Read the words on the historical marker shown above.

For many years now, I’ve written about the way history is transmitted in the USA.

Whether we are talking about public-facing “commemoration” and “interpretation”, or the history taught in the classrooms of our children, most people in the USA treat history as a list of dates and matching “facts”.

As someone who writes about US history, I am often at pains to make clear that history is a discipline, not a science.

Anyone writing about American history is faced with a daunting mountain of historical documents and records.

Court records. Legislative records. Letters and professional correspondence. Diplomatic correspondence. Drawings, paintings, and photographs. Goods receipts and business accounts. Wills and inventories. Censuses and marriage bonds, banns, and certificates. Family Bibles, religious texts, and prepared sermons. Contemporary news reports and journalism. Poetry and literature. Biographies, autobiographies, and hagiographies. Obituaries and death notices. Weather reports. Pamphlets, posters, placards, and propaganda produced by citizens, foreigners, and politicians. Property conveyancing papers. Tribal enrolment documents. Pension and land bounty records. Music and voice recordings. Physicians’ research, reports, and autopsy results. Flyers and bills for shows, plays, and other entertainments. Military reports to commanders. Ships’ manifests. Banking and loan records. Gravestone inscriptions and epitaphs. History books written by others.

You get the point.

And this isn’t even including accompanying or supporting archaeological, agricultural, architectural, engineering, manufacturing, scientific, and genetic evidence.

So when an historian - or even a writer of popular history - decides to tell a story, there is a LOT of sifting involved.

Example. Writing a single accurate paragraph asserting that large swathes of the American population were deeply affected psychologically by “the night the stars fell” in 1833 might require hours or even days of background reading.

This particularly impressive Leonid meteor shower might be written as a straight astronomical event in history.

Or it could be placed within a wider context involving American scientific progress, or held up as a mirror to America’s enduring tendency to view unusual events through a religious lens.

“The Night the Stars Fell” can be employed as an exemplar, jumping-off point, or metaphor for other historical narratives.

What we choose to say about that mid-November night nearly 200 years ago - and perhaps even more important - what we choose NOT to say, will completely alter the nature, meaning, and significance of the story being told.

This is what humans do.

They repeat stories.

And when they repeat stories, they almost always repeat every story in a way which aligns with their own worldview, stripping-out bits here, adding an embellishment or emphasis there.

A simple historical marker on the side of a road in central Virginia is a perfect illustration of how history in America is truncated, chopped, amended, abridged, curated, and even falsified before being funnelled into the service of the “American Exceptionalism” story.

*****

Henrico County, Virginia started off as a settler-colonialist “Citie” in 1611, and was named for Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of Anne of Denmark and King James the VI and I of Scotland and England, respectively.

To place this event in context, this is the same year that William Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest”, and just eight years after the death of Elizabeth I.

“Henrico” is a corruption of the earlier Latin rendering of “Henry”, i.e., “Henricus”.

The “Citie of Henricus” was destroyed during the great Powhatan uprising of 1622, but the name lived-on with the establishment of Henrico Shire in 1634.

Henrico is one of the oldest counties in Virginia, and thus one of the oldest in the entire USA.

The simplest way to understand the geography of the region where Jamestown, the Citie of Henricus, and other early colonies were planted, is to picture a vast estuary (Chesapeake Bay) running south to north from its inlet on the Atlantic Ocean, with a huge number of creeks and rivers on both its eastern and western sides. The Chesapeake is in fact the largest estuary in the entire USA - around 193 miles long, and varying between 3 and 25 miles in width.

Today, this bay divides sections of the states of Virginia and Maryland.

Back in the time of Shakespeare, almost every attempt at settlement by the English was begun on the banks of the rivers opening into Chesapeake Bay, or on islands situated in those rivers.

It is impossible to stress strongly enough the fact that such early settlements and “plantations” in Virginia were not a case of “impoverished Europeans escaping political or religious persecution back home”.

Settlements in Virginia were a get-rich-quick scheme for upper-class English elites from London, operating as a trading company under charter from the king.

King James hoped to use such colonies for generating the wealth which would place his kingdoms in England, Scotland, and Ireland on a more equal footing with rivals such as Spain, whose monarchs had already been extracting resources and riches from the Americas for over a century.

The first colonizers to arrive in Virginia were speculators, pure and simple, and they certainly had no intention of stooping to agricultural or manual labor.

Their sole purpose was to get an immediate return on the investments made by various shareholders in Virginia and England.

Any European commoners present in Virginia had been brought over as indentured servants or craftspeople in the service of the shareholding elites.

Early attempts to extract marketable commodities from North American resources - through viticulture, silk-making, glass-blowing, tar and pitch making, carpentry, and salt-making met with only limited success (or outright failure).

Only the development of a tobacco-growing industry, and the eventual replacement of indentured servants with outright slavery, would eventually see a turnaround in fortunes for The Virginia Company of London.

It is worth pointing-out that during the first 20 years of colonization in Virginia and Maryland, shareholders, military men, craftspeople, indentured servants, spies, and war captives arrived there from over a dozen countries other than England - Ireland, France, Germany, Poland, Wales, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Wallonia (Belgium), Italy, Austria, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Portugal, Scotland, Armenia, and likely Sweden and Finland.

Within another twenty or thirty years, the ethnic mix around the Chesapeake Bay would include Sephardic Jews, like Jacob Lumbrozo.

Later, more Jewish families would relocate from colonies in South America and the Caribbean to Anglo colonies up and down the coast from South Carolina to Rhode Island and New York, bringing their African and Indigenous “servants” with them (and oftentimes, their mixed-ethnic families, as well). This is why we can find free men of color like “Shadrach Jones” being manumitted by his father Simon? Bar Jonas in Charles County, Maryland during the 1700s.

By the end of the 1600s, we can even document the presence of Romani people in Virginia, where a “Gypsy woman” testified before a magistrate that she could not be tried under Christian law, as she was “noe Christian”.

Needless to say, by 1620 the first people from Africa had also arrived in Virginia, much against their will.

It is extremely important to understand that, for the first 50 years of the Virginia colony, Africans and African-Americans were treated in much the same way as European indentured servants, being allowed to serve out a fixed period of labor before gaining their freedom.

African and European indentured servants co-mingled socially and sexually, and liaisons with members of the local Indigenous communities were also common.

This means that for many decades, long before Virginia began to develop and enshrine in law a race-based caste system for slavery, there existed a substantial population of free persons of color.

This early presence of a nominally free, mixed-ethnic underclass, would have a bearing on later events in Virginia, as we will learn shortly...

*****

Tobacco is a labor-intensive crop, and events like the Great Fire of London in 1666 created a great demand for craftspeople, builders, and laborers at home in England.

Better wages in England made indentured servitude in Virginia a far less tempting prospect for the English underclasses.

Unwilling to see their line of income go up in smoke, the wealthy elites of Virginia began to come up with “justifications” for enslaving some indentured servants for life.

You see where this is going...

Tobacco is also a hungry crop, sucking nutrients rapidly from the soil in which it is grown.

In Virginia Colony, this meant that tobacco plantation owners, and increasing numbers of indentured servants who had completed their terms of service, were actively on the lookout for new land to cultivate - land invariably found farther upriver, deeper inside Indian country.

The English had always used violence and duplicity in their dealings with the various Indigenous tribes and nations of Virginia.

Anyone watching Palestine today would recognize the exact same depressing algebra of occupation.

Colonizer steals more land (leading to reprisals from the rightful occupier), and the colonizer responds with multiplied force, claiming that this disproportionate ferocity and brutality is “justified”.

By 1675, The Virginia Company had been dissolved, and the monarchy had assumed direct control of its overseas colony in Virginia.

England had seen a king executed, fought two civil wars, lived through a temporary Puritan and republican takeover of the reins of government, witnessed the restoration of its monarchy, and later watched its capitol city burn down.

The restored King Charles II rewarded those who had remained loyal to the monarchy during the Cromwellian interregnum, and one of his favorites, William Berkeley, was once more given the governorship of Virginia Colony in 1660, a post he had already held (during the English Civil War back in the 1640s).

Berkeley’s second term would end in disaster in 1677.

*****

It is beyond the scope of this article to go into the finer details. What matters, is that a new dynamic was taking shape in Virginia.

Remember the free mixed-ethnic underclass population which was beginning to grow on the outer edges of English forts and settlements?

These people were beginning to push inland in search of more land, bringing them into ever greater conflict with Indigenous peoples, including those tribes who had gone to great lengths to remain on friendly trading terms with English leaders like Berkeley.

Meanwhile, an erstwhile friend of Governor Berkeley named Nathaniel Bacon had arrived in Virginia with his own ambitions.

Bacon, like Berkeley, came from a wealthy, aristocratic background, and was educated at Cambridge, well-connected, and well-travelled. Related to Francis Bacon, who had been Lord Chancellor of England back in the 1620s, Nathaniel Bacon was also a vile man who had attempted to cheat someone out of their inheritance. It was this scandal which saw nepo-baby Bacon shipped off into golden exile by his father to Virginia, with a cool start-up fund of £1,800 (English pounds, worth about a half a million dollars today).

Neither Berkeley nor Bacon had any regard for people below their own social class, and neither had any love for Indians.

Whereas Berkeley preferred to play political chess, using “manageable” tribes to act as a buffer against hostile tribes (while enriching himself through trade monopolies), Bacon saw a faster path to riches for himself and his circle of supporters.

“...ruin and extirpate all Indians in General.”

James Crewes, the man commemorated on the marker at the top of this piece, was another member of the wealthier planter and merchant classes in Virginia, holding both African and Indigenous slaves.

Crewes was an avid supporter of Bacon’s genocidal approach to the ethnic-cleansing of Virginia.

Both Bacon and Crewes recognized that the free mixed-ethnic underclass population could also be mobilized in support of total war against all Indians - after all, it was these people, former indentured servants on the very edge of English settlement, clearing timber for small farms, and outright squatting on already-cleared Indian farmland, who bore the brunt of Indian reprisals.

Add to this the arbitrary way in which Governor Berkeley ran the colony as a fiefdom, throw in some unpopular taxes, cronyism, and a recent collapse in tobacco market prices, and you need only a spark to set-off the fire of insurrection.

In 1676 and 1677, Nathaniel Bacon, James Crewes, and others gathered a small army of this mixed-ethnic crew, which included both free and enslaved men (and women), and led them on a campaign of slaughter against the Indians, making no differentiation between warrior or woman, and taking scores of slaves. The Doeg, Occoneechee, Susquehannock, and Pamunkey were treated with equal treachery, even though the majority of these had lived peacably alongside the English for decades, with some even supplying food and fighting men to assist the English at times.

Many of these friends of the English were forced to flee for their lives with their children into the depths of the nearby Dragon Swamp.

Berkeley denounced his former friend Bacon as a rebel, launching counter-insurgency expeditions against him and his followers.

Bacon even managed to seize control of the government itself for a short time, eventually burning Jamestown itself to the ground.

The rebellion began to fizzle-out after Bacon died suddenly of dysentery in late October, 1676.

Berkeley would get some measure of revenge, overseeing the hanging of a couple of dozen insurrectionists, including James Crewes.

Interestingly, the only party to have expressed empathy for the suffering of the Indians, was the committee who reported on the rebellion directly to King Charles II...

*****

Over the decades and centuries since these events, many historians and commentators have tried to shoehorn Bacon’s Rebellion into a sort of “prequel” role, leading to the War for Independence.

This writer can find no serious reading of these events which would make Nathaniel Bacon a “proto-patriot” or hero.

Bacon was an opportunist who leveraged underclass grievances to further his own ambitions.

It is noteworthy that both Bacon and Berkeley were willing to offer manumission as an enticement to get indentured servants and the enslaved to follow them during this conflict. A modern corollary to this would be the offering of free medical care and third level education funding to US armed forces recruits from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Bacon cared not one jot for his underclass followers, a situation recognizable to many Vietnam and Iraq War veterans, and indeed many of the service people onboard the USS Lincoln near the Persian Gulf today.

This pattern and dynamic was present throughout the frontier years of “Manifest Destiny”, all across America, and through various wars, including the War for Independence.

Offer the underclasses enticements (land bounties, etc.) to do the dirty work, before the wealthy swoop in to reap the rewards. Think kids from West Virginia trailer parks sent to Iraq 20 years ago, while the men behind companies like Halliburton, Blackwater, and Lockheed Martin laughed all the way to the bank (whose governing board were also laughing en masse).

And when the wars are over, when the free land runs out, when crop prices stagnate or tumble, when recessions, depressions, and other crises come (as they always will), many among the underclasses can be trained to believe they are still the social equals of those who send them to war and consign them to a life living paycheck to paycheck, dreading the day a medical emergency finds them.

And with few Indians left in their midst to focus their ire upon today, they can be trained instead to turn their hatred upon “the gays”, “the Libs”, Black and Latino people, or indeed, one another.

Having read this far, look over the words on Virginia’s “historical marker” again, paying less attention to what is actually said, and more attention to the things left unsaid:

“English merchant James Crewes (1623-1677), emigrated to Virginia by 1655 and acquired a 541 acre plantation at Turkey Island. As a planter, burgess from Henrico County and militia officer, Crewes disagreed with the governor’s policies related to native commerce, perceived high taxation and apathy over Native American attacks on the Virginia frontier. In 1675, he and other residents joined with Nathaniel Bacon to protect their interests in the colony. Captured and found guilty as an instigator in Bacon’s Rebellion, Crewes was hanged near Jamestown in January of 1677. His Turkey Island plantation was purchased by William Randolph in 1684.”

Ethnic cleansing becomes “acquired a plantation”. Choosing a policy other than outright genocide becomes government “apathy over Native American attacks on the Virginia frontier”. Launching a full-blown violent insurrection was a way to express disagreement with “...policies related to...perceived high taxation”. Waging war for the freedom to take over and squat on the land of friendly Indians was done merely “to protect their interests in the colony”.

The story could be more truthfully told by saying “Some ruthless, bigoted rich guys (who wanted to get even richer) raised an insurrectionist army by telling a mob that killing would make them better off”.

No one on the colonizing side comes out of this story as “the good guys”.

Not Berkeley.

Not Bacon.

Not even the mixed-ethnic frontierspeople.

The worst consequence of Bacon’s Rebellion? Other than the destruction of various Indigenous communities?

The fact that white, black, and brown people had been willing to rise up against the colonial administration, TOGETHER, led to the introduction of harsher “race laws”, in order to more clearly separate “white” from “black” in America’s emerging racial caste system.

Consider the title of this lovely piece of legislation from 1705:

“An act declaring the Negro, Mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion, to be real estate”

This law was expressly intended to force mixed-ethnic people further to one side of the white/black binary caste divide, and superseded this earlier attempt from 1661:

“An Act to to Discourage English Running Away with Negroes”

Divide and rule...

*****

Postscript

As recently as 2020, 50% of Henrico County respondents self-reported their “ethnicity” as “white alone”.

Around 29% of Henrico County respondents self-reported their “ethnicity” as “black alone”.

Almost 10% self-report as “Asian alone”, while around 7% say they are “Hispanic or Latino”.

The remaining 4% is comprised of people who identify as “multiracial”, “Native American”, or simply “other”.

How people self-identify, i.e., “white alone” or “Black alone” SAYS VERY LITTLE ABOUT THEIR ACTUAL ANCESTRY.

What it does say, is something about how people wish to present themselves, about how they wish to be perceived.

The average African-American carries 25% European DNA.

Let’s just leave that fact to stew for a while, while readers ponder the horrifying historical reasons for it.

At least 1 in 20 Americans self-identifying as “white” have some Black ancestry.

Numbers would be higher, except for the late wave of preferential treatment given to “white” immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th century, leading to many communities of German, Scandinavian, Polish, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish people in northern states having never gone through the early colonial interethnic mixing process.

The number of Americans self-identifying as “white” who have some Black ancestry rises to 1 in 10 in places like South Carolina and Louisiana, and will be an order of magnitude higher among “Old Mix Americans”, people descended from pre-War of Independence populations of the Carolinas and Chesapeake Bay area.

Consider the map below, which shows the population of “free persons of color” in 1790, in and around the rivers where Bacon’s Rebellion took place. Many of these folks would have literally been the great-grandchildren of the mixed-ethnic frontierspeople who had rallied to Bacon and Crewe’s flag.

Between Bacon’s Rebellion and the American War for Independence, Virginia introduced some of the strictest and most punitive “race laws” in North America, as we have already learned.

Many free persons of color voted with their feet, and headed west, into the mountains of Southern Appalachia, where many of their descendants still live, to this day, self-identifying as “white” or simply “American”.

You won’t find their story on any roadside historical marker...

I think we all know why.

Galveston, oh Galveston

Wonder if she could forget me

I’d go home if they would let me

Put down this gun

And go to Galveston...

In November, 1968, the USA was embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war, just like today.

The lead-up to an expanded war in both Vietnam and Iran was marked by the US (or US-sanctioned) assassination of both countries’ leaders - President Ngô Đình Diệm in Nov 1963, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Feb 2026, respectively.

One major difference, though.

Ngô Đình Diệm was actually the leader of SOUTH Vietnam, a state ostensibly seen as a “friend” of the USA at the time.

French colonizers of a much larger “French Indochina” (which included Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) had already colluded with the communist North Vietnamese against South Vietnamese nationalists in the years immediately after WWII, mainly due to the South Vietnamese nationalists’ hostility to French colonial occupation.

In an effort to salvage their collapsing southeast Asian empire during the First Indochina War of 1946-1954, the French soon switched their support from the communists to the nationalists.

This last gasp French effort failed and they withdrew from southeast Asia in 1954, but the USA decided to increase American involvement and low-key support of Vietnamese nationalists - support which had already begun under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations during the 1950s.

John F. Kennedy further increased the number of “military advisors” from 900 to 16,300 during the early 1960s, and JFK was the man in the Oval Office when Ngô Đình Diệm was assassinated in 1963.

Kennedy himself would be assassinated three weeks after Diệm...

The assassinated Diệm was replaced by a military junta general named Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in a rigged election in 1967.

As the late war criminal and US secretary of state Henry Kissinger put it in a conversation with William F. Buckley, Jr: “Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thiệu meets the same fate as Diệm, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

At any rate, the USA now had a “bastard in charge” who was more to their liking, just as they had achieved in Iran THE FIRST TIME back in 1953, when the UK’s MI6 and the US’s CIA conspired to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, a leader who had the temerity to believe that Iran’s petroleum reserves should benefit the Iranian people, not UK and USA business interests.

The Iranian peoples’ uprising in 1979 against the brutal and sadistic puppet “Shah” imposed on them by the UK and USA was an act of self-determination (and a bloody nose to US empire) which no USA administration has ever forgiven...

*****

Anti-Vietnam War sentiment took time to grow in the pre-internet age, with most Americans still relying upon the traditional “big three” corporate networks (CBS, ABC, and NBC) for most national news.

US foreign correspondents during the early days of the Vietnam War were, for the most part, the journalistic embodiment of contemporary USA Cold War ideology, and their view of the Vietnamese people (in both North and South Vietnam) was suffused with America’s peculiar form of white ethno-supremacist bigotry.

Only the influx of larger numbers of foreign correspondents during the late 1960s (including freelancers and non-US journalists) led to wider American awareness of the brutal nature of the conflict in southeast Asia.

The Tet Offensive of Jan 1968 took many Americans back home by surprise, with most “respected” media outlets having spent years assuring the mothers and fathers of US soldiers that things were moving along just fine.

The reportage of the Mỹ Lai Massacre of Mar 1968, in which US soldiers committed war crimes including gang rape, and the outright murder of hundreds of innocent women, children, and the elderly, brought anti-war protests to a boil.

With the Black civil rights struggle happening concurrently, college students and many other people became radicalized, with thousands protesting and burning draft cards in public.

As Black civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael remarked in 1966, in a comment partially borrowed from the street (and later attributed to Muhammed Ali): ““Why should black folks fight a war against yellow folks so that white folks can keep a land they stole from red folks? We’re not going to Vietnam. Ain’t no Vietcong ever called me ni**er!”

The USA’s triple-tap bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Minab in Iran on 28 Feb 2026 (which killed around 170 children) hasn’t seen a similar level of US public outrage, probably due to the fact that American boys haven’t <yet> been drafted into an illegal, futile, and immoral ground war.

The Israel lobby in America has spent decades egging-on American military involvement in Western Asia, and would sorely love to see American kids thrown into the furnace of a ground offensive in Iran.

The difference between 1967 and 2026?

The internet.

Young Americans in particular no longer trust or rely upon the corporate media.

Things which are the same in 2026 as the 1960s?

Federal government and state agencies attacking student protestors.

Most people of my generation will recall the shooting dead of unarmed student protestors at Kent State (in Ohio) in 1970.

Student advocates for Palestinian rights and critics of the US-financed genocide in Gaza today have been suspended, arrested, detained, incarcerated, and threatened with deportation.

Perhaps the single biggest thing which remains unchanged is the hard-core, highly indoctrinated and propagandized base of supporters (representing around 30% of the USA voting population), who will go to the wall to defend their narrow, ill-educated, bigoted worldview, and lawless, extremist governments which attempt to criminalize legitimate political dissent.

*****

One of the greatest American songwriters of all time turns 80 this week.

Jimmy Webb wrote the song “Galveston” in 1968 during the height of the US war in Vietnam, and the song was recorded and released by the great and virtually inimitable Glen Campbell in early 1969.

I often stayed with my maternal grandparents in their humble trailer home in Phoenix, Arizona back in 1969, while my “blended” Missouri family tried to make a fresh start in the Sun Belt.

As was common in those days among working class evangelical folk, me and my older brother were made to kneel on the floor beside our beds at night and say our prayers.

I can still remember clearly at the end of prayers having to recite the names of family members serving in Vietnam:

“And God bless Uncle Elmer overseas...”

I barely understood what “overseas” actually meant.

Maybe the prayers worked, because Uncle Elmer came back home in mostly one piece, invalided out of the army after being shot by one of his own fellow soldiers.

As was also common in those days (and is still common), Uncle Elmer, as a veteran, got preferential treatment when applying for a job in law enforcement, and in photos, he looked suitably smart and imposing in his deputy sheriff garb.

Uncle Elmer died of multiple skin carcinomas at a relatively young age, probably brought on by exposure to exfoliants like Agent Orange (produced by Dow and Monsanto) - “products” which made a fortune for those chemical companies.

I wasn’t particularly sad when Uncle Elmer died, because he was also a violent man who liked to use the buckle end of a belt on children.

I guess you might call him part of “unsung America”.

*****

Music was always an escape from the world of trailer parks, and no one should ever underestimate the power of a song, even a half-understood song, to have an impact on a young mind.

Even as a five-year-old, the music, vocals, and words of “Galveston” were deeply affecting:

Galveston, oh Galveston

I am so afraid of dying

before I dry the tears she’s crying

before I watch your seabirds flying in the sun

at Galveston

It would be many years before I understood that this song was written from the viewpoint of a young man, a virtual kid, who had been drafted into the war in Vietnam.

And it would be many, many years later before I learned that Jimmy Webb’s original lyrics had been “modified” for Glen Campbell’s recording, lest they come across as too “hippy” or anti-war, and thus alienate the hyper-patriotic “base” most likely to purchase country music records.

The original second verse:

Galveston, oh Galveston

Wonder if she could forget me

I’d go home if they would let me

Put down this gun

And go to Galveston...

Became this:

Galveston, oh Galveston

I still hear your sea waves crashing

While I watch the cannons flashing

I clean my gun

And dream of Galveston...

“I clean my gun...” FFS.

On Jimmy Webb’s 80th birthday, with another war being waged by the same morally bankrupt suspects, let’s all wish Mr. Webb - the man who wrote “Wichita Lineman”, “Up, Up and Away”, and “MacArthur Park” - a happy birthday.

But let’s also remember that many of those “damn hippies” back in the day were actually right.

And if we sing along to “Galveston”, let’s sing the original words of fear, loneliness, and longing.

Not the words forced into our mouths by corporations and warmongers.

Colin Rand Kaepernick is back in the news this week, a full decade after his career was abruptly cut short by, well, racism.

To be precise, Kaepernick was kicked-out into the cold by American political and business elites who refused to countenance any form of reality intruding upon the spectacle they sell.

Ten years later, we have the owner of the 49ers buying council elections in California, while two and a half thousand miles east, we must still endure the man who, in 2016, said of Kaepernick’s understated protest:

“I think it’s a terrible thing, and you know, maybe he should find a country that works better for him. Let him try, it won’t happen.”

A US president who is a convicted criminal, a friend of convicted paedophiles, a man whose own idea of “protest” involves inciting his base to storm the nation’s capitol and violently assault officers of the law, THIS person was affronted by a mixed-ethnic American taking a knee in silence.

What exactly is so provocative about calling-out police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem?

Is it because the police, like the armed forces, often serve as the enforcement arm of a largely unaccountable gang called Big Business (and the governments bought and controlled by these same oligarchs)?

Is it because refusing to “perform patriotism” publicly undermines the official narrative underpinning corporate and political power?

Maybe we should look more carefully at the act of kneeling itself…

*****

What is represented by kneeling?

Subservience? Obedience? Humility? Religiosity? Divisiveness?

It all depends on the witness, of course, and their angle of observation.

What is the meaning of a clenched fist salute?

Pride?  Solidarity?  Defiance?  Triumphalism?  Black anger?

In America, as ever, meaning is only inferred and attached to gestures and symbols after checking the ethnicity and skin color of the person using them.

"Respect the flag" and "Respect the national anthem" are phrases used ad nauseum by a certain American sub-culture, a sub-culture which has loaded their own meaning onto a piece of cloth and a tortured melody.

"Respect the flag" and "Respect the national anthem" actually mean "See what I see, feel what I feel, believe what I believe", and most of all, "accept the supremacy of my culture over yours".

People who wrap themselves in the red, white, and blue will never allow others to ascribe their own meanings to the symbols around them, because such free-thinking might leave the back door ajar to a righteous storm raging outside the cozy confines of heartland American kitchens...

This national anthem - so deeply-imbued with "patriotic" meaning - only became the "national anthem" in a formal sense in 1931.

Hardly an “ancient tradition”.

Most American schoolchildren know that the words to the song now called The Star-Spangled Banner were written by a certain Francis Scott Key, after he witnessed the American flag still flying over Fort McHenry near Baltimore, Maryland in 1814, following the British overnight bombardment of that fort during the War of 1812.

Francis Scott Key.  Patriot.  End of lesson.

But wait.  "Angles of observation", "perspectives", and all that.

What do many "white" Christian nationalist flag-wavers claim to loathe the most?  East Coast elites?  High-falutin' lawyer types?

When it comes to Francis Scott Key, they can start ticking those boxes.

The music to this "sacred" anthem was actually lifted from a drinking song once popular in fancy English gentlemen's clubs.

Very private, very exclusive clubs.

And Francis Scott Key would have been plenty familiar with "fancy" things, as he was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth into a well-to-do East Coast planter family.  Mr. Key enjoyed his excellent view of Fort McHenry not from inside the fort alongside the soldiers, but from the deck of a British warship where he had been enjoying the finest of wines while negotiating the exchange of some prisoners, including a physician friend. 

In fairness, Key had already done a brief stint with a local militia, but common soldiering wasn't really his thing.

Francis Scott Key was a lawyer.  And a slaveholder. 

And much like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, two elitist hypocrites from the generation preceding him, Mr. Key often expressed his dislike of the cruelties perpetrated within the institution of slavery. 

But Key didn't actually disapprove of slavery, he merely disapproved of slaveholders who were less "benevolent" than himself. 

Mr. Key often represented (at no cost) abused slaves petitioning for their freedom.  But his benevolent "great white father" hand-wringing did not stop his law practice from helping so-called "good" slaveholders to reclaim their "property". 

Mr. Key used the niceties of American law to help bring runaway slaves to "justice" - that is to say, back into their legally sanctioned condition of lifelong servitude.

A law firm's books must be balanced, of course.  Fine wine isn't cheap.

While he was outwardly a devoutly religious man, Francis Scott Key fought strenuously against the abolitionist sentiment taking root within his religious circles.

Mr. Key would have been able to accept the end of slavery, BUT ONLY IF ALL FREED SLAVES WERE ABLE TO BE EXPEDITED OUT OF AMERICA AND "BACK" TO AFRICA.

By the end of his life, Francis Scott Key's vociferous opposition to abolition was so pronounced that he was actually perceived as a dangerous sympathizer with the southern cause. 

And while we cannot pick our relatives, it is interesting to note that Mr. Key's sister Anne married a certain Roger Brooke Taney in 1806 - the man who would go on to be the Chief Justice who penned the infamous "Dred Scott" decision of 1857 which helped to hasten the start of the Civil War.

Here are Justice Taney's words:

"It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in regard to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted; but the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect..."

*****

Few groups in American history are as mired in hypocrisy as the current MAGA-fascists.

Most claim to be Constitutional "originalists", treating the USA's 237-year-old design for self-governance as "Holy Scripture" - immutable, timeless, unchanging.

Except they are only "originalists" when it comes to progressive interpretations of the Constitution which serve social justice (or undermine patriarchy and white supremacy).

The Supreme Court believes it is welcome and entitled to invoke or ignore the original historical meaning of the Constitution's text, if it serves contemporary conservative desires.

This is why supporters of slavery like the aforementioned Roger Brooke Taney felt able to claim that the Constitution should be interpreted in light of the CONTEMPORARY attitudes and views of his own era.

The US Supreme Court of Taney ruled that since the majority of voting Americans had decided OVER TIME that African-Americans were "not quite human", it was therefore constitutionally legal to withhold certain "human rights".

This is also why conservatives in league with the gun lobby and arms industry have been able to find Supreme Court justices able to contort the original meaning of the Second Amendment to the point that one is left wondering if some judges have a proper grasp of English at all.

Yet we know they DO understand the real meaning and intent of the text, and we know we are being gas-lit, once again.

In other words, social conservatives can, in fact, be weirdly, hideously "progressive" in their interpretation of the Constitution - but only when it suits them.

*****

I have no idea whether the foregoing historical details have informed the men and women "taking the knee" during the national anthem in recent years. 

Probably not.

But one thing is certain.  Symbols are powerful, and symbols are loaded with dreams, presumptions, agendas, and yes, hatreds.

The political classes in the USA like to talk about Americans’ rights and freedoms.

About the right to peaceful protest.

But all of the talk about “rights” hides some unsettling truths…

A protest is meant to shine light on wrongs and injustice.

Those who benefit and enrich themselves under the status quo mostly detest protestors. When protestors gain something, those with wealth and power tend to lose something.

So the right to protest is only “respected” as long as a protest remains ineffective.

Once a protest becomes EFFECTIVE, things take on a sinister complexion.

Once a protest becomes EFFECTIVE, it doesn’t matter if it’s peaceful or not.

Contrary to all the platitudes about American rights, US history can boast a catalogue of examples where the right to protest has been violently suppressed.

The Whiskey Rebellion. Miners’ unions. Voter registration drives. Civil Rights activism. Kent State. American Indian rights. Women’s suffrage. Pro-Palestine student demonstrations.

Hell, half of the USA fought a Civil War to smash and destroy protests against human slavery…

Colin Kaepernick was brought down because his silent, peaceful protest was EFFECTIVE. Instead of standing outside a police station holding a placard and shouting, Kaepernick subverted the bread and circuses spectacle of the NFL to reach a much wider audience.

How dare someone break the third wall between the money men and the audience they see as “theirs”.

How dare someone call into question the rituals of patriotism - rituals which serve only to protect those who deploy patriotism as a means to maintain sheep-like obeisance among the disempowered.

Why should Colin Kaepernick and others like him be expected to "respect the flag", or to "respect the anthem"? 

Why? 

When did this flag and this anthem really begin to represent ALL Americans?

1865?  1965? 

Yesterday? 

Ever?

*****

Does anyone even remember Colin Kaepernick? A man who lost his career for having a social conscience?

The current fascist-in-chief made sure to attend Super Bowl 2025 last year, before his approval ratings had cratered.

He gave 2026 a miss, offering only his usual poisonous social media commentary from a distance. Halftime show performer Bad Bunny was “one of the worst EVER”.

Of course he was. He is brown, and speaks Spanish.

At Super Bowl 2025, legions of Trump’s adoring fascist enablers dutifully booed any members of the "out group".

The NFL bowed before his administration's demand that the "End Racism" slogan should be "disappeared", in a precursor warm-up to Trump’s efforts to ruin World Cup 2026.

During the 2025 halftime show, Kendrick Lamar did not forget Kaepernick.

And Kendrick Lamar did not bow.

Using Black Americans to physically embody the flag was a statement extraordinaire - one of the most powerful rebuttals of "exclusive ownership" of the audience - and patriotism - you're ever likely to see.

Trump left early.

The American flag and national anthem are symbols often most beloved by those who do not respect Mr. Lamar, do not respect Mr. Kaepernick, do not respect the Black community, or the Black community's right to social justice, free speech and legitimate protest.

The biggest flag-wavers of all believe THEY are entitled to storm and vandalize the nation's capitol on the basis of fake grievances, knowing their "champion" is prepared to pardon their violence.

They howl their putrid, imbecilic hatred at images of "libs" on stadium screens.

Meanwhile, a silent minute or two on bended knee to highlight real social injustice causes spittle-flecked rage...

But hey.

Betsy Ross sewed a flag.

And Francis Scott Key was a patriot.

End of lesson.

Meanwhile, a decade after one chapter in his life was closed, an unassuming guy named Colin Kaepernick this month picked-up the bill for an independent autopsy on the body of a young Mississippi man named Nolan Wells, because in the USA, patriotism is often little more than a performance of obedience and privilege, and justice is almost always for people who can afford it.

I was born in the wagon of a travelling show

My mama used to dance for the money they’d throw

Papa would do whatever he could

Preach a little gospel

Sell a couple bottles of Doctor Good

Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves (1971)

A lot of my European friends - mostly from the UK and Germany - have cornered me at get togethers down the years and asked “What is this thing with America and religion? Why are so many people in a modern, highly-developed country still so “God this” and “Jesus that”?

In other words, the majority of Europeans consider themselves a post-Enlightenment society, where a combination of high literacy rates and almost universal access to third level education has created a population able to weigh the religion-based certitudes of the past against widely available evidence which contradicts those traditional certitudes.

After years of reading, discussion, and pondering, I arrived at my own <hyper-distilled> answer to my friends’ questions...

*****

All three major Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have traditionally had theologians who read, studied, and interpreted the religious writings which are the foundation and accompaniment to their faith.

Jews have their “Bible” or “Tanakh” (Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim), and the accompanying Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash - which are basically a gathering together of centuries of commentary, debate, and interpretation of Jewish religious law and ethics.

Muslims have the Quran, along with many writings shared with the Hebrew Torah and Christian New Testament, as well as a large body of Hadith - deeds and sayings attributed to their main prophet, Muhammad.

Christians have their “Old Testament”, which is basically a variation on the Jewish Bible, with an additional body of writings called the “New Testament”, which was written by both Jewish and non-Jewish followers of an apocalyptic cult begun by quasi-historical figures such as John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth roughly 2,000 years ago.

Because the early Christian Church was adopted into the structures of the Roman Empire, it became a very “top-down” hierarchical institution.

This meant that Christians (from the early Middle Ages through to the Early Modern Period) didn’t share or have access to a body of writings explaining the theological or philosophical debates behind Christian scripture, doctrine or canon law.

Doctrine and canon law was debated behind closed doors, and then fed down through the hierarchical channels - Pope to archbishop to bishop to priest.

This paternalistic and untransparent way of interpreting Christian writings and formulating religious “law” (and rampant corruption) eventually led to the Protestant break with the Catholic Church during the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in Europe.

Because a shared, common religion is one of the cornerstones which help monarchs and leaders to maintain social order and cohesion, the Protestant Reformation led to the Wars of Religion during the 1500s and 1600s - some of the bloodiest and most brutal conflicts ever seen on European soil.

And when the killing starts anywhere, people become even more deeply entrenched in their sense of righteousness.

Henry VIII of England used Protestant/Catholic divisions as an excuse to override Catholic Papist power, and to confiscate millions of crowns of wealth and property from the Catholic Church - making himself head of the church in England.

Many extreme Protestants saw through Henry’s opportunistic Protestantism, and tried to force the new “Protestant-lite” Anglican Church to become more hard-core anti-Catholic.

During and after the reigns of Henry VIII, his daughter Elizabeth I, James the VI/I, and Charles I, many of the most extreme Protestants (Puritans and Separatists) decided to try their luck on foreign shores, in The Netherlands, and later in North America.

Long story short, the English colonies in North America were first settled by a number of elites (loyal to the establishment and its Anglican Church), along with a very noisy bunch of Protestant extremists, underclass indentured servants, and involuntary transportees (war prisoners, political prisoners, convicts, beggars, vagrants, criminals, prostitutes, etc).

*****

While many Europeans were undergoing a gradual social revolution (leading to universal suffrage and wider access to higher education for its lower classes during the 1700s and 1800s), many Americans were quite literally preoccupied with land-grabbing and violent ethnic cleansing.

Religion in colonial America was seen as the baseline division between “God’s people” and those placed outside His covenant.

Puritan writers and ministers characterized Indian resistance to settler-colonialism in Biblical terms, with the English framed as latter-day Israelites, beset on all sides by “savages” similar to the Biblical Philistines.

This pattern would continue. In 1763-64 in Pennsylvania, a Scottish immigrant and Presbyterian minister named John Elder would lead a gang of Scottish and Ulster men (who were illegally squatting on Indian land) to commit “pre-emptive” massacres on peaceful Indians they characterized as “Canaanites”.

In this overwhelmingly Protestant frontier environment with few schools, even fewer seminaries, and almost no institutes of higher learning, an educated clergy was scarce.

Many aspiring Protestant clergy were offered dispensations, i.e., they were allowed to become ordained “ministers of the Gospel” without having to attend a formal theological college or seminary.

And this, perhaps more than anything else, led to the distinctly American institutions of “camp meetings” and “revivals”, where razzamatazz, charisma, theatricality, and emotionality came to replace serious study and analysis of religious scripture.

Many frontier “preacher men” were in fact illiterate, having simply memorized enough Bible verses to be able to bluff their way into a respectable social position.

Is it any wonder, that in such an environment, churches sprang up and divided like bacteria in a Petri dish?

This is not some random, back of an envelope analysis, by the way.

This writer has chuckled over records showing one backwoods Wesleyan Methodist church in North Carolina having a “theological schism” over the question of snuff-dipping during sermons...

(see Henry Clay Sisk and the Wesleyan Missionary Church of the early 1900s. Reverend Sisk also seems to have had a nice little cash sideline in sacramental “healing oil”. Interestingly, Mr. Sisk was descended from the mixed-ethnic “Bean” family of frontier Appalachia, and “Loving” people who may have once been colonial Tidewater crypto-Jews named “Levine”.)

In a less humorous example, one mountain preacher even led his congregation to participate in human sacrifice...

(see the ritual murder of Lucinda Mills in 1933 in Martin County, Kentucky)

*****

Manifest Destiny - aka the seizing of America - was only completed in the 1890s, with the massacre of 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee, the later surrender of the Apache, and the annexation of Hawaii in 1893.

One might fairly suspect that a people’s theology tends to reflect the nature of its practitioners.

Almost all churches attended by “white” American Christian evangelicals today, whether mainline Protestant or Pentacostalist (Assemblies of God, Church of God of Prophecy, Disciples of Christ, et al), find their roots in 18th, 19th, and 20th century “do-it-yourself” religious movements founded by people barely touched by the arts of philosophy or academically rigorous language and divinity studies.

Such places of worship are a world away from the scholarship of theologians who study Catholic canon law, the Jewish Torah and Talmud, or the Islamic Quran and Hadith.

Such places of worship are a universe away from sciences like geology and biology, humanities subjects like Assyriology, or ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek language studies.

And of course MAGA will say that is the whole point - their personal relationship with their God and Jesus shouldn’t require an understanding of science, history, ancient languages, or philosophy.

For many evangelicals, knowledge is in fact the enemy of faith.

Frontier America sped past The Enlightenment, and came up smiling in early 1900s California.

Just in time for the new cult of wealth and shiny celebrity (which has meshed seamlessly with the cult of acquisition) to give us “prosperity Gospel” and megachurches.

So to my friends who wonder why USA politicians and celebrities are always thanking Jesus, or always asking God to “Bless America”, the answer is fairly simple.

American evangelicalism (and much of American religion in general), bears very little relation to actual religious teachings.

Religious practice in America has often been little more than a made-up faith system, divorced from its historical origins and tenets, interpreted and designed to justify or excuse whatever it is that certain Americans want to do or believe.

Justifying slavery and racism? Call dark skin the biblical Mark of Cain.

God bless America.

Bombing an elementary school full of girls in Minab, Iran?

God bless America.

Supplying endless bombs to crush the bodies of Gazan children under concrete rubble?

God bless America.

While much of the western world has become more secular in nature, the USA hasn’t.

Maybe the explanation goes beyond the USA’s peculiar history.

Maybe it’s because the USA still NEEDS its own customized belief system able to justify, sanctify, and excuse its actions.

[Image: River baptism, Benton County, Tennessee]

What is “America”?

Who gets to define what is “America”?

Is “America”:

1) A physical territory?

2) A nation state controlling that physical territory?

3) The political and legal institutions governing that nation state?

4) The people inhabiting and identifying with a physical territory?

5) The people inhabiting a physical territory who also identify with the nation state controlling that physical territory?

6) The people inhabiting a physical territory who also identify with the political institutions of that nation state?

7) The people who just happen to be living inside boundaries drawn by violent settler-colonialists many years ago?

8) Is America a culture, or an agglomeration of cultures?

9) Or is “America” a symbol, a cipher, for a set of ideas conjured utterly in the minds and imaginations of people with no real understanding of political history?

The truth is, “America” can be one or many of these things, depending upon who is answering the question, and whose answer gets to be broadcast most widely.

Wherever we choose to look in the historical record, whenever a rich person, an ideologue, a tyrant, or an autocrat is on the rise, that person will always, ALWAYS, attempt to conflate the definition of “The Nation” with their own self interest.

Greedy and rapacious men will swear that unbridled capitalism is not only good, they will claim it is THE AMERICAN WAY.

What’s more, greedy and rapacious men will say that they themselves are the very embodiment of THE AMERICAN WAY.

This is why I have never been the kind of person who wraps themselves in a flag, and says they “love America”.

As an observer of culture and history born in the 1960s, and as someone who has been lucky enough to travel and live in other countries, I have always been struck by the many contradictions at the heart of American identity.

Too many people claim this word “America”, and I don’t want MY America to be confused with the America of Ronald Reagan, Elon Musk, the KKK, George Armstrong Custer, Lindsey Graham, Andrew Jackson, Stephen Miller, J. Edgar Hoover, Jerry Falwell, the Peabody Coal Company, Pat Robertson, Wall Street, Texas Rangers, Richard Nixon, Jim Crow, Marlboro Man, Mormons, or a thousand other freaks and hypocrites who hoard and rage and lie and denigrate and call their personal inner dysfunction “America”.

And because of the stories I choose to tell, many people, including the authors of Project 2025 and the white evangelical Christian nationalists who support Donald Trump, will even presume that I “hate America”.

Which I of course do not, because to me America is not a system of government, an ideology, a “heroic project”, a “City on a Hill”, or a state “blessed by God” to fulfil a special role in the world.

America, like so many other places on this big blue marble in space, is not merely territory or “property” enclosed by a series of lines marked out by land surveyors, either.

America is its people.

And there are more good people than bad people in America, I’m sure of it.

But Houston, we have a problem.

The place called America has reached a critical inflection point.

On one side, we have people who live in what should still be called “objective reality”.

On the other side, we have people who live inside a conjured reality - a reality conjured within their own minds, or a reality conjured for them by bad faith actors.

The loudest cheerleaders for the MAGA project - men like Stephen Miller, Tom Cotton, and the subject of this article, Eric Schmitt - are given unlimited space by a supine (or actively complicit) legacy media ecosystem to propagate endless outright lies and propaganda.

Unchallenged.

To serve in the cabinet of an administration, or to serve as a US senator, should require a certain amount of gravitas.

At the bare minimum, a member of cabinet or a congressperson should possess a reasonable grasp of American history.

How can a person claim to speak for “America” and “Americans” if they don’t even know or understand what actually “made America”?

*****

The internal contradictions in the arguments of those who say “Make America Great Again” or “America First” are hilarious and legion.

If someone suggests that the nation state called the USA should make reparations to the descendants of people who were dispossessed and/or enslaved as recently as 4 generations ago, MAGA types will shriek “That is ancient history! I never killed an Indian, I never owned slaves, and I will be damned if I will let Big Government take a penny of my taxes to pay any form of redress or compensation”.

Yet these same people will speak with pride of “Pilgrim Fathers” and “The Founding Fathers”, as if actions taken by religious fanatics or wealthy slaveholding people living 8 or 9 generations ago still have a direct bearing on their own personal sense of identity.

Put even more bluntly, if something or someone in American history is perceived as good or “heroic”, people are happy and ready to claim a direct cultural inheritance.

If something in American history is perceived as something less than “heroic”, less than laudable, it then becomes something “we’ve moved on from”, and therefore has nothing to do with them.

What’s more, to even bring up the things “we’ve moved on from” is seen as limp-wristed wokery - or in the case of Black folks, it’s just them making excuses for their own cultural or genetic flaws and moral shortcomings.

I’m going to flog this dead horse to make sure the point is 100% clear.

Why is the current regime removing exhibitions and installations dealing with slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples from federally funded museums?

Why should MAGA types even care if other Americans today learn about and talk about what the MAGA movement likes to call “ancient history”?

If it’s so irrelevant, why should it matter SO DAMN MUCH today?

How can something be so unimportant, yet important enough to require erasure?

Oh wait.

The MAGA movement claims that to even mention history as seen through Black, Brown, or Indigenous eyes is “divisive”.

Because all any Trump voter ever wanted was for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and “white” people to live together in complete social equity and harmony, right?

Yeah right.

What MAGA supporters really want IS FOR OTHER PEOPLES’ OBJECTIVE HISTORIES AND REALITIES TO STOP INTRUDING UPON THEIR OWN CONJURED REALITY.

Telling someone their “reality” is unsustainable in the face of facts is the MAGA definition of “being divisive”.

Darwin’s well-evidenced, compelling and convincing theory of evolution intrudes upon evangelical MAGA’s conjured reality.

Atheism intrudes upon evangelical MAGA’s conjured reality.

American Indian genocide intrudes upon MAGA’s conjured reality.

The systemic racism and historical violence of American society intrudes upon MAGA’s conjured reality.

Put bluntly, MAGA are willing to control, coerce, and even hurt others in order to preserve the comfort of their own imaginary identity and reality.

*****

Imagine if your farmer grandfather had murdered his next door neighbor, burnt down his house, and stolen his livestock, leaving his neighbor’s widow and children living in tents on the road beside their old farm.

Forty years later, you drive down the road on your way to town, the lucky inheritor of your father’s farm. A grandchild of the man your grandfather murdered is hitch-hiking into town.

You do not stop for them. They should get their own car.

Besides, you don’t want them dirtying your upholstery. They wear tattered old clothes and live in tents, after all.

One day in a local town hall meeting, someone suggests doing something to help the family living on the side of the road.

They invite the great-grandmother to speak, and ask her to explain how her children and grandchildren came to be living in tents on the side of the road.

When she begins to speak, mentioning your grandfather, you get up and leave.

You didn’t personally burn down her house.

You find her words “divisive”.

You’ve worked hard all your life. Inheriting a farm wasn’t a ticket to riches.

The past is the past.

Nothing to do with you.

*****

Imagine lawmakers in Germany today trying to remove all mention of The Holocaust from German museums:

“The Holocaust is ancient history.”

“Almost no one alive today worked for the Nazis.”

“I never killed a Jew or Gypsy or homosexual.”

“It’s nothing to do with me.”

“We’ve moved on.”

“Mentioning World War II is divisive.”

“Let’s focus on the progress we’ve made.”

The thing always missing from these statements, whether applied to Germany or the USA, is the fact that there is never one single history.

There are many “histories”.

For the Lenape Indians, there is the time before Europeans > the time of smallpox > the time of resistance > the time of migration > more resistance > the times of forced removal > attempts at rebuilding

Every Indigenous tribe or nation has its own history.

Every region in America has its own Black histories.

Spanish and French parts of North America have separate but interconnected histories.

Mixed-ethnic Appalachians have a completely different history to New Englanders.

But for MAGA types, or White Christian Nationalists, there is only one story of America (and by extension the later USA), and it follows a clear trajectory:

Good Christian Settlers > Fighting Indians > Fighting British Tyranny > Fighting more Indians > Building a Nation > “Giving” Blacks their freedom > Everything is now cool, right?

This is why men like Eric Schmitt, Senator for Missouri and “white” nationalist, was able to keep a straight face while giving a speech called “What is an American?” at the National Conservative Conference in September last year...

I’m not going to reproduce the speech in full. Those who are interested may find a link to the full speech <here>.

I will pull a selection of the remarks he made - remarks which were offered as statements of fact, as part of his argument in favor of “blood and soil” white nationalism.

Under these “alternative facts” I will share some actual facts, based on verifiable evidence.

Remember that these are the words of a US senator, educated in political science at a Jesuit College.

These are the views and beliefs of someone who might be expected to have at least a rudimentary grasp of US history.

Note that Schmitt uses the term “National Conservatism” rather than “white Christian Nationalism”.

His own statements make clear what he actually means by “National Conservatism”.

*****

The first three pages of Schmitt’s speech can be summed up thus:

America is not a “project” or a “proposition”. It is not a lofty list of ideals. It is a physical place and a nation with a distinct “history, heritage, and interests”.

We begin to understand exactly whose “history, heritage, and interests” Schmitt means, when he begins to bemoan The Left’s “abolishing” of his “specific Western heritage”.

Schmitt rails against statues coming down, names being changed, heroes becoming villains, and “the story of the nation” being rewritten.

This is tired old “grandpa shaking his fist at the clouds” stuff.

This is also one historically privileged group demanding continued pride of place for their own origin myth, and calling the inclusion of other peoples’ real stories “rewriting history”.

Seven-eighths of Eric Schmitt’s ancestors arrived in the USA too late to experience or take part in the Civil War, never mind the War for Independence.

Yet many African-Americans who wish to see statues of enslavers pulled down are the descendants of Black people who had already been living in America two and a half centuries before the Civil War, and one and a half centuries before the War for Independence.

Who gets to tell the story of America then?

Many Mexicans do not see the slave traders who fought at The Alamo as heroes.

Those “Texians” are correctly seen as violent colonizers who arrived in Mexico - again - two and a half centuries AFTER the Spanish ancestors of Mexicans.

The Indigenous American ancestry of most Mexicans (and Indigenous peoples in general) goes back at least 14,000 years.

How do Eric Schmitt’s people, with their brief 100-150 years in America, get to define the distinct “history, heritage, and interests” of this “physical place and nation”?

How does Eric Schmitt presume to bewail the fate of “real Americans”, claiming that their neighborhoods are “transformed beyond recognition by immigration”, when virtually all of Eric Schmitt’s OWN family arrived in America as part of the final great waves of European immigration?

As Schmitt gets into his stride, his speech goes heavier and heavier on the anti-immigration theme, praising Donald Trump for standing-up to both neo-liberal conservatives and leftists as they conspire to allow waves of foreign immigrants and workers to take American jobs. Schmitt praises heartland Americans for stubbornly refusing to forget who they are, even as America is wrongfully transformed into something different to the country “that once belonged to them”.

No doubt the “white” nativist Protestants of Illinois and Missouri felt the same way when Schmitt’s brown and Catholic great-grandparents arrived in the American Midwest from Sicily!

In fact, Eric Schmitt’s great-grandfather Salvatore Vitale only took the oath of allegiance to the USA in 1943.

There can be little doubt that the welcome given to the Vitale family was complicated by their name being deeply associated with the Sicilian mob in St. Louis.

“Specific Western heritage”, indeed.

*****

Despite almost all of Eric Schmitt’s family having missed Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Bacon’s Rebellion, the French and Indian War, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the First and Second Great Awakenings, the War for Independence, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Cumberland Gap, Indian Removal, the Cherokee Land Lottery, the War of 1812, and the Civil War, he chooses to invoke many events in American/USA history as HIS history.

This bit is worth quoting at length:

“The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls - all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a ‘proposition’.

They believed they were forging a nation - a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us.

America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.”

When all of those events were unfolding, almost all of Schmitt’s family were living in Germany, Prussia, Belgium, or Italy.

These latter-day “true Americans” like Schmitt who endlessly praise get-up-and-go capitalism as “The American Way” might also want to renounce some of their own relatively recent immigrant forebears.

Many, many of the German immigrants to places like Missouri during the mid- to late 1800s were “freethinkers”, anarchists, and proto-socialists, including the “48ers” who were European revolutionaries.

The modern “Kindergarten” movement in America was developed by one such German “48er” (Margarethe Schurz), while the first public Kindergarten in the USA (Gasp! Socialism!) opened in Schmitt’s hometown of St. Louis in 1873.

Many other “48ers” were active labor organizers (and vehemently anti-slavery), so Schmitt’s German roots are a little bit more “European leftist” than “Kentucky settlers behind their stockade walls”.

Perhaps most hilarious of all, of the one or two remote ancestors of Schmitt who WERE in America at the time of the War for Independence, one was a Virginia slaveholder, while the other, Johann Shellhorse (Schellhaas/Schellhausen), appears to have been a Hessian mercenary in the employ of the British army! A German with family members who went on to intermarry with the mixed-ethnic “Bunch” family - a family counting Lonnie Bunch, current head of The Smithsonian among its descendants. So when Eric Schmitt helps Trump and the MAGA movement to erase Black history, he is helping to erase his own family history.

Schmitt is right in one regard, though.

Almost none of the people he mentions as “struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth” or “repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks” were fighting for a “proposition”.

But they also weren’t bleeding, struggling, or dying for “us”.

They were not building a country for “us”.

They were religious extremists, speculators, indentured servants, enslaved Black and Indigenous peoples, transported convicts, and thousands upon thousands of others, some driven by religious ideology, some by hopes of easy money, and many simply trying to survive.

Again, they were not building a country for “us”.

The USA came into being as a nation because a coterie of slaveholding men with money and property decided they could get even more money and property by not having to answer to the British government.

And they used propaganda, cash and promises of free land to get the underclasses to do most of the fighting.

*****

They say that every accusation hurled by MAGA at the Left is projection.

When MAGA got called out for their racism, misogyny, or homophobia, they screamed about “the woke Left” trying to interfere with free speech.

Yet when this “woke mob” points out that Charlie Kirk was racist (using his own words), or speaks out for Palestinian rights on university campuses, people literally get arrested or deported.

When conservatives repeat a myth, they are simply “telling their own history”.

When scholars correct this false mythology with evidence, they are accused of “wokery” or “rewriting history”.

And yet again, it is the Project 2025 and MAGA gangs who literally remove historical exhibitions and displays from public spaces when they dare to tell history from any viewpoint other than their own.

Eric Schmitt is right at the front of this battle against the forces of darkness, reminding MAGA that:

“America was settled, founded and built by the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative and risk-taking sons and daughters of the West.”

Furthermore:

“This...is why every great feat of the modern world bore American fingerprints.”

We won’t get into it here, the question of who actually “built” America. I’m sure the descendants of enslaved African-Americans have a word or two to say about that.

But Schmitt’s grandiose claims for American fingerprints being on “every great feat” is worth fact-checking.

“It was an American who created...the telephone...”

[Uh, Alexander Graham Bell was actually a Scotsman (educated in Scotland) who only later in life immigrated to the USA]

“It was an American who mapped the human genome...”

[Um, wasn’t that work actually initiated by Ronald Fisher, an Englishman?]

“It was an American who invented the microchip, the modern computer, and the internet...”

[Geez. I can give the American Jack Kilby the microchip, but the modern computer and the internet have to go to Charles Babbage/Alan Turing and Timothy John Berners-Lee, all Englishmen]

“It was an American who gave the world the airplane. And 24 years later, it was an American (from Missouri, I might add) who first traversed the Atlantic Ocean in a single solo flight...”

[Charles Lindbergh, white supremacist, was actually born in Michigan, raised in Minnesota and Washington, D. C. Lindbergh’s father was Swedish, while his mother was the daughter of a Canadian immigrant father and a mother whose parents were English. The indomitable American spirit is well summed-up by this Lindbergh quote: “We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races...”]

“It was an American who broke the sound barrier...”

[Chuck Yeager was indeed American, the descendant of mixed-ethnic West Virginian Melungeon mountain people like the Sizemore family, who are part Indigenous American, African, European, and likely part Jewish and Romani]

“It was an American who split the atom...”

[Damn. I was sure that was done by English physicist Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, Irish physicist Ernest Walton, and Ernest Rutherford of New Zealand]

“It was an American who built the first skyscraper...”

[William Le Baron Jenney of Massachusetts did indeed build the first skyscraper, after attending architectural college in...France, alongside Gustave Eiffel]

“It was an American - from Missouri, I might add again - who devised the Hubble Telescope...”

[I’m from Missouri, too. But this accolade is usually given to Nancy Grace Roman of Nashville, Tennessee]

*****

Schmitt goes on to riff on other aspects of American Exceptionalism, after his “hoo-ha” claims for American innovation:

“We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims...”

[Uh, not YOUR family, bud]

“The people who built our country were not villains. They were heroes. We can no longer apologize for who we are.”

[No one ever suggested that Americans apologize for who they ARE, nor did anyone ever suggest that Americans apologize for who their ancestors WERE. Some of us do, however, demand the right to be taught real history, not propaganda told through a series of self-congratulatory vignettes scrubbed clean of unpleasant truths. Funny how you spend paragraphs taking pride in the achievements of others, as if their achievements reflect on YOU and your view of the world, but disavow, downplay, or minimalize genocide and slavery]

“I’m a Missouri boy, born and raised. I’m from the state where Lewis and Clark launched their expedition. Where Jesse James lived and Daniel Boone died. The state that launched a thousand wagon trails, carrying American pioneers west to find their destiny.”

[Um, sorry Schmitt. When Lewis and Clark set out on their expedition to the west, 14 of your 16 second great-grandparents were living somewhere other than America. There you go, taking credit for other peoples’ deeds again. And I’m not so sure that bragging about a Confederate bushwhacker and outlaw helps your whole “America is great” argument]

“My ancestors arrived [in Missouri] in the 1840s...back then Missouri was as far west as you could go...”

[Uh, no, Missouri wasn’t “as far west as you could go” between 1820 and 1840. In fact, Ste. Genevieve had been founded in Missouri by the French a whole century earlier, and that town was comprised of a mix of African-Americans, Indigenous Americans, French, and French Métis peoples. Stop pretending that the world didn’t exist before US citizens got there]

And here we go. No “white” American history is complete without exaggerated claims being made for the role played by Ulster folk, aka the “Scots-Irish”:

“Think about the kinds of people it takes to do that - to build a home at the edge of the known world. Those were the kinds of people our ancestors were.”

[Again, Missouri wasn’t the “edge of the known world”. The French and Spanish had been there since the 1600s. The Missouria tribe would also have been surprised to learn that they lived at the “edge of the known world”]

“The first settlers in my state were mostly Scots-Irish - a hard, proud, fiercely independent people, forged in the hills of Ulster and the backwoods of Appalachia, ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization. They were the ancestors - as it just so happens - of my friend and our vice president, JD Vance.”

[Except for the inconvenient fact that the Scots-Irish were NEVER the majority settler population of any county or state ANYWHERE during the age of settler-colonialism. Perhaps even more inconvenient, is the fact that J. D. Vance has absolutely ZERO documented “Scots-Irish” ancestry. He DOES have documented Black ancestry, though. Funny how he never seems to mention it]

“Now, just as a matter of historical record, the Indians were perfectly capable of invading, killing and enslaving each other all on their own for centuries before we got here.”

[Ah, the old “they were already fighting each other” chestnut. By that logic, if I hear a domestic disturbance next door, I have a right to smash through a window, join in the punching, kick them out of their house, and let my son and his wife move in]

“...the American settling of the frontier was an expression of something deeper in the soul of our people...American heritage is not a narrative of oppression and evil, but the unfolding story of our people’s pioneer spirit...We’re not sorry. Why would we be sorry?”

[Why does this sound suspiciously like modern Zionism? Because it’s the same self-exculpatory bullshit]

“America is the proudest and most magnificent heritage ever known to man.”

[A wise person once said “Self praise is no praise”. Nuff said]

*****

I’m going to finish this off with one more extended quote from the venerable Senator from Missouri:

“On July 4, 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged across our nation, President Trump traveled to Mount Rushmore to address the nation. On our nation’s anniversary, as anarchists looted and defaced and tore down statues and monuments all across the country, the president stood before the granite cliff face and declared: ‘This monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed’.

If you want to know who we are, look no further than the monument that stood behind him. Mount Rushmore took 14 years and hundreds of men to build. They climbed 700 stairs every day to be lowered down on ropes over the cliff face—sometimes in the blazing heat, sometimes in the bitter cold—to carve the faces of our heroes into the side of the great mountain.

There was no practical need for any of it. It’s just who we were. We were Americans. We did it because we could.

For decades, the people in power sought to turn our past into a repressed memory - something so awful that we would prefer to forget it altogether. They made self-hatred and shame our new civic religion.

Let me say this today, as clearly as I can: We are done being ashamed. We love our country, and we will never apologize for the great men who built it.”

[Schmitt’s attempt to invoke the righteous outrage caused by the all-too-common murder of Black Americans by law enforcement officers (as a counterpoint to “American pride”) is despicable.

No one should be surprised that a white nationalist would glorify Mount Rushmore, the ultimate visual and environmental imposition of colonialist hegemony upon any people displaced by “Manifest Destiny”. It is all too appropriate that this desecration of sacred Indian ground should be praised by Schmitt as a sign of “American” achievements and greatness. Not only because it underscores the coarse vulgarity of MAGA, but also because it reminds us of the ignorance at the heart of the current regime.

Mount Rushmore (Pahá Sápa) was carved by John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, the son of a Danish Mormon man (and erstwhile homeopathy practitioner) who was simultaneously married to two sisters.

Borglum was heavily involved in Ku Klux Klan politics during the 1920s, and was a rabid believer in Nordic “racial” superiority. How many Americans are aware that before his work at Mount Rushmore, Borglum was commissioned and began work on a giant carving of Confederate “heroes” at Stone Mountain, 15 miles east of Atlanta, Georgia? Technical disputes meant that he never finished the commission (it would be completed by others), but the backstory to the man who carved Mount Rushmore places it an entirely different light when we re-read the words of Eric Schmitt: “It’s just who we were. We were Americans. We did it because we could.”

Yes. It is just who we were. We did it because we could.]

*****

Postscript

None of us get a say in where we happen to be born.

This fact came to me as an epiphany at the age of 13, when I was locked in my bedroom for weeks on end by my nutty evangelical parents.

I cannot even remember the supposed infraction which led to this lengthy “grounding” or incarceration.

What I DO remember is having all of my books taken away, except for a brown faux leather King James Version Bible.

For Christmas that year I received a paint-by-numbers set of da Vinci’s “Last Supper”.

Between reading both the Old and New Testaments front to back (two or three times), and making a total dog’s dinner of the paint set, it occurred to me that if I had been born in India, I wouldn’t be saying The Pledge of Allegiance at school every morning.

If I had been born in China, my young mind wouldn’t have been programmed with visions of an impending Apocalypse and Rapture.

If I had been born in Iran, I would have US bombs raining down on my head right now.

If I had been born in Palestine, I would probably be dead under 80,000 tons of rubble.

None of us get a say in where we happen to be born.

It’s the people who came before us who robbed somebody’s land, drew some lines on a map and called it a new nation.

It’s the people who came before us who made up a story about the nation in which we were born - a story intended to obscure and bury the wicked deeds committed by so many of our forebears.

There are a lot of good people who just happened to be born inside the lines marking out a territory called the USA.

I’m on the side of those people.

And on the side of other good people, everywhere, who are being forced to live inside someone else’s “conjured reality”.

I'm going to start this weekend piece with a little story pulled from my own life.

Like so many kids from my background (Old Mix American* working class), I joined the US military without finishing high school - on my 17th birthday, in fact.

I spent three years stationed with an artillery unit situated along what was then called "The Iron Curtain", a border dividing the "Free West" from the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe.

The Warsaw Pact countries were essentially all of the nations which, at the end of WWII, had ended-up as satellites or outright puppet states of what was then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

All of the countries behind the Iron Curtain (East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania) had governments/regimes situated politically on a spectrum between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

Put simply, the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism rests on how many of the following aspects of governance are out of the hands of the wider "demos" or people, and controlled by the few.

It doesn't matter if these "few" are communist party officials, monarchs, dictators, corporations and oligarchs, or elected officials who flout the laws and norms of democracy.

If any government, administration, or regime includes more than one of the following indicators, they are authoritarian at the very least:

1) an elaborate foundational myth and/or ideology

2) a single party or body of governance

3) state terror

4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication

5) a monopoly on advanced weapons systems

6) concentrated control of news media

7) centrally controlled economy

8) government access to mass surveillance systems

As a teenager I had been propagandized or indoctrinated to believe that service in the US Armed Forces was meant to forestall or prevent a “free” and “liberal” USA and Western Europe from falling under communist authoritarian rule.

The wisdom which comes with age - experience and education - has taught this writer that almost any system of government can be undermined and corrupted by those who are motivated by greed, lust for power, or rigid ideology.

Compare the following to the list above:

• Project 2025/White Christian Nationalism/MAGA.

• A two-party system (with both in thrall to Big Business and billionaire lobbyists).

• ICE patrols, raids, and murders.

• Anti-immigrant and LGBTQ+ hate speech and the demonization of “The Left” and other political opponents.

• The Broligarchy of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel, et al.

• TV, radio, and newspapers in the hands of the few.

• Hybrid surveillance/incarceration systems expanding rapidly via privately-owned tech and AI companies.

The USA now bears all the hallmarks of the systems it once claimed to oppose.

The USA government has always served the rich and powerful, mainly through foreign resource wars and the passing of legislation to increase the wealth of the Epstein Class.

Those of us in the “imperial core”, i.e., “back home in America” just tended to ignore it, as long as we were able to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads.

We pretended that our soldiers were protecting our “freedom”, when all they were protecting was low gas prices and corporate profits.

And now that our armed forces have been handed their ass on a plate by Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan (and now Iran), the rich and powerful are turning their baleful gaze inward.

They hope to protect their power by fomenting war among ourselves.

*****

I had a German girlfriend when I got out of the army in the mid-80s, so I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey to out-process, and flew back to Germany to be with her.

One of the many jobs I held down at the time included working as a frame-maker for a small town art gallery in Upper Franconia, a very provincial and conservative part of the state of Bavaria.

After a few months at this gallery, the owner (who will remain unnamed), approached me and asked if I would consider doing an extra "job" for her and her partner.

Over the course of a couple of hours, "T" tried to explain to me the history of the Siebenbürger people, a German-speaking minority who lived in the mountains of Transylvania, in central Romania.

The Siebenbürger are descendants of 12th century medieval Germanic mercenaries invited by King Andrew II of Hungary to take up land grants and fortify the eastern borders of what was the Kingdom of Hungary at the time.

King Andrew’s idea was not new. The ruling classes everywhere will often throw an economic bone or two to certain preferred underclass groups to get them to do the hard and dirty work of subduing and guarding a permeable frontier.

[Image: Remains of an old “Saxon” settlement in Romania]

The Transylvanian Germans would build homesteads and farms while fighting-off various Mongols and Cumans, in much the same way that underclass Americans were offered land grants along the Appalachian and later frontiers.

The poor and uneducated would fight and drive off the Indians, build forts, clear forests and roadways, set up farms and grist mills and ferry crossings, until the wealthy land, cattle, and mining barons arrived to take over.

The region in Romania known as Wallachia is where Vlad Tepes - “Vlad the Impaler” or "Dracula" - played the Hungarians off against the Ottoman Turks to build his own kingdom during the 1400s.

Most of the enemies he viciously impaled on stakes were in fact Siebenbürger soldiers.

Between 1965-1989, Romania was ruled by the brutal Nicolae Ceaușescu, who is widely considered to have run the most repressive regime among all the Warsaw Pact nations.

As part of his "make Romania great again" program, he embraced isolationism and shunned international trade, seeking to make Romania self-sufficient in every respect - food, energy, manufactured goods - everything.

By the time Ceaușescu came to power, Romania's effective overlord, the Soviet Union, had already transported at least 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania to labor camps in the Ukrainian Donbas region between 1944-1965.

Many of these and their children are the people referred-to as "Nazis" by Putin today.

Ceaușescu's cultural program involved the attempted elimination of all ethnic minority groups.

Initially, this ethnic-cleansing took the form of shutting-down all newspapers, publishing houses, schools, and theaters in which anything other than the Romanian language was spoken.

Roma (Gypsy) communities were dismantled wholesale.

It is not common knowledge in the west that the Roma (who are a separate ethnic group to "Romanians") were held as slaves for centuries in the kingdoms which would eventually become Romania.

Speaking their own languages, the enslaved Roma of regions like Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bessarabia were only emancipated during the 1850s and 1860s.

During the 1970s and 1980s, many members of both the Roma and Siebenbürger communities began to be "disappeared" by Ceaușescu's much-feared secret police, the Securitate, just as many Hispanic Americans are being persecuted, swept up, or executed by ICE thugs today…

*****

It is against this background that "T", who had actor and painter friends among the Siebenbürger behind the Iron Curtain, asked me if I would would drive her into Romania.

A Romanian theater troupe had been touring what was called "West Germany" at the time. Three of its number were Siebenbürger who had defected and were claiming asylum in Germany.

There was one small problem, however.

None of them had been allowed to travel while holding their own identity documents. Those were being held by a member of the Securitate who travelled with all such touring companies.

Without some form of ID, any claim for asylum was likely to be rejected. Any defector handed-back over to the Romanian embassy and secret police was a dead man walking.

"T" was going to Romania to retrieve some form of ID for these people.

She also hoped to smuggle out a couple of paintings which could be auctioned in the west, with the cash raised being funnelled back into Romania in order to help the desperate families left behind.

They could use western cash on the Romanian black market to survive, and maybe even use it to bribe a border official to look the other way if they attempted to cross into the west to join their loved ones.

"Why on earth do you want ME to drive?" I asked.

"Because you hold a US passport", she replied. "The border police and Securitate are unlikely to risk an international incident by detaining or harming an American."

This all sounded extremely risky, and to my eternal shame, instead of a simple "yes" or "no", I found myself asking "Am I going to get paid for this?"

I was still only 20 years old, but fully deserved her reaction.

"What the hell is the matter with you? Have you never done anything solely for others? Just for the damn sake of GOODNESS?"

Long story short, I agreed to go.

*****

We went shopping for cartons of Kent cigarettes (prime currency in Romania at the time), as well as tiny luxuries like condoms, pantyhose, and music cassette tapes - contraception and the trappings of "decadent" Western culture were outlawed by Ceaușescu in his twisted dream of an ethnically and culturally pure "Motherland".

Driving in stages, our first stop was in Vienna, where I was advised to eat well, as we wouldn't be eating well again for a few days.

From there, it was on to our first stop behind the Iron Curtain - Budapest - where we took a brief rest before pushing on.

We drove across the Hungarian plains in white-out blizzard conditions on unploughed, unilluminated highways, giant Soviet-era sculptures of proletariat workers looming suddenly out of the snow-blasted darkness along the roadsides like silent titan gods.

The actual crossing of the border from Hungary into Romania was terrifying.

I had never had a gun pointed directly at me; never mind a dozen or so Kalashnikovs. The casual laughter and staring eyes of mostly unshaven soldiers - all with only one hand on their weapon as the other held a cigarette - placed a heavy stone in the nauseous pit of my stomach.

Hands gripping the steering wheel, I turned and said to "T" "Geez, I hope they don't search the car and take all the stuff meant for your friends".

She slapped me as hard as I've ever been slapped. Leaning near, she whispered angrily through clenched teeth "Shut up you idiot! There are bugs everywhere. They can hear every word you say."

When one of the soldiers made clear his intention to search the car, "T" handed me a carton of cigarettes and my passport, and told me to play the dumb American.

It wasn't hard.

Getting out of the car, I turned warily toward the soldier who seemed to be in charge, holding out my passport while keeping the carton of cigarettes tucked under my arm. He put a hand on my shoulder and gestured toward the checkpoint booth.

I made a "You first, I'll follow" sort of gesture, but he nudged me with his rifle barrel, indicating that I was to walk ahead. That 20 yards with a rifle at my back was the longest 20 yards of my life.

Once inside his booth/office, he took the carton of cigarettes from under my arm and laid it on a small table, before taking a pack of state manufactured cigarettes - "Carpațis" - from his own pocket and offering me one.

My cigarette lit, he began pointing at the carton of Kents, and pointing back at the old BMW. It became obvious that he wanted to know what else was on the menu, but wished the bribe to remain between the two of us, out of sight of his underlings.

I went back to the car and gathered a small selection of items, tucking them inside my coat and hurrying back to the checkpoint.

Nothing I offered seemed to satisfy him, and my increasing anxiety and fear must have been obvious. Finally, a smile, an exclamation, and a slap on my back.

A Michael Jackson cassette had done it. The soldier smiled and pointed to a small photo pinned to the wall beside the table. A gift for his wife or girlfriend.

He put the cassette into a drawer under the table, and walked me back to the car, waving the others aside.

I got back into the car and crossed into Romania, looking neither left nor right in case someone might try to get my attention and stop us again.

*****

We arrived in Sibiu under cover of darkness on the second night after a journey of around 900 miles, the shadowy black mass of the Transylvanian Mountains hulking in the mid-distance.

Even in a small city like Sibiu (about the size of Reno, Nevada), electricity was only available a couple of hours every day, and it was strictly rationed.

We were met at the end of a long, wide boulevard by a dark-complexioned man standing outside a heavy, ancient oak door set back along a row of large sooty terraced townhouses which betrayed hints of former glory from the century before.

He led us down some stairs and pushed open another door, where a family sat huddled around a simple table under a single bare lightbulb in the kitchen of a freezing basement apartment, all rising with cries and smiles and hugs and warm handshakes to greet us.

The generosity of these people upon our arrival has stayed with me to this day.

They had almost nothing. Nothing in the way of decent clothing, and nothing in the way of wholesome, nourishing food.

Most of their winter sustenance was comprised of hard, stale bread and homemade sauerkraut fermented in barrels in the cellar.

Yet within the hour they had triumphantly produced a small cut of bacon wrapped in a piece of newspaper, which they cooked in a skillet before insisting that we, and we alone, should eat.

They later pulled a bottle of vodka from a hiding place behind a cupboard, and filled our glasses again and again.

I later learned they had hoarded these things for months in anticipation of our arrival.

The next morning, as "T" discussed business with our hosts, I went to the door, turning to ask if anyone would like me to fetch them something from the center of town.

I had hoped to get a brief glimpse of the city once known as "Hermannstadt" when it was still part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WWI.

Everyone burst out laughing.

"And what will you bring us back from town?" they asked in the most curious German accent I had ever heard.

"I don't know. A bar of chocolate, maybe?"

This reply led to near pandemonium, with hoots and guffaws and more gales of laughter.

Another bottle of vodka was taken from the secret place behind the cupboard, and placed in the center of the kitchen table.

Thomas pointed to the bottle.

"Bring us back a bar of chocolate, and the bottle is yours."

After many hours wandering the streets, I returned.

Empty-handed.

I will save for another time the story of our exit from Romania, which made our entry seem like the red carpet treatment.

Things very nearly turned very, very bad indeed.

But I'm here now, aged 62, writing of a world which, until recently, seemed many lifetimes distant.

Nicolae Ceaușescu was not a totalitarian dictator on his first day in office.

He wasn't even an authoritarian, really.

Power without checks and balances makes a monster of most humans, though...

After a quarter century of his hellish tyranny, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed on Romanian national television on Christmas Day in 1989, five years after my unlikely escapade there.

*****

I have travelled, and I have seen the workings of many people in many places.

And I will say it here and now.

The Republic called the USA is momentarily lost.

Authoritarianism has crept up softly on the American people, and struck.

The world has suddenly grown much smaller and more dangerous.

Freedom of speech and a free press have never seemed in as much danger in the USA.

Modern Americans have had too much, for too long, and most have never bothered to wonder how or why this could or should be so.

They foolishly believed that consumerist affluence and cheap gasoline were somehow a measure of American "greatness", “freedom”, or “exceptionalism”.

Others, of course, believe in "God's blessings".

Most Americans never thought to ask why gasoline in the USA has always cost a quarter or a tenth the amount it costs in other developed countries.

I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans know that the US, in cahoots with the UK, overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran during the 1950s in order to maintain control of petroleum reserves in that country.

Hell, I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans could point to Iran on a map.

Modern Americans have treated comfort as a birthright, wilfully turning a blind eye to, or remaining entirely ignorant of, the suffering and cheap labor furnished by generations of downtrodden Black and Hispanic communities (and the “white” underclasses taught to believe they were “special”, even when dirt poor).

In recent months, some of my readers have suggested that there is a case for optimism, because only 1 in 3 voters actually voted for a fascist.

This optimism is misplaced.

The current president enjoys a 35% approval rating, similar to the 37% support enjoyed by Hitler when he came to power nearly a century ago in 1933.

Trump’s minions continue to tear down the very last structures upholding democracy - right this minute, while you read this essay.

Stephen Miller is laying the groundwork for the legal persecution of “leftists”, in the same way that Hitler demonized Communists, gays, and Jews.

The American populace is as thoroughly propagandized as any of those who ever lived in any authoritarian state.

*****

Over the past while I have shared posts on various media suggesting that boycotts, civil disobedience, and general strikes are probably the only way to head-off the emergence of a full-blown techno-fascist, “white” nationalist autocracy this autumn.

When I shared boycott “target lists” of those who have either made public declarations of support for Trump or Project 2025, or given direct financial aid to Trump, the GOP, or Project 2025 (through endorsements, individual donations, and various PACS), the most common response was people quibbling over which companies were most deserving of being boycotted, or people saying that such boycotts would cause too much personal hardship.

This is like bickering over whose turn it is to cook while a tornado approaches.

If resistance doesn’t hurt, it’s probably not resistance.

It’s performative moral posturing.

But it’s almost certainly too late for boycotts now, anyway.

Much of Congress is complicit or acquiescent.

Many of the courts and the DOJ are complicit or acquiescent.

Many government agencies such as ICE are complicit.

Many of us are complicit, or stand transfixed by the lamp of the oncoming train.

If the Republicans lose control of both the House and Senate, Trump and many of his minions know they will be going to prison.

The current administration is never going to accept the midterm election results if they do not go their way.

The current president, with the help of his technocrats, has taken over almost all levers of government and dismantled almost all oversight bodies.

Big Tech is this very minute illegally harvesting every single shred of data concerning our lives and our loved ones.

Everyone from George Orwell to Frank Zappa warned this was coming, but neither could have imagined the power of AI.

AI and authoritarianism have never in history been combined in the way they are today.

This is going to make the old surveillance states of the Warsaw Pact look bumbling and amateurish…

Brownshirt thugs and goons roam the streets of our towns and cities, waiting for their master to release them entirely from their leashes.

Many of us claim we are not racist, but why do we only know the names of “white people” killed during interactions with ICE and Customs and Border Control?

1/16/2025 Unnamed Honduran man, El Paso, Texas

1/20/2025 Felix Bauckholt, Coventry, Vermont

3/15/2025 Rubin Ray Martinez, South Padre Island

3/28/2025 Elena Catarina Morales-Chan, Texas

3/28/2025 Enrique Juan Tizol Macario1, Texas

3/31/2025 Unnamed man, San Diego, California

6/15/2025 Unnamed Guatemalan man, El Paso, Texas

6/27/2025 Unnamed man, Rio Grande City, Texas

7/7/2025 Ryan Louis Mosqueda, McAllen, Texas

7/12/2025 Jaime Alanis, Ventura County, California

8/14/2025 Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, Monrovia, California

8/17/2025 Unnamed Ecuadorian woman, El Paso, Texas

8/30/2025 Unnamed Mexican man, Carrizo Springs, Texas

9/12/2025 Silverio Villegas González, Franklin Park, Illinois

9/23/2025 Yahir David Martinez, Brownsville, Texas

10/13/2025 Axel Everado Iquic-Sequen, El Paso, Texas

10/13/2025 Manuel Mateo Lopez, El Paso, Texas

10/23/2025 Jose Castro-Rivera, Norfolk, Virginia

11/14/2025 Bartolo Baltazar Baltazar, Imperial Beach, California

11/14/2025 Epifanio Molina Bravo, Imperial Beach, California

11/14/2025 Hector Lopez Lopez, Imperial Beach, California

11/14/2025 Unknown, Imperial Beach, California

12/11/2025 Isaias Sanchez Barboza, Starr County, Texas

12/31/2025 Keith Porter, Los Angeles, California

1/7/2026 Renee Good, Minneapolis, Minnesota

1/24/2026 Alex Pretti, Minneapolis, Minnesota

2/16/2026 Dr. Linda Davis, Savannah, Georgia

2/24/2026 Nurul Amin Shah Alam, Buffalo, New York

3/24/2026 Daphy Michel, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

7/7/2026 Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Houston, Texas

7/13/2026 Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, Biddeford, Maine

7/14/2026 unnamed man, Jacksonville, Florida

This list does not include at least 59 deaths which occurred while being held in ICE, CBP, or in government contracted private prison custody since Trump took office the second time.

*****

If we do not want to see another Civil War, we will need to relearn a simple truth:

Freedom isn’t free.

It seems unfathomable hearing people say things like “Oh, I couldn’t boycott that place, my friend works there”.

If we as consumers are not even willing to absorb the “pain” of boycotting the most egregious and immoral corporations, we do not deserve freedom.

Truth is, there is almost never such a thing as a "moral" corporation, anyway.

Where shareholders are getting rich, someone, somewhere, is invariably being hurt.

For a so-called majority Christian nation, it is astonishing how few Americans pause to consider the reported words of the man who gave rise to a world religious movement:

"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

So once again...

IF WE ARE ONLY WILLING TO FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM WHEN IT DOESN'T HURT, WE DO NOT DESERVE DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM.

Go look up The Battle of Blair Mountain.

Go watch the film "Matewan".

Remember the suffragettes and the Civil Rights movements.

When our boycotts and strikes cause “collateral damage” to our own, we take them to our bosom and look after them.

It's called solidarity.

It's what all of us good people do.

It's why I shared my own small story of trying to help people who might have been killed without the help of strangers.

But I'm no hero. Far from it.

I just got put in a spot where, for the first time in my life, I was given the chance to make a decision, a chance to help a few people to resist an authoritarian.

It could’ve cost me. I’m lucky and glad it didn’t.

There are some more hard decisions to make, right here, right now, for all of us.

The latest authoritarian is not some cardboard cut-out in a faraway land with petroleum reserves.

He’s right here at home.

We won’t all be lucky all the time.

But I like to remember the words of James Baldwin:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

*Old Mix American = Americans descended from the mixed-ethnic underclasses already present in the Anglo-American colonies between 1589 and 1776

List of deaths during ICE and CBP encounters taken from The American Prospect

In this semiquincentennial year, the close relationship of the late disgraced sex trafficker (and likely Israeli intelligence asset) Jeffrey Epstein with the current president of the USA has been pushed from the top of news bulletins.

This is of course outrageous, but perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked, or even surprised.

Sexual violence flows like a vast underground river through all of American history, its inky waters feeding the tap roots of the collective American body politic.

Before we even consider the depravity of so many modern politicians, it is worth reflecting on the long history of sexual predation by USA politicians and social elites on indentured servants, Indigenous peoples, and the enslaved.

Consider this example:

Any random Black American born between 1960-1965 has an average of 51 European direct ancestors out of 365 sixth or seventh great-grandparents.

“White” Americans should pause to reflect on why this is so.

At length.

And yes, we know that sexual violence crosses all class, ethnic, and gender boundaries.

Nonetheless, paedophilia, pederasty, misogyny, and the rank sexual exploitation of the vulnerable (especially those from the underclasses) have always been the particular prerogatives of the rich and powerful - social categories which have almost always been dominated by “white men” in the USA.

See Trump’s teen beauty pageants as a conveyor belt for exploitation.

See the trafficking and abuse of underaged eastern European models by creeps like Jean-Luc Brunel (another Epstein associate who “hanged himself” in jail in 2022).

Note the remarkable overlap between the social circles of Victoria’s Secret principal Les Wexner, Epstein, and Donald Trump.

Just over the last few years, here are the names of some of the politicians, public officials, or other “notables” credibly accused or convicted of sexual misconduct or criminality involving a minor:

Representative Matt Gaetz (2024) - Allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor and solicitation of prostitution

Representative Mel Reynolds (1995) - Sexual misconduct with a minor

Representative Donald “Buz” Lukens (1989) - Sexual misconduct with a minor

Representative Gerry Studds (1983) - Sexual misconduct with a minor

Representative Daniel Crane (1983) - Sexual misconduct with a minor

Justin Eichorn (2026) - Minnesota lawmaker charged with attempted coercion and enticement of a minor, pleaded guilty to lesser charge of attempted possession of child pornography

Ray Holmberg (2024) - long-serving North Dakota senator convicted of child sex tourism

Robert John May (2026) - member of South Carolina House of Representatives convicted of distributing sexual abuse material involving children

Bo Michael Dresner (2024) - Texas GOP leader convicted on child sexual abuse and child pornography charges

Luis Borunda (2024) - former Maryland Deputy Secretary of State, also served on Maryland Economic Development Commission and the Baltimore Board of Education; tapped by Trump to serve on Voter Fraud Commission in 2016; convicted on federal charges of child sexual exploitation

Timothy Lee Nolan (2118) - convicted child sex offender and child sex trafficker, former state district court judge, Trump campaign official

Alexander brothers (2026) - Israeli-American businessmen and convicted sex offenders; Trump associates currently seeking a presidential pardon

Joel Micah Greenberg (2021) - American politician, former tax collector of Seminole County, Florida, convicted sex trafficker who used the state’s driver license system to obtain names of minors for “commercial sex acts”

Ralph Allan Lee Shortey (2018) - convicted child sex offender, former politician and businessman; Oklahoma state campaign chair for Donald Trump in 2016

I could go on and on, but there’s only so much a soul can take at one sitting...

The point which matters most here, is that the sexual abuse of vulnerable children, and the exploitation of the disenfranchised by those in power, is not new or sporadic.

US political bigwigs were at it way back in 1789.

There was a big difference, though.

Back then, the trafficking of minors was completely legal...

*****

This was witnessed firsthand by the Scottish political pamphleteer James Thomson Callender.

James Callender spent pretty much his entire life fleeing from one place to another - in the first instance from his native Scotland to the newly-born USA.

Callender seems to have suffered from a sublimely underdeveloped appreciation for the social discretion required to survive in the viper pit of American politics.

While more conservative American historians like to portray Callender as a “muckraker” or dissolute scandal-monger, others see a gifted satirist who was simply unable to restrain himself in the face of hypocrisy.

For my own part, I tend to recognize an equal-opportunity social critic trying to find a way to earn a living as a writer among an upper-class society only interested in “The Truth” when it can be weaponized against their enemies.

Described as a “Radical Republican” by conviction, James Callender arrived in a USA so new that most of its Founding Fathers were still alive and viciously squabbling among one another, with everyone jockeying for position at the top of the pile.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, it wasn’t “Democrats” versus “Republicans”, though - at least not in the current sense.

No, it was the Federalists and the Republicans.

The latter are somewhat confusing to modern readers. Although they were known as the Republican Party during the 1790s, they shouldn’t really be seen as a direct precursor of the modern GOP.

To avoid confusion, many historians refer to this anti-Federalist group as the Jeffersonian Republican Party.

To complicate things even further, the Federalist Party would fall by the wayside by the 1820s, and with no meaningful opposition, the Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson began to splinter into the various factions which would become the Democratic Republicans (the later “Democrats”) and the “National Republicans” (aka “anti-Jacksonians”, and later, “Whigs”).

The Anti-Jacksonians had absorbed many men from the defunct Federalist Party, and it is this “proto-conservative” faction of “Whigs” which can be seen as the forerunner of the modern GOP.

Whew. You’ll be tested on that later...

Boiled down into plain language, the early USA was a political project of the “white” propertied class, and concerned primarily with the interests of:

- the merchant elites

- the landowning and/or slaveholding classes

Squabbles between post-War of Independence parties mostly concerned issues of state versus federal power, debt and tax management, and the exact form a government-chartered central bank should take.

The modern concept of “Left” or “Right” is a much later borrowing from FRENCH political concepts of social equality which followed upon their own revolution of 1789.

This is one of the hardest things to pin down and and explain clearly to Americans today.

There have been rebellions, wars, uprisings, and revolutions everywhere throughout history claiming to be about “liberation” (and its sister term, “liberty”).

But liberty and freedom are not unidirectional. There is “freedom to”, and there is “freedom from”.

If we were to make two columns, we would see that different countries and peoples have completely different things in both columns, and one column might be much longer than the other.

We’ll not go into endless examples here.

The American War for Independence was not a war seeking “liberation” or “democracy” in the sense of greater rights and social standing being extended to ALL citizens.

Democracy as envisaged by the 1789 French Revolution and the 1792 French Commune horrified “Founding Fathers” like John Adams.

The American War for Independence was about the “freedom to” make more money and expand territorially, while securing “freedom from” as many limitations to self-enrichment as possible.

*****

To the extent that the first political parties in the new USA could even be rightly characterized as “parties” - let alone leftist or rightist - we might see the Federalists as mostly city-based “conservative money men”, eager to create a banking system similar to The Central Bank of England.

Monetary stability matters deeply to people who have already made their money, but find themselves head of a new state and government “too broke to pay attention”.

Federalists were often perceived by opponents as snobbish elites, and closet Anglophiles.

Key leading Federalists included: Alexander Hamilton (1st US treasury secretary under Washington), John Adams (2nd US president), and George Washington (1st US president; officially “neutral”, but clearly a Federalist sympathizer)

The Republicans, on the other hand, were more popular outside cities, and preferred the idea of state-chartered banks to a massive central bank, fearing that the latter would consolidate wealth and power among the urban elites.

If the Republicans could be said to have been truly more “liberal” or “progressive” than the Federalists in any clear regard, it was in terms of their belief that banks should allow “start-ups” access to capital - for example, settler-colonizers on the western frontier might need access to capital for sawmill or farming and mining equipment.

Key leading Republicans included: Thomas Jefferson (3rd US president), James Madison (4th US president), James Monroe (5th US president)

Boiled down even further, it would be fair to say that Federalists wanted a central government strong enough to raise taxes, while Jeffersonian Republicans preferred that power remain more dispersed among local electorates.

Neither of these parties lost much sleep over the impoverished underclasses, Indigenous rights, women’s rights, or enslaved people.

Except for John Adams, every single one of the first 12 presidents of the USA had been slaveholders at one time or another.

Much has been written about the “Enlightenment Thinking” of Thomas Jefferson, and his cheering-on of the ideals of the French Revolution from the sidelines.

Yet once those ideals had managed to spill over into Haiti - leading to Black emancipation and self-governance - the slaveholding Jefferson lost some of his taste for “democracy”.

*****

Gettng back to our man James Callender...

Callender eventually came into social contact with Thomas Jefferson, who saw his facility for biting satire as a potential weapon for use against his political enemies.

Washington had been used to getting a free pass from criticism in the immediate aftermath of the War for Independence, but things had begun to change.

With Jefferson’s financial backing, Callender attacked George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton ruthlessly in the press.

Those who would see the early leaders of the USA as the wisest of “Founding Fathers” treat Washington in particular almost as a secular saint, and point to his stepping down and refusal to seek a third term as evidence of his putting country before personal ambition.

A more sober reading would point to the fact that Washington was 64 years old, and in relatively poor health.

Drinking fine wine under a shade tree on his extensive plantation back in Virginia (with its enslaved chefs and dozens of “servants”) would have seemed preferable to the bear-pit of politics.

Washington believed he had earned a place beyond criticism or reproach, and made clear his disdain for the “infamous scribblers” of a free press.

But whereas Washington kept his dislike of the public print media private, his successor John Adams took his own disdain for the press to another level.

In a move which would make Donald Trump smile and nod in approval, Adams passed The Alien and Sedition Acts in an effort to shut down public criticism of his administration.

This attempt to restrict freedom of speech did not go down well - Adams served only one term before being replaced by Thomas Jefferson.

Before stepping down, Adams still managed to use his new piece of legislation to imprison many journalists - including Jefferson’s attack dog in the press, James Callender.

*****

The year that the French stormed The Bastille, Thomas Jefferson began “sexual relations” with an enslaved girl named Sally Hemings when she was 14-16 years old (Jefferson was in his late 40s).

For reasons too complicated to enter into here in this short article, after his release from prison in 1801, James Thomson Callender managed to have a falling-out with his erstwhile paymaster Thomas Jefferson, who had been elected third president of the USA.

With his career in disarray, Callender got back to writing, and this time he was swinging for people on both sides of the Federalist/Jeffersonian political divide, calling-out the endemic hypocrisy and corruption of the new USA’s political classes.

In 1802, Callender published the first in a series of articles exposing Jefferson’s “shadow family” with Sally Hemings - the early 19th century equivalent to a full release of the Epstein Files:

“It is well known that the man, Whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age.”

Caught between libel trials and vicious physical attacks, with powerful enemies and former allies turning on him, stuck in financial disputes with newspaper owners, some say that Callender turned to the bottle for solace.

He was found drowned in the James River in July of 1803, in what some saw as suspicious circumstances...

Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson

And in the same way that The Epstein Files have been released but redacted, Callender’s claims about Jefferson’s middle-aged exploitation of an enslaved teenager were buried under two subsequent centuries of “Founding Father” myth-making, and dismissed as the ravings of a gutter pamphleteer.

America’s “white” ruling class closed ranks around one of their own.

*****

This is the kind of article which invariably attracts comments from those who will say “You cannot judge the actions of people living centuries ago by the standards of today”.

And yet the current regime and its hand-picked Supreme Court majority do precisely that, with their “originalist” interpretation of the US Constitution.

Their belief is that we SHOULD be governed by the thought processes, motives, intentions, and presumably, the hypocrisies of men who lived 250 years ago.

These are the people who have turned a couple of foundational political documents into a form of secular Holy Scripture.

These are the people who always claim that whenever the USA fails morally - with slavery, with women’s rights, Indigenous rights, minority rights - that it has been “failing to live up to the vision of its Founding Fathers”.

This is a mind game.

By claiming that it is we the people who have failed The Founders, the myth of American exceptionalism at birth can remain intact.

In this framing, we are made dependent on the vision and wisdom of “white” Founding Fathers, instead of seeing the truth, which is this:

The arc of history doesn’t bend inexorably toward rights, social justice, and true democracy as envisaged by a small, entitled, and privileged group of men.

WE THE PEOPLE take it, break it, and remake it ourselves.

With political activism, tangible resistance, voter registration drives, trade unions, civil rights movements, sit-ins, uprisings, strikes, rebellions, and even civil wars...

*****

While the comparison of James Callender’s exposé of Jefferson with the “release” of the Epstein Files is far from a seamless analogy, the comparison points to a few home truths.

Power and impunity have ALWAYS been cozy bedfellows in a land where the word “equality” is often nothing more than a mouth noise.

Allowing Washington’s and Jefferson’s rank moral hypocrisy to slide, in order to create a grandiose foundation story for SOME, signalled to every politician who followed them that power equals impunity.

It is the reason Andrew Jackson felt able to ignore Supreme Court decisions in favor of Indigenous Americans.

It is the reason James Knox Polk could manufacture a war designed to steal a large chunk of Mexico.

It is the reason Andrew Johnson’s offspring could leave a trail of disenfranchised Black descendants.

It is the reason long-serving senators like Strom Thurmond could fight like a wolverine for decades to preserve segregation, all while having secret mixed-ethnic children who were classified as Black, and suffered for their Blackness.

Between 1998 and 2010, DNA testing (along with rigorous and proper historical investigation), proved what the Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson had always known.

Not only what they had always known about their ancestry, but what they understood about “male whiteness” equalling power.

And how power equals impunity.

The current president of the USA - a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser - is not an aberration to this ancient equation, except insofar as he has decided he can drop all pretence of even offering lip service to the proposition that “all men are created equal”.

Women and young girls are props and commodities. Wars are business opportunities. Poor people are losers. Voters are either enemies or useful idiots.

The history of women, Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and immigrants of less-than-white ancestry is an utter irrelevance, except when it threatens to obscure or diminish the over-arching heroic tale spun for White Christian Nationalists.

And even if a modern James Callender (with all his human flaws) could be found to expose the darkest secrets of Trumpworld, one has to wonder if even the abject corruption of Donald John Trump will eventually be buried and forgotten under the dead weight of the perpetual myth of “American Exceptionalism”.

*****

Postscript

For the “You cannot judge the actions of people living centuries ago by the standards of today” crowd.

Just over 100 years BEFORE a middle-aged Thomas Jefferson began sexually exploiting an enslaved teenaged girl, American Quaker settlers in Pennsylvania signed a petition against slavery, using powerful arguments invoking the Christian Golden Rule, while cleverly comparing the capture of Africans to the 16th and 17th century Barbary slave trade in European Christians.

Compare the moral wisdom of signatories to this petition - Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, and Derick op den Graeff, to the words written by Thomas Jefferson a full century later (note - the surnames Hendericks and op den Graeff survive in the Southern Appalachian surnames “Hendrix” and “Upthegrove”).

Thomas Jefferson:

“In proportion to their number, [incompatible immigrants] will infuse into [the nation] their spirit, warp or bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

― Notes on the State of Virginia

“I advance it therefore...that the blacks...are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

― Notes on the State of Virginia

“Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the Negro blood. But observe, that this does not reestablish freedom, which depends on the condition of the mother, the principle of the civil law, partus sequitur ventrem* being adopted here.”

* “childbirth follows the womb”, i.e. the condition of chattel slavery is inherited via the mother

I hope a time comes before my own death, in which people come to understand that many of the "crazies" in USA society are not just sick or "evil" aberrations - nor do they spring out of nothingness.

First we need to realize that there are many kinds of “crazy” in the USA.

There are the people with various mental illnesses, clinically describable.

In the USA, only people with money tend to receive a clinical diagnosis and an ongoing regimen of care which might include medications, treatments, therapies, and social supports.

A daughter of wealthy parents (with a summer house in The Hamptons) experiencing an eating disorder and a substance abuse problem might be sent away to a residential rehabilitation ranch in the mountains out west.

Polite society <mostly> no longer refers to such people as “crazy”.

People without money, though?

They just suffer. Their families suffer. Many find it impossible to hold down a job, and many end up living and sleeping rough.

Polite society becomes less polite when referring to these kind of people.

“I was accosted by some crazy dude outside Starbuck’s this morning.”

Whether the victim is rich or poor, we tend to agree that some types of mental unwellness are severe enough that some form of intervention is either necessary or desirable - for example, when someone poses a clear danger to themselves or others.

These people might be called the “unacceptably crazy”.

Then there are the “acceptably crazy” - the people left to get on in life the best they can, because they pose no apparent danger to anyone.

It is among this “acceptably crazy” cohort where money and class are the biggest predictors and modifiers of public perception.

By any reasonable metric, the current president of the USA is barking mad.

Bonkers. Unwell. Stark raving.

In fact, between his inability to speak without gross distortion, exaggeration, or barefaced lying, his rollbacks of environmental protections, cruel attacks on healthcare, interference in women’s reproductive rights, history of sexual molestation (and probably far worse), arming of genocidal regimes, assaults on Black voting rights, outright racism, summary executions of fishermen and US protestors, and the wanton bombing of innocent children in Iran - all of the foregoing should force any reasonable human to conclude that the only alternative to Trump being a mentally ill sociopath is that he is simply EVIL.

The US president is not even close to being “acceptably crazy”.

Yet one in three US voters are still on board.

Which means that by any measure, one in three US voters are also crazy, or so diminished in education, common sense, intellectual faculties, or moral judgement that being led by a dangerous lunatic is just fine by them…

*****

On the Fourth of July, as high winds blew stands and tables across the empty expanse of grass at Trump’s “Freedom 250” fiasco like tumbleweeds through a deserted town, presenters on “Fox News” continued to comment on the non-existent crowds, like courtiers marveling at The Emperor’s New Clothes.

One MAGA diehard spoke to camera, opining that “some liberals” over at the National Weather Service had “got up to something” in an effort to sabotage Trump’s Big Day.

Back in 1976 (as his “Jonestown” project was taking shape during America’s bicentennial year), I doubt even the Reverend Jim Jones believed that one in three Americans were so ready to drink the Koolaid.

And because American culture has always equivalated wealth and power with worth and ability, no one is prepared to invoke the 25th Amendment, no one is prepared to say that Americans elected a crazy man to lead them.

And meanwhile, many of the people we do see as “crazy”, are only labelled as such to protect us from seeing ourselves reflected in their eyes.

What if many so-called "crazies" in America are the entirely expected human outfall from centuries of:

interpersonal and institutional violence,

duplicity,

religious extremism,

racism,

misogyny,

homophobia,

environmental pillage,

greed and consumerism as national ideology, and

the incessant lies, lies, lies used to cover-up, justify, and obfuscate the almost ceaseless hypocrisy of The American Myth?

Take Ryan Wesley Routh, an American "weirdo", who wanted to dispose of another American "weirdo" in West Palm Beach, Florida back in 2024.

The only substantive difference between Routh and his target?

One comes from the American underclasses, the other from the world of inherited wealth built upon underclass exploitation.

One wanted to commit violence out of a misguided? sense of social justice.

The other is a catalyst for violence internationally, vandalizes constitutional law, and evades justice in order to preserve and extend his wealth, power, and privilege.

Two crazies.

The rich one spews hatred against immigrants, even though his own mother was an immigrant and his father's father was also an immigrant.

Of course, being Johnny-Come-Latelys in terms of American history doesn't matter - the main thing is that they were such very "white" Scottish and German immigrants, and they got their hands on some money through unscrupulous and immoral business dealings.

Money and whiteness have always been at the core of "The American Dream".

*****

Don't be fooled by Ryan Wesley Routh's gaunt, Northern European-looking hangdog appearance and sandy hair.

Routh is in fact part of a confusing mish-mash of people who have been ethnically intermixing in the eastern part of the USA for generations - long, long before the USA even existed.

Without comprehensive DNA testing, these peoples from the Carolina Piedmont and Southern Appalachia proper are often impossible to tease into clear familial threads.

Some come from families of large slaveholders, while others come from relatively poor farmers and tradespeople who held only one or two slaves.

Many in fact descend from the PROGENY of these slaveholders - whether big and small - children of the women abused, raped, or kept on the side as "consorts", separate from their "official families".

Subsistence farmers too poor to keep slaves were often those most likely to marry the "mulatto" women born within this deep and wide cauldron of wickedness.

This "not quite white" American underclass has existed literally for centuries - long before certain Drumpfs and MacLeods arrived in the USA, shiny and white on the outside, ruthless, dark and bigoted on the inside...

It has never been easy for members of this mixed-ethnic American laborer underclass to get ahead.

And before they could even imagine "social mobility", they had to achieve "racial mobility".

The minute some of them managed to achieve "racial mobility", they were often still too poor to resist the onslaught of the land barons, railway barons, coal barons...

This is one of the greatest untold secrets in US history - how a "brown" underclass spent generations on the outside peering-in at "The American Dream".

Trying to be "white" enough to be part of "White Christian Nationalism".

"White" enough to serve as actual soldiers in the military, rather than as cooks, janitors, or supply workers.

"White" enough to gain access to a good apprenticeship or a decent education.

"White" enough to eventually gain access to middle-class jobs.

Such an intergenerational struggle is not easy to keep on a steel-rail track leading to eventual success and achievement of The American Dream...

Many fall by the wayside.

*****

Self-loathing caused by centuries-old class and racial caste systems can often lead to profound social sicknesses like domestic violence and substance abuse.

Even those who did manage to reach the "white" side of the color bar - but without becoming skilled or educated - were often left clinging to little more than their "whiteness", their Christianity, and birthright "American-ness" as markers of their self-worth.

This underclass represents much of the cannon fodder sent to places like Vietnam or Iraq - all while proudly proclaiming "I come from a military family" and telling themselves that they are "protecting American freedoms".

Many of these people forgot, or were never told about their true socio-ethnic roots.

Unaware of the actual reasons their family had been locked-out of social advancement for generations, they eventually came to resent nebulous groups like "Welfare Queens", "Non-Christians", "Experts" or "Elites" or "The Deep State".

And they are also the ones most easily fooled by fascist propaganda and rhetoric which plays upon their various insecurities and resentments.

Too proud to see themselves as victims, they would rather align themselves with the rich and powerful, however unlikely it is that they will ever sit at the same table.

But some, a very particular subset of the disempowered, don't want to sit at the table of the rich and powerful.

They just want to have some goddamn AGENCY in this life.

Any kind of agency.

Like the agency to take-out some of the rich, corrupt, and powerful.

Most of these currently enraged members of the underclasses are perfectly sane.

Some are misguided, some aren’t, in where they choose to apportion blame.

AND WHY WOULDN’T MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN UNDERCLASSES OFTEN BE MISGUIDED? THEIR LEADERS AND THE CORPORATE MEDIA ARE LIARS.

Many of the rich and powerful are also perfectly sane, just infinitely selfish, ruthless, dishonest, and greedy.

Many are utter sociopaths.

A few are batshit crazy.

Ryan Wesley Routh.

Donald John Trump.

You tell me who is crazier.

I know which one I'd sooner offer a spare bed in my house if either knocked on my door on a stormy night...

Image: Ryan Wesley Routh and some of his forebears

Our total genetic inheritance is of course determined more or less equally by the genes carried and passed-down to us by our parents, and by extension, ALL of their ancestors, men and women.

Most of the DNA we inherit has been shuffled or “recombined” as it was passed-along, making us a mixture of our dad’s ancestors, and a mixture of our mother’s ancestors.

The exact mix of this autosomal DNA changes with every child born, and it is why one child might favor its mother, while another might be the spitting image of its grandfather.

A weird thing about genetics, though, is the fact that men inherit a certain part of their genes only from their direct father, and women inherit a certain part of their genes only from their direct mother.

This part of our genes is exempt from being thrown into the blender - and this small part remains largely unchanged over many generations, except for random mutations.

The genes which men inherit only from their father say very little about a man’s OVERALL genetic make-up. They merely tell us a little bit about a man’s father, and his father’s father, and so on.

That small portion of a man’s genes which he got only from his father (and thus from his father’s father) is called “Y” DNA.

Even if a man belongs to a “Y” haplogroup which is most common in Northern Europe, we should not take this to mean the man is ethnically “Northern European”.

*****

In an American context, for example, let’s say a slaveholder named “Smith” in 1690s Virginia fathered a son by an enslaved woman.

Let’s say this mixed-ethnic son grew up, was manumitted in his father’s will, took the surname “Smith”, and went on to have children with a woman of predominantly African ancestry.

Let’s then say that all of their children and grandchildren also took partners mainly from the African-American community over the next 300 years.

Any descendant of that early mixed-ethnic Smith alive today would most likely self-identify as “Black”.

And if that descendant were to take an autosomal DNA test, his results might show him to be 70% West African, 10% Indigenous American, 10% European, and 10% various “other”.

10% European admixture might seem a high percentage for someone with only 1 single DIRECT LINE Northern European ancestor, but we must remember that almost ALL African-Americans have some European ancestry, meaning that extra European DNA would have been acquired from multiple Black ancestors outside of one’s direct paternal or maternal lineage.

A “Smith” born today will usually carry a little bit of the European ancestry from ALL of his ancestors - reaching back perhaps six or seven generations.

But one thing will remain.

That persistent bit of Northern European DNA carried on the “Y” chromosome given to him by his father, and father’s father, and father’s father’s father...

In fact, if this “Smith” descendant showed almost ZERO percent European admixture in an autosomal DNA test, he would still carry the European “Y” haplogroup of his most distant paternal ancestor.

*****

So what is the value of knowing our mitochondrial (female) or “Y” (male) BNA haplogroup, if it says so little about our overall genetic inheritance?

Besides, our genetic inheritance is often utterly unrelated to our CULTURAL inheritance, which is where true identity resides, after all.

Because these haplogroups are extremely useful for understanding history, and mapping historical events such as slavery, migrations, population change, intermarriage patterns, and colonization.

Rather than telling us what we ARE, these DNA results can tell us what we once WERE (or weren’t).

A “white” heartland American evangelical family today might have a cherished piece of family folklore, recounting how their earliest ancestor “escaped religious persecution” and “stowed away aboard a ship in Scotland and made their way to America”.

But if all of the males in the family share a predominantly sub-Saharan African E-M2 haplogroup, then we can begin to doubt the family lore...

*****

Below is a table showing the currently known “Y” haplogroups of US presidents.

I have always been intrigued by the DNA haplogroup of Thomas Jefferson, one of the most consequential of US leaders.

Note that almost a quarter of presidential DNA remains unreported, for various reasons.

The T1a1a haplogroup of Jefferson’s descendants is vanishingly rare in most of the British Isles.

This haplogroup is less rare in Southern Italy and the Iberian peninsula, but it is by far most common in the Middle East and East Africa.

Most online genealogies attempt to connect Thomas Jefferson with the “Jeaffreson” families of Suffolk, England, but there is simply no solid documentary evidence to back-up such assertions.

Very unlike most elite families of that time, Jefferson himself was quite taciturn about his hereditary background.

We do know that English “Jeaffresons” held commercial interests in the Caribbean during the 1600s.

Those who listened to the three-part BWWW podcast episode “Pre-Deliverance” will have learned how England under Oliver Cromwell had reopened England and English colonies (especially in the Caribbean) to Jewish settlement.

Could Thomas Jefferson be the descendant of Sephardic (Iberian) Jews who “borrowed” the surname of a prominent merchant family of St. Kitts and Antigua?

His family certainly fits the profile of many colonial-era slaveholding Jewish people of South America and the Caribbean, who tended to intermix freely (i.e. sexually) with people of color, both slave and free.

*****

Everyone by now has heard of about Jefferson’s enslaved and underaged “lover” and consort Sally Hemings.

It is also interesting that Thomas Jefferson was not Christian.

Like many educated men of the time, Jefferson was drawn to the ideals of The Enlightenment, preferring that religious faith be based in rationality and reason.

The innumerable discrepancies (and tales of miracles) in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and other religious texts had made Jefferson sceptical of both Christianity and Judaism, and he belonged to a school of religious thought called “Deism”.

Yet while maintaining a distance from religious dogma, Jefferson was fully supportive of extending full rights and religious freedom to Jewish people in America.

Was he a saintly figure?

Far from it.

His treatment of African-Americans, in particular his enslaved concubine Sally Hemings, makes that much crystal clear.

Was Jefferson important in terms of power and influence?

Absolutely.

And the modern science of genetics helps us to ask questions of America’s “Founding Fathers”, where previously they were believed to be of 100% nailed-on “white northern European” ancestry.

We’ll take another look at Jefferson in our mid-week newsletter...

Friends and other people often ask me "What's this thing with you and history?"

As if history is for fusty old geeks or weirdos - something to lump alongside stamp collecting, or attending a Goth convention after the age of 50 (no offence intended to philatelists or late middle-aged fans of The Cure).

When I was about 14 years old, my junior high school had try-outs for the annual school play.

That year, the play was a musical called "Let George Do It", a typical piece of heartland American fluff purporting to tell the life of the first President of the USA, George Washington.

I went to the try-outs, and got "first stand-by", or understudy.

My older brother got the actual part. Any “middle-kid” with an older, more senior sibling will understand exactly how that felt...

Our school at the time was in Phoenix, Arizona, and our school productions always went on the road. That year, we were going to perform in a most unusual place.

The Hopi Indian Reservation in NE Arizona.

The distance between 1978 and 2026 is huge, and only the wisdom of age eventually made me look back with a combination of shame and horror at what American kids were indoctrinated, trained and employed to do back in the day.

Like some insane scene from a David Lynch film, we children were dispatched to impoverished Indian reservations as an all-singing, all-dancing propaganda corps for telling the vanquished all about the wonderfulness of their conquerors.

I now see the breathtaking lack of self-awareness, and the level of coarse and arrogant hubris - a colonizer’s imposition, utterly impervious to irony...

George Washington was notorious for suffering from bad teeth. By the age of 57 he was left with only a single tooth - a tooth which was removed to make way for dentures which he wore for most of his latter years.

American schoolchildren of my generation took it as a cultural touchstone or piece of historical iconography that George Washington had wooden teeth. This "factoid" was as true as the story of Pocahontas' deep infatuation with Captain Smith...

This is the weakness, the failure, of pseudo-history and foundational mythology.

By being so specific in their construction of a false history, the bluffers inadvertently reveal their hand.

The only reason American schoolchildren were taught about "wooden dentures", was because the reality was too brutish and nasty for "The Father of a Nation".

You see, George Washington wore dentures made from teeth extracted from animals and the mouths of his slaves - living and dead.

Unlike the purveyors of the "wooden teeth" story, historians rely on documentary evidence when constructing biographies.

And it's all still there, in the letters and accounts of Mr. Washington himself.

May 8, 1784:

[paid 6 pounds 2 shillings to]

“Negroes for 9 Teeth, on acc[oun]t of the French Dentis [sic] Doctr Lemay [sic].” .

Of course, this sort of living cannibalism practiced by the wealthy upon the poor and disempowered is still with us today - whether it be the black market in organs, or the use of "surrogacy farms" in poorer countries, where young women are paid a relative pittance to carry and bear children for wealthy westerners.

A certain type of people need gods and heroes. And it is those people who are most likely to bend facts and commit violence in defence of what they believe their gods and heroes represent.

In reality, gods and heroes are simply reflections of how some people wish to see themselves, and how they wish the world worked.

Wilfully ignoring contradictory evidence or being blind to alternative ways of seeing is the hallmark of extreme ideology.

Extreme ideologies anywhere - in politics, religion, economics - will always cause more conflict, pain, suffering, and death than a fact-based reality.

This is why facts and truth matter.

This is also why facts and the truth should be shared widely.

We are facing an administration which defunds or erases historical education - especially in cases where history is not taught from a "MAGA" perspective.

A "MAGA" perspective means an adherence to outdated hagiographies of "Founding Fathers" devoid of context or any meaningful critique.

A "MAGA" perspective means a jingoistic embrace of "American Exceptionalism", scrubbed clean of the stains of land theft, genocide, slavery, racism, religious extremism, rapacious capitalism, environmental degradation, and imperialism.

An indoctrinated, propagandized population, devoid of critical thought, is now on its last legs as a free people. Too foolish to see it, they are bringing down good people with them on their Raft of the Medusa.

We cannot understand our current problems, we cannot understand who we are, we cannot find a better way ahead, unless we understand how we got here.

This is the reason I "do" history.

PS. Big shout out to this week’s new paid subscribers. I see you, and your support means more than you can imagine.

A quick word to all followers, subscribers, and patrons!

I don’t normally post selfies, but in this age of AI and deep fakery, sometimes it’s good to let readers and listeners know they are dealing with an actual human being.

I am currently in the process of future-proofing the Before We Were White website and podcast, and preparing to enter the fray of online video production.

What do I mean by “future-proofing”?

At the risk of sounding like some sort of Doomsday Prepper, I am deeply concerned about this autumn’s elections in the USA.

I am even more concerned by the almost total capture of legacy media and social media by a small coterie of billionaires - a gang represented by an unholy Venn Diagram of arms manufacturers, neo-liberal warmongers, the Israel Lobby, Silicon Valley technocrats, social media oligarchs, “white” Christian nationalist theocrats, and a sub-fascist surveillance state which would have shocked the STASI, KGB, and CIA only a few decades ago.

What will good Americans do when NSPM-7 (National Security Presidential Memorandum - 7 of 25 Sep 2025) goes into full force?

What will good Americans do when the internet is locked down under the guise of “protecting national security”, as ICE thugs are deployed to collect “suspect” ballot boxes?

They’ve already defenestrated TikTok - claiming its Chinese ownership posed a danger to Americans, before handing it over to the hyper-Zionist multi-billionaire Ellison family.

This is the very same Trump-enabling Ellison gang which has turned CBS and its hitherto venerated flagship program “60 Minutes” into a propaganda mouthpiece for the technocracy (and Israel) - the very same Ellison gang which is now taking over CNN.

Don’t even get me started with Peter Thiel and Palantir, Flock cameras, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and others.

Tell the truth.

Leaving aside legacy media, what will you do when Alphabet (Google/YouTube), Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Amazon, TikTok, and “X” use their own onboard AI to not only throttle and isolate dissenting voices, but also begin to block us altogether, or even pass our profile information to the authorities implementing NSPM-7?

And let us not fool ourselves. Even Substack, a relatively pleasant corner of the online world, has some “interesting” investors.

The future envisioned in the TV series “Black Mirror” is now upon us.

So your humble writer is in the process of future-proofing, by “moving house” online, and hoping that storing everything on hosts and servers outside the USA might offer a tiny modicum of protection against what I hope will never transpire.

*****

On a happier note, on this Juneteenth I am delighted to see that at least one federal judge (Angel Kelley), has pushed back against this regime’s attempts to whitewash or erase any American history which doesn’t follow “the myth”.

Trump signed an executive order last year ludicrously entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, an order which led to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directing the removal of “improper partisan ideology” from museums, monuments, and landmarks under federal control.

In other words, any mention of American history from a Black or Indigenous viewpoint is now officially deemed as “divisive” by the idiots in charge.

Under Trump, a multi-panel exhibition near the location of George Washington’s house in Philadelphia (relating the story of the people enslaved by Washington), had been removed as part of an “anti-woke” agenda pursued by the current regime.

Judge Kelley recently ordered the panels reinstated, and an excerpt from her written ruling is worth sharing today, on Juneteenth:

The efforts of the Trump regime intend “...to rewrite the Nation’s history with a white-out pen.”

“Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths.”

“History cannot be faithfully told while excluding the experiences of communities whose contributions, struggles, and achievements form an important part of our Nation’s story.”

Angel Kelley, you are aptly named.

Thank you, every one of you, who have supported the Before We Were White project thus far, and I hope to be sharing many, many more stories of interest in the days and years to come.

Brian

It’s June.

The Knicks are back after more than half a century.

The World Cup is underway.

It’s almost Father’s Day, and I’m sitting here reflecting on fatherhood, and remembering all the Junes I’ve seen - including one “June” who was actually a pretty girl in 8th grade at school.

“June” was completely out of my league, although I didn’t know it at the time.

I live far from the place I was reared, and it’s well over a half century since my last county fair, which I seem to recall was in...June.

Some things you only meet once in life, and if you meet them as a little kid, they stick in the memory.

I met “The Zipper” when I was about 8 or 9 years old - at the Platte County Fair.

This was the same fair where the dark-eyed, dark-haired man in charge of the “House of Horror” convinced me and my brother that they had a werewolf in a cage out the back, but he was too dangerous for public display.

The dark-haired man said if we came back after midnight when the fair was closed (with ten bucks), he would show us the werewolf.

We lived a good few miles out along Route 92, so me and the brother never made it back to the fairgrounds that night. We daren’t ask our parents for ten bucks because we were poor, and besides, we couldn’t ask for a lift back in, because the dark-haired man had said it was a SECRET.

But back to “The Zipper”. There was a huddle of boys on the fairway near The Zipper, some munching cotton candy, others with lips tinged blue from a flavor of snow cone made from ingredients known only to chemists.

Everyone was daring the others to go on The Zipper.

You see, The Zipper was the only ride at the fair with a “Barf Barrel” placed at the exit.

What’s more, the oldest boy present (an impressive 14 years old), stated with no small amount of gravitas (and two cross-my-hearts) that only last month, a cage from another Zipper in the next county had broken free mid-ride, flinging two young boys a hundred yards to meet their untimely doom.

This latter piece of news raised the dare stakes considerably.

So of course me and the brother went on The Zipper. We didn’t need the Barf Barrel, because we both got sick on the ride, screaming like banshees for it to stop.

I’ve never seen another Zipper since that long ago night in June with “Brand New Key” blaring from loudspeakers as we retched, certain of our impending deaths.

“The Zipper” has become, for this writer, a hazy symbol of American culture itself, or at least a certain kind of childhood cultural upbringing.

Bright lights and screams, sugar and rust, bravado and menace.

And when that “certain kind of childhood” was played-out within a mostly poor, “white”, working-class, evangelical community, memory itself can feel like an ever-present and malevolent stalker to some of us.

*****

Over half a century later, it would be a little bit trite, and a lot easier, to write regular elegies to lost innocence.

I would love to be able to write pieces a la Garrison Keillor, filled with gentle humor and reassurances that the USA and its people are, all in all, good and decent.

Many Americans are lucky enough to grow up in a well-adjusted, loving, and supportive family environment, in a town, city, or place with a sense of community, with enough money for education, health care, and a nice roof over their head.

It’s fertile ground for companionable childhood memories, the kind we like to share, and the kind most people enjoy reading.

As a writer, there’s a damn sight more of a living to be had from selling this kind of affirmation.

But for vast numbers of people in America, things are and have always been, well, different.

For Black and Brown people especially, but also for the people often called “white trash”.

This makes some Americans see things a bit…differently.

Like when we look behind the glitz of this week’s sporting events...

The cheapest tickets to last week’s NBA match at Madison Square Garden cost more than the average American factory worker could earn in a month and a half.

Owner of The Knicks, nepo baby James Dolan, couldn’t care less. Neither could his buddy, the current US president, a man who loves basketball so much that he slept through much of the match he attended. We’ll presume he stayed awake when this same friend, James Dolan, got married at Mar-a-Lago a few years back.

Gianni Infantino, the unspeakably corrupt head of FIFA (soccer’s world governing body), turned a blind eye as US Customs and Border Protection denied entry to a fully-accredited and highly respected football referee for no apparent reason than the fact that he is a brown Somalian.

You see, the head of US Customs and Border Protection, Rodney Scott, and his boss, Donald Trump, don’t like brown people from “shithole countries”.

That’s not all that Scott has in common with his boss.

The man protecting the World Cup from brown professional referees has no respect for women, having been a member of a US Border Patrol Facebook group in which members mocked migrant deaths and shared misogynistic jokes.

“Jokes” were not even the worst of it. Scott has also been accused by a San Diego Superior Court judge of making rape threats against female whistleblowers at the US Border Patrol agency.

And while our eyes remain fixed on NBA Finals and World Cups, while we enjoy the sounds and smells of summer fairgrounds, a story which broke less than two years ago is reaching a conclusion this month.

Amid the spectacle and bombast and bread and circuses, thousands of Haitian asylum seekers await news of their ultimate fate in Ohio.

Just like Omar Abdulkadir Artan, the Somali referee told he is not welcome in the USA, these Haitians have the misfortune of also being from a “shithole country”.

*****

There are thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio due to a convergence of circumstances and various interests.

Springfield saw manufacturing jobs begin to disappear in the 1980s, with job losses peaking over the last 20 years.

While some of the whys and wherefores are open to debate, the loss of so many jobs was mostly due to a broad range of developments which helped to create a perfect storm.

These developments included the advent of neo-Liberal economic policies (aka “Reaganomics”), the signing of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), automation of many manufacturing processes, poor and/or callous business decisions, and a burgeoning economic globalization (a fancy way of saying that companies began to outsource labor to places like China and Mexico where labor costs were lower).

Many residents, facing long-term unemployment, moved away - which meant that the population of Springfield plummeted from 80,000 to just over 60,000 by 2014.

The people of Springfield were clearly anxious to halt this decline in population (and their general standard of living).

In 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook much of Haiti to pieces.

Anywhere between 100,000 and 316,000 Haitians are believed to have died in the worst natural catastrophe to hit a single country this century.

For an already poor country, the fall-out was almost insurmountable, with consequences including food insecurity, street and gang violence, and widespread lack of access to medical care.

In 1990, the US Congress enacted legislation granting legal status to certain designated countries, which meant that people from those countries fleeing war, natural disasters, political crisis, political violence, or civil unrest became eligible for visas under the TPS (temporary protected status) system.

Depending on the country, TPS is reviewed every 6, 12, or 18 months, at which time protected status can be extended or revoked.

As of July 2025, the following countries had an active TPS designation:

Afghanistan

Burma (Myanmar)

Cameroon

El Salvador

Ethiopia

Haiti

Honduras

Lebanon

Nepal

Nicaragua

Somalia

South Sudan

Sudan

Syria

Ukraine

Yemen

Venezuela

Haiti, having already been brought to its knees by the 2010 earthquake, saw its US-backed authoritarian leader Jovenel Moïse assassinated by Colombian mercenaries in 2021.

The ensuing street violence and political unrest led to thousands of Haitians fleeing to the USA under the TPS system, including to places like Springfield, Ohio, where many businesses welcomed them as a cheap source of labor.

In 2024, a Haitian immigrant knocked down and killed a local child while driving without a licence - an incident which touched-off open conflict between some locals and the Haitian immigrant community.

This is the point where Trump and J.D. Vance waded into the fray, leveraging this single incident into their white nationalist re-election campaign rhetoric in September of 2024, spreading false, racist, and ridiculous rumors suggesting that Haitians were stealing and eating local peoples’ pets.

Between then and now, Trump’s authoritarian attempts to use ICE and US Border Patrol have been held back by a thin line of judges.

Pending a final outcome, Trump’s minions have used other duplicitous means to try and force out the Haitian community, such as refusing to renew immigrants’ driver’s licences, making it impossible for many to work.

Like Cubans, and most Latin Americans, Haitians find themselves forever used as pawns in games of colonial chess.

*****

Inspired in part by the success of the American Revolution, enslaved Haitians rose up against their French colonial oppressors in 1791.

And won.

Many Haitians had hoped and even expected that the new USA would recognise their independence - after all, many free Black Haitian “Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue” had fought alongside American militias against the British only a decade earlier...

Under the ever-classy pedophile slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, the USA withheld recognition, choosing to isolate the new Caribbean nation, fearing that Haiti would become a beacon and example to enslaved peoples in the USA.

What’s more, the USA would enforce a trade embargo on the nascent Haitian state, an embargo which signalled the start of two full centuries of US colonialist interference, including the brutal occupation of Haiti by US Marines between 1915 and 1934.

Way back in 1825, French gunboats had already returned to Haiti, demanding financial “compensation” for the loss of French slaveholders’ “property” during the recent revolution.

Failure to comply would have resulted in the French government refusing to recognise Haitian claims of independence, and almost certain war.

With no help forthcoming, Haiti had no choice but to accept these terms.

Economically isolated and financially crippled, Haiti was forced to take out more and more additional loans to service this “independence debt”.

Shortly before WWI, the US “acquired” Haiti’s national treasury, and after WWI, Haiti’s remaining “debt” was moved onto the books of US investors such as the National City Bank of New York (later known as Citibank).

During the U.S. occupation of Haiti, more than seven percent of Haiti’s land was given or sold to U.S. companies.

Interest which had accrued on loans taken out by Haiti between 1825 and 1875 was not finally paid-off to US investors until 1947, shortly after the end of WWII...

From the establishment of the first European settlement of La Isabela by Christopher Columbus in 1493 - right up to the present day - Indigenous and African peoples on the island once called Quisqueya or Ayiti have been victims of slavery, colonialist exploitation, international capitalism, and the violent puppet regimes supported or enabled by outside interests.

And this is why 15,000 to 20,000 Haitians could end-up in a Rust Belt town in Ohio in 2024, willing to work LEGALLY in factories owned by shameless multi-national conglomerates like Dole, PLC., a company which cut its teeth by overthrowing Indigenous leaders and taking-over much of Hawaii in order to turn it into a vast pineapple plantation, manned by field workers from Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines and Portugal.

Pineapples are not native to Hawaii, by the way. But then again, nor are American capitalists...

It’s all part of the game called “Global Capital”, and the winners under this system don’t give a solitary f**k what people at the bottom - Black, White, Haitian, or American - think about it.

Until they need a vote, that is.

At election time, the mess caused by greed and neoliberal economic theorists (like Ohio-born Arthur Laffer) can be blamed on cat-eating Haitian “unhumans” by racist, misogynistic dungsacks like J. D. Vance and Donald Trump.

*****

As an 8 year old, I never wondered why school janitors, or the people cleaning up the fairway at 3 in the morning (once The Zipper had gone dark and silent), were always people of color.

Now I know why.

Just like I know how billionaires own the NBA and world football.

One in a million kids from a borough in New York or a favela in Brazil will make it to Madison Square Garden or a World Cup Final.

And if they dare to remember and speak for the millions who can never escape poverty, if they dare to point a finger at the Epstein Class, they will be told to “Shut up and dribble”.

Keep the show on the road. UFC on the White House lawn.

Politicians are carney barkers, and real estate moguls own the fairground.

Bright lights and screams, sugar and rust, bravado and menace.

Bread and circuses.

America has some unusual surnames, some of which have mostly died-out in their original home countries.

Sometimes I might spend nearly a week trying to get to the original source of a specific surname - recently I went back to the surname “Cornett”.

The Cornett surname is attached to Appalachia and frontier-era America as certainly as bubble-gum to the underside of a roadside diner table.

The fact is, no one really knows the deep origins of these Cornett folks.  The name itself can be found in France, Belgium, and many other places, including Scotland, where it arrived during the Middle Ages along with Norman (French Viking) warlords.

The first American Cornetts appear in the historical record in 1700s colonial Virginia, almost never with any documentary trail back to the Old World.

Later bearers of this surname carry Y DNA (male ancestor) markers from many different lands and wellsprings - a state of affairs only too common in a country where so many families of different ethnic backgrounds carry surnames “borrowed” from the Anglo cultural ascendancy.

Many years of research into the social/ethnic history of Appalachia have led this writer down paths which have induced a full range of reactions - from outright horror to utter admiration.

So when I first read of a “bad” man named Samuel Cornett who was “married” to a certain Polly Davidson (around the turn of the 1700s and 1800s in Letcher County, Kentucky) my mind was open.  If there are two sides to every story, then every Appalachian story has at least three sides.

Many of these early non-Indigenous settlers and colonizers of Southern Appalachia are named in various records as slaveholders.  This is a story rarely told - the sheer number of people piling into mountainous Indian lands with a few slaves in tow.

The received wisdom of most Americans is that slavery was a “Deep South thing”.

That slavery was only for big cotton plantations.

Large southern plantation owners were certainly the individuals most likely to hold the largest numbers of slaves, and this fact has led many apologists for “The Rebel Cause” to assert that slavery never really took root in mountain country, or that slaveholding was confined to wealthy elites.

This assertion is wrong.

While the mountains of southern Appalachia had far fewer LARGE slaveholders than the Deep South, slavery was still widespread.

Not every person of color associated with a farm, business, or household was enslaved.

When we examine wills and census documents from the period between the War for Independence and say, 1840, we often find households with some members enumerated as “white”, while others might be enumerated under categories such as “all other free” or “free persons of color”, or perhaps “all other persons except Indians not taxed”.

Years of studying thousands upon thousands of such documents has made it obvious that many heads of household were extremely fluid in how they reported the status of household members - this occurred for a myriad of reasons, with “racial status” and free or enslaved status affecting everything from property rights to tax burdens.

The issue of exactly who was truly enslaved, and who was a family member, consort, or concubine (being portrayed as being enslaved), is somewhat complicated by the fact that Virginia and the Carolinas were among the earliest states to move legislation against their “free colored” populations.

By the time of the American Revolution, Virginia and the Carolinas had seen nearly 200 years of inter-ethnic mixing between non-enslaved African-Americans, Atlantic Creole “Portuguese”, mixed-ethnic Caribbean peoples, Lenape, Shawnee, Catawba, Saponi, Pamunkey, and other Indigenous peoples, Brazilians, Jewish adventurers and merchants, and Romani peoples from Germany (Sinti), France (Manouche), Spain (Gitanos), and the British Isles (Romanichal). 

Not to mention peoples from the Dutch East Indies, Madagascar, India, or the Barbary Coast of North Africa...

So.  When we look at a man like Samuel Cornett in 1820s Eastern Kentucky, listed as a slaveholder and head of a household including people of color, we need to take the existence of these Old Mix Americans into account.

Oftentimes the “slaves” enumerated as the “property” of a household were actually part of mixed-ethnic frontier families, and only enumerated as “slaves” because inter-ethnic marriage had been made illegal under various pieces of repressive legislation.

And yes, sometimes the people of color were the children born to women suffering under a shocking imbalance of power, whether they were “free” concubines, or held as virtual sex slaves…

*****

Samuel Cornett might have been “brown” or “white” himself.  Of single ethnicity or multi-ethnic.

Samuel Cornett would not have been the first to blur the lines between outright slavery, forced concubinage, and common-law marriage.

These are all things which this writer tends to bear in mind when reading accounts of lives on the American frontier. 

And after weighing all of the evidence to hand, Cornett does indeed seem to have been the holder of at least four or five outright slaves.

Again, merely being a slaveholder does not automatically mean the enslaver was “white”, nor does it automatically mean that the enslaved were of wholly, or even partial African ancestry (the widespread enslavement of American Indians is shockingly forgotten by most).

As a writer, I have often been loathe to address the issue of “brown slaveholders”, because white supremacists and racists tend to latch onto such facts, as if the existence of a small percentage of non-white slaveholders somehow calls the evil of 300 years of race and caste-based chattel slavery into question.

Even worse, modern white supremacists and racists seize onto this fact as if it somehow excuses their own racism today.

A feeling for nuance is rare among such people…

Leaving all of that aside, what really caught my eye was the family lore telling how Samuel Cornett’s wife/consort Polly Davidson contracted “consumption” - tuberculosis - and spent her last couple of years kept in a “pen”.

Needless to say, this seemed like one of the most horrifying pieces of historical detail one might stumble across.

For years I kept a special file on this particular Samuel Cornett, his name under an ugly dark cloud in my imagination.

The slaveholder who locked his sick wife in a “pen”.

But this man is why every single tid-bit of random knowledge from life’s rich tapestry is worth learning.

You see, Southern Appalachia is home to its own culture, with its own words and ways and food and building traditions.

Southern Appalachian innovation created the “dog-trot cabin” - two small cabins separated by a narrow gap, but covered by a single roof.

An ingenious way to manage temperature in an age before central heating and air conditioning...

Two compartmentalised cabins are easier to heat quickly in winter. 

Two compartmentalised cabins with a narrow gap encourage the “Venturi Effect” in summer heat, in which any wind passing through the gap is cooled, helping to cool both cabins, while affording the perfect covered, shady, and cool place to sit out-of-doors.

A pleasant place for man and dog alike...

But most important to this story, the two separate rooms of a “dog-trot cabin” were known as...”pens”.

So simple historical documents can be read in at least two utterly different ways, depending on the level of knowledge we possess, and the lens through which we choose to view the past.

In one, we have a brutal slaveholder who kept his suffering wife/concubine locked away in a shed.

In the other, we have a multi-ethnic family trying to survive, and a woman with tuberculosis living in the cabin beside her family, in an effort to halt further spread of sickness to her children.

Maybe before deciding how to view things, we should consider a couple of final details.

*****

It is said that shortly after Polly Davidson’s death, Samuel Cornett went fully insane...

Family folklore tends to have little good to say about Samuel.

He is said to have abandoned one wife (and children) back in Virginia.

Without diaries or letters, we are unlikely to ever know why.  He may have been an abject, worthless family man.  His first wife may have been screwing around.

Men and women in early Appalachia often parted ways on grounds of adultery - which was committed by men AND women.  The records are myriad.

We do know that many of the people casting aspersions on his character and mental capacity were people with an interest in his property.

We know that some of these people - including members of the family he left 30 years previously - sought to disenfranchise Polly Davidson’s children, calling them “illegitimate”.

We know that Samuel Cornett pushed back against this, describing these “illegitimate” children in affectionate terms.

Other folklore tells of a woman (concubine?) enslaved by or living with Samuel Cornett. She is said to have killed another young enslaved boy with an iron for harming her young baby.

Samuel Cornett, apparently enraged by her damage to his “property”, is said to have made the girl walk barefoot for miles to present herself to the local judge, where she faced a count of murder.

Apparently the judge declined to convict upon hearing her evidence.

So was Samuel Cornett a cruel, vicious disgrace of a man?

Or was he being vilified by a former family and community scandalized by his “taking-up” with an Indian or African-American woman?

All of the above?

We just don’t know.

But a few things we do know. 

Keeping a wife in a “pen” in the early 1800s did not mean what it means today.

And the trauma visited upon generations of human beings by the actions of other human beings travels down the decades and centuries.

The self-loathing and societal dysfunction caused by people - usually women and people of color - being treated as “less than” forges a long, hard steel chain of pain, suffering, and trouble, until something - or someone - breaks that chain.

I’m re-posting this article from a while back, to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe on the first of June, 1926.

I am asking those who are followers or supporters of our podcast to bear with us, as we are in the process of moving host due to issues with our current provider.

*****

Like many millions of people around the world, I’ve always been fascinated by Monroe.

In my own case, this fascination has little to do with the glamorous Hollywood icon - which Monroe herself admitted was a character carefully crafted over many years.

No, my fascination lies in the way an image or character sold as a commodity can become so vast and overwhelming it consumes its creator.

In popular culture, songs like Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”, while seemingly empathetic, do an injustice to Monroe, portraying her solely as a sort of naive victim, chewed up and spat out by the men in her life and a ruthless, sexist film industry.

It’s more complicated than that.

And if anyone ever had a right to call themselves “self-made”, it was Marilyn Monroe.

Monroe was born in 1926 to a mother who was first married aged only 14.

We can only speculate what role, if any, this child marriage played in the later mental health issues which would plague Gladys Pearl Monroe.

Gladys was actually born in Mexico to railway worker Otis Monroe and his wife Della Mae Hogan, with the family moving to California around the year 1900.

Her marriage at 14 to Jasper Baker was "stormy", with many later accounts accusing Baker of extreme domestic violence. Gladys appears to have already been pregnant at the time of her first marriage, giving birth to their first child, a son named Robert Baker, at the tender age of 15.

Gladys Monroe managed to extricate herself from this marriage at the age of 20, already a mother of two children, but her children were taken away by Jasper Baker. It is known that she tried to remain in contact with these children for a while, but became estranged for reasons impossible for outsiders to know or understand - let alone pass judgement upon.

Gladys Monroe married again in Los Angeles at the age of 22, this time to a man called Martin Mortenson.

The exact hows and whys are unclear, but this marriage also broke down, and Gladys became pregnant by a work colleague (and married man) named Charles Gifford in 1926.

The child of this tryst, Norma Jeane, took the surname of her mother's still legal husband, and was officially born as "Norma Jeane Mortenson" on paper.

Norma Jeane had what can only be called a desperate and difficult childhood, with "home" a constant rotation between intermittent spells with her birth mother, and time spent with foster parents, work colleagues of her erratic mother, and in orphanages.

Norma Jeane's mother would spend her first spell in an asylum for the insane when Norma Jeane was only nine years old, after suffering what was back then called "a nervous breakdown".

Gladys Monroe would later be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia...

Norma Jeane would take various quasi-paternal surnames before settling on her mother's maiden name - the name by which she would become famous.

[Image: Norma Jeane at 17]

Every later effort to establish contact with her biological father Charles Gifford was rebuffed, and this rejection must have been the source of real emotional pain.

Monroe’s biological father’s background was relatively privileged, with deep roots in colonial-era Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Put in the bluntest terms, Monroe’s mother, on the other hand, came from generations of impoverished Appalachian people.

I’ve written elsewhere, in articles/podcasts like “Hillbilly Face”, about the way Southern Appalachians have been mocked and stereotyped through the years, while often turning the tables on their smug “social superiors”, even to the point of making huge amounts of money by playing up to outsiders’ presumptions and expectations.

Marilyn Monroe was no innocent ingénue - she knew full well how to sell an intoxicating mix of playfulness and unapologetic sexuality minus any sense of guilt, cheapness or tawdriness.

A brown-haired girl from an underclass background portraying a “blonde bombshell” character was a decision made by her, not a film studio.

While guessing ethnicity from photos is a fool's game of phenotype analysis, I am still posting this series of photos, because I have some familiarity with the Hogan and Nance families behind Marilyn Monroe's mother, and her mother before her. 

They are my own distant relations (Norma Jeane is an 8th cousin).  Lest this seem like a wish for fame by association, I will point out that Charles Manson is a closer 7th cousin...

We would find that we are all cousins in one way or another if we cared to dig deeply enough!

Both the Nance and Hogan families of Marilyn Monroe's maternal lineage are mixed-ethnic, "Old Mix American" people, and it is hard to ignore the possibility that the tragic lives of Norma Jeane and her mother were at least partially the result of trans-generational trauma.

The extremely low social status of most Black and mixed-ethnic women throughout American history made the formation and development of confident, ambitious young girls from such backgrounds the exception, rather than the rule - at least until more recent times.

Monroe was found dead of an apparent barbiturate overdose in the summer of 1962, after suffering years of anxiety, bouts of depression, and low self-esteem coupled with the type of substance abuse we would now call "self-medication".

While her untimely death was certainly a tragedy, I refuse to see her solely as a victim.

Monroe was a voracious reader, and independent-minded. She refused offers of marriage from studio bigshots, because she didn’t want her success to be seen as coming from anything but her own work.

She took time out from the Hollywood merry-go-round to put herself through proper acting school, where her ability was admired and respected by fellow students.

In 36 short years, this woman managed to give the world a body of work built on tenacity, real comic genius, serious acting chops, and sheer charisma - DESPITE her desperate family background and attempts by various men to rein her in and control her.

At a time when the USA was more deeply sexist than today (and the film industry often predatory), Monroe was a miracle of human, and especially female, resilience.

Sometimes we separate ideas which belong together.

Sometimes we sling things together which should be kept separate (no, we’re not talking pineapple and pizza).

Words like “nation” and “state”, once clearly delineable in meaning, have become almost interchangeable terms in English.

There is a reason that the most powerful country in the Americas is called “The United States”, rather than “The United Nations”.

Now, I can already imagine people out there saying “But America is a single nation made up of individual states”.

Not quite.

The word “nation” was originally intended to signify a large group of people with a widely shared sense of identity and/or set of beliefs.

Once upon a time, people could refer to “the Slavic nation”, “the Jewish nation”, or “the Cherokee nation”, without presuming that these “nations” were confined to a clearly marked territory, or ruled under a single government.

A nation might inhabit a single territory, or many. A nation could fall under the rule of a single monarchy, empire, or many.

People like the Kurds and Armenians were traditionally viewed as “nations”, even while their populations fell under the rule of multiple empires simultaneously.

Today, we tend to speak of ethnic groups, instead of “nations”.

A “state”, as opposed to a “nation”, simply refers to a region or number of regions falling under the control of a specific ruler, governing body or political system.

Monarchies, principalities, empires, republics, democracies, unions, commonwealths, are all types of political “states”.

The term “nation-state” only came into vogue during the 19th century craze for nationalism.

This is why the American “founding fathers” first chose to describe their new independent polity as a group of “united colonies”, and later, “united states”, rather than as “united nations”.

The Declaration of Independence itself never refers to nationhood or the founding of a new nation.

The only use of the word “nation” refers to the violence of Hessian mercenaries, whose behavior (under English direction) is deemed unworthy of the head of a “civilized nation” - “nation” meaning “Englishmen”, not “the state”.

Terms used throughout the Declaration of Independence refer to government, or the governed.

The later term “nation-state” is used to suggest that almost everyone living under a specific government, in a specific place, has a widely shared sense of ethnic identity and/or set of beliefs.

In other words, proponents of this system believe that the state (territory and government) and the nation (ethnic group being governed) should align.

The USA, perhaps more than any other polity in history, has worked hard to conflate the meaning of the words “nation” and “state”.

There is a reason for this, which we’ll get to a little later...

*****

This lumping-together of separate concepts relates directly to another sleight of hand found almost solely in the USA, and that is the constant attempt by some to separate things which DO belong together - in this case, history and politics.

As an unapologetic leftist and observer of current events who happens to write about American history, I often find myself caught in a sort of narrative trap.

I have never been particularly interested in the type of history which is a list of “great men”, touting their achievements, nor do I find myself mesmerised by their intimate letters or obscure biographical details in a voyeuristic kind of way.

To quote from Betty Williamson (biographer of the wonderful 20th century fantasy author John Collier), I have always tended, like the subject of her biography, to see humans as “...flawed but with potential, everywhere contaminated by narrow creeds, institutions, coteries, vanities, and careers...”

Maybe I’m just not enough of a “people person”.

I am far more likely to be found absorbed in a history book explaining how the production and trade in salt - sodium chloride - has been central to human history.

Put another way, I am more interested in the motivations and actions that humans in general tend to repeat, often in the destructive (and self-destructive) firestorm of war.

The motivations and actions of leaders and “heroes” are not fundamentally different to the motivations which drive all of us.

Whether a certain person’s motivations and actions have a real historical impact depends on many things: contingency, personal morality, social morality, psychopathy, sociopathy, level of greed, determination, access to wealth or powerful networks, charisma, “the spirit of the times”, or sheer dumb luck.

This is not to say that an historian or history writer needs to have a political agenda per se.

We are simply saying that understanding historical events outside of a socio-political context is impossible.

As someone born in the USA (who has been lucky enough to have seen and lived in many places outside the USA), I never fail to be amazed at the average American’s ability to disconnect real political awareness from history.

Saying that “America was founded by people escaping religious persecution” who later “fought for freedom and liberty” is not political awareness, and it’s certainly not history.

Consider the following:

Since WWII, US military interventions are estimated to have caused the deaths of between 20-30 million people.

Since 1970, US and European sanctions levied against perceived adversaries are estimated to have caused between 29 and 38 million deaths worldwide.

The hows and whys of this human carnage have been written about at length by proper historians.

What matters here, today, is that the vast majority of Americans base their voting decisions on economic self-interest, or ideologies based in religion or fraudulent propaganda and slogan-based “talking points” fed to them by a media and education system mainly serving the monied political, corporate and industrialist classes.

People driven by hate, greed, intolerance, ideology, or simple small-mindedness are ALWAYS interested in controlling the media and education.

And in times of authoritarianism or fascism, these people ALWAYS come after certain people who teach and write about history...

*****

All of my life, I have met people who claim to “love history”.

What many of these people really love is nothing of the sort.

What these people really want are antiques, escapism, time travel, and universal morality tales stripped of nuance, detail, context, or specificity.

The USA has more “living history” museums per capita than most other western countries.

Americans will happily visit these historical theme parks, plantation houses, and castles. They will even use them as backdrops for weddings and other personal or business events.

Americans want stories and tales of Mayflowers and good ancestors “escaping religious persecution”.

Americans want to see women in bonnets sitting at spinning wheels or sewing patchwork quilts in lovingly-restored log cabins.

Americans want Benjamin Franklin’s kite, Thomas Edison’s light bulb, the Wright Brothers’ first airplane.

Americans want to inspect the crack in the Liberty Bell (”Yep Tammy, it’s really there”), and cheer as the The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is re-enacted by people in tricorn hats.

It’s like trying to understand what gave rise to a human like Charles Manson by staring at the 1959 Ford Fairlane he drove...

Even when they are well-intentioned, most narrators of USA history have always been blinded by the impenetrable fog of propaganda and mythology which suffused the pre- and post-independence era.

This is why otherwise perfectly kind and thoughtful people love US history as presented by people like Ken Burns.

This type of history is a form of comfort blanket, in which every horror of the past is configured and characterized as a case of “bad faith actors” betraying the golden promise of the USA’s foundation.

In other words, the “American Project” is essentially “good”, but a few “bad guys” keep ruining it.

Americans want history as a show, with a compelling narrative arc, a feelgood story with good guys and bad guys.

Most of all, the show and narrative arc must center the viewer or visitor as being one of the “good guys”.

Often to its own cost, the Before We Were White project refuses to see things in such terms.

Comforting lies are not history.

It doesn’t matter how many people prefer a comforting lie to the truth, unless money and clicks are the only reason for writing...

*****

People who study these things say that the human brain is wired to imprint negative experiences far more readily than positive ones.

Apparently this has to do with survival itself.

We can walk past 20 animals per day, taking note of maybe only one or two of them.

Maybe what we choose to notice is simply due to size, color, or rarity.

We mostly forget seeing the endless small groups of birds flying overhead or the line of ants crawling along the ground.

But when we walk past a driveway where an angry Rottweiler rushes out, our brain takes copious notes.

Because mild pleasures are many and fleeting, we only bother to remember the highlights.

Bad experiences, though, set up a permanent compound in our memory bank.

It’s the same when dealing with people, in real life and online.

We might have 100 neutral or positive interactions with people every day, but it’s the negative interactions which we tend to remember.

So.

As a writer exploring the intersection of American ethnicity, identity, history, and politics, it is impossible to keep all of these things in separate boxes marked “positive history” and “negative history”.

It’s all just “history”.

That being said, it is virtually impossible to un-see or “un-know” the unspeakable violence, amorality, wickedness, and self-serving brand of POLITICS which allowed some people to thrive, while grinding others into the dirt.

There is a very particular kind of lonely feeling of awareness which comes with knowing that the heads of Black people “convicted” of “crimes” were regularly placed on spikes along the roads in parts of America in order to terrify any enslaved person who might dare contemplate violence toward their enslaver.

To this writer’s knowledge, no TV show or “historical re-enactment village” has ever portrayed or even hinted at this reality.

Even the medium of film, which might be expected to push the envelope somewhat, always fails to portray the sheer barbarous nature of historical reality.

Decent films like “Last of the Mohicans” hint at, but skirt carefully around the levels of European barbarity, while “hoo ha!” films like Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot” are simply execrable.

Likewise, no “Plimoth” living history village ever re-enacted “The Great Swamp Massacre”, which involved the mass slaughter and burning of hundreds of Narragansett women and children in their villages the week before Christmas in 1675.

I am not stupid, and understand that young children and the descendants of those affected by slavery and genocide could do without such horrors being “brought to life” - especially as spectacle.

And yet.

We are left with little more than a simulacrum of history, just as American evangelical Christianity is a spooky simulacrum of Iron Age Levantine religious belief and practice stripped of context.

Instead of something approaching historicity - an impassioned Jewish street preacher railing against the Jewish establishment’s hypocrisy and collaboration with Roman occupation - we get a character filtered and modified by centuries of metaphysical misdeployment and power politics.

Comparing “evangelical Jesus” to historical Jesus is the same as thinking the King Arthur in shining medieval armor of Hollywood bears any resemblance to a violent 5th century Cambro-Romano warlord battling “Saxon” invaders during the age of Beowulf.

Personally, I cannot watch a demonstration of English colonial folk craft without remembering the number of settler-colonists who were coining a small fortune (and encouraging dubious land transfers) by selling cheap alcohol to Indigenous peoples already ravaged by war and European-introduced smallpox.

When politicians mouth platitudes about pious Puritans and America’s “Christian” foundations during this semiquincentennial year, I cannot unknow settlers from the 1600s like Matthias St. John of colonial Connecticut, always selling “syder to the Indians by which they was Drunke”, or the teenaged Thomas Granger of Plymouth, hanged for “buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, divers sheep, two calves, and a turkey”, or poor Hannah Bonney, also of Plymouth, whipped at the post for bearing a child by an enslaved African man called Nimrod.

Personally, I cannot watch a demonstration of English colonial forgework without remembering that blacksmiths in the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay Colonies also repaired human shackles.

Regularly.

In other words, much of American history IS the story of how ethnic, economic, and religious politics shaped that history...

*****

At any rate, back to the observation that the human brain is wired to imprint negative experiences far more readily than positive ones.

This axiom definitely applies to writing for a living.

At a time when I should simply be delighted about the many kind and supportive people who’ve followed my writing for the past few years, I still notice and mull overmuch when someone checks-out or unsubscribes.

So last month, I noticed an “unsubscribe”, because the person took the time to write a goodbye email.

In essence, this person explained that while they have very much enjoyed my writing for delving into the forgotten ethnic groups which make up the unique American “melting pot”, they feel unwilling to support “editorializing” about Israel.

Hmmm.

That, right there, goes to the heart of everything written above.

This blog and its sister podcast are called “Before We Were White”.

Not because at one time all “white people” were Brown or Black, but because “white” is a caste category masquerading as an ethnicity.

Before we were “white”, we were English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, German, Swiss, French, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Czech, Sami, Spanish, Portuguese, Romani (Gypsies), Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish, Malagasy, Igbo, Mande, Wolof, Fula, Mandingo, Gola, Ashanti, Yoruba, Ogoni, Kongo, Berber, Arab, Turkish, Greek, Cypriot, Majorcan, Minorcan, Taino, Narragansett, Pamunkey, Catawba, Saponi, Yuchi, Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Creek, Azore Islanders, and sundry South Asians from the hundreds of ethnic groups found there.

AND THIS IS ONLY A PARTIAL LIST OF THE ETHNIC GROUPS FOUND IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA DURING THE COLONIAL ERA.

In America, the colonial era underclasses of every ethnicity named above became intermixed to the point that claiming an individual ethnicity today is simply laughable.

(The ruling “white” classes also intermixed with Brown and Black people, but that is a less edifying story all its own.)

Controlling a “state” is all fine and dandy, but if the citizens of that state cannot be shepherded into some form of collective identity, the state will be much harder to hold together.

It is this absence of a national identity based on a single ethnicity which has always made the privileged and ruling classes in America ceaselessly attempt to replace “ethnicity” with “race”, so they can pretend that the USA is a “nation-state”, founded by and for a fake ethnic group called “white Christians”.

As a publication, Before We Were White is about showing that in America, using skin color or “race” as a proxy for ethnicity is a joke.

As a publication, Before We Were White is about showing that in America, artificial “race” identities propping-up fake ethno- or “white” supremacy is America’s “original sin”.

As a publication, Before We Were White is about showing that in such a profoundly mixed-ethnic America, a strong, cohesive “ethno-nationhood” is impossible to construct.

*****

The USA was never built on a common shared ancestry, single language, one set of religious traditions, nor the rites of passage, food traditions, etc. of one or even three or fifty ethnic groups.

That still doesn’t stop conservatives, MAGA, sundry racists, Christian Nationalists, “patriots”, “white folks” (whatever you wish to call them) who want to force a “national identity”, aka a specific and limited definition of “nationhood” on the USA.

They can cry and they can try, but it is never going to work, because America is multi-ethnic, period, AND “WHITE” IS NOT AN ETHNICITY.

Does this mean that the USA is finished as a state or wannabe “nation-state”?

Are we doomed to descend into another Civil War?

Not necessarily.

We could choose to believe that our citizenship, our statehood or “nationhood”, resides in a shared political ethos - universal human rights, democratic self-governance, freedom of speech, religious freedom, a free press, tolerance of cultural difference.

This would require us to push back, hard, against the current resurgence of racism, and the rise of “white” Christian Nationalism, gangster kleptocracy, and tech-oligarchy.

It would also require us to ditch the whole foundational myth which pretends that the USA was born “exceptional” in 1776.

If the Founding Fathers were so perfect and wise, we wouldn’t have needed a Civil War, a Civil Rights Movement, and umpteen amendments to the original Constitution...

MAGA types are fond of saying “What point is there in digging up or dwelling on the past? It’s divisive.”

Anyone with an ounce of intuition or wisdom recognizes their disingenuous game.

The mythological story of American Exceptionalism has left so-called “white folks” at the top of the pile.

The Founding Fathers were “white folks”. Puritans were mostly “white folks”. Settlers at Jamestown were mostly “white folks”.

Put another way, MAGA types see the “Story of America” as a “white story”, and because they see themselves as “white”, they see themselves as party to every “white” achievement, every “American” achievement.

Exposing the dark underbelly of racist settler-colonialism takes the shine off their self-image.

By explaining the real politics which drove America’s development, the story of “the greatest nation in the world” is laid bare as a White Christian Nationalist fairy tale..

For my own part, I prefer the older linguistic way of keeping the meanings of “nation” and “state” separate.

The USA is a federation of colonialist states, governing a myriad of peoples or “nations”.

I do not accept a world where exploring history and historical ethnicity can somehow be divorced from politics.

My polite “unsubscriber” loves learning all about historical ethnicities in America, BUT NOT WHAT THEIR ETHNICITY MEANT TO THEIR DAILY LIVED EXPERIENCE IN POLITICAL TERMS.

They want Charles Manson’s 1959 Ford Fairlane.

*****

“But what does modern Israel have to do with the history of ethnicity in America?”, I hear you ask.

Before we continue, it’s necessary to say something which might sound a bit “woo-woo” at first glance.

Here goes.

Every single thing in this life, this world, is connected in some way.

This is obviously true in the fields of physics and chemistry, and likewise in the realms of biology and genetics.

But it is also true in the study of history.

There is no “History of America” which can be segregated and parsed-out separate to the history of Europe, of Africa, of Asia, of pre-contact America.

The English settler-colonialist takeover of Tsenacommacah (the American Indian lands later called “Virginia”) cannot be separated from their contemporary settler-colonialist takeover and plunder of Ireland.

Both “projects” were based in similar motivations (greed), with similar justifications (”they are pagan savages”), and utilized similar methods (duplicity, rapine, pillage, theft, and astonishing violence).

Analogies and parables and metaphors can be clumsy and imperfect, but they exist for a reason.

And that reason, is to help us to see parallels which might otherwise go unnoticed.

If we set aside the European Crusader states of the Middle Ages, the real age of European settler-colonialism began with the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta in North Africa in 1415.

After 500 years of worldwide mayhem, the final European settler-colonialist project was begun by the UK and sundry Jewish Europeans during the post-WWI British Mandate in Palestine.

The establishment of a settler-colonialist state was officially and unilaterally declared as a fait accompli in 1948.

Anyone wishing to understand and appreciate the brutal reality of British/USA settler-colonialist history - its processes, its methods, its casuistry, its violence, its racism - can understand it perfectly, live-streamed, in real time, by observing the current State of Israel.

Almost EVERYTHING currently seen in Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, and Syria has a corollary in British American colonial/USA history.

Israel’s attempt to split Palestinian resistance - weakening Fatah by funding Hamas - is a tactic straight out of the European colonialist “divide and conquer” playbook.

Israel is currently employing the same tactics in Lebanon, striking deals with a weakened and ineffectual government which represents only a part of the Lebanese population.

These carefully cultivated divisions in Lebanese and Palestinian society (between those willing to cut deals with Israel, and those who advocate armed resistance), are remarkably similar to the way American settler-colonizers gathered a non-representative number of Cherokee Nation members at New Echota in 1835, in order to force a treaty which would “legally” hand over upwards of 7 million acres of Cherokee land into US control and ownership.

The greater section of Cherokee society refusing to sign this treaty in 1835, if alive today, would be characterized as “terrorists”, just as resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are characterized today.

Israel’s destruction of Palestinian property, and the driving of Palestinians from their homes and farms into distant refugee camps in 1948, 1967 (and most brutally since October 2023), is a perfect mirror to USA “emigration depots” and the subsequent forced removal of Cherokee, Choctaw, Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Lenape, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Odawa, Sauk, Meskwaki, Seneca, and others from the eastern parts of US-controlled North America to dusty reservations in Oklahoma.

Palestinian refugee camps and enclaves in Southern Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza are worse than Indian reservations, however, being more akin to 20th century open-air concentration camps.

Most people today fail to realize that concentration camps existed long before Hitler’s Germany.

We’ve already mentioned the “emigration depots” of 1830s Indian Removal, which were proto-concentration camps, with crowded, unsanitary conditions leading to innumerable deaths even before the forced trail marches west.

But the UK and its teenage runaway colony, the USA, continued with their concentration camp innovations - the UK during its second war against the Dutch Boers in South Africa, the USA during its war in The Philippines.

Both conflicts were fought between 1899 and 1902, but the USA excelled and exceeded its parent nation, with the American military not only perfecting “concentration zones”, but also introducing torture as military policy.

How many people today realize that the brutal and illegal waterboarding torture seen during the USA’s nasty and fruitless “War on Terror” was first deployed a century earlier in The Philippines?

How many Americans today even know that the USA killed anywhere between a quarter million and three-quarters of a million human beings in The Philippines?

And even more in Iraq only 20-some-odd years ago?

*****

What about voters’ rights?

It took the USA until 1865 to extend voting rights to Black Americans.

It took the USA until 1924 to extend voting rights to American Indians.

These federal rights were not worth the paper on which they were written, due to “states’ rights” to conduct elections.

It took the USA until 1965 - a full century after the Civil War, and almost two centuries after The Declaration of Independence - to finally legislate to enforce and protect the franchise of Indigenous and Black Americans.

Rights and protections which are being rolled back as we speak...

Again, vicious little kid brother Israel is right there, copying the USA model by withholding voting rights from the people whose territory it has illegally occupied since 1967.

Why shouldn’t America’s proxy in West Asia feel impunity when behaving just like its big brother?

The dark archipelago of the Israeli prison system, with thousands of Palestinians being held without trial, subject to sexual violence and other forms of torture, is merely a vicious counterpart to the prison system being run by the country which has the highest per capita imprisoned population in the world, a country which created Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and is building new gulags run by ICE.

Even Israel’s refusal to declare formal borders is a mimicking of the USA’s 19th century belief in “Manifest Destiny” - where borders can change constantly according to how much land can be seized.

By the 20th century, the USA finally stopped physically occupying new territories, turning to other forms of imperialism - regime change, clandestine ops, assassinations, sanctions, etc.

But with the USA government feeding billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money into the black vortex of evildoing in Palestine/Israel, it is currently hard to tell where Zionist “Manifest Destiny” will end.

As a writer, I can no more stop “editorializing about Israel” than I can stop editorializing about the land of my birth.

I would like to think that if I had been an American writing about history in the 1940s, I would have also editorialized about the murder of homosexuals, the Romani, the disabled, and Jewish people in Germany, while being wise enough to notice and compare this to the treatment of the gay community, American Indians, and Black Americans in my own country.

Behind all of this, ALL OF IT, is greed, racism and ethno-supremacy...

In Israel, as in America, ethnicity IS political, and has always been political.

It’s all connected.

Woo-woo.

We don’t watch much TV around our house nowadays.

As someone born at the very tail end of the “Boomer” generation, my early life was measured-out and in many ways defined by TV.

Some good TV, and an awful lot of trash, truth be told.

I’ve seen Fess Parker playing Daniel Boone. Speed Racer and Fat Albert cartoons. The Munsters. Sesame Street. Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The Jeffersons. Welcome Back, Kotter. The Love Boat. Charlie’s Angels.

I missed a lot of 1980s TV, being stationed with the US Army in Germany.

Further travels eventually saw US TV fall almost completely off my radar.

As a person plagued by “FOMO”, I did try to stay in touch with popular culture.

A brief romance with US TV was briefly rekindled during the 1990s, with the arrival of The X-Files, Millennium, and similar pre-millennial angst-ridden fare, but work, and a love of live music, sailing, and the outdoors eventually saw the communal screen in our house turning into a dust covered black rectangle in the corner.

So I missed The Sopranos. I also missed The Wire.

I know - my bad.

Since the turn of the millennium, younger family members (aka “my son”) began to mention TV shows which were considered essential touchstones for contemporary culture.

“Breaking Bad”.

Its follow-up, “Better Call Saul”.

Determined not to become entirely culturally illiterate, I decided to make the effort to keep up with popular culture.

So I watched Breaking Bad. Brilliant.

And then I finally got around to watching “Better Call Saul”.

Slower paced and lower key, but still loved every minute of it.

*****

When you do what I do, it’s impossible to watch credits without noticing surnames, and going “Ah! I know something about that person’s family history”.

The lead character Jimmy McGill is played by Bob Odenkirk, whose German and Irish background comes mostly from “late wave” German and Irish immigration during the 19th century.

The character Kim Wexler is played by Rhea Seehorn, also with German and Irish roots, with a soupçon of Bohemian Czech thrown in for good measure.

The Seehorn surname itself is German, and most people bearing the Seehorn family name have roots in America going back to an earlier wave of German immigration during the early 1700s.

Although Rhea Seehorn (latterly starring in the post-apocalyptic Pluribus series) sports the quintessential blonde hair and blue eyes popularly associated with Germanic peoples, her own Seehorn ancestry peters-out of any reliable documentary record in early 1800s North Carolina, among a plethora of German families commonly associated with what are known as the “Black Dutch”.

Those who follow this blog and podcast will already know that “Black Dutch” was a term used in early colonial and frontier-era America by many people of German ancestry with complex ethnic backgrounds.

This complicated ethnicity included German Sinti (Romani or “Gypsy”) people, German Jews, or Germans/Czechs who had intermixed with darker ethnic groups of African or Indigenous ancestry (Moravians, for example) found along the settler-colonial frontier.

Contrary to common wisdom, people of complex German background were far more numerous on the Southern Appalachian frontier of Daniel Boone than the much-vaunted “Scots-Irish”.

Ms. Seehorn’s direct ancestors include Grindstaffs, Shouns/Showns, Slemps, Stouts, and Snyders - all of these families can still be found today in Southern Appalachia, which has FAR more German heritage than most people imagine.

Here are just a few of these old Appalachian German families beginning only with the letter “S”, like Ms. Seehorn:

Seahorn (Seehorn, Zeehorn)

Seger/Seeger (Sieger)

Setzer

Shafer/Shaver (Schäfer)

Shawver (Schauber)

Shell (Schell)

Shepherd (Schäfer)

Shown/Shoun (Schaun)

Sides (Seitz)

Siler (Seiler)

Slager (Schläger)

Slemp (Schlemp)

Sliger (Schleiger)

Slusher (Schlösser)

Smelser (Schmelzer)

Smith (Schmidt)

Snider/Snyder (Schneider)

Snodderly (Schnatterle)

Spear{s} (Speer)

Spraker (Sprecher)

Sprinkle (Sprenckel)

Stagner (Steigner?)

Stamper (perhaps from “Stempert”)

Stonecipher (Steinseifer)

Stout (Staudt?)

Stover (Stauffer)

Surface (Zerfass, Zerfuss)

Swadley (possibly “Schwadle” or Swiss German “Schwadli”)

Swearingen (Schweringen, sometimes from Dutch “van Sweeringen”)

Swisher (see “Switzer” and Irish Palatines)

Switzer

[Images: Celia Stout, a direct ancestor of Rhea Seehorn with “witches” in her family tree, and bottom, Marmaduke Seahorn riding an ostrich. Don’t ask. I have no idea.]

#history #rheaseehorn #BetterCallSaul #blackdutch

Within 48 hours of Mark Zuckerberg's pathetic, cringe-inducing curtsy before the gold-plated iron throne of MAGA authoritarianism back in January of 2025, my feed on Facebook underwent a metamorphosis.

After years of curating my social media experience with third party ad-blockers, aggressive privacy settings, and regularly clicking "hide all posts from this page", Zuckerberg seems to have instructed the people who code the Facebook algorithm to go for "maximum MAGA brown nose", and find a way to force-feed right wing culture war talking points to those of us with no appetite.

I suddenly found myself being treated to an endless parade of creepy memes and "content" from various corners of the GOP, MAGA, and Christo-nationalist freakoverse.

I recall a page with around 700,000+ plus "followers" called "The Patriot Post" was particularly persistent during the first weeks of Trump’s second term in trying to shove its garbage into my beleaguered feed.

It took me a few hours of digging to get to the source of that particular spooky and weird manifestation of MAGA worship.

You are welcome to make yourself feel utterly soiled by doing your own investigations, but my own advice is don’t bother looking - unless you enjoy having unremitting ignorance and extremely limited concepts of “liberty” taking-up valuable space in your brain.

I can spare you the unpleasantness if you like.

The page/publication in question was written by people using pseudonyms ("We put the writing ahead of the writer"), whose sources of funding were as opaque as lead roof sheeting.

The main player appeared to be a man named Mark Caldwell, of Hamilton County, Tennessee. More anon.

Most urban-dwelling US citizens will be familiar with certain tropes which inform the self-identity of many heartland Americans.

Gun culture. Evangelical Protestant religion. Mistrust of authority.

What many people outside this culture do not understand, is how heartland America has spent centuries carefully redefining and reimagining its own roots, history, and origin story, to move it farther and farther away from various unpleasant truths.

For example, many of the people who first colonized the various frontiers in North America were often drawn from the very least empowered mixed-ethnic underclasses.

They acted almost as shock troops for a cash-strapped post-independence government which would only follow on their heels after much of the dirty work of ethnic-cleansing had been done.

In other words, they were useful to the new US government (with its so-called “federal lands”) and the speculator and industrialist elites (with their vast land companies).

Vast tracts of land only have a value to capitalists if resources can be converted into gold, silver, or cash.

It takes settlers to kill Indians, lay trackways and roads, log timber, set up mills, and mine lead, so the underclasses were given “title” to Indian lands through government grants, or they purchased Indian lands at a knock-down price from land speculators.

In an environment far distant from higher education or Enlightenment thought, in a place and time defined by violence, many of these colonizers would have been regarded by many people “back east” as an irretrievably debased and vulgar people - the very ancestors of the folks infamously described as “deplorables” by a certain politician.

As long as this rural underclass and urban working class remained useful (as cannon fodder for wars, for example), it was necessary for the speculator and industrialist elites to pay regular lip service to them, and to collaborate in the eventual redefining and reimagining of the underclass American identity.

The guns and violence which achieved ethnic cleansing were funnelled into a new mythos of self-reliance and “respect for the military”.

The characterization of American Indians as “savages” meant that being Christian became code for being “civilized”.

Because racialist thinking was core to both ethnic cleansing and slavery, the mixed-ethnic underclasses had to be allowed inside the “white” tent of self-identity.

Reduced to the simplest possible terms, the modern MAGA movement are the people who have chosen to accept the mythological version of their past, because the truth is far less palatable.

Back to the slop being served on social media…

Like so many other Americans from his background, Mark Caldwell of "The Patriot Post" goes big on claiming that the USA is "a Christian nation".

Like many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who believe that if a text is old, then it must be "sacred", he treats the US Constitution as immutable Scripture.

Even though every amendment represents a decision to alter “scripture”.

Like many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, Caldwell fetishizes military service as the ultimate expression of loyalty and devotion to the concept of "liberty".

Finally, he describes himself as being of mostly "Scots-Irish" ancestry, which is the self-identity of choice for many people of his background.

This choice of self-identity among much of conservative America is almost always based on only a tiny, selected percentage of their ancestry.

Allow me to explain why so many "Heartland Americans" perpetuate this highly-abridged (and often downright false) history of their origins...

*****

America's first inner identity, its first distinctly "American" culture, is "Southern Appalachian".

Before Appalachian culture came into being, America was largely a land of immigrant administrators, speculators, members of religious sects, colonists, convicts, servants, and slaves of many different cultures and ethnicities.

English, Africans (including the Gullah and so many others), Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, Romani, Greek, Minorcan, Malagasy, et al.

Were these people changed by being in America? Sure. But in the earliest days, they tended to live, marry, work and migrate as ethnic enclaves, religious groups, or extended family groups.

There were Scottish communities around Cape Fear and in the Carolina backcountry. Quakers tended to settle near one another in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere. German-speaking Mennonites did the same. French communities existed in places such as Manakin Town. Minorcans in Florida. Welsh towns in Pennsylvania. Jewish communities in Georgia. Displaced indigenous groups such as the Lenape and Catawba in various locales.

Unlike the people just mentioned, folks arriving in America from Ulster in Ireland were not a single, cohesive ethnic group. Some were Anglican. Some were Presbyterian. Some were Catholic. Many were Quakers. Some were English, some were Irish, some were Scottish, and a good few were Welsh. Many were French, German, or Flemish.

Some of these individual groups from Ulster stuck together in America, for a while - especially in places like Pennsylvania.

But for those who followed the spine of Appalachia southwards during the 1700s, into Virginia and the Carolina backcountry, any “Scots-Irishness” was soon subsumed into a potent, mixed-ethnic cocktail.

Southern Appalachia was not Pennsylvania (a multi-ethnic place itself).

Southern Appalachia was multi-ethnic on an entirely new level, with its mountain gaps and passes acting as funnels west for settlers from the entire eastern seaboard of North America.

In fact, "Southern Appalachian" equals "multi-ethnic".

Period.

There is no sustainable argument for a majority "Scots-Irish" culture in Appalachia. In terms of sheer numbers, people of English and German ancestry are far more prevalent.

The music said to be "Scots-Irish" is the same music which was played throughout the British Isles by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots during the age of fiddle tunes and broadside ballads.

Feuding and fighting are not specific remnants of "Scots-Irish" culture. Feuding is a feature of remote rural insular communities everywhere; in fact, almost none of the mountain feuds of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, or Kentucky were fought by people with roots in Ulster.

The cultural sideline most embraced as being a "Scots-Irish thing" - distilling liquor - was also practiced by mountain folks with German and French roots. We can know this by reading contemporary letters and wills leaving stills to relatives and children. Most everyone made booze of one kind or another from whatever was at hand.

Barley. Corn. Potatoes. Apples. Peaches.

In an age before painkillers and anesthetics, before colonizers had acquired herbal knowledge of their new surroundings, alcohol was a treasured blessing (and often a social curse).

The multi-ethnic character of Appalachia is there for all to see in other historical records, for those who care to read them.

Revolutionary War Rolls. Land bounties and land warrants. Wills. Census records. Marriages. Entries in family Bibles. Court proceedings. Newspaper accounts. Contracts of land and personal indenture.

In no county of the Southern Appalachian heartland - the hill and holler country of Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, western parts of Virginia and North Carolina, and southern West Virginia - in no county there, none, can the MAJORITY of people be demonstrated to be descended from Ulster folk.

Whatever Google tells you, whatever the new-fangled AI claims to "know", those search engines and large language models will only regurgitate what has been said the most times by the most people.

The majority of people in the 1970s and 1980s thought that eggs and butter were unhealthy, and that margarine was "good". We now know that everyone, from "experts" down to the man in the street, was simply repeating "received wisdom".

Received wisdom is often wrong.

*****

Someone recently asked "Why would people say they were Scots-Irish if they weren't? What could they hope to gain through this deception?"

Perhaps the most important thing to point-out when answering this question is that most old Southern Appalachian families have people of color in their family tree somewhere.

And this is surely why <some> Americans have been so determined to insist that "Southern Appalachian culture" equals "Scots-Irish culture".

If America's first non-indigenous core identity and culture could in fact be shown to be fundamentally multi-ethnic instead of "Scots-Irish" - and this CAN be shown - then one of America's earliest, largest and richest cultural identities - "Appalachian" - can no longer be considered the sole province of "Protestant white folks".

This would force us to change our image of the families travelling in covered wagons. It changes our mental picture of the people in the forts and blockhouses of frontier Kentucky. It changes the color of many women sitting at spinning wheels and looms in log cabins.

It makes us question everyone.

Tavern keepers.

Keelboatmen.

Loggers.

Mill workers.

Soldiers.

Longhunters.

And when we begin to question everyone, and we begin to see the many different ethnic groups intermixing, we begin to see a brown people.

And if you are the sort of person who believes that your culture, your "American-ness", your "specialness" resides in your "whiteness", this is a big problem for your entire sense of self.

*****

Always, always remember that America, perhaps more than any English-speaking nation, is full of people carrying surnames which bear no relation to their ancestry.

African-Americans carry Irish and Scottish surnames.

American Indians carry Irish and Scottish surnames.

As do people of Jewish and Romani ancestry.

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, America's binary racial caste system forced such multi-ethnic "brown people" of Appalachia to declare themselves "white".

This was not some personal proto-identity politics, about just wanting to identify with the "ascendant race".

This was a matter of deadly, legal seriousness.

Being declared a "mulatto" or "colored" could see any number of rights withheld.

Voting rights. The right to attend local schools. The right to own a gun.

Picking and going by a "white" name - often a name borrowed from a neighbor with Irish or Scottish roots - was the absolute basic first step in disguising one's true ethnicity.

Not every family claiming a spurious "Scots-Irish" background did this for consciously racialist reasons.

Many supporters of the Royalist or "Tory" cause found their lives and farms and personal property under threat by "Patriots" during the 1770s and 1780s. Many chose to pack-up and head for the mountains.

All things English became hugely unfashionable and undesirable in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution - a war which might arguably be better described as America's First Civil War.

People from Ulster - especially Presbyterians already hostile to Anglican English interests - were early and avid supporters of the "Patriot" cause.

It seems pretty obvious that former Tory/Loyalist families in Southern Appalachia would not have been keen to advertise their past affiliations, nor their roots, among such neighbors.

Especially if these erstwhile Tories appeared "racially dubious".

Given a choice between English-speaking "white" identities, many opted for "Irish" over "English".

Remember that the term "Scots-Irish" wasn't yet in wide usage, and certainly not among the descendants of Ulster folk. They simply called themselves Irish or Scots.

My own great-great-grandfather Hogan - a nut-brown Melungeon - claimed to have been born in Ireland on his military service records. He was not born in Ireland. Nor was his father. Nor his grandfather. But his claimed birth in Ireland helped to deflect uncomfortable questions in a deeply, deeply racist country.

Another British and American invented ethnicity - "Anglo-Saxon" - makes no room for brown people. But Anglo-Saxon racism always did allow for the idea of brown Irish people. Hell, the English were positively determined to prove the "racial inferiority" of Irish people ever since they first decided to steal the land of the Gaels.

[Photo: Alfred Bailey and wife Sarilda Perkins]

In other words, my brown ancestors could have never gotten away with saying they were "Anglo-Saxon", and certainly did not want to admit to being part Indian or African.

Somewhere along the line, one side of my family became "Hogans", and in doing so, they also became Irish, and over time, "white".

Similar stories unfolded all over Appalachia.

There are some family lines of people named Vance, Myers and McInturff who call themselves "Scots-Irish", when they are in fact of German descent from people surnamed "Wentz", "Mayer" and "Meckendorf".

For multi-ethnic Appalachians, to be "Irish" was a simple form of shorthand.

Being "Irish" was to be aligned with "whiteness".

Being "Irish" was to be aligned with American, as opposed to English interests.

The history of Southern Appalachia during the 1700s and 1800s is one of the most richly fascinating stories imaginable.

We are doing this story a grave disservice by hiding it under a reductionist blanket of "Scots-Irishness".

Painters, just like musicians or actors, need patrons or a paying audience.

This might seem obvious, but it has a direct bearing on how we view history.

English society has been notoriously class-conscious since the first Norman warlords began erecting their stone fortresses - aka castles - among the British, Danish, and Saxon peoples of England after 1066.

These Normans/Northmen (of Normandy in France) were really just "Frenchified" Vikings with a serious superiority complex after spending a few generations away from their Northern homelands.

Their "Viking French" tongue became the language of the ruling classes in Britain, and this legacy survives right down to the present day, even in American English.

When we want to sound lofty or educated, we tend to use words borrowed and evolved from the Norman French language.

When we want plain talk, we tend to use words evolved mostly from Saxon English.

Think of the difference between saying "an illuminated chamber", or "a well-lit room".

But I digress (or "wander off-path", if we choose to avoid French usages here).

Our deeply-ingrained sense of social class, for much of history, not only dictated our language and choice of words - social class also dictated much of what was deemed worthy of recording in words and images.

In the age before affordable photography, only very few people could afford to pay a trained artist for a painting, never mind a portrait.

The peasantry, the underclasses, and the poor were only rarely subjects for the artist's brush - they simply couldn't pay for such a service.

Any chance of possessing art usually depended on having a talented family member.

In fact, until the mid-19th century, most members of the lower classes had only ever caught fleeting glimpses of their own appearance in glass window panes and liquid surfaces, as prior to that, handheld mirrors were a luxury item.

So art as a paid occupation - in the age before social realism - was generally concerned with portraiture of the ruling classes, the landed gentry, merchant classes, along with landscapes, religious themes, and the documentation of "great events" - with only a few noteworthy exceptions.

*****

I invite any reader here to fire-up a search engine, and attempt to locate contemporary images of the American working classes and underclasses from any time before the mid-19th century.

Paintings, etchings, drawings, anything.

You will find precious little.

What is more, by the time American painters DID decide to paint scenes from the lives of frontierspeople and common people, America as a whole was already actively, aggressively engaged in curating its own myth.

Think of George Caleb Bingham's 1852 painting of Daniel Boone leading "white settlers" through the Cumberland Gap - a painting made over 80 years after the events it sought to portray.

Yet even before Daniel Boone had crossed the mountains into "Ken-te-ke", people of mixed ethnicity from the Virginia and Carolina backcountry had been hunting, trading, and intermarrying among the Indians in both Kentucky and Tennessee for decades.

Later generations would refer to this mixed crew as "Melungeons", and begin to construct a dubious mythology around them, as if the existence of free "brown people" were a mysterious affront to the natural order.

Yet there was little mystery to it. Since the time of first European contact, the underclasses in North America had been intermixing with one another.

Spaniards, Portuguese, Portuguese Jews, Romani, Irish, Scots, Welshmen, Finns, Germans, Poles, Swedes, Dutchmen and Frenchmen.

Intermixing with Malagasy, Africans, Caribbeans, South Asians, Arabs or "Moors", Yuchi, Catawba, Lenape, Pamunkey, Cherokee, Shawnee - you name it, they were all there in the first melting pot.

Yet we see none of these mixed or "brown" families represented in the story of the "American frontier", and they are almost never represented in art.

This is where it gets a little ticklish and complex, because there ARE early American drawings of "non-white" people in scenes such as slave markets and slave auctions, or Indigenous peoples shown in obsequious postures of "the vanquished", or in romanticized portrayals of "noble savages".

Yet the presence of these people in contemporary art was almost incidental, with the Indigenous and enslaved treated more like props than human subjects, with their own narratives and regular attempts to assert their personal and collective agency.

This is because America was happy to portray "The Three Americas" which underpinned the racial caste system - Black, White, Indian - but only if the use of "non-white props" served a “white”, Euro-supremacist narrative.

Anyone who was not "Black" (and thus unfree), anyone who was not "Red" (and thus savage), became by default and by design, "White" - and thus free. 

White, Savage, or Slave.

With very few exceptions, when speaking of freeborn citizens, "Brown" was simply not an option.

*****

As we've already suggested, most artists in 16th and 17th century class-conscious colonial America painted what they deemed to be "worthy" subjects - or at least subjects who could afford to pay them. 

In other words, the "white" merchant classes, religious leaders and elites.

So decades and centuries of art mostly portrayed only three groups of people at best - well-to-do "whites", enslaved "Blacks", or "Indians".

For their own futures and safety, the free mixed-ethnic brown underclasses were usually pressing ever westward, or keeping to the hills and hollers, swamps and backwoods...

Needless to say, the brown and impoverished underclasses of the rural hinterland and frontier rarely sat for painters - men who worked mostly in large coastal towns and cities with their more developed economies.

In the post-Revolutionary years (as many American artists began to turn their faces away from "elite" subjects and to the historical men and women who were now deemed worthy of remembrance as “nation builders”), painters from “back east” probably found it hard to conceive that the American frontier was actually settled in large part by "brown people".

Yet it was.

Photography would only begin to become widespread and more affordable in the mid- to late 1880s, just in time to capture some of the elderly faces of those who first settled the Appalachian region.

Yet we can push the time frame slightly farther back in time by examining early camera lucida drawings.

Historians and genealogists digging through 19th century documents and family records will often stumble across images of people rendered in a curious style.

These portraits are neither freehand drawings, nor are they early photographs.

These pictures were made using an old optical drawing aid called a “camera lucida”, patented in the early 1800s, but clearly a development of the much older “camera obscura” of the 1500s.

This apparatus essentially involved using a lens to project an image of the sitter directly onto a flat surface where paper or canvas was placed, allowing the artist to trace and shade the subject with no need to be constantly looking up.

This of course allowed the artist to produce quite accurate images at greater speed than conventional drawing or painting.

Because the camera lucida was also quite portable, artists were not bound to work by appointment in a workshop or studio.

Itinerant artists were thus able to offer relatively true-to-life portraits for a price well below that of oil or watercolor paintings, in the comfort and privacy of the customer’s home.

Through a combination of camera lucida images, the earliest photographs, court and census documents, and cross-referencing folklore and DNA, we can begin to build a picture of the lost “brown people” who have been mostly written-out of American history.

*****

The paintings shared at the top of this piece and just below were made by a French gentleman in early 1800s Brazil, a man named Debret. 

Debret was an unusual man with an early, almost anthropological fascination with the "non-white" peoples of Brazil.

The one above shows the house of Portuguese Cigano "Gypsy" slave traders in Rio de Janeiro.  The other here below shows what are probably "Genizaro" or mixed-ethnic slave traders marching Guarani captives to market.

What does this have to do with Anglo-American history?

SIMILAR SCENES WERE OCCURRING FROM MAINE TO SOUTH CAROLINA TO LOUISIANA TO TEXAS TO CALIFORNIA, even if we are not lucky enough to have had a painter like Debret working in such places.

Catholic Spanish and Portuguese America saw people of mixed ethnicity as existing on a spectrum of "casto".

Protestant Anglo-America, perhaps due to its literalist and more simplistic Manichean view of things, tried desperately to reduce much of the world into binaries.

Good/evil.

Black/white.

Artificial binaries were good for defining real humans versus "property".

Free versus unfree.

But, humans being human, they often refuse to slot into ridiculous and arbitrary categories.

American "folk heroes" like Jim Bowie were trading with mixed-ethnic pirates for slaves among the mixed-ethnic communities of the Gulf Coast long before Texan "independence" from Mexico.

"Gulf of America”, indeed... 

Jewish slave merchants operated out of Maryland, Rhode Island, and Charleston, with households often comprised of "free people of color".

Many Indigenous American tribes had become drawn deeply into this sordid trade, and many people of African origin became absorbed into tribal communities like the Seminole, Cherokee, and Choctaw.

Métis communities and mixed-ethnic "prairie bandits" lived for decades on the lands which would only later become the Louisiana Purchase. 

And all of these people (who were often brown to begin with) "co-mingled" endlessly, thus creating an even larger brown American underclass - an unsung and largely forgotten part of American history - some of whom would spend decades, centuries, attempting to cross the color bar into "whiteness".

Knowledge is a funny thing.

Knowledge rips down curtains and opens up broad, hitherto unimagined vistas.

In American pop culture, this idea was advanced in films like “The Matrix”, where choosing to take “the red pill” was used as a metaphor for gaining sudden access to everything which is real and true, instead of existing inside the comforting haze of illusion induced by taking “the blue pill”.

Almost all metaphors or analogies are flawed or simplistic by their very nature.

There is no real life version of being “red-pilled” just once.

Epiphanies arrive daily or weekly or yearly or just once in a lifetime, in all sizes.

They can be the quiet “aha” moments when we discover a new way of understanding, or they can be life-altering earthquakes which bring the safe walls of our entire existence crashing down.

Put another way, being “red-pilled” is just what should come from being intensely curious about the world and its endless, wondrous inner workings.

Being “red-pilled” should be the natural result of maintaining a childlike openness to seeing things in new and different ways.

But in our ultra post-modern world of “alternative facts” and AI, where truth is relative, reactionaries and far right conservatives have once again inverted the meaning of a term, in order to force it into their own rigid worldview.

Lots of people nowadays use this concept of being “red-pilled” in a completely different (and dishonest) way, such as when conspiracy theorists talk about the “knowledge” which only they, and a few select others, possess.

They claim to have been “red-pilled”, implying that their eyes have been opened to new facts (or a hidden reality), when they have in fact learned nothing new at all.

They are merely taking their previously-held beliefs, gut feelings (and perhaps some newly-formed suspicions) and elevated this smorgasbord of “stuff they heard” into a category THEY call “the truth”.

This elevation of unsubstantiated suspicion into a political worldview is not confined to conservatives.

It is not that long ago that millions of people from both ends of the political spectrum were united in seeing a dark and vast conspiracy behind the Covid pandemic and various attempts to manage or contain it.

*****

This is of course all about a desire for a sense of empowerment in a complex, unjust, and confusing world in which the underclass majority feel oftentimes powerless.

To believe we have rare and privileged access to the machinery whirring behind the curtain is a sort of spiritual or emotional compensation for not having access to the levers of actual power.

Access to those levers usually requires access to accurate information, which in turn requires “connections” and higher education.

Then we need luck. Probably a certain level of ruthlessness. Money.

Those of us lacking all or most of these things are the underclasses, the modern equivalent of the medieval peasantry, whether we like it or not.

There is no “blue pill” or “red pill” state of existence.

There is only a spectrum between “high information levels” and “low information levels”.

There is only a spectrum between education and indoctrination.

There is only a spectrum between curiosity and indifference.

People who are on the wrong end of any such spectrum might drive down a highway through a pine forest.

Some might recognize the place where their uncle drives a truck for a logging company.

They might notice a roadside picnic table or the scent of the “nice woods”.

A person on the other end of the spectrum - one who is intensely curious - also notices those things, but might also have learned the names of many kinds of tree.

Even those trees with no immediate value to a logging company or paper mill.

A person on the other end of the spectrum - one who is intensely curious - will probably know the difference between virgin or old growth forest and a commercial monoculture forest devoid of wildlife and carpet-bombed with urea fertilizer pellets.

All of this means that a 15 minute drive down the road through a wooded area is a completely different experience for different people, depending on their place on the information spectrum.

The information spectrum also has a large hand in how we perceive religion, money, patriotism, sexuality, entertainment, food, childrens’ behavior - even the very concepts of good and evil.

Like I said, knowledge is a funny thing.

In a world moulded by neo-liberal economics, many of us now occupy a physical space - a nation, a world - alongside people inhabiting an entirely different mental universe.

In a way probably never seen in human history.

This is not “community”, and that is worrisome.

Worrisome for the people with power, and worrisome for the people without power.

*****

Depending on what kind of power we are lacking, many people reach for other forms of security, other ways of achieving a sense of self-worth and personal agency.

Like joining a gang.

Gangs come in many forms, good, bad, and well, silly.

Churches and religious sects. Lodges and freemasonry. Trade unions. Charity and volunteer work. Political parties. Criminal gangs. Like-minded conspiracy theorists. Bowling teams. White supremacist groups. Witches’ covens.

Notice how religion and witchcraft are bookends to this list of gangs.

That’s because the current acting Secretary of the Navy, a man with the power of life and death over thousands of Americans and Iranians, recently expressed his conviction that entire sections of California have been taken-over and beset by “witches”, and that these witches are a threat to the Christian way of life in America.

By “witches”, Hung Cao (who is of Vietnamese descent) was referring to what many people call “neo-pagans”, and sometimes, “Wiccans”.

By “Christianity”, Mr. Cao was referring to evangelical, or “dispensationalist” Christianity.

It doesn’t matter right now whether you believe in one or the other - New Agerism or Evangelicalism.

What matters is that they are both a certain type of gang, cut from similar cloth.

Both believe in the existence of supernatural forces. Both believe that humans can influence these supernatural forces through human action - prayer or spell-casting, for example.

What also matters, is that both evangelical Christianity and neo-pagan witchcraft like to believe that they are the inheritors of ancient beliefs, passed down through millennia of immutable tradition.

In fact, like so many “American” cultural movements, both evangelical Christianity and neo-pagan witchcraft find their roots in post-industrial 19th century British society.

*****

We could easily write 50,000 words or more about the roots of evangelicalism, going back to at least the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, and the English Civil War of the 1600s.

We could spend hours outlining the explosion in varieties of Christianity during those years - Hussites, Moravians, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Separatists, Puritans, Quakers, Methodists - but we won’t.

The simple fact is that most modern American “evangelicals” today - the ones who place emphasis on being “saved” or “born again”, the ones awaiting “The Rapture” - originate from mainly two sources:

1) from “Revivalist” meetings, camps and churches which sprang up during the 1800s and early 1900s as a perceived antidote to increasing secularism or “ungodliness”, with preachers as shamanic-entertainers (see groups like the Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists, for example).

2) from 19th century British “splitters” from the established churches who began to offer a new interpretation of The Bible - instead of the old belief in a timeless “covenant” between God and His followers, people began to speak in terms of “dispensations”, or periods of time in which God would fulfil certain prophesies leading up to the “end times” and “final judgement”.

Almost every trope found in popular American culture associated with evangelical Protestantism - “The Mark of the Beast”, “The Number of the Beast”, “666”, “The Rapture” - comes from one single British person’s 19th century interpretation of the final book of the Christian Bible.

John Nelson Darby, you have a lot to answer for...

Darby’s personal interpretation of the final book of the Christian Bible - a non-historical, non-didactic array of visions, prophesies, symbols, and weird allegories - fed directly into various American pentecostalist movements.

“The Revelation of John”, and its place in the Christian canon, is highly contentious, and its value as “scripture” has been disputed for centuries by Catholics and Protestants alike.

No one knows who actually wrote it, and its preoccupation with lurid visions of violence, apocalypse, and chiliasm (millennialism) made early gatherers of Christian writings (the first Christians!) suspect that “John of Patmos”, if not actually mentally disturbed, was borrowing heavily from older Persian and Babylonian religious ideas.

This new-fangled form of Christianity became a craze. And with USA society based firmly within a tradition of “doing business”, any craze is fertile soil for the harvest of dollars.

It is almost certainly no coincidence that the biggest bursting-forth of Pentecostalist-style evangelicalism in America coincided with the birth of paperback publishing, radio, film, and later, TV.

Metaphorically speaking, these dispensationalists were able to turn an artful, sober, and steadily paced novel - The Bible - into a Hollywood action movie.

Those of us of a certain age, raised within the American underclass evangelical belief system, will remember decades like the 1970s.

The best-selling non-fiction lists published in places like The New York Times included titles like “The Joy of Sex” or “Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution”. What they didn’t include was the predominantly mail order-based book sales aimed at evangelical Christians. One of the biggest selling books of the 1970s was “The Late Great Planet Earth” by Hal Lindsey, a low-brow, decidedly non-academic romp through various end times interpretations of the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and The Revelation.

This nonsense would be harmless except for the fact that such “folk religion” or “pop religion” laid much of the foundation for modern Christian Zionism, with dangerous apocalyptic fools like Mike Huckabee - the current US ambassador to Israel - airily inviting Israel to complete its genocidal expansionism.

Those doomsday prophesies won’t fulfil themselves, after all...

Remembering 1976 in particular, non-evangelicals might recall popular films like “Rocky” or “All the President’s Men”, while those of us held in thrall to “the cult” ensured that “The Omen” and “In Search of Noah’s Ark” were also in that year’s top ten movies.

It is doubtful in the extreme whether the current Secretary of the Navy (an unexploded ordnance disposal specialist) understands how an ex-Anglican clergyman living in colonized Ireland completely altered American Christianity during the 1800s.

Mr. Cao and his wife home-schooled their children and attend an evangelical mega-church in Leesburg, VA.

Their church is affiliated with the Calvary Chapel Association, an international group which “holds to evangelical doctrine with charismatic practices like tongues and prophecy while maintaining a strong pre-tribulationist, pre-millennialist eschatology”.

In other words, the man occupying one of the most important posts in the US military believes in supernatural miracles and sees himself as part of God’s plan for the end times.

Not a comforting thought.

Maybe he is an expert in neo-pagan witchcraft, though?

*****

Most of us have a pretty categorized view of “witches”.

There is of course the witch as icon, the witch of costumery.

Black hats and black cats, warts on noses, double, double, toil and trouble witches.

These are the stylized descendants of medieval and early modern witches, and in popular culture they are seen as a solidly European phenomenon.

The victims of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 Massachusetts inhabit a liminal zone between Europe and America, being mostly the children and grandchildren of people from Civil War-era (Cromwellian and Puritan) England.

Oddly, the witch as icon, the witch of costumery, preserves a whisper of truth within it.

Women on the edge of a community - the aged (the hag), the widowed, the less devout, impoverished beggars, the outspoken, the sharp-tongued, the mixed-ethnic, the one-time “working girls” - these were the women often accused of witchcraft and devilment in highly superstitious and insular communities.

Whether we look to medieval Germany and Iceland during the 1500s and 1600s, or Scotland, England and colonial America slightly later, we also see accusations of witchcraft being used as a way to force conformity - especially religious conformity.

Practitioners of pre-Christian or non-Christian folk magic or healing were often characterized by Christians and the Christian clergy as being in league with The Devil of European Christianity.

This “Satan” of Christian teaching is a being oddly difficult to ascertain from Hebrew scriptures (being more often characterized as one of God’s henchmen, sent to periodically test Yahweh’s children).

Judaeo-Christian theology is a complicated mess, with faith and historicity, scripture and archeology, and endless internal contradictions almost never being reconcilable.

That is another story, though. Back to our witches.

The framework of belief for most modern “witches” can be found in Victorian and Edwardian era England, just like dispensationalist theology.

A girl named Margaret Murray was born into a well-to-do household full of Indian servants in British colonial India in 1863, to a businessman father and a missionary mother.

Murray would eventually become a well-travelled and highly-educated Egyptologist, archeologist, folklorist, and first-wave feminist.

It is Murray who first tried to connect the early modern witch trials of Europe to the Christian Church’s putative attempt to stamp out relict practitioners of a pre-Christian religious “Horned God” cult.

She wrote “The Witch Cult in Western Europe” in 1921, and wrote the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s “witchcraft” entry in 1929.

This encyclopedia article would remain in place until 1969 - long enough to influence generations of people’s thinking on the subject of witchcraft.

And while Murray’s work in Egyptology and archeology remain respected, her work in folklore and witchcraft in particular has been almost wholly discredited by better and more extensive research.

But the damage was already done, by Murray and later English occultists like Gerald Gardner, the latter an amateur anthropologist and “Wiccan”.

Uncountable self-styled “witches” today are firmly convinced that “the craft” is a continuation of an ancient legacy, and often view it solely through a feminist lens, believing that witch trials were a systematic attempt to break matriarchal power and pre-Christian female-centered belief systems.

Many neo-pagan witches will also state baldly that most accused witches in history were herbalists and midwives, and that a misogynistic patriarchy sought to supplant women in these positions with male doctors.

This universalist view completely ignores the fact that throughout much of Europe, anywhere between 13% and 27% of people accused of witchcraft were male.

In some places like Normandy, Burgundy, Finland, Estonia, parts of Baltic Germany, Russia, or Iceland, men were the gender more commonly accused of witchcraft.

In other words, while patriarchy and misogyny almost certainly played a role in some accusations made against many female “witches”, this is only part of a far more complex story.

Many Americans might be surprised to learn that in between the witch crazes of Shakespeare’s time and the rise of neo-paganism and Wicca, a belief in witches was being kept firmly alive in places like Southern Appalachia.

And just as the “Old Time Religion” of mountain people was situated between 16th century Calvinism and 19th century evangelicalism, mountain witches occupied a space between the European witch crazes and the “witches” said by the Secretary of the Navy to currently be infesting Monterey, California.

*****

18th and 19th century Appalachia saw no shortage of misogyny or patriarchal beliefs, but those considered to be “witches” were found among both genders.

My own 300,000 person database includes many mountain folks who were accused of being, or widely considered to be witches (not an exhaustive list):

William Stout of Overton County, TN (1898-1865)

Parthenia Hammock of Putnam County, TN (1834-1899)

John Fox of Owsley County, KY (1790- )

Elizabeth Clay of Harlan County, KY (1810- )

William “Devil Bill” Boggs of Russell County, VA (1823-1854)

Polly Brewington of Putnam County, TN (1830-1882)

Betts Mollett of Johnson County, KY (1810-1870)

Leah Smock of Meade County, KY (1818-1840)

Phoebe Lingerfelt of NC and Sullivan County, TN (1887-1943)

The last person on the list above seems to have favored wandering about the mountains in the form of a turkey, while poor Leah Smock was burned to death (according to local lore).

We even find backwoods counterparts to the “Witchfinder Generals” like Matthew Hopkins of 1600s England, with mountain men like Elkana “Caney” Robey of Lewis County, WV (1775-1851) being regarded locally as competent witchfinders.

Here is a mountain man in conversation with a travelling Methodist minister named John Dickey, speaking of local witches in 1898:

“Old Aunt Dinah, a slave of the same Wm Turner, 104 years old was another (witch). (Turner was about 100 at that time). Salim Sturgeon, a white woman lived as the concubine or wife of Negro George, a slave of the same Wm Turner, she was the third (witch). It began by cattle dying and hair balls being found in them, hide whole but the internal part shot to pieces, horses died, hogs died, cows, etc. Log heaps were made and all these were burned as a torture to the witches. The hair balls were carried in peoples’ pockets to show what had happened. The people who feared the witches kept their pockets turned wrong side outwards, at night for safety...”

Note how much of the “witchery” above is associated with people living on the margins of “respectable” society - enslaved women, or white women who had taken Black men as partners.

But unlike Puritan-era England or Scotland under James VI, being called a “witch” in Southern Appalachia did not automatically condemn a person.

Away from the authoritarian eye of state churches and clergymen paid by state-sanctioned tithes and taxation, Appalachian witches seem to have been judged by their work and intentions alone.

In fact, “Granny Witch” and “Granny Doctor” seem to have been almost interchangeable terms among mountain folk, with women of American Indian background or mixed-ethnic ancestry being held in particularly high regard for their medical skills and knowledge.

And far from being a situation where “the patriarchy” was seeking to supplant or stamp out the existence of herbalist doctors and midwives, “Granny Witches” (and their male counterparts) seem to have been, for the most part, regarded with a combination of caution and respect.

“Granny Collins”, a Melungeon woman born “Louisa Bolling” in Floyd County, KY in 1869 (and related to the Locke family of Gypsy ancestry), was said to have worn large golden bangles in her ears, and was a typical example of the blurred line between “granny doctor” and “granny witch”.

While outsiders like to mock “hillbillies” and Southern Appalachia as place of inbreeding, the mountain population included people with ancestors from at least 5 continents, and it would be almost impossible to trace every aspect of mountain culture back to an original source.

It is probably best to see Appalachian culture, including its folk beliefs and religion, as what anthropologists like to call “syncretic”.

A good example might be the once widespread use of “witch balls”.

Once well-known in parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and the mountain parts of Virginia and North Carolina, “witch balls” or “witch bullets” were balls of hair (usually animal) rolled into a small hard ball and held together with tallow or beeswax.

It is possible that “witch balls” were an evolution of the antiquated practice of using “bezoars” in folk medicine (a word from ancient Persia describing the round and polished hairballs found inside certain animals).

Witch balls in Appalachia were used in a way similar to what might be considered “Voodoo” in the popular imagination.

A “witch” would draw an image of the person or thing they hoped to cause harm, and the witch ball would be thrown or flicked at the image.

It was believed that pain or damage would be caused to the part of the victim which had been struck by such a ball.

Unlike modern American evangelicalism or neo-pagan witchcraft, we will likely never know the true and complete story behind every aspect of mountain religion or mountain “witchcraft”. Its origins are simply too diverse and complex.

Which is really kind of cool, don’t you think?

But in place of knowledge, information, and education, we have a Secretary of the Navy offering his half-baked theology as a counterweight to another half-baked pseudo-religion.

Before long, this Substack will have managed to alienate 90% of its potential readers…

Damn.

But just for the record, given a choice between living among dispensationalist, Pentecostalist, evangelical Christians and the neo-pagan witches of Monterey, I will always opt for the people motivated by tolerance, kindness, forgiveness, generosity, and a love of nature.

Light a black candle, and throw another leg of newt in the pot for me...

[Images: “Moonlight Dance” by Emma Childs; John Nelson Darby; Margaret Murray; Gerald Gardner; modern witch balls; a selection of bezoars]

Attempting to understand and decipher history - real history - is hard.

We read, we question, we read some more, we check our sources for ideological bias, we read someone else’s revision of canonical sources, we sniff around for hidden motivations and contingencies...

And when we think we’ve got to the deepest level of interpretation, there is always another angle to consider.

Consider the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890.

For those unfamiliar with this piece of American history, the bare bones of what happened is this:

The US government had signed treaties with the Lakota, primarily to protect colonizers passing through Lakota territory on the Oregon Trail to the American Northwest. 

The government of the US of America undertook to enforce a restriction on US citizens settling on Lakota territory.

The government of the US of America did not honor its undertakings as per treaty.

The discovery of gold in the Dakotas led to a mass influx of ruffians, squatters, and miners.

The introduction of forts and railroads on and over treaty-protected Lakota territory led to further conflict.

As part of its policy of ethnic-cleansing, the US encouraged and facilitated the shooting to near extinction of the Great Plains bison, which were the main source of sustenance for Indigenous peoples of the Plains.

[Hill of bison skulls gathered in Rougeville, Michigan]

As part of its policy of ethnic-cleansing, the US allowed the mass settlement of Scandinavian immigrants in the Dakotas.

Under-employed veterans from the Civil War and newly enlisted men were sent west to put down Lakota resistance.

These early military expeditions against the Lakota and their Dakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho allies were failures, with half of the 7th Cavalry Regiment under George Armstrong Custer being wiped-out near the Little Bighorn River in the summer of 1876.

But “Custer’s Last Stand” is probably the worst name for any historical event in US history. 

It really should be called “The Lakota’s Last Stand”, for their battlefield victory at the Battle of the Greasy Grass would precipitate the US throwing its full weight behind neutralizing the Lakota - the last entirely self-governing group of Indigenous people in the lands now called the USA.

The Wounded Knee Massacre came during the US Army’s Pine Ridge Campaign in the deep winter of 1890, at the tail end of various “mopping-up” operations by the US military, as remnant bands of Lakota were being rounded-up and forced onto small reservations.

Long story short, while force-marching a band of Lakota to a reservation, a roughneck bunch of green army recruits attempted to collect all firearms from the people being force-marched.

What happened next - the death of scores of Lakota people including women and children - is a perfect example of history which has been told from multiple angles...

1) Murica hoo-hah! version

Decent army boys (thank you for your service) just doing their job, and those darn “Injuns” went crazy, and we had to shoot the shit out of them in self defence.

2) Post-Vietnam-Era hippy version

Gentle nature-worshipping people meaning no harm are brutally slain by colonialist oppressors.

3) Historian No. 1 version

Americans already inured to violence by the Civil War, along with recent immigrant recruits eager to “prove their worth” as new US citizens, are only too happy and eager to fight wars against people they see as “savages”.

4) Historian No. 2 version

This mass shooting was a tragic and unfortunate escalation, in which army recruits (already on edge due to their misunderstanding of the meaning of the “Ghost Dance” religious movement), saw menace and danger in every aspect of Lakota behavior.

[Mass grave of Wounded Knee dead, 1891]

There is something wrong with every one of these versions.

There shouldn’t be - after all, it’s not like it’s ancient history.

Five of my own great-grandparents were alive at the time, with two of them still alive in the 1980s.

But a country which has done terrible things becomes exceptionally good at obfuscating and burying the truth of its crimes.

And only by digging, digging, digging can we hope to get a proper picture of such terrible events.

American “hoo-hah!” apologists for Manifest Destiny will point out that the Lakota were themselves a warlike people.  After all, the original homeland of the Lakota was around the Great Lakes, and they were only in Dakota Territory recently, having taken those hunting grounds from the Crow people through warfare.

What these apologists fail to mention is the much larger domino effect caused by settler colonialism, with entire tribes and communities being forced westward by settler violence, where they end up in conflict with other tribes attempting to stand their ground. This inter-Indian conflict is then encouraged and used by the settler-colonialists to further “divide and conquer”.

The hippy or “New Ager” version also ignores the political and military agency of the Lakota, seeing them in simplistic terms as little more than passive and peace-loving victims in a European-style morality play.

The so-called “proper” historical versions written by non-American Indian academics have their own specific angles of interpretation.

Almost every one of these “serious” versions of history seeks to blame, excuse, demonize, explain away or justify greed, brutality, and bloodshed.

Trying to apportion blame or explain the massacre at Wounded Knee based only on the few minutes, days, weeks, or even months leading-up to it allows us to judge violence in isolation.

It allows us to simplify a much longer, much uglier story into a stand-alone episode, in which “tragic mistakes were made” - mistakes which, on their own, might be forgiven.

This will happen again one day, when American writers, commentators, and historians will have to grapple with the fact that the USA elected a man - twice - who started a war on 28 Feb 2026 without the imprimatur of Congress.

Not that a Congress bought and paid for by corporations and the Israel Lobby would have voted to stop him...

On the first day of this unprovoked and illegal war, US forces “triple-tapped” a school full of little children.

[Bloodstained belongings of schoolchildren in Minab, 28 Feb 2026]

Americans will one day try to apportion blame or explain this mass murder, once again, in terms of “mistakes made”, while ignoring the 400 year old, 600 pound gorilla in the room.

That gorilla’s name is “US Empire”.

*****

Few humans are utterly evil.

Even fewer are saints. 

None of us beyond childhood are innocent.

But whoever we choose to see as our enemy, there is a crystal moment of clarity when we can also choose to do wrong, or try to do what is right.

There is no historical interpretation which will ever make it right, that men turned machine guns on women and children crouching for cover, terrified, in a deep ravine in mid-winter South Dakota.

It is no coincidence that the self-styled “Secretary of War”, Pete Hegseth, the butcher of Minab, has recently insisted that the 19 US soldiers who were ridiculously awarded “Medals of Honor” explicitly for their part in the Wounded Knee atrocity will not be stripped of their medals posthumously, as had long been demanded by native American groups.

Truth and justice are preoccupations of “the woke”, apparently.

And to those who insist that Wounded Knee was a tragic mistake?

On the image shared at the top of this piece, you’ll find a snatch of doggerel poetry.

People ashamed of a “tragic mistake” do not proudly pose for photos, and write such things.

The people killed in our name - in South Dakota, The Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine, Iran - will never be able to utter another word.

It is us who are left to shrug, and gripe about the price of gasoline or the new Michael Jackson biopic (the latter also an exercise in historical airbrushing, BTW).

It is us who are left free to pick a version of history which won’t trouble us when we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday this July.