The Bill of Rights turns 232 years old today. Adopted in 1791 as a consolation prize for the Anti-Federalists,  it has been perhaps the most important part of American legal history since the eighteenth century and has served as an inconvenient reminder of the laissez-faire libertarian philosophy that permeated American political theory in the late 18th century.

As I noted in “Magna Carta and the Fantasy of Legal Constraints on States,” words written on parchment do not actually protect anyone’s freedoms, and legal constraints on state power are only as good as the ideological backing they receive from the population.

Nevertheless, for all its weaknesses, the Bill of Rights—when taken seriously by the general population—has played a part in preserving basic human rights for Americans that were eviscerated in many nations long ago. Thanks to the First Amendment and those who support it, for example, freedom of speech is often more respected in the United States than is almost any place one might hold up as an example. One can be arrested and imprisoned for saying unpopular things in France and Germany, just to name two examples. (And we’re not even considering the far more illiberal states of Asia.)

How absurd it was, for example, to hear the French pretend to be supporters of freedom of speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre when the French state imposed legal sanctions on people for saying allegedly anti-Semitic or racist things. In Germany, one can be imprisoned for saying unpopular things about Nazis or the Holocaust. What most (but not all) Americans understand—and what the French and Germans don’t—is that in a free country, some people will say repugnant things.

The First Amendment can also be partly credited for the lack of strong anti-defamation laws in the United States. For example, thanks to the First Amendment, federal law makes it very difficult for government agents to sue members of the public for alleged “defamatory” behavior. The whole concept of defamation, of course, is just a way to shut people up who say things the “victims” don’t like.

Moreover, religious freedom has never been more than a temporary convenience for people in most of the world. The French government seized Catholic churches long ago, and most of Europe shut down religious services during the Covid Panic. In the United States, these shutdowns were shorter, less widespread, and more haphazard due primarily to the lingering power of the First Amendment, as written. And certainly, for all the anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism that has reared its head in America over the decades, nothing compares to the government-sanctioned anti-Semitism that has at times permeated France, Germany, Austria, and a host of other “free” countries in Europe.

And as far as being Catholic goes, even the worst anti-Catholic persecutions in American history have nothing on the persecutions concocted by anti-Catholic regimes of the Spaniards, French, Mexicans, Brits, Japanese, and many others.

As for property rights — which includes the right to own weapons for self-defense — the US regime has managed to find new exceptions to this every year, but even in that case, the US often comes off looking relatively less awful. We need to look no further than the French regime’s scattered jihads against basic privacy and property.

Of course, most regimes do this every time there’s an “emergency.” In Canada, during World War II, the federal government mandated registration of all firearms, which it claimed was necessary to fight domestic subversion. Human rights go right out the window in the UK whenever the state feels the “need.” The US itself suspended habeas corpus and a host of other human rights during the Civil War. And the Bill of Rights didn’t prevent the internment of the Japanese-Americans, many of whom, unlike the Reservation Indians of old, were full-blown American citizens.

In the long sordid history of conquest and colonialism, the US has held its own (in a bad way), whether in the Philippines in Iraq or on the Western frontier of North America. And yet, the presence of the Bill of Rights and the ideology it represents has long been an inconvenience and an impediment — albeit often a weak one —to an even more aggressive state in terms of prosecuting “enemies” of the state who oppose American militarism.

A Bright Spot in an Unnecessary Constitution 

Bizarrely revered by many as a “pro-freedom” document, the document now generally called “the Constitution” was originally devoted almost entirely toward creating a new, bigger, more coercive, more expensive version of the United States. The United States, of course, had already existed since 1777 under a functioning constitution that had allowed the United States to enter into numerous international alliances and win a war against the most powerful empire on earth.

That wasn’t good enough for the oligarchs of the day, the crony capitalists with names like Washington, Madison, and Hamilton.  Hamilton and friends had long plotted for a more powerful United States government to allow the mega-rich of the time, like George Washington and James Madison, to more easily develop their lands and investments with the help of government infrastructure. Hamilton wanted to create a clone of the British Empire to allow him to indulge his grandiose dreams of financial imperialism.

The tiny Shays Rebellion in 1786 finally provided them with a chance to press their ideas on the masses and to attempt to convince the voters that there was already too much freedom going on in America at the time.

The Federalists didn’t mention that they’d benefit personally from the new constitution, of course, but instead focused on the idea that without a stronger central government, the country would be overthrown by the powers of “faction.”

Patrick Henry and the Anti-Federalists pointed out—correctly—that the US already had proven it had sufficient means to deal with European powers, and that in the bloody history of states, the true threat to freedom lay not in there being too much freedom, as the Federalists claimed, but in the overweening power of centralized states.

Virtually no one believed that a new constitution was necessary to secure what they had earlier called their “English Liberties,” including freedom of speech, a right to due process, jury trials, and more. Those freedoms were already assumed to be assured to all non-slaves. Those freedoms had been won in the Revolution. The people didn’t need a more powerful Congress to protect them. If their freedoms were threatened, the people could rely on highly democratic (for the time) state legislatures and a decentralized militia system.

But, in the end, the Federalists won out after they promised to adopt a Bill of Rights to limit the power of Congress. As we know, though, the Bill of Rights began to break down immediately, and it was only a matter of time until the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson’s embargo, and other even worse crimes perpetrated on the states and the people.

It was the Constitution of 1787, after all, that strengthened the institution of slavery, set the stage for the fugitive slave acts, and made provision for the criminal prosecution of those who attempted to help set escaped slaves free.

That’s what sort of “pro-freedom” document the Constitution was and is.

What the Constitutions Should Have Said 

The Bill of Rights would never have been necessary, however, if so much power had not been granted to the central government by the constitution of 1787 in the first place.

Indeed, the earlier constitution of 1777 (the so-called Articles of Confederation) had itself been too detailed and powerful.

After all, the whole idea of a national constitution had always been sold on really just two premises: 1) It would assist in national defense and 2) it would facilitate trade among the member states.

In other words, it should never have been anything more than a customs union and a mutual defense agreement. So, in the service of sound political science, I have composed a new constitution for us:

Article 1. The United States shall meet every two years in Congress assembled to negotiate terms for the maintenance of a union of independent states. There shall be no duties or taxes imposed on trade among the states or the people therein. The states, in Congress assembled shall set the standards for membership in the United States and provide provision for member withdrawal and the conditions for receiving the benefits of mutual defense as a member of the Union.

The End.

Nothing more is necessary or prudent. Independent states enter into mutual defense agreements quite frequently, without surrendering their independence, and trade agreements are a quite mundane affair in the history of states.

Any appeal to “patriotism” or lofty ideas of “America” or the fanciful notion that people in Arizona are the countrymen of people in New York has no backing in the day-to-day realities of living. Never in history was there a group of 330 million people spread across four million square miles who were part of the same community and who shared the same experiences, interests, or even the same economic ties.

In reality, the people of Colorado, for example, have more in common with the people of Saskatchewan—in terms of economic interests, culture, and history—than with the people of Georgia or Delaware or Pennsylvania. People only believe the residents of the US states make up “one people” because their third-grade teachers told them as much. Actual experience tells us otherwise.

Those who demanded the Bill of Rights had attempted to preserve this idea of government on a human scale: government that reflects the realities of daily life, human relationships, and the necessity of free commerce—rather than the ideological fantasies of nation builders. Even to this day, the idea that the minutiae of life and commerce should be governed by a group of millionaires sitting in luxury 2,000 miles away is repugnant to the reasonable mind. In preventing this, the Bill of Rights has largely failed, although things most certainly could have been worse.

 

Ryan McMaken is executive editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in public policy, finance, and international relations from the University of Colorado. He was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

 

Ryan McMaken } Mises Wire

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America’s university systems are rotten to their core. The proof is in the Congressional hearings when university presidents refuse to denounce calls for genocide and in the streets filled with college kids chanting their approval for mass murder.

BREAKING: Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), presses Harvard President Claudine Gay on campus antisemitism during Congressional hearing. pic.twitter.com/8U7LnVqZ26

— Breaking 4 News (@Breaking_4_News) December 5, 2023

Still, our academic institutions weren’t captured on Oct. 7 when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel. This isn’t a new nightmare for American students. They have suffered in the ever-increasing radicalized world of collegiate education for decades. Traditional beliefs are demonized, while professors promote harmful sexual and racial ideologies as inherently good. (ROOKE: There’s A Good Reason Trad Wives Can’t Stop Telling You About Their Sex Lives)

And thus, there is little campus support for college-educated conservative women.

Most groups available to women are geared toward uplifting progressive causes antithetical to traditional values and beliefs. In “You’re Not Alone: The Conservative Woman’s Guide To College,” author Karin Lips shows young women entering their college years how to navigate their hostile campuses to find like-minded students and mentors.

“This book is here to mentor you on how to thrive on campus as a young conservative woman, even in the face of liberal intolerance,” she wrote. “You can earn good grades. You can make friends. You can successfully prepare for your career.”

Lips is the founder and president of the Network of Enlightened Women (NeW). It originally started as a book club for women who wanted to read classic books which were being left off the University of Virginia’s college syllabus. However, it has since grown into a national organization encouraging conservative women to connect on issues important to them.

In my new book, I tell the story of @CHSommers visiting UVA when I was a student.

Buy it today to see how campuses have changed and strategies for dealing with what’s happening on campuses today.https://t.co/8hBPS7DUhh

— Karin Lips (@klips) December 13, 2023

Although we differ in opinion on whether it is positive how our campuses have become predominately female, offering women a different path than bitter feminism is important if we want them to find their purpose. GirlBoss attitudes strip women of their femininity and encourage them to search for a life without family. It does our society no good to have large swaths of our female population stuck in lives that don’t fulfill them. Feminism would have them believe a family is incompatible with success, while the right mentor could show them options giving them the possibility of having both.

Lips’ advice for women to look for college campuses with higher ratios of women to men was ingenious. Of course, it would make sense that if a woman is looking for a man willing to marry young, she will need to be in an environment where men have less of a romantic choice. She calls this the “man deficit.” (ROOKE: Why Are So Many American Men Killing Themselves? The Answer’s Obvious)

“In places where there is a ‘man deficit,’ or an undersupply of college-educated men, men are less likely to commit. The college and post-college hookup culture, declining marriage rates among college-educated women, and lack of commitment by men, … are byproducts of an undersupply of college-educated men,” Lips wrote.

Her research found that “58% of women in college self-identify as liberal…whereas only 15% identify as conservative” and “almost 60% of female professors identify as liberal, while 22% identify as conservative.” Although the lack of intellectual diversity among the faculty and students can be lonely, it also makes it easier to find professors sympathetic to conservative students, according to Lips. She urges these women to create relationships with friendly faculty because they often help connect students with programs and think tanks looking for the next generation of conservative thinkers.

Lips’ guide gives conservative women a much-needed blueprint for holding on to their traditional values while finding their purpose.

 

Mary Rooke | Daily Caller

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline, and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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Another tragic loss as an otherwise young and healthy man suddenly drops dead. Lt. Col. Jered Little, “commander of Public Health Activity-Hawaii,” was proudly advertised en masse to encourage uptake of the COVID Vaccine. He died suddenly on Nov. 30 of a heart attack or stroke.

 

Arlington, VA mourns the sudden loss of one of its own, Army Lieutenant and Officer Jered Little, who passed away unexpectedly on Thursday, November 30, 2023, at the age of 39. The exact cause of his death has not been disclosed, but it is believed that he suffered a heart attack or a stroke.

 

Jab Poster Boy for the military passes away Nov 29 at age 39 pic.twitter.com/OxIA9pl6Ct

— Bama_Jeans (@bamajayt) December 12, 2023

 

 

Jered Little was an exceptional officer known for his leadership, dedication, and commitment to service. His military career was marked by strategic acumen and an unwavering sense of duty. Beyond his military life, Jered was a respected member of the Arlington community, often volunteering at local schools and mentoring young people.

 

 

His government and its public health apparatus lied to him despite his service, and now he is dead.

 

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Hello, Friends of Freedom,

Our wonderful country has been beset with an atmosphere of incivility for quiet sometime now. In my awareness of politics over the last 40 years it keeps going from one depth of darkness to even lower levels of attack not only on candidates but their families as well.

It seems the ability to speak in a disparaging way about each other as candidates is more important than addressing the issues we see all around every day, i.e., Poverty, homelessness, looting in our stores, suppression of freedom with civil implemented mandates that have no legal bases at all, and the ongoing spending our tax dollars for foreign wars, wasteful government bureaucratic offices, and of course lavish lifestyle of our leaders while the average American struggles to pay bills.

What is civility, and did we ever have it as a country? In our beginnings, we certainly did have attacks in the press at the time of each political party, but there was a limit, and when the important work had to be done, they actually did work together for the common good.

Our fathers and founding statesmen affirmed over and over in their writings that the most important source of our civil virtues was our grounding in religious faith and its freedom of expression in the culture.

A few quotes:

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall: “One great object of the colonial charters was avowedly the propagation of the Christian faith.”

John Adams: “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were….the general principles of Christianity.”

The list of government officials who validate the role of the Christian faith in our founding as a nation is or could be a good-sized book containing those quotes.

President Harry Truman openly affirmed that, “ In this great country of ours has been demonstrated the fundamental unity of Christianity and democracy.”

Also, our great French ally and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville recorded in his great work, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: “There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America-and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.”

We were blessed with the most unique form of government, perhaps since governments have been formed for the overall good of society. Our incredible Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, and our Bill of Rights have enabled mankind to achieve dignity, self-respect, nobleness, and prosperity that is unprecedented yet in modern or ancient history.

The Constitution, of course, being the CORNERSTONE of the building of the country, has laid a clear blueprint of the ideas of the founding fathers in relationship to freedoms that should be afforded to all of humanity.

Since we have had a decline of civility, perhaps we should examine the reason why. Could it be that we have simply accepted the cultural buzz and lies from the media about the role of faith and particularly Christianity that is nowhere regulated by law in any of their founding documents yet is presented as fact to a historically uneducated populace?

Let’s look at the celebration of Christmas. Since it is fast approaching, many people will not acknowledge its important role in the formation of Western Society. In fact, we have been pressured and had a veil of fear placed over us as Christians (if you are one). The simple greeting is no longer delivered with a robust smile and confidence but many Christians shy away from this incredible time of joy and often mutter the pablum phrase, “Happy holiday.” WORDS MATTER! (on an aside note, three of the Presidents of Ivy League colleges would not acknowledge evil with their words, and it cost one of them their job, and hundreds of petitions are moving for the firing of all three of them) Yes, WORDS MATTER! To deny the celebration of your faith by not acknowledging history is a dangerous thing, not just a polite way of saying I don’t want to offend anyone. The offense is in the suppression of your freedom of expression.) But I digress…lol.

For example, the widespread use of the word “HOLIDAYS” to describe what has traditionally been called Christmas for over 180 years in our culture. The removal of the Christian emblem of the Holy Family from public venues. No observance or acknowledgment in our public schools of the largest celebrated holiday in the Western World, if not the entire world? Yet we are reduced to and subjected to silence about it. This never happened when I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. Christmas still had a space and a place in every public venue, from banks to grocery stores, to libraries, and even public schools. But now people are even afraid to wish someone a MERRY CHRISTMAS? How did we get here?

I will tell you how we got here.

A simple phrase called Separation of Church and State. First of all, this phrase is found nowhere in any of our founding documents. Many have been taught that it is a part of the FIRST AMENDMENT, which simply states,

“CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW RESPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION OR PROHIBITING THE FREE EXPRESSION THEREOF.”

The words “separation,” “church,” or “state” are not found in the First Amendment. Yet many people, having never read the Constitution, think it is there. Also, if you prove to them it is not there, then they will say, but it is implied.

I hope in the next weeks to show you the origin of this phrase and how it has been used as a political tool to drive a wedge between common sense and civil celebration. Targeting the historically uneducated as they unwarily defend this phrase and use it to detract from the original intention of the founding fathers ideas, and especially targeting the idea of faith in the public arena.

Until Next Week,

Allen

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Nothing says let’s all get along like a gang of Muslime yutes (Yooouths) beating up a guy dressed as Santa on his way to be Santa for some local kids.

Half a dozen migrant youths attacked the 54-year-old victim whilst others watched and laughed.

 

The 54-year-old victim was due to perform at the Königsalm on Königsplatz in the city of Kassel on Dec. 6 when he was approached by a gang of youths who crossed the street and confronted him.

According to the victim, Rainer B., the gang comprised several teenagers of a migrant background around 15 years of age. He told police they insulted him, calling him a “son of a bitch” and a “fat man” and ordered him to remove his Santa Claus costume.

They said they were Muslim and that Germany was “their country,” the victim said, as reported by the Hessische Allgemeine newspaper.

When he refused, the gang turned violent and struck him, resulting in injuries to his neck and tearing his costume. In self-defense, the man hit one of his attackers in the face, causing them to flee towards Martinsplatz.

 

The Muslims are teaching the kids that Germany is their country. Is that the sort of thing that could rile up the Fatherland, or have the once proud German people been diversity whipped into submission?

One positive note. Santa did his gig. He showed up all tussled up and torn and talked to the kids. No pictures were allowed, which is a bit of a bummer. Given the cultural arc of Germany, it might have been useful to have that one on hand for the grandkids. Here I am with Santa after a group of adherents of the Religion of Peace roughed him up a bit.

Not that the caliphate would allow you to keep something like that.

Oh, and in keeping with my intermittent habit of messing with song lyrics.

 

I saw Muslims kicking Santa Claus.
On his way to Kessel Town last night
To scratch some angry itch
They knocked him down into the  ditch
Tore his suit did those Muslim Yutes
Then called him a son of a bitch.

 

I couldn’t help myself. Ans yes, it could be better.

 

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