Posted on 08/18/2020 8:48:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
American colonial leaders in the 18th century and Martin Luther King, Jr. both fused religious beliefs with philosophical principles to motivate action.
Throughout the Stamp Act crisis of the 1760s — the “Prologue to Revolution,” according to the title of historian Edmund S. Morgan’s published collection of documents — the British North American colonists sent petition after petition to both houses of the British Parliament. These petitions frequently asserted the rights that the colonists possessed as British subjects.
According to the Resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, the colonists were “entitled to all the inherent rights and liberties” due to them as “natural born subjects” of the British king. They possessed the same “rights of Englishmen” that had been possessed by British subjects since the time of Magna Carta. Among these rights was that of immunity to taxation without representation — the birth of the rallying cry that now constitutes just about all that most Americans can tell you about the American Revolution.
Most of the colonists at this time argued on the ground of the universally acknowledged geopolitical reality: the British colonies in North America existed under the British imperial constitution and within the jurisdiction of British political authority. They were British subjects with British rights.
Against this backdrop of pragmatic, predictable political debate, James Otis’s “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” stood out like an electric guitar in a classical string ensemble. Although Otis did acknowledge the legitimate political authority of Great Britain and its Parliament over the colonies, he imagined an entire realm beyond and underneath this geopolitical one.
He opens the discussion by describing someone searching after the “foundation of any of their rights,” stopping first at a “charter from the crown,” and then at “old Magna Charta,” until finally: “They imagine themselves on the borders of Chaos . . . and see creation rising out of the unformed mass, or from nothing.” Peering across this border throughout the pamphlet, Otis proceeds to trace the “rights of our fellow subjects in Great Britain” directly to “God and nature.”
Otis, according to contemporary accounts, suffered from mental illness in the later part of his life. Perhaps he was already losing his grip in 1763. But if he was crazy to imagine a parallel reality in which “God and nature” were the foundations for the colonists’ rights — both “black and white,” we might add — so, too, was Thomas Jefferson a decade later.
Jefferson’s “Summary View of the Rights of British America” similarly soars well beyond the politics of pragmatic reality and attaches the colonists’ rights to “God” and “nature,” raising the outlandish claim that the early colonists actually emigrated from England to begin entirely new political societies in North America. Jefferson’s then-ridiculous historical claims became political reality two years later, however, when his Declaration of Independence justified colonial independence on the basis of the twin pillars of his and Otis’s parallel reality: “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
Both Otis and Jefferson engaged in political action on the basis of a more expansive perception of reality than that of their contemporaries: a perception of a parallel reality that could not be directly sensed or experienced. They tried to convince the people of their time that the things that seemed most real to these people — things like British imperial political power or their traditional political rights — were actually less important or even less real than abstract principles like God and nature. Their politics of parallel reality was visionary without being utopian, and aspirational without being progressive.
The parallel reality of a divinely created natural order was less a goal to be reached and more a standard already and always present. Aligning with this standard was not a historical inevitability but an ongoing practical task.
In highlighting aspects of reality that could not be directly seen, heard, or felt, early Americans like Otis and Jefferson were not just imagining things. Nor were they simply engaging in hyperbolic rhetoric. They were also engaging in a kind of premodern natural science, the kind that holds a more expansive view of nature as including not two, but four, constituent dimensions.
Aristotle had enumerated four causes of natural motion or change: material, efficient, formal, and final. The first two can be sensed directly, while the last two cannot. The “formal” dimension is most often associated with the soul, and the “final” involves concepts like happiness and, ultimately, religious beliefs about an afterlife. The formal and final dimensions, on this older, broader understanding, run like a parallel reality throughout the entire natural world. They are always present and powerful but exist beyond the reach of our physical senses. We ordinarily sense the world in 2-D, but it actually exists in 4-D. By attending to these additional dimensions in their political arguments, Otis and Jefferson weren’t “seeing things.” They were seeing more and further than their contemporaries, or the many sensible historians who have dismissed their ideas, could.
Martin Luther King, Jr. is most often associated with the high-flying, fluffy-and-fuzzy rhetoric that these sensible historians tend to ascribe to Otis and Jefferson. His best-known speech is about a “dream” — mellifluous, certainly; serious and sensible, most certainly not. Malcolm X is the hard-hitting, serious realist; King is the soft-headed idealist. A closer look, however, reveals a very different King: a King whose “dream” was not a sleepy look into the future but a clear-sighted perception of the waking world around him.
King’s dream was not only about an imagined future reality but also, and more profoundly, about a present reality that walks silently alongside and powerfully influences the one that we see. In line with the tradition of Otis and Jefferson, King consistently engaged in the politics of parallel reality.
This can be seen most clearly by carefully attending to King’s strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience. The common perception is that King’s strategy was basically the same as Gandhi’s, buttressed by Thoreau and then window-dressed with conventional American references to the Founding, Lincoln, and Christianity. Although Gandhi’s example was an important influence on King’s strategy, and Thoreau was an important influence on many nonviolent protest movements (including Gandhi’s), this common perception entirely misses the core of the strategy in King’s own eyes.
King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is probably the most profound, thorough, and lengthy statement that King ever provided in explanation of his strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience. In it, King traces the lineage of this strategy through the Boston Tea Party, Socrates, the early Christians, and finally, all the way to the incombustible trio of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. King even quotes T. S. Eliot at one point. Gandhi and Thoreau? They don’t even merit a mention.
Instead, King relies on Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich in his succinct explanation of the justification for civil disobedience: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” The “eternal law and natural law” run parallel to “human law” as real and essential components of law; to paraphrase James Otis, everyone sees human laws, but few trace their foundations to an unseen reality behind them.
Just as Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolutionaries justified their declaration of independence with reference to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” so King justifies his strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience with reference to “the moral law or the law of God.” In both cases, concrete political action is justified by an unseen, immaterial world in which God exists, sets things in order, and legislates for humanity.
This pattern continues in King’s other writings and speeches about his strategy and the philosophy behind it. Gandhi and Thoreau are mostly absent. In their place is a persistent emphasis on acting in light of physically imperceptible realities. At the outset of his 1958 essay “The Power of Nonviolence,” King admits that his philosophy “didn’t make sense to most of the people in the beginning.” It didn’t comport with their most familiar and direct experiences of life and of the world that they could see, hear, and feel regularly around them. “External physical violence” was something obvious, evident; nonviolent resistance, on the other hand, was an “internal matter” whose effects could not be physically seen.
In the last speech of his life, ten years later, King related the encounters of protesters with Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama. Explaining Bull Connor’s tactics of setting dogs on the protesters and spraying them with fire hoses, King did not say that Bull Connor was an unjust oppressor, a racist, or even ignorant. In fact, he specifically noted Connor’s knowledge of “physics.” The point that King emphasized is that while Connor “knew a kind of physics,” he did not connect this knowledge to “the transphysics that we knew about.”
In an interesting twist on the biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that he had referenced in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King noted “the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out.” After rhetorically transforming physical fire into spiritual fire, King did the same thing to the water: “If we were Baptist or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.” The physical water of the fire hoses became the spiritual water of religious baptism.
Viewing the resonances of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s thought with that of the American Revolutionaries in terms of the politics of parallel reality — instead of the conventional terminology of Christianity or natural law theory — shines much-needed light on crucial aspects of both.
First, it provides an essential supplement to Lincoln’s famous interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as primarily forward-looking. The aspirational quality of the phrase “all men are created equal” consists in the fact that the concrete, physical reality that we see does not match up with the parallel reality that we don’t see. This was as true in the moment Jefferson drafted the Declaration in 1776 as it was in the moment Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and, for that matter, in every moment between these and our current one.
“All men are created equal” is not forward-looking but an immediately present reality; we just think of it as forward-looking because we are looking forward to a time when our concrete, physical reality looks more like this parallel one.
Second, it helps us navigate the long-standing difficulty of trying to reconcile the moral principles that imbued the American Founding era with the starkly contrasting realities of African American slavery, Native American displacement, the political exclusion of women, and numerous other unjust practices of the time. Statements relating to religious belief (whether natural or revealed) or human nature — such as “all men are created equal” — are not statements about physical, tangible reality but rather about an immaterial, invisible parallel reality.
This is one way of understanding what Lincoln meant when he said that the Founders “did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality. . . . They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.” Jefferson and the other Founders, in other words, weren’t talking about concrete, sensible reality in these statements of moral principle. Nor were they talking about the future. They were talking about a “constantly” present parallel reality.
Third, it simultaneously connects Martin Luther King, Jr. with a much broader, older philosophical-religious tradition and provides a simple, straightforward way of contrasting his outlook with that characteristic of Malcolm X and his followers. Martin Luther King, Jr. differed from Malcolm X in the content and centrality of his religious beliefs to his political activism, in his identification with the American political tradition going back to the Revolution, in his reliance on natural law theory, and in his indefatigable optimism (among other things).
All these elements can be comprehended under the heading of the politics of parallel reality — seeing a 4-D world rather than a 2-D one. The quarrel between King and Malcolm X was, in fact, a version of the one between Plato and Machiavelli: where Malcolm X typically emphasized the physical, “effectual” dimensions of reality, King was preoccupied with the immaterial ones that cannot be seen from inside the cave.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and British North American colonial leaders in the mid-eighteenth century similarly relied on a fusion of religious beliefs with philosophical principles to motivate political action. It was only by engaging in the politics of parallel reality that they were able to bring about momentous change in the part of reality that too often holds our focus.
In this way, the King-led African American civil rights movement of the 1960s was more like the American Revolutionary movement of the eighteenth century than it was like any other twentieth-century rights movement.
Republished from RealClearPolitics, with permission.
He also wrote and gave numerous sermons about why communism was incompatible with Christianity regardless of capitalism’s flaws. I won’t get into all that here, but also want to stress that MLK, like Gandhi, is one of the last great products of a thoroughly *classical* education — which means being steeped in the Scriptures, in the Greek and Roman classics, etc... just as the founders of America were. MLK spoke the language of our founders and was on their same level of genius. Period.
And like so many other things, once the Left got a hold of it, it ceased to have any resemblance to its former self.
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was "settled" that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were "final;" not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.
How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!
Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.
While King himself was not a communist, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. This delicate subject, made more so given the martyrdom and subsequent lionization of King, should nevertheless be broached as a means of providing insight into some of the darker forces that worked their way into what was essentially a pro American, conservative, Christian civil rights movement.
King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. His closest advisor Stanley Levison was a Communist. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by King, had Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as Vice President who was at the same time president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, an identified communist front according to the Legislative Committee on un-American Activities, Louisiana (Report April 13, 1964 pp. 31-38). The field director of SCEF was Carl Braden, a known communist agitator who was also involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy as a member. King maintained regular correspondence with Carl Braden. Bayard Rustin, a known communist, was also on the board of SCLC.
Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., 1957, previously known as the Commonwealth College until the House Committee on un-American Activities sited it as a communist front (April 27, 1949). HCAA found that Commonwealth was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing New Testament texts to those of Karl Marx. King knew many communists associated with the Highlander school.
King hired communist official Hunter Pitts O’Dell, 1960, at the SCLC. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported (Oct. 26, 1962) “A Communist has infiltrated the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King’s SCLC. He is Jack H. O’Dell, acting executive director of conference activities in the southeastern states including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.” Dr. King fired O’Dell when this became public but subsequently rehired him to head the SCLC New York office.
King himself expresses a Marxist outlook in his book “Stride Toward Freedom” when he stated, “in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me even more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism has greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system”
King, unfortunately, didn’t understand that it was Capitalism and freedom that was responsible for the successes the African-American community already had achieved in his day and the key to future success. By “better distribution of wealth” King meant state control over the economy. His contempt for “the profit motive” was unfortunate given that African-Americans should’ve been encouraged by their leaders to seek fair profit to the best of their ability. King’s leftist ideas contributed to an opening of the floodgates to such radicals as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, as well as the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of poverty perpetrating welfare, the destruction of the family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.
In “Stride Toward Freedom” Dr. King states “In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yea and a partial no. My readings of Marx convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.”
King, like Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, had “a dialectical point of view.” The goal of the dialectic is authoritarianism. A nation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, cannot be half free and half slave. By advocating socialism, King chose an imperious stand toward his own people in contrast to a stand for genuine freedom, self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital. King did not advocate the American system of free market capitalism. Instead, he stood for a system that has stunted the growth of African-Americans as well as the rest of us.
All Marxists believe in Hegelian Dialectics. This is a belief that “progress” is achieved through conflict between opposing viewpoints. Any ideological assertion (thesis) will create its own opposite (antithesis). Progress is achieved when a conclusion (synthesis) is reached which espouses aspects of both the thesis and antithesis.
For example, Hitler had a dialectical point of view. He rejected Marxist class warfare, but embraced the basic socialist idea of the insignificance of the individual compared to the collective state.
This belief in dialectical progress is why liberals pit the rich against the poor, old against young, black against white, men against women, gay against straight, ad nauseam.
King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? “I am now convinced…the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” But “to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure” it “must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income” and “must automatically increase as the total social income grows.” So far, his proposal was not materially different from Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth program. This was from his later works, but he had voiced support for “a modified form of socialism” for some time. While accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King told the press, “We feel we have much to learn from Scandinavia’s democratic socialist tradition and from the manner in which you have overcome many of the social and economic problems that still plague far more powerful and affluent nations.”
This issue is somewhat clouded by what Dr. King wrote in his 1957 book “Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story”, in which he wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the Communist super state of the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.
“During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized *Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.
First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularist and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the means.
Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an ‘interim’ reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man’s so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself.”
Martin Luther King Jr., *Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story* (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 92-93
Don’t forget that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppressions of the Soviet Union are painfully evident, evidenced by the brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. At the time Stride toward Freedom was written, domestic attitudes toward communism could not have been more hostile. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life, the counterculture revolution of the sixties and the leftist tinted civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism generally more palatable.
The fact is that he WAS a socialist and that goes to the heart of what went wrong with the civil rights establishment after the legal battles against codified discrimination were won.
I am a black man who has been getting calluses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaguing the black community in favor of free market solutions that are far more appropriate today. These forces frequently cite Dr. King and use his exhortations to government to lead the way. They specifically cite his socialist outlook as justification for their continuance. The two parent black family was destroyed by LBJ’s welfare state. That was the worst cultural calamity to EVER befall the black community in the US, and the most destructive force in its cultural life notwithstanding the imposition of Jim Crow law via the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Fergueson decision. MLK was a leading proponent for expanding the welfare state, whose baleful effects were just beginning to be seen in the black community.
MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. There is much about him that I admire. An assessment of his life could creditably yield the adjective of great. Despite that, he does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure in our history, he was the “indispensable man.” Without his courage, acumen, honor, and integrity, the US would simply not exist, and if it did, it probably would have been as a monarchy and certainly not as a constitutional republic.
I disagree with this authors premise. The divine right of Kings philosophy was also based on the unseen, or God. But the cornerstone of the divine right philosophy was that men weren’t created equal, that some men, Kings and other rulers, were created by God better than others to rule. That governments were divinely ordained by God.
The Declaration of Independence presented a new philosophy of government with a new cornerstone. The new philosophy was that governments are created by men to protect their rights. The cornerstone of this philosophy was that all men were created equal. God did not make some men better to rule over others.
Under the divine right of Kings philosophy slavery is fine. It fits in that philosophy. However slavery is incompatible, even antithetical, to the DoI and our philosophy of government.
The American Revolution produced the constitutionally limited power federal government.
Unfortunately, partly as a consequence of all the wars the US has gotten into, martial law arguably never completely disappearing after a war, corrupt lawmakers have not only exploited martial law but have also manufactured their own crises to unconstitutionally expand the federal government’s powers imo.
”I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” —James Madison, Speech at the Virginia Convention to ratify the Federal Constitution (1788-06-06)
”To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.” —Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson's Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank : 1791
”The system of the General Government is to seize all doubtful ground. We must join in the scramble, or get nothing. Where first occupancy is to give right, he who lies still loses all.” —Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1797.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA64), for example, a law made by misguided Republicans, but brilliantly exploited by post-17th Amendment ratification Democrats, is largely based on constitutionally non-existent federal government powers.
More specifically, despite the wide range of race and sex-related protections established by CRA64 and its titles, it remains that the only powers that the states have expressly constitutionally given to the feds to make laws that protect on the basis of race and sex are actually limited to voting rights issues, evidenced by the 15th and 19th Amendments.
Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation [emphasis added].”
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation [emphasis added]."
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
The remedy for patriots being oppressed under the boots of unconstitutionally big federal government…
Send "Orange Man Bad" federal and state government desperate Democrats and RINOs home in November!
Supporting PDJT with a new patriot Congress and state government leaders that will promise to fully support his already excellent work for MAGA and stopping SARS-CoV-2 will effectively give fast-working Trump a "third term" in office imo.
"The “Holy Grail” of organized crime is to party with Uncle Sam's "unlimited credit card."" —me
"The power to tax involves the power to destroy, [...]” —Chief Justice John Marshall, McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819.
"The 16th Amendment effectively repealed the involuntary servitude aspect of the 13th Amendment imo, evidenced by unconstitutional federal taxes." —me
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"13th Amendment, Section 1:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude [emphasis added], except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
"16th Amendment:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
"It’s politically correct, under the Democratic Party and its tyrant judges, to use your voting power to make your fellow citizens involuntary servants." —me
"The Democratic elite define a "pro-choice" democracy as being able to vote for your preferred master." —me
"The ill-conceived 17th Amendment not only effectively politically repealed the 3/4 state supermajority requirement of the Constitution’s Article V for ratification of proposed amendments to the Constitution imo, politically correct interpretations of the Constitution now prevailing under Democratic judicial tyranny, but also consider this. That amendment also effectively nullified Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers along with the Supreme Court’s clarification of Congress’s limited power to appropriate taxes." —me
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"The constitutionally undefined political parties are basically rival, corrupt voter unions, “union dues” paid by means of unconstitutional federal taxes. Belonging to a political party means that you are a subject, not a member.” —me
"Patriots need to support PDJT in demanding that Congress moves "April 15" tax day to the day before election day." —me
"The smart crooks long ago figured out that getting themselves elected to federal office to make unconstitutional tax laws to fill their pockets is a much easier way to make a living than robbing banks." —me
"Federal career lawmakers probably laugh all the way to the bank to deposit bribes for putting loopholes for the rich and corporations in tax appropriations laws, Congress actually not having the express constitutional authority to make most appropriations laws where domestic policy is concerned. Such laws are based on stolen state powers and uniquely associated stolen state revenues." —me
A great Douglass quote.
Thanks for posting this. We will need this, after the war. We will want to put America back they way it should have been: with laws in alignment with “the laws of nature and of Nature’s God.”
Thank you for this well-written rebuttal to the common trope that King wasn’t a Marxist/Communist.
bump
Wonderful thread here!
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