicated to liberty or collectivism.

As it happens, today we are in fact two countries existing withing the same border. One people views the government as the source of everything good. The other views it, as the Founders did, as a bulwark of ordered liberty and opportunity -- BUT NOTHING MORE. We agree with Washington that government is a dangerous servant but an even more fearful master. The question is, will the federal government serve the people's interests or the people serve the government's interests?

We are, as people, far more philosophically divided now than ever before in our history. As a diligent student of history, I can tell you that societies so divided never have reconciled such deep divides without violence.

And, like 1860, we are just one dead Supreme Court justice, one stolen election, one Reichstag fire or even one failed Gunwalker Scandal investigation away from the irresistible slide to civil war.

The only thing I can do myself is to continue to strive to maintain what liberty is left -- and to regain lost liberties -- by peaceful means while preparing myself and others for doing so by other means.

And that's the only Independence Day declaration I have for you today.

Two different countries. "Obama may be the letter writer's fuhrer. He's not mine."

So, the last newspaper I bought on our way out of town on my trip to Ohio contained this letter: "Health act ruling should mean it's time to end states' rights talk."

The Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed the Affordable Care Act. Alabama, with its rich heritage in states' rights, will scream in agony that the federal government has acted to save all families from financial ruin.

The Republican presumptive nominee for president has vowed to reverse the Supreme Court if elected. Who remembers George Wallace and Eugene "Bull" Connor inciting the public to "get rid of outside agitators"? Who remembers the Alabama governor telling the national media "we don't want no outsiders coming down here telling us what to do"? I remember. But, more important, I remember why.

As long as the state could keep federal law away from Alabama, the "states' rights" good-old boys could enforce segregation, redesign voting districts, deny civil rights and refuse people the opportunity to vote, provide separate and unequal education and a number of other atrocities without fear of legal recourse. The Civil Rights Act was passed because states like Alabama would not do it on their own.

Even U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy begged the Rev. Martin L. King Jr. to stop demonstrating in Birmingham. It was too ugly for the nation to watch. The media coverage was giving all of the U.S. a very nasty view of the reason why civil rights was important in the first place.

Those politicians who said states' rights had precedence over federal law were known segregationists -- haters who would rather die than sit in church next to anyone of a different race or origin. How stupid and naive.

Yet, today, are we that far removed from that ugly past? Mitt Romney sounds like Wallace in my view. The message is the same, just worded a bit different.

The Romans knew poverty leads to insurrection. They knew the people must have opportunity and a chance to succeed; otherwise, they could not govern. It is no different now.

Our beloved country is in a crisis. To break loose from the chains that bind us, we must think and act as a single people. We are American citizens. No one is any better than the other.

If you do not care about your neighbor, who is going to care about you? The time for separatism is over. The time for teamwork is here.

Let us work together to strengthen our great country by accepting our role as bona-fide citizens. Put away the cancer of thinking like a states' rightist and act like you love our country.

Jefferson J. Drew

Birmingham

Needless to say, I felt this required a rejoinder. It was printed today.

"We don't serve government; government serves us."

The June 30 letter "Health act ruling should mean it's time to end states' rights talk" (Your Views) linking Jim Crow to opposition to Obamacare is so full of historical fallacies and leaps of illogic that it would take your entire editorial page to detail. The letter writer's primary beef seems to be with the founders' concept of the republic and the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which to my knowledge has not been repealed.

Taken together with the letter's "no justice, no peace" threat implied in the words "poverty leads to insurrection," the collectivist credo of "we must think and act as one people" evokes the street-brawling Hitlerian motto "One people, one government, one leader" -- or else. President Barack Obama may be the letter writer's fuhrer. He's not mine.

The letter taunts us to submit to federal tyranny and "act like you love our country." The writer's fundamental error is to think we still inhabit the same country. We are, in fact, two countries divided by the fundamental difference of principle on the question: Does the government serve the people, or do the people serve the government?

This is not a question whose answer can be negotiated or finessed. The answers are mutually hostile to one another. I know how the founders answered that question to the tyrant King George -- at the muzzles of their rifles.

As for me, I love MY country; I do not love the collectivist "people's paradise" of a country the letter writer seems to inhabit.

Mike Vanderboegh

Pinson

We are all soldiers in a cold war provoked by our own government. My speech at Canon City CO, 5 July 2014.

The German general and military theorist Clausewitz said that "war is politics by other means." I have been traveling our country for the past year or so, from the East Coast to Nevada and from Florida and Texas to the upper Midwest and I would like to advance a corollary to that-- politics is war by another means.

Now there's hot wars and there's cold wars -- the difference being whether or not there's shooting going on. Of course in the famous cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, shooting would flare up between them and client states from time to time but never did they shoot at each other directly -- the reason was a doctrine called "mutual assured destruction." With nuclear weapons available on both sides, neither wished to risk annihilation. But the deterrence represented by mutual assured destruction rested upon the understanding of both parties that it was possible, and had either party not comprehended that in 1962 when I was ten, large swaths of this country would still be uninhabitable radioactive wasteland.

Another way of putting that is George Washington's stolen quote from the Roman Republic that those who wish for peace should be prepared for war.

John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, written in 1690, said,

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.

I have been a soldier of liberty in a cold war with my own government for twenty years now. This was not my choice. I would rather have been left alone to tend to the truly important things -- life, love, family, faith, opportunity -- those wonderful gifts of God that the Founders expected would be secured by a government of limited and counter-balanced powers, that would both secure the rule of law and live within it. But the last three administrations run by the elites of both corrupt political parties have NOT left me alone -- just as they did not leave YOU alone. They have smashed flat the rule of law in service to their own power -- in furtherance of their insatiable huger for other peoples liberty and property and lives. Pat Buchanan once said that these parties were two wings of the same bird of prey, and he was right.

From Ruby Ridge, to Waco, to the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban to the deliberate failure to secure our borders, to the PATRIOT Act, to Obamacare, to NSA spying, to the use of the IRS against political opponents, to the creation and sustenance of the Frankenstein monster of a vertically-integrated militarized police state -- the appetites of the elites of both parties have put themselves into a continual war with the people. It may have been a cold war up to now but it could turn hot at any moment. Just ask the Bundys.

I am a soldier in that war. And want to, or not -- like it, or not -- SO, TOO, ARE ALL OF YOU.

We did not declare war on the federal government -- but by their actions, by their continued depredations our liberty, our property and the looting of the public treasury to fund those depredations, THEY have declared war on US. John Locke would tell you so were he here. So, too, would the Founders.

It is not a shooting war. Not yet. Although from Nevada to Connecticut to New York to Colorado, armed civil disobedience to Intolerable Acts and intolerable actions is growing. At the Bundy Ranch and elsewhere we stand facing each other -- the people and the government -- like two sides of an incipient bar fight and it would take only a stupid move on the part of somebody -- anybody -- to knock the beer bottle off the bar and start the donnybrook.

And a very bloody donnybrook it would be.

But we are not there yet.

Not yet.

And I pray to God we never are.

But that's not the way to bet.

So until someone on a federal paycheck, someone wearing a state police uniform, or merely an out-of-control local cop knocks the beer bottle off the bar, we have a cold war and what we have available to us is politics -- politics and preparedness. Preparedness for the day when politics fails. Preparedness so effective and so obvious to the other side that even the most clueless among them will understand that resort to violence really does amount to the assured destruction of all their tyrannical plans -- of their hunger to control the rest of us -- indeed, assured destruction of their own lives. Perhaps if they internalize THAT and ease up out of the faces of people who merely wish to be left alone -- well, perhaps we can get out of this situation they've made without a cold war turning into a hot one.

But until that happens we should understand that we are all soldiers in a cold war being waged by our own government against the people. We should understand that and we should act like it.

For we are all in fact two countries now, sharing a common border and (mostly) a common language, but divided along the answer to this fundamental question -- Does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government?

This is not a question whose different answers can be compromised or finessed or even ignored. It is either one or the other and it cannot be both. So when Harry Reid promises us in the wake of the Bundy standoff that "this isn't over," he's right. It can never be over until one side or the other wins. It can never be over until we answer that question -- for good or evil -- and it will either be the Founders; answer or King George's. Or, I should say, King Barack's.

For when we see the actions of the federally empowered militarized police today, or understand the tyranny behind the IRS attacks on the Tea Parties, or any of hundreds of other abuses and usurpations of power, it is impossible not to see the wisdom of my friend Billy Beck's observation that "today all politics is dress rehearsal for civil war."

And over all it -- over all of us -- hangs the imminent threat of systemic economic collapse represented by $60 Trillion in debt that is the product of these evil elites of both corrupt political parties.

And when that anvil falls -- when their rotten system collapses -- it will smash flat the guilty and innocent alike.

So we must be there, we cold warriors of liberty and the Founders' Republic. We must be there, ready to save what can be saved. For there is no one else to do it.

By politics or force of arms -- and it is the tyrant's choice -- we must be there.

We must be ready.

For there is no one else.

"We will not forget those who solicited our deaths and the deaths of our families. We will not forget and history will not forgive."

"Tap dancing in a minefield blindfolded."

My reply to Bob Nicholson's latest.

Mr. Nicholson, As you have done me the courtesy of a reply to my email regarding your anti-NRA screed (something that rarely occurs with others of your collectivist proclivities), I thought it only fitting to return the favor by answering your ill-formed and ill-informed opinions and questions by giving you an honest glimpse into the world view of those of your fellow citizens whom you so evidently despise. I do so in the hope that such knowledge might help you avoid personal culpability for the civil war that you evidently seek.

You begin by asking sarcastically, "So how do you really feel about background checks?" The Founders would have thought the entire idea to be repugnant and unworthy of a government that claims to represent a free people. Requiring the people to obtain the prior permission of the government to exercise a God-given, inalienable and natural right as codified in the Constitution would be preposterous to the Founders. One might as well require prior government permission to exercise a First Amendment right.

If the law-abiding must seek government approval then such rights are not rights at all and are subject to federal ban at any whim of the bureaucracy. THAT is the central tyranny of your proposal. A related offense to liberty is this: that government control of the private sale of firearms is designed to develop lists, not of firearms but of firearm owners. And the only reason for that is to facilitate confiscation at some future date and time.

For bureaucrats can only send armed men to the doors of people who are on their list. Indeed, this is what happened to the Jews and other "political undesirables" in Nazi Germany. All arms having been previously registered by the nominally democratic regime of the Weimar Republic, the Nazis had no trouble disarming their opponents. Ironically, the same Weimar socialists who had registered everyone's weapons (including their own) then found themselves disarmed by means of the same lists they had created.

Understand, then, that we have no intention of traveling that road. We will fight and we will kill in righteous self defense anyone who tries to take our liberty, our property and our lives.

You may think us crazy for doing so, for even thinking that we have the right to shirk our "responsibility to society" (to use your words), but the fact of the matter is that we are here, we are not changing our minds, we are done backing up to every unconstitutional infringement the federal government has imposed upon us since the National Firearms Act of 1934 and we will shoot the armed thugs operating under color of law that your proposed policy sends to our doors to compel our obedience.

Accept that as the ironclad fact and promise that it is, deal with it and act accordingly. For we will not forget those who solicited our deaths and the deaths of our families. We will not forget and history will not forgive. (Cf. Nuremberg, 1945-46.)

As for your second paragraph sneering at the possibility of successfully fighting the federal government backed by the military, my first reaction was, "Just who does this jerk think the military is made up of?" The military, my apparently clueless friend, is made up of OUR sons and daughters (especially the tip-of-the-spear units) NOT those of our pretended "betters" who send theirs to hothouse-lily Ivy League schools where they chant "Black Lives Matter" while safely ensconced in their anti-free speech "comfort zones." OUR sons and daughters are the ones who have spent the last decade getting combat experience in foreign wars. OURS not theirs. And which way do you suppose our adult children will be pointing their government-provided ordnance when the orders (YOUR orders that YOU solicited) come down to disarm Grandpa Jack or kill Uncle Billy as "enemies of the people"?

My second reaction to that paragraph was disbelief that anyone could be so ignorant of military history as to make such a stupid statement. Rambo was certainly fiction, but in the extensive chronicles of guerrillas versus governments, the governments lose almost as often as the insurgents and when they do, they lose spectacularly. You may ask the ghost of His Majesty's General Thomas Gage how his gun raids worked out for King George the Third. Which leads me to my third comment to that appallingly ignorant paragraph. I wondered aloud, "This moke really doesn't understand that there are people who have been studying and preparing and training to do that very thing since the original sin of Waco in 1993."

For it is the same regime that committed the massacre at Waco that you evidently trust with the power to circumscribe our liberties, the power to seize our property, even at the cost of our lives. No one in the federal government was ever called to account for Waco, nor for any of the scandals to date in the Obama administration beginning with, but certainly not limited to, Fast and Furious. Well I've got news for you. As I told Eric Holder in a letter more than six years ago, there will be no more free Wacos. The next federal bloody misadventure of that sort will get us all a nice, ghastly civil war. And it will be a war that we have been considering how to win for the past twenty years.

I refer you to an essay I wrote regarding the application of 4th Generation warfare in the context of just such a civil war as you seek to provoke. You will find it here. I would draw your particular attention to Bill Clinton's Rules of Engagement:

The thing is, once started, the regime will find it almost impossible to stop on any terms besides their own unconditional surrender as they would be fighting an enraged but dispersed network insurgency. It is likely that after a few weeks of such blood-letting, the administration will be unable to find anybody left alive with sufficient influence among the insurgents with whom they can negotiate an end to the horror. The fact of the matter is that they would have done their best to kill the folks they would need to stop what they started. And they will want to stop it, oh, yes, out of concern for their own miserable hides if nothing else. For they will have provoked a conflict that will not be directed at the war-fighters, the grunts, even those in the outnumbered federal police, but rather at the war-makers, i.e. themselves.

In this they have only Bill Clinton to blame. When the Philanderer in Chief, frustrated with Serbian intransigence in 1999, changed the rules of engagement to include the political leadership, news media and the intellectual underpinning of his enemy's war effort, he accidentally filed suit under the Law of Unintended Consequences. The Serbians knuckled under, yes. But the rest of the world took note, including (the Three Percent). I assure you, the appeal to the higher court of history in that case has yet to be decided. . .

Johnston is as wrong as he can be when comparing past history to 4th Generation warfare, distributed networks and leaderless resistance, especially as will be practiced in the United States if it ever goes to war with itself. He is wrong, but the powerful men and women he is writing for think he's right. Unfortunately for them, in the situation the administration would find itself after Waco Two, the "decapitation" strategy would for them more resemble Russian Roulette played with an automatic pistol. . .

I have asked this question before. They will fight to the last ATF agent or to the last oath-breaking soldier. Will they fight to the first senior bureaucrat, the second Congressman, the third newspaper editor, the fourth Senator, the fifth White House aide? Can they stand Bill Clinton's rules of engagement?

What does this have to do with you? Well, remember what I said above, "We will not forget those who solicited our deaths and the deaths of our families. We will not forget and history will not forgive."

One of my readers had this reaction to your email bleating, Borg-like, that "resistance is futile, you will be assimilated":

"I find it baffling that Bob thinks we'd waste a single shot on people in the military. What a horrid waste of time and ammo, engaging those who didn't cause the problem. People like Bob, who sent them, however. . ."

He left the hypothetical results of your proposal for civil war hanging in the air. Ho Chi Minh once said, "Cherish your enemies, for they teach you the best lessons." You begin to see, perhaps, just how right the old collectivist butcher was, especially when by your advocacy of the precursors of tyranny, you invoke the Law of Unintended Consequences upon yourself. This is a mission I took upon myself many years ago: I am trying to save lives here, one unthinking collectivist tyrant wannabe at a time. I hope you can appreciate that.

For we represent two different world views, you and we. Boil it down and you believe that people should serve the government. If you didn't, you wouldn't trust a corrupt regime willing commit Waco massacres with one scintilla of essential liberty. We believe, like the Founders, that government should serve the people -- that it should be accountable to the people and restrained by the rule of law under the Constitution of the Founder's Republic. Each side believes fervently in these mutually exclusive propositions. It is collectivism versus individualism. Throughout history, such fundamental divides have most often been decided by sanguinary wars of unspeakable ferocity. If you believe otherwise, you are whistling past the graveyard of our own history.

My advice? Try to understand that you are tap dancing in a minefield blindfolded. You are unthinkingly toying with titanic forces you barely recognize. The NRA, as perhaps you can more readily understand now, is truly the least of your worries. Consider Ho Chi Minh's advice. Perhaps the best counsel that I can offer you is that provided by the Sheriff in Silverado, who when asked by a townsman what was happening, advised, "Hide and watch."

Sincerely,

Mike Vanderboegh

The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters