The Big COVID Con Exposed - By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

 

One of the great grifter movies, aside from the Clinton and Obama presidencies, is The Sting. Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) and Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford} team up, “to pull off a complicated scheme known simple as the Big Con,” a racket to crush Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) and his empire.

We have had several iterations of the Big Con over the past four years, with Gondorff and Hooker played by a rotating cast including James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. All schemed and conspired to destroy Donald Trump and his family and presidency.

The latest sequel features Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx as the grifters and swindlers, using the Chinese coronavirus as the Big Con to keep President Trump from winning a second term in the White House. In the movie, the con succeeded but in Washington D.C., the con-verse is happening, with the schemes blowing up in the faces of the deep state grifters.

In the past week, two pillars of the COVID Con collapsed: deaths and positive tests. Back in April, the news was all about death counts. Fox News ran a death tally on the screen, much like the running score of football game. Cable news shows talked about nothing but rising death counts, spreading fear porn to justify recommendations for staying at home and shutting down the U.S. economy.

The first crack in the pillar occurred in early May when task force member Dr. Birx claimed, “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust.” She believed the CDC was inflating Wuhan flu mortality by as much as 25 percent.

The pillar of COVID deaths crumbled just days ago when the CDC updated their mortality numbers to reflect deaths “from COVID” versus deaths “with COVID.”

Death with COVID means that George Floyd is counted a COVID death because he tested positive at autopsy. This is similar to the case of a Colorado man dying of alcohol poisoning but the death was later blamed on COVID. Washington public officials counted gunshot fatalities as COVID deaths.

The new CDC statistics show that only 6,640 deaths are due to COVID alone, rather than the commonly reported 164,280 deaths allegedly associated with COVID. In other words, only 4 percent of media sensationalized deaths were due solely to COVID and not other underlying medical conditions.

Could COVID have been a contributory factor? Sure, but what about the underlying comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, even terminal cancer, all of which significantly increased the risk of death from COVID or even the seasonal flu. The CDC summarized it succinctly, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.”

What this means is that those at lower risk, younger and healthier, are extremely unlikely to die from the Chinese flu, and shutting down the economy to protect the healthy makes little sense, unless economic destruction is the ultimate goal.

Not surprisingly, this revision received little attention in the DNC media, covered only by conservative news sites like Gateway Pundit. Not only ignored, but the truth was suppressed with Twitter blaming the updated CDC numbers on QAnon and removing tweets discussing the new data.

It seems the left wants QAnon to be the new “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton once blamed for reports that her husband was having sex with a young White House intern. Yet the CDC numbers are on their website and the blue dress spoke for itself.

As death counts became suspect and testing ramped up, the media did a smooth sashay to case counts, or positive tests. Death counts and hospitalizations were flat, suggesting herd immunity was present in many parts of the country. To justify keeping businesses, churches, and schools closed, the DNC media now focused on positive tests.

A positive test means simply that there are viral particles in a person’s respiratory tract. They have been infected months ago and the sensitive PCR test detected dead viral fragments. A positive test does not mean a person is sick or contagious. And more testing means more positive cases, leading to so-called “surges” that were anything but.

Days ago, in of all places, the New York Times, the second pillar of the COVID Con crumbled, as they reported,

The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.

Sensitivity of the PCR tests has to do with amplification of genetic material from the virus. The fewer cycles required, the higher the viral load and greater likelihood of being contagious. By setting the threshold of amplification cycles too high, the test is overly sensitive.

Imagine a home security alarm so sensitive that it is triggered by a wind gust or leaf hitting a window. The homeowner will certainly be alerted if an intruder is attempting to break in, but the alarm will be going off constantly with false, or in the case of the virus, non-clinically significant positives. Or as the NY Times put it,

Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.

33 amplification cycles may be the upper limit for detecting live virus, according to the CDC, but many commercial labs are using 40 cycles as a positive test, in essence sounding the burglar alarm when a bird lands on the back deck.

The NY Times found, “Up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” Yet lockdowns of businesses and schools continue based on these wildly inaccurate numbers.

Is this purposeful or incompetent? I suggest the former. President Trump downplayed testing in favor of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine. The Democrat-media establishment immediately pushed for more testing and told everyone that hydroxy was as deadly as cyanide.

Fox News crank Neil Cavuto said of hydroxy, “It will kill you.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming an “evidence-based” approach to combating the Chinese flu, pushed for “testing, testing, testing.” Yet both of those admonitions were fear-based, not evidence-based.

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

 

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn, Twitter, Parler, and QuodVerum.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_big_covid_con_exposed.html 

Mayors, governors, presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, popes, potentates - by Jon Rappoport

 (So - is it better to 'stay safe' or be informed? Yeah, I know - who's got time to be informed when everyone I know is masked up to stay safe. After all, DaMajority is always right - right? Muh teacher always said that and she knows everythin' - right? - CL)

 

Based on my vast experience as a translator, this is what these leaders are saying:

“We’re too stupid to know what’s going on. So we rely on our public health officials. What they recommend becomes law or edict. Right away.”

“We’re in the process of committing economic suicide. We would ask you to join us, but there is no asking. You’re in, whether you like it or not. And the ‘we’ is a bit of a misnomer, because as leaders, our paychecks are secure. Also, ‘in the process of committing’ isn’t entirely correct, because we’ve already accomplished the aforementioned suicide. Apparently, one can achieve the act of self-destruction multiple times.”

“For example, we re-open our economies, expand testing with worthless tests, rack up false positives, and then on the basis of these meaningless case numbers, we move to lockdowns again.”

“Don’t blame us. We’re too stupid to know what we’re doing. Of course, we SEE what we’re doing, but there is a distinction between seeing and knowing. Our people are sorting out that distinction now, and we’ll get back to you with clarifications, as we can.”

“There are two issues we need to explain. First, the CDC has announced that only six percent of COVID deaths have been caused by the virus alone. In all other instances, the elderly victims were already suffering from multiple and serious health conditions. We’re aware that these prior conditions, plus the inflicted terror of a COVID diagnosis, plus the ensuing isolation from family and family, have been sufficient to cause death in 94 percent of ALL persons labeled ‘death by the virus.’ NO VIRUS IS REQUIRED. Startling, isn’t it? But we ignore all this. Why? Because we’re told to.”

Second, as the New York Times has revealed, up to 90 percent of all cases of COVID, defined by a positive test, are indeed meaningless, because the quantity of virus in people’s bodies is so infinitesimal, no harm would come to them and no contagion from person to person would occur. We also ignore this matter, because we’re told to.”

“Ordinarily, these two major developments would lead us to proclaim, ‘Go back to work, go back to your lives, take off your masks, it’s all over.’ But we don’t make that proclamation. We carry on as if nothing has happened. Why? In order to remain consistent, and because we’re told to. We’re that stupid.”

“There is a third issue, now that we think of it. The US and the UK, back in March, were considering open policies. No lockdowns. Then a demonstrably failed computer modeler named Neil Ferguson, from the Imperial College of London, stated that 500,000 people could die in the UK, and two million could die in the US. On that basis, with no investigation of Ferguson’s abysmal track record, both countries went to lockdowns and the first round of economic suicide. Other countries followed suit. Why? We leaders of these countries understood the economic and human consequences, but we didn’t GRASP the consequences. The distinction, here again, is in the process of being sorted out.”

“In the interest of full disclosure, there is a yet a fourth issue we must place on the table and enter into the record. You see, at the beginning of this whole business, in Wuhan, we really have no idea what researchers did or didn’t do, in their lab, which resulted in them announcing they had discovered a new coronavirus that was causing a serious outbreak.”

“We’re not permitted in these labs. There is no video of the step by step process which occurred in the Wuhan lab. There were no non-conflicted independent observers. Bottom line: we don’t know whether a new virus was actually discovered.”

“We do know no traditional large-scale electron microscope studies have been performed, using tissue samples from, say, a thousand patients who were supposedly afflicted with the epidemic disease.”

“We also know the researchers started with a piece of RNA they simply PRESUMED came from a virus. One more…oddity.”

“We also know the researchers stated that pneumonia was the cardinal feature of the new epidemic. Yet, going back decades, about 300,000 people a year in China die from pneumonia. That means millions of cases of pneumonia occur every year in China.”

“We also know that if these researchers in Wuhan had looked through the windows of their lab, they would have seen a deadly haze. This is called air pollution. In Wuhan, and other Chinese cities, the lethal mixture of early industrial age and modern industrial age polluting toxins is unprecedented in human history.”

“This pollution causes all sorts of lung infections, including pneumonia, which, again, was said to be cardinal feature of the NEW epidemic.”

“We know and yet we don’t know, if you catch our drift.”

“We can add things up but the conclusion evades us.”

“We see but we don’t understand.”

“However, bear with us. There is much to sort out and clarify.”

“The light WILL shine through the darkness.”

“You’re in our thoughts and prayers.”

“Thank you for your service.”

“That is all.”

NO, YOU FINE FEATHERED LEADERS. THAT IS VERY DEFINITELY NOT ALL. THE SHIT STORM IS ALREADY COMING YOUR WAY.

DUCK.

 

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/09/02/mayors-governors-presidents-prime-ministers-dictators-kings-queens-popes-potentates/

Where Will All These War Games Lead? – Patrick J. Buchanan

Potential collisions between the U.S., Russia or China are not even back-burner issues this election year. Meanwhile, we are consumed by the coronavirus, the crashed economy, racial divisions and riots that have ripped apart cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha since the Memorial Day death of George Floyd.

 

In northeast Syria last week, a U.S. military vehicle collided with a Russian armored vehicle, injuring four American soldiers.

Both the Americans and Russians blame each other for failing to follow established rules of the road. Had an American been killed, we could have had a crisis on our hands.

Query: With the ISIS caliphate dead and buried, why are 500 U.S. troops still in Syria a year after Donald Trump said we would be pulling them out? What are they doing there to justify risking a clash with Russian troops who are in Syria as the invited allies of the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad, whether we approve of his regime or not?

Nor was this the only U.S.-Russian faceoff last week.

Over the Black Sea, two Russian military jets swept past the nose of an American B-52, one of the bombers on which the airborne leg of our strategic deterrent depends. The Russian Su-27s flew so close to the B-52 that their afterburners shook the eight-engine bomber.

What was a nuclear-capable B-52 doing over the Black Sea, which is to Russia what the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are to us?

That B-52 overflight of the Black Sea was part of an exercise in which six U.S. B-52s overflew all 30 NATO nations in one day — from the U.S. and Canada to Spain and the Balkans and to the eastern Baltic Sea — in a military exercise to test Russian air defenses.

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At the end of August, the Russian navy conducted its own war games near Alaska, involving dozens of ships and aircraft, the largest such drill in these northern seas since Soviet times.

Russia’s navy chief, Adm. Nikolai Yevmenov, said 50 warships and 40 aircraft took part in the Bering Sea exercise, which involved multiple practice missile launches. Said the admiral: “We are holding such massive drills there for the first time ever.”

As Trump rebuilt the U.S. military, Vladimir Putin reciprocated.

And, last week, Putin had a pointed warning for any nation that meddles in Belarus. With Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian autocrat facing huge and hostile demonstrations demanding he resign, Putin put out word that outside intervention to effect Lukashenko’s removal could cause Russian special forces to intervene.

The fall of Lukashenko from power, after 25 years ruling Belarus, could lead to a crisis as NATO allies Lithuania and Poland both border on the former Soviet republic of 9.5 million people.

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Also in late August, on the other side of the world, China conducted a huge naval exercise in the South and East China seas and Taiwan Strait.

After an American U-2 overflew its ships during the exercise, Beijing denounced the “naked provocation” and test-fired four ballistic missiles into the South China Sea. Two of those missiles have been described as “carrier killers.” They are said to have been developed to attack aircraft carriers such as the 100,000-ton vessels that serve as the backbone of the fleets the U.S. Navy deploys in these same waters.

The U.S. has been sending its own warships into what an angry China claims are its territorial waters around the atolls and reefs it has fortified and converted into air and naval bases in the Paracel and Spratly islands.

What exactly is our ultimate goal here?

China has also been ramping up pressure on Taiwan by having military planes and warships circumnavigate the island and by sending aircraft across midpoint in the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan recently purchased 66 US F-16s for delivery over the next 10 years. Yet, its armed forces are no match for Beijing’s. And China has put the world on notice that any move by Taiwan toward independence would cross a red line and be crushed by Beijing.

Is America prepared to fight China over fortified rocks and reefs in the South China Sea to which we have no territorial claim? Are we prepared to fight China to prevent the gradual absorption of Taiwan, which Richard Nixon conceded in 1972 we do not deny is a part of China?

In its confrontation with Iran, the U.S. seems about to suffer a setback in the Security Council. Our attempt to effect a “snapback” of U.N. sanctions on Iran, for violating the 2015 nuclear deal, seems certain to be rejected by our three principal NATO allies, as well as Russia and China.

How would Tehran’s victory in the U.N. over the U.S., which would open the door to sales and purchases of weapons by the ayatollah’s regime, be received?

Potential collisions between the U.S., Russia or China are not even back-burner issues this election year. Meanwhile, we are consumed by the coronavirus, the crashed economy, racial divisions and riots that have ripped apart cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha since the Memorial Day death of George Floyd.

Still, Leon Trotsky had a point when he said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

https://buchanan.org/blog/where-will-all-these-war-games-lead-142105 

Does Western Civilization Have a Future, or Is It Already in Its Grave? - PaulCraigRoberts.org

Sandia National Laboritories, a US government-funded nuclear weapons developer, requires its white employees to be subjected to indoctrination in trainings sessions in which critical race theory propagandists tell the white employees they are racists, because they have white privilege due to their skin color. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/sandia-labs-goes-nuclear-employee-who-sparked-internal-revolt-over-critical-race-theory 

One of the abused white employees, Casey Peterson, produced a video that rejected the propaganda of systemic white racism and white privilege.  As whites throughout the US experience this sort of abuse from their government and private employers, the video went viral. 

Sandia’s white executives locked Peterson out of Sandia’s email network so that he could not receive support from his 16,000 fellow workers, who have had enough of self-hating white bosses badmouthing white employees.  

The anti-white racist bosses at Sandia have been identified as James Peery, Director, Dori Ellis, Associate Director, David White, head of the Cyber R&D Center, and Mark Sellers, Associate Director for the Mission Assurance Division. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/sandia-labs-goes-nuclear-employee-who-sparked-internal-revolt-over-critical-race-theory  These self-hating whites “have made it clear that they want to force critical race theory, race-segregated trainings, and white male reeducation camps on their employees.”  All dissent will be severely punished.  Those who accept the reeducation will be the ones promoted. Those who reject their brainwashing will be purged.

This is happening during the Trump administration.  Does this mean that Trump approves of the use of taxpayers’ dollars to force-feed white employees of government funded companies that they are racists?

No.  As a person who spent a quarter century in Washington, I can tell you that presidents know only a small percentage of the decisions government makes during their term of office.  Most of the people in government are serving themselves, not the president and not the public, and they serve themselves by serving private interest groups.  They become lobbysts inside government for private interests. This basic fact makes mincemeat of the liberal hope of a do-good government.

The question that needs an answer is why are the white executives who run Sandia destroying the confidence of white employees in the white race?  If Congress really represented the American people, there would be an investigation.

The corrupt Sandia executives who are using taxpayers’ money to teach their white employees to hate themselves for their racist sins have put Peterson on administrative leave while they try to concoct a case that his “actions have comprised or posed a threat to Sandia computing and security systems.”  Of course, the corrupt anti-white racist executives will find out that Peterson “comprised a threat to the security systems” by objecting to anti-white propaganda.

What is ongoing at Sandia is ongoing at every level of government, state, local, and federal.  It is also going on at private companies, both public and private.  For example, I know a software engineer employed by a private company who had to go to a sensitivity training session where white male employees had to stand up and be identified as oppressors of the female and non-white employees. 

There are now large numbers of firms whose service is to denigrate white males at mandatory sensitivity-training sessions that are now part of employment obligations at private, government,  and government funded companies.

Because of the far-reaching popularity of my columns, I receive numerous emails from white male employees describing how much they hate their jobs, because of the hostility of their female and black bosses toward white males.  They pray for an Asian boss—Chinese, Japanese, Korean—because they judge them by performance, not by an anti-white male ideology.  White bosses are unreliable, because they got to be bosses by being self-hating white males.

What I have reported is the facts of today.  Yet we hear continually that being white is a privilege.  This alleged privilege, if it exists, is very rare.  No white male, unless he is self-hating, has white privilege at Sandia National Laboritories.  Nor at my friend’s software company.  

In her book, The Blackening of Europe, Clare Ellis describes the ideas that over the decades deracinated the white European ethnicities of confidence in their race, culture and achievements.  This confidence destroying deracination has enabled the ongoing largely unopposed riots and looting in numerous American cities.  The white liberals who govern these cities lack the confidence to maintain law and order. They have been convinced that law and order is a white privilege.

Whether or not Trump wins reelection, Western Civilization may be in its grave, killed by white liberals and Jews from the Frankfurt School imported into America. But if Trump loses reelection fairly, it will be definite proof that the structure of belief that upholds Western civilization has completelly collapsed, and white people themselves will have voted their own demise.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/01/does-western-civilization-have-a-future-or-is-it-already-in-its-grave/ 

America’s Private Militias of the 19th Century - By Ryan McMaken

Since at least as early as the mid-1990s, the term “militia” has been increasingly used by journalists and scholars on the left in connection with alleged “right-wing extremists.”1

Over time, the term “militia” has been used to describe nearly any group of nonleftist armed men, and has been generally used in close connection with terms like “extremism,” “violence,” and “vigilante.” We have been reminded of this in recent years during riots in places like Ferguson, Missouri (in 2014), and Kenosha, Wisconsin (in 2020). In both cases, armed volunteers attempted to assist private sector business owners with protecting their property from looters and rioters. And in both cases, the volunteers were described with terms such as: “violent,” “militia,” “extreme,” and “white vigilante.”

Historically in the United States, however, the term “militia” had entirely different connotations. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, militias were considered to be common institutions central to civic and community life. They were a common fixture of local festivals and celebrations, and they functioned in some ways as fraternal orders function today.

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Although some critics of the militia idea have attempted to claim militias existed primarily to suppress slave rebellions, the fact is militias were common and widespread in Northern states where they had no role whatsoever in maintaining the institution of slavery. In fact, militias often served an important role in providing opportunities and community cohesion for new immigrants.

The Local Militias of the Nineteenth Century

What’s more, many militias were independent of a centralized state militia system and functioned largely as private entities. They elected their own officers, were self-funded, and trained on their own schedules. Although they were ostensibly commanded by the state governors, this system of functionally private militias became an established part of daily life for many Americans. These were local volunteer militias with names like the “Richardson Light Guard,” the “Detroit Light Guard,” or the “Asmonean Guard.”2 They were essentially private clubs composed of gun owners who were expected to assist in keeping law and order within the cities and towns of the United States.

They were separate from the so-called common militias, which developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which in many cases were staffed with conscripts, were funded with tax dollars, and were commanded by an established state bureaucracy.

But by the Jacksonian period, new volunteer militias began to arise. As noted by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, the United States by the 1830s had seen “a remarkable growth in the privately organized volunteer militia. The number of volunteer units had been expanding steadily since the American Revolution, but after the war of 1812, it exploded. Three hundred sprang up in California alone between 1849 and 1856.”3

These groups were, in the words of historian Marcus Cunliffe, “volunteer companies existing independently of the statewide system of militia, and they held themselves aloof from the common mass. They provided their own uniforms.”4

They also elected their own officers, did their own fundraising, staffed their own governing boards, and sought out for themselves a secure position within the communities where members lived. In earlier decades, especially the 1830s and 1840s, these groups tended to be “elite” in the sense that they attracted upper middle– and upper-class members of the community. This was in many cases because of the cost of funding these volunteer militias.

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As a member of the Detroit Light Guard remembered, “at that time the company got nothing from the State. They had to pay for all they got, uniforms and all.”5

But by the 1850s, firearms and uniforms were becoming more affordable to the middle and working classes. This brought in many new members from outside the local elite circles of established families. Moreover, some militias were able to solicit funding from wealthy members of the community who acted as patrons. The case of the Richardson Light Guard (RLG) is instructive:

The RLG came into being in South Reading, Massachusetts, in 1851, in response to a perceived shortage of militiamen in the years following the Mexican War. At the time, all that was necessary for the militia to be regarded as legally sanctions was for the group to “petition the governor” for what amounted to a nod of approval. This was granted. But at that point, the group still lacked funding. Although members paid dues, historian Barry Stentiford notes that “Dues were not enough [to] cover the expenses of the fledgling company, and committee members had to use their own money to carry out its business.”6

Members came up with a plan to offer “honorary memberships” to wealthy members of the community. The largest donor in this scheme was a man named Richardson, after whom the militia was soon named. Funding from prominent community members also added legitimacy to the group and ensured it would continue to be regarded as a community-sanctioned group of armed men.

Although the RLG enjoyed legal sanction, it was essentially a private organization, and Stentiford notes, “At its inception, the RLG belonged to its members, and to prominent residents of the town of South Reading. The town of South Reading, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the federal government occupied a diminishing hierarchy of influence.”7

In other words, while everyone admitted local, state, and federal officials enjoyed some form of control of the militia, this authority was tentative at best.

Massachusetts wasn’t the only place were militias were privately funded and privately controlled. When Iowa became a US territory in 1838, for example, an “official” territorial militia was formed. On the other hand:

The formation of local militia groups was more relaxed in comparison to the State militia service. To form a local militia group one would simply ask for local men to sign up, name the group, possibly elect officials or form by-laws, and then write to the Iowa Territory legislature to introduce themselves and request weapons….If you received a positive letter back and weapons, you were a militia group in the Territory of Iowa.

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Indeed, this sort of local—and even private ownership—was an increasingly common method of organizing militias by midcentury. Hummel concludes that “Because many volunteer units were privately organized, recruited, and equipped, the militia became a partially privatized system as well.”

Because of their local nature, many militias reflected local character as well—and access was hardly limited to national ethnic majorities. By the 1850s, immigrants had come to dominate many volunteer militias, with Irish, Scottish, and German militias becoming especially common. The Scottish militiamen wore kilts as part of their parade uniforms. The Italians created a “Guardia Nazionale Italiana.” Robert Ernst notes that the “significance of the immigrant military companies is evident in the fact that in 1853, more than 4,000 of the 6,000 uniformed militia in New York City were of foreign birth.”8

Nor were militia groups limited to Christians. Jack D. Foner recounts in the American Jewish Archives Journal:

Jews in New York City formed military companies of their own. Troop K, Empire Hussars, was composed entirely of Jews, as was the Young Men’s Lafayette Association. A third unit, the Asmonean Guard, consisted of both Jewish and Christian employees of The Asmonean, one of the earliest Anglo-Jewish weekly newspapers. “Our employees,” commented the newspaper, “have been seized with this military mania, as they have enrolled themselves into an independent corps.”

As militias became more middle class, their names changed as well. Militias began to refer to themselves with names that might be used for sports teams today, including terms like “Invincibles,” “Avengers,” and “Snake Hunters.”

Dress uniforms were often extravagant and modeled on Napoleon’s troops earlier in the century. These groups were even known to impress foreigners. As one Englishman remarked: “They marched in sections, with a splendid band at their head and…it would be impossible to find a more military-looking, well-drilled body of men.”9

These volunteer militias were attractive to potential members, because these groups served many social functions as well. As noted by historian Briton Cooper Busch, “in peacetime, all [volunteer militias] helped their communities celebrate festivals, holidays, and funerals with marches, balls, and banquets, helping out in emergencies, and often building an esprit de corps which established a basis for effective wartime service and even elite reputations.”10

In many cases, membership in a local militia provided opportunities for social advancement, and “it was not uncommon for individual families to have long associations with these institutions.”11 For newcomers to any community, whether or not of foreign origin, “the militia company provided a means for newer residents to embed themselves into the fabric of the community.”12

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The volunteer militias played a similar role to that of the volunteer fire brigades of this period, which in many communities came to be dominated by immigrant groups and served as a way to and advance the social and economic lives of newcomers.13

Militias Replaced by Full-Time Government Police and Centralized “National Guard”

Needless to say, this model of American militias is long gone from the imagination of nearly all Americans. Modern-day journalists and scholars have been hard at work attempting to connect militias, past and present, either to slavery or to fringe groups and vigilantism. Moreover, many Americans now regard the idea of privately controlled bands of armed men with trepidation and fear.

As the size and scope of taxpayer-funded bureaucratic agencies grew throughout the nineteenth century, private volunteer militias were deemed increasingly unnecessary and undesirable. The late nineteenth century was a period during which states and the federal government went to great lengths to end the old system of locally controlled militias, and this was topped off by the Militia Act of 1903 which largely ended state autonomy in controlling state military resources as well. By 1945, the National Guard was well on its way to becoming little more than an auxiliary to the federal government’s military establishment, although some remnants of the old decentralized system remained.

When it comes to urban environments, these militia were in many respects replaced by today’s state and local police forces, which unlike the volunteer militias are on the job full-time and enjoy immunity and privileges far beyond what any militia member of old might have ever dreamed of having. Rather than private self-funded militias called out only occasionally to quell riots and uprisings, we have immense, taxpayer-paid police forces with military equipment, SWAT teams, and riot gear to carry out no-knock raids (often getting the address wrong).

The old militia system was by no means flawless, but this switch to a more centralized bureaucratic system is not without costs of its own, both in terms of dollars and the potential for abuse.

Moreover, as has become increasingly apparent in recent years, National Guard troops and local police forces are clearly inadequate to provide safety and security for private homes and businesses. Half of the nation’s violent crimes remain “unsolved” as police focus on petty drug offenses rather than homicides. Meanwhile—as happened in both Ferguson and Kenosha—National Guard troops focus their protection on government buildings while private businesses burn.

The dominant shapers of public opinion would have us believe that volunteer groups of armed men must be regarded with horror. Yet it is increasingly clear that the institutions that have replaced the militias of the past still leave much to be desired.

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1.Chip Berlet, Right-Wing Populism: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guildford Press, 2000), p. 289. Berlet asserts during the mid-1990s, “armed militia movements grew rapidly” and labels the growth in these militias a “major U.S. social movement” of the time.

2.The term “guard” was common in names for these militia groups. The term, according to Stentiford, “emhpasized the defensive ideals of the American militia.” (p. 33).

3.Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1996), p. 157.

4.Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America 1775–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 218.

5.James D. Elderkin, Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of a Soldier of Three Wars, as Written by Himself (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1899), p. 127.

6.Barry M. Stentiford, The Richardson Light Guard of Wakefield, Massachusetts: A Town Militia in War and Peace, 1851–1975 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), pp. 33–40.

7.Ibid., p. 39.

8.Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994), p. 129.

9.Cunliffe, p. 217.

10.Briton Cooper Busch, Bunker Hill to Bastogne: Elite Forces and American Society (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006), p. 53.

11.Busch, p. 53.

12.Stentiford, p. 34.

13.Cunliffe (p. 89) notes that fire companies in American cities were “linked with military companies” and provided “ready-made recruits” for some militias. They were also closely linked with partisan machine politics at the time.

The Best of Ryan McMaken

Ryan W. McMaken is the editor of Mises Daily and The Austrian. Send him mail.

 

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/09/ryan-mcmaken/americas-private-militias-of-the-nineteenth-century/