Insubordinate Americans

Quigley's Deli, off of Highway 96

Dispatches from the State of Jefferson

My family and I have a long-standing tradition of taking one summer road trip a year, and last week we took the opportunity to travel up to the good old State of Jefferson — because seriously, what’s better family fun than discussing political sovereignty and learning about new ways to kick off our government overlords? The only better way would have been a beach trip to Hawaii, but maybe next year.

Jokes aside, the primary reason we took the trip was to see the beautiful scenery of northern California, and we only visited one county — the largest one, Siskiyou — included in the proposed 51st state. I didn’t attend any official State of Jefferson meetings or converse with any of the movement’s leaders; in fact I mostly just talked to average people we happened to stumble across. Nevertheless, the trip provided me with some experiences I’ll never forget, cemented an unshakeable allegiance in my heart to the people of Siskiyou county, and taught me more about what’s at stake for supporters of the State of Jefferson movement than anything else possibly could have.

Let me start off by saying something blunt about the initial disappointments of the trip. Sorry, J. Arthur Bloom, but if you were to take the pulse of the Jefferson movement by a visit to Yreka alone, you’d come away thinking it was deader than dead. Yreka was the first stop on our destination, chosen because it seemed to be the historic focal point of statehood-related activities. After all, this is the place where it all started, when a group of gallant young men decided to hold up Highway 99 declaring that they would “secede each Thursday until further notice.” It is also where Judge John C. Childs was inaugurated (with bears and all) as interim governor of Jefferson in 1941. One would think this would be the place with the greatest passion and fervor of all.

Of the locals I talked to here, I got the feeling that most of them thought of the statehood movement as akin to something like a “Keep Austin Weird” campaign; a novel piece of regional heritage which can be fun to celebrate—certainly something you can sell shirts over—but an idea which is, at bottom, more of a dream of outsiders than an impending reality. And to my surprise, as I walked the town, I found nothing much more serious than stores selling ‘official merchandise.’ Yreka’s museum, which was otherwise very extensive, housed not a single exhibit on the famous story of 1941; even the courthouse where Childs once walked was empty. The annual Siskiyou Golden Fair, which just happened to be going on at the time, was the only place that proved fruitful in my search for secessionist enthusiasm. It was here that I found a Tea Party booth proudly flying the double crosses and offering a raffle for a houseboat vacation (which are apparently the new militia movement).

The thing about Tea Parties, as many have pointed out, is that they’re different wherever you go. And this one certainly wasn’t of the Jenny Beth Martin flavor. As I picked up a Jefferson Backroads magazine sitting on the table, the man at the booth seemed more anxious to hand me another, much more radical, pamphlet; a pamphlet created by Anthony Intiso, a man who’s put on his big boy pants and left the sandbox by proposing a completely independent Republic of Jefferson, instead of merely a new state. Intiso used to think that statehood would be fine, until he recognized what should be glaringly obvious: becoming a new state under an unconstitutional federal system “puts you right back where you started. You may think you’ve gained some freedom—and you may have to a certain extent,certain extent on a state–California — basis, but not from the federal government, because you can’t be a state in that system without adhering to their rules.”

This is a legitimate criticism and we’ll get back to it later, but in the meantime leftists and distributists should know, in case the Tea Party label scares them, that there’s something for everyone here. Intiso’s group, for example, is strongly anti-corporate, and he seems to have even bought into a wacky conspiracy theory which holds that the entity we call the state is literally just a giant private corporation. A little rough around the edges, but hey, he’s got character. Purple up his prose a bit and it sounds like it’s straight out of Tate and Agar’s classic Who Owns America? I’ll take him! (more…)

atlantis3

We’re all Atlanteans here

 “All that is said by any of us can only be imitation and representation. For if we consider the likenesses which painters make of bodies divine and heavenly, and the different degrees of gratification with which the eye of the spectator receives them, we shall see that we are satisfied with the artist who is able in any degree to imitate the earth and its mountains, and the rivers, and the woods, and the universe, and the things that are and move therein, and further, that knowing nothing precise about such matters, we do not examine or analyze the painting; all that is required is a sort of indistinct and deceptive mode of shadowing them forth.” — Critias

“If thou dost not now recognize thine own thought-forms … the lights will daunt thee, the sounds will awe thee, and the rays will terrify thee.” — Tibetan Book of the Dead

h/t @enagurney, with the music video.

I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered.
*****

Tom Bertonneau investigates the myth of Atlantis, and finds himself quite sympathetic to its expositors:

Historians have long since tidied up history and set all the dates.  The professors know what they know.

But do they really know what they know or are they merely being professional such that, like all professionals nowadays, their choler boils over preemptively concerning any idea not fully vetted by the peer-review committee of Soporifica?  Or on the other hand is there not in the imaginations of Messrs. Rudbeck, Spence, Haggard and Hyne, and their kith and kin, something like a profound intuition?

What kind of intuition?

“A great universal civilization in deep prehistory,” Michell called it, the memory of which persisted until the moment when the Enlightenment ceased to countenance anything except itself about midway through the Eighteenth Century.

I commend to you Rune Soup’s Whisky Rants, all of them. He’s like the Moldbug of chaos magic. The one on Atlantis is very interesting and asks some good questions; I’m not really convinced that the Cuban underwater city is quite worth getting excited about yet, but let’s run with it for a minute:

Atlantis has been found. If you admit that fact then the museum is in immediate need of miles and miles of redecorating. And this is just one place. The whole edifice of the western European narrative starts to slip like a clown’s face in the rain. …

There is a fucking city of step pyramids and processional streets stretching thousands of square metres at the bottom of the sea.

There are several of those, but the specific one in question does have something of an unusual story, involving a Soviet defector named Paulina Zelitsky and her Canadian husband, Paul Weinzweig. There hasn’t been a subsequent expedition since the ‘discovery’ was made in 2001, which is unfortunate but given political realities involving Cuba, not necessarily indicative of any kind of cover-up. Zelitsky more or less disappeared, with the exception of this report about her being arrested in Mexico, until about a year ago when her two-volume memoir, of sorts, came out. I haven’t read it, but the description on Amazon says:

Paulina concludes in her arguments that the main strategy of the current Russian Government is to attain global dominion, naturally prioritizing it in the Arctic which is absolutely strategically important for Russia in military and economic terms. The “sabre-rattling” strategy adopted by the current Russian government not just in Arctic but also in the Gulf of Mexico is directed toward military intimidation of their Arctic neighbors in order to maintain full military control and develop Arctic resources without interference from other Arctic neighbors. The nuclear deterrent cycle is about to repeat once again with Russian government rebuilding its previously abandoned military bases in Cuba and once again secretly sending its navy equipped with nuclear missiles to Cuba.

Sounds crazy, right? But just maybe a little prescient, given this news two weeks ago. She’s also taken up internet commenting, posting largely on Ukrainian affairs — she was educated in Odessa — and is clearly quite opposed to Russia’s new self-assertion on the world stage.

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Jacobites, Masons, and Fredericksburg

I’m about halfway through Jake Bacharach’s The Bend of the World, which is enormously fun to read. You should all go and buy it now. It deals heavily with the occult history of Pittsburgh, and this being a somewhat witchy post, there’s one bit that’s just too topical not to begin with. It’s what is proving to be one of my favorite characters, the protagonist’s best friend Johnny, describing the theories of one Winston Pringle, in a book called Fourth River, Fifth Dimension:

So basically, he said, you’ve got this ancient sacred geometry, sacred topography, what with the three rivers and the underground fourth river all meeting at the Point. Usual back story. Indians knew it was holy, blah blah blah. So the Marquis Du Quesne, who’s the governor-general of New France, and who also just happens to be the grand master of the Priory of Scion, hears about this, in particular the fourth river, which is, duh, obviously, the underground stream of medieval European esotericism, immediately puts together an exhibition, kicks out the Indians, and builds Fort Duquesne. So then Adam Weishaupt, the thirty-third-degree Freemason and immortal founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, gets wind of this, and basically does the Illuminati version of Aw No She Di’in! Now, uh, well, there’s basically a big digression about how Shea and Wilson stole all of Pringle’s ideas about Weishaupt killing and replacing George Washington, but yeah, basically, he uses Washington, who he either is or is manipulating, and conceives the Forbes expedition, and burns down Fort Duquesne, and erects Fort Pitt, and lays the groundwork for the founding of Pittsburgh. Then etc. etc. ad infinitum, a bunch of boring shit. Then Andrew Carnegie arrives and him and Frick get involved; Frick, by the way, is linked back to the Priory of Sion via a tenuous connection to Isaac Newton; the Pinkertons at the Homestead Strike, that’s all basically a blood sacrifice sort of thing, it begins this century-long magical working, which eventually gets taken over by the CIA, of course, which is where Pringle’s family gets involved. It’s the goddamn Remembrances of Conspiracies Past. Well, the point is to open up the transdimensional portal between quantum realities, allowing travel between any points in space-time and total control over the historical timeline and all that good stuff. I’m telling you, it’s fucking awesome.

*****

The fateful Braddock expedition, which preceded the Forbes expedition by several years, crossed the Potomac at a place called the Key of All Keys, the name for a big rock that served as a landmark in what is now Washington, DC. In the army’s ranks at the time was a lieutenant colonel by the name of George Washington. Today, all that remains of the Key of All Keys lies at the bottom of a covered well near the present location of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which may or may not be built on human remains. According to most accounts, the stone from the area was quarried for use in the White House and Capitol.

At some point Braddock’s army was joined by a former Jacobite-turned-country doctor, Hugh Mercer, who had moved to the Pennsylvania frontier in 1746 after serving as a surgeon until the Battle of Culloden. He quickly enlisted in the very same army that he fought ten years earlier. Accounts vary as to where exactly Washington and Mercer met, either at the Monongahela or at the beginning of the Forbes expedition, but at any rate they became close friends. Washington was already a Mason at the time, having joined the newly-formed Fredericksburg Masonic lodge in November 1752 (It was officially chartered by the Grand Lodge of Scotland in 1758).

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Salondotcom linkfest

A week ago, just before the account was returned to us, I went on the Rick Amato show to talk about the suppression of @salondotcom. Quite happy to be introduced as “definitely not a jagoff”:

I forgot to mention that it was probably Salon that reported us, but what can you do. Here’s a round-up of news coverage, after the jump:

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Buzzfeed and the War Party

My latest at TheDC:

Ben Smith appears to have been convinced by one of the neoconservatives’ top operators that neoconservative is no longer a useful label, and has now endorsed that person’s replacement term. Quite a trick, isn’t it? Imagine Lila Rose convincing the Associated Press to start using “pro-life” again and you’ll get a sense of the journalistic malfeasance at work.

Jamie Weinstein, Funniest Celebrity in Washington, sticks his fingers in his ears and doesn’t seem to like that I mentioned his friends.

The conflict of individual against community

Andrew Sullivan, acting a bit more of a spin doctor than usual after reading Mark Lilla’s sobering piece on the modern political context we live in, declared an empathic victory in the name of individual freedom earlier this week, calling modern America a nation of libertarians in an acid-laced bit of wankery the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Windsor decision – or his recent compensatory tirades on manliness, depending on your view of wankery. Money shot (because he’s too much a coward to say it himself):

The core idea of this post-ideological new age was simply expanding the freedom of the individual – and it was embraced economically by the right, socially by the left, and completely by the next generation of pragmatic liberaltarians.

The blather on display here is incredibly detached, and fails to seriously take into consideration that individual freedom has not been triumphant, but in fact contracting more than it has been expanding thanks to government and corporate interests.  But to discuss that at length would be a hindrance, and any response would likely be apathetic.

Instead, let us focus on the core problem Sullivan attempts to address in the post: The matter of foreign policy in response to this development, as well as the loss of hegemony following the quixotic crusades that were Iraq and Afghanistan. In fairness, Brooks’ calls for a return to worshiping the American Dream and the glory that is the nation’s “exceptionalism” (a word which people tend to forget was coined by Stalin as an insult) comes off as dense and paranoiac. It shows him clinging to the old parameters of which the world existed, a time that barely has meaning now. But to call Sullivan’s own response nonsense would be a bit of an understatement:

But there is another, saner response to this, and Lilla points the way. It is to re-exercize the intellectual muscles that created and then defended the idea of democratic capitalism – and to use them, first of all, to address the democratic deficits in our own too-often bought-and-paid-for republic, to build and defend intermediate institutions that check individualism’s acidic power – families, churches, neighborhoods, school-boards, sports leagues, AA meetings. And so we match gay freedom with gay marriage and military service, embracing libertarianism but hitching it to institutions that also connect it to the community as a whole.

To start with, where does Lilla even mention this, other than in a vague hint about the potential of reactionary right with the parable of the golem? Even then, he was more making a point than suggesting a solution. Also, what that has to do with foreign policy is beyond anyone’s imagination.

Sullivan’s extrapolation seems more a desire to display his Thatcherite paternalism than anything functional, for many of his suggestions are institutions designed to strangulate individuality. The military are specialists in this line of business: Nothing strips away individual freedom more than being trained against nature into becoming an efficient killing machine. Yet families, churches, any community-style organization are also capable of undermining the independence of the individual.

But then, that’s the point of a community, and therein lies the modern conflict that Sullivan fails to appreciate.
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