Where else is an American beyond daily police control? Where else is an American outside the 24 hour surveillance of omniscient databanks and ubiquitous cameras? Where else is an American generally free to do whatever he pleases? Where else can an American achieve physical self-sufficiency in food, shelter, and energy, and thus slough off the inherent bondage of the modern interdependent society? Where else can an American easily avoid the mindless pablum of television? Where else can an American raise his family as he sees fit, thus transmitting generational software (i.e., values, morals, work ethic, etc.) in spite of government and media programming efforts?
There's nothing like the opportunity for children when they're being raised, learning to be around cattle and do chores, to be around wood and land and iron at a young age, learning to work. That's probably the biggest reason that we stay in the ranching business.
That's why I want my grandkids around. ...It's pretty hard for a government agent to pull the wool over someone's eyes that's ever had to deal with fire and rain and wind and snow and all the other elements. My kids started working right at my side fighting fires, moving cattle at 11 or 12 years old....
You don't just feed cows or chickens; you have to feed 'em right or they don't produce, and that's a discipline that's learned, that's what they learn very young. Not like a bunch of bureaucrats who live in an imaginary, abstract world. We have to live in the real world. If we don't adhere to and work with nature, we get cold pretty danged fast. Someone who works for the government because they've got a degree might get away with ignoring the truth, but anyone in the ranching business, we haven't been here for four generations because we ignored the truth and didn't work with nature.
— from The Ballad of Carl Drega (2002), p. 169
The rural American, especially those on their own family farm and ranch, is the USG's final, and most threatening, enemy. The city folk have long since been co-opted, and even the libertarian holdouts are implicitly at government's mercy due to the fragility of urban life. Cut off electricity, food, or water for any extended period and Ayn Rand herself would have quickly caved from her 6th floor 34th Street Manhattan apartment.
The country folk, however, have yet to be conquered. They are the most threatening. What other Americans can thumb their nose at government and urban socialism and say, "No thanks! We don't need you!" Those outside of the tax/welfare circuitry are enemies to socialism because they have no vested interest in the redistribution/regulatory scheme. An urban "black marketeer" is bad enough in the eyes of government, but those engaged in the rural underground (i.e., free) economy are many times more of a threat because of their lifestyle's self-sufficiency and privacy.
Since it is not cost-effective to monitor rural Americans individually, and since it cannot be done collectively, the solution is to urbanize them. From farm to public housing, from ranch to brick tenement, the USG must herd these mustangs off their land and into the city corrals where all broken horses belong. Obviously, they will not go willingly or quietly. So, the USG must "yank the rug out from under them." The "rug" is the land itself. This actually began during the early 1960s:
In 1962, the Committee for Economic Development comprised approximately seventy-five of the nation's most powerful corporate executives. They represented not only the food industry but also oil and gas, insurance, investment and retail industries. Almost all groups that stood to gain from [farm] consolidation were represented on that committee. Their report ("An Adaptive Program for Agriculture") outlined a plan to eliminate farmers and farms. It was detailed and well thought out.
...[A]s early as 1964, congressmen were being told by industry giants like Pillsbury, Swift, General Foods, and Campbell Soup that the biggest problem in agriculture was too many farmers.
— Joel Dyer, Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma Is Only the Beginning
Noting that farm children who went off to college rarely returned to the family farm, programs were instituted to send farm kids to college. As expected, they did not return. After a generation, a handful of agro-conglomerates had generally driven America's small farmers off their land by paying them less for their produce than the cost of growing it, thus throwing farmers into the welcoming clutches of bankers. Once mortgages had been assumed, foreclosures were only a matter of time given the artificial boom/bust cycles of the Federal Reserve. The Department of Agriculture helpfully supplied its Form A0109 farmland census data to the corporate raiders.
In 2019 you can count on one hand the number of multinational companies who control the world's grain supply. Three companies control over 80% of America's beef-packing market. Less than ten corporations control nearly all of our packaged food. The desired consolidation of America's farms into "agribusiness" had been achieved. It's been done only once before in history: during Stalin's reign with the 1930s "dekulakization" of independent small farmers and agricultural collectivization.
Farmers have gone from a majority to a minority to a curiosity. Since 1991, their leading cause of violent death is no longer accidents, but suicide.
By the 1980s, however, a mini-revolution in food and farming was flourishing: organic fruits, vegetables, and meats. In the nation's latest population migration, people were forsaking the madness of the cities and seeking small acreages of paradise in the country — especially in the West. By the late 1990s, the land rights movement (comprised of ranchers, farmers, and other rural folk) had become a major thorn in the globalists' hide.
What we're seeing in 2019 is a multi-pronged attack using the Endangered Species Act, the UN's "Rewilding" and "Biosphere Reserves" and "World Heritage" and "anti-desertification" programs, etc. You'll notice that the federal land grab under environmental pretense is a western phenomenon, perpetrated by Eastern Socialists. These are people who shriek at our mining, logging, hunting, fishing, and cattle grazing, yet who have long ago covered their own states with asphalt and concrete. What hypocrisy!
One possible legal defense
We must challenge the jurisdiction of these land regulations. The two relevant clauses in the Constitution are:
To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever,...over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;...
— Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution
The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States [government];...
— Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2 of the Constitution
Fully one-third of America's land mass is being policed by the feds as if such were "the territory or other property belonging to the United States" government under Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2 of the Constitution. We're talking 28% of Montana, 49% of Wyoming, 50% of California, 63% of Idaho, 68% of Utah, and 87% of Nevada!
However, for the USG to regulate the use or disposal of property, the USG must be the owner of that property. It does not own the West.
IV:3:2 of the Constitution refers to "territory," which is what the West was before statehood. Formerly owned by Great Britain, the "Western territory" was ceded to the Union after the Revolutionary War and was under the jurisdiction of the USG until western statehood. (See The Federalist #7 and #43.) Also under US jurisdiction after the War was the "district of Vermont" which was recognized as an independent republic (as were Texas and Hawaii) until becoming the 14th state in 1791.
The "Western territory" was carved up into singular territories in the 1860's. Idaho was a "territory" from 1863 until 1890. Montana was a "territory" from 1864 until 1889. Wyoming was a "territory" from 1868 until 1890. Arizona was a "territory" until 1912. When a "territory" becomes a state, it is no longer under the federal jurisdiction of IV:3:2. Once the western territories became states, all that land previously controlled by the feds should have legally gone to the states. The fact that the USG d
oes not abide by this was the basis for several lawsuits by both individuals and states (e.g., U.S. v. Haught in federal district court in Phoenix). The original 13 colonies got to keep their land when they became states, and under the "equal footing" doctrine so should the rest of the states.
If a state, by consent of its legislature, wishes to sell some of its land to the USG, it may — and that federal property is then under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress under I:8:17 of the Constitution. But unless and until a state sells land to the USG, it still belongs to the state.
So, there are only two ways the feds may lawfully exercise criminal jurisdiction over USA property: 1) If it is part of a US territory or protectorate (before becoming a state), or 2) if it is property sold by a state to the USG. Look at IV:3:2 this way: chronologically in between "territory" and "property" is one of the 50 states. Forcing the USG to recognize this without resorting to arms is the present and future dilemma of the American West.
The people of the West are being pushed to the limit. The surprise is not that they are finally talking about taking up arms to defend their way of life...but that they have waited so long.
— Vin Suprynowicz, The Ballad of Carl Drega (2002), p. 138
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he cares more about than his own personal safety; is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
— John Stuart Mill
Casper, Wyoming
Fall 2019
"Grampa Bill, I heard on TV that our refusal to turn in our battle rifles is Whiskey Rebellion 2 — that our actions deserve federal intervention."
...It is remarkable how little changed in the nature of conflict and the parameters of political discourse during three decades of Revolutionary upheaval (i.e., between 1765 and 1795). There is little of substance to distinguish the rhetoric, perspectives, ideology, or methods of Tories and British bureaucrats in the earlier period from those of the friends of [federal government] order thirty years later. There is an ideological identity between many of the suspicions, fears, diagnoses, and prescriptions for the cure of political ill-health in the writings of Thomas Hutchinson, James Otis, George Grenville, and Lord North in the years preceding the Revolution, and those of George Washington, Hamilton, Fisher Ames, and other Federalists after the war.
— Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (1986)
In 1790, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton urged a federal excise tax on the domestic production of spirits. The grain farmers in western Pennsylvania, a rough and independent lot, didn't much care for this. It hurt their livelihood, and the feds had been little help in stopping the Indian raids. Being on the frontier of the new nation and far from reach of the young federal government, the whiskey-making farmers not only refused to pay the excise tax, they began to assault federal tax collectors who unwisely strayed too far from Philadelphia (the US capital at the time). Then, they coerced federal judges not to preside over excise tax cases. By August 1794, unrest had spread to twenty counties in four states.
Increasingly concerned, Washington and Hamilton decided that it was time for action. They formed a 12,950 man army, marched into western Pennsylvania and quelled the rebellion (although the leaders escaped into the mountains). Their supply line stretched to breaking, Hamilton authorized the impressment of civilian property. Crops and livestock were stolen, and fences were torn down for firewood.
1,500 soldiers under General Daniel Morgan (the famed guerrilla leader who so brilliantly harassed the British during the Revolutionary War) were left behind in Pittsburgh to maintain order until the spring of 1795. They frequently looted and destroyed private property, and roughed up civilians. Through this terror the federal government amply demonstrated its authority and quelled the tax revolt.
Bill Russell, now eighty-one years old, says, "Similar events, but different."
"How so?" asks the sixteen year-old.
"The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 was basically a regional tax revolt. Our situation involves much, much more than that. The federal government is making noises of a military invasion to conquer a peaceful state which refuses to self-disarm in obedience to the Stanley ruling and the resulting Dangerous Weapons Act of 2007 and Safe Streets and Neighborhoods Act. In order to disarm us of the most effective hand weapon ever created — the self-loading battle rifle — Washington, D.C. blithely proposes genocide under the guise of Civil War 2."
"But they promise not to confiscate handguns and hunting long guns. All we have to do is give up our AR15s, AKs, M1s, M14s, and FALs."
Russell chuckles. "Yeah, while they keep theirs, and more. It's like promising to leave an animal alone after he's been declawed. Oh, but he's allowed to keep his teeth? It's his very claws which keep him safe from predators. To assent to his declawing is suicide. Animals know this and won't permit it. You're forgetting that we've already given up our BARs, M2s, and M16s because of the National Firearms Act of 1934. Only time will tell if Wyomingites and Westerners have the survival sense of the average critter."
"What should we do?"
"Our choice is simple: Should we fight with our battle rifles, or without them? Do we have a better chance of freedom with them, or without them? Let me put it this way: my elk rifle doesn't protect my elk rifle; my FAL protects my elk rifle. Firearms are tools — specific tools for specific tasks. Can liberty be protected solely by hunting weapons? That would be like building a house with a Leatherman multitool — theoretically possible, but very arduous, and therefore never attempted."
"But doesn't our keeping battle rifles invite federal response?"
"No, not at all. There's a faulty hidden premise there."
"Which is what, Grampa?"
"That if self-loading, magazine-fed rifles had not been invented, we would be safe from unilateral disarmament."
"I don't understand."
"Okay. Imagine it's 1919 instead of 2019, and only bolt-action rifles exist. They were the battle rifles of their day. What tyrannical government of 1919 allowed their civilian possession? None. First, they registered and confiscated the Mauser M98 and Lee-Enfield, and then they worked their way through the hunting rifles and shotguns. We're seeing the same progression today, only the feds had to start much later because until 1934 we enjoyed unrestricted ownership of cannons, mortars, and machine guns — and all, somehow, without a crime wave.
"No, the government cannot allow its subjects to be as well armed as their enforcers. That's straight out of Tyranny 101. As Chairman Mao used to say, 'All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.' An armed citizenry means a balance of political power vis-a-vis the federal government. That was the entire point of the 2nd Amendment, which was fully explained in The Federalist. The whole purpose of our disarmament is the creation of an unchallengeable police state.
"So, no, my FAL is not a red cape to the federal bull. Any gun is. Congress is harping on military-pattern rifles only because they're the most effective remaining firearms at keeping tyranny in check, so it's logical strategy to confiscate them before hunting rifles."
Grandson grins. "So we're not gonna disarm, right?"
Russell lovingly places a weathered hand on the young man's shoulder. "I wouldn't bet on it, Son. I wouldn't bet on it."
"Good! They'd come after your FAL that Mr. Krassny used to own."
"That'd be some trophy, wouldn't it? After all the trouble he stirred up for them!" Russell says. "Hey, have I shown it to you lately? I just had some new optics mounted. Can't use the iron sights anymore with my old eyes."
"Awesome! Can we go out back and shoot it?"
"Sure thing, Son. You know what you have to do, right?"
Grandson intones, "Load mags, pick up brass, and clean the rifle after."
Russell smiles. "Y
ou got it. What a deal, eh? Oh, and I'll bring along something you've never seen."
"What's that?"
"Harold Krassny's war-issue Colt .45."
"No!"
"Indeed. When his P-51 got shot down over Occupied Europe, he killed three Germans with it getting back to Allied lines. He gave it to me just before he died back in 2008. Now, I want you to have them."
"No way!"
Russell laughs. "Yep, you. I'd have given them to your father, but we both know he wouldn't appreciate them. He thinks Harold was a cold-blooded murderer responsible by example for over 200 deaths. Carl never understood what it takes to maintain our liberty, but you do. So, I want you to have the FAL and the Colt, but only if you promise me something."
Grandson is instantly solemn. "Yes, sir, anything."
With great severity Russell says, "These are not just pieces of steel. They're not even just guns. They are sacred relics, son. They were owned by a true American patriot who fought and died for his country. You must promise me right here and now that you will never, under any circumstances, surrender them to some gun confiscation squad. Not out of fear, not out of weakness, not out of despair will you ever give them up and dishonor your grandfather and Mr. Krassny. And when you can no longer bear them because of age or infirmity, you will choose a worthy successor. Promise me."
The young man sniffs and rapidly blinks his tears away. "I promise, Grampa. I'll never give them up. They'd have to kill me first."
It's now Bill Russell's turn to blink away the tears.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Molon Labe! Page 51
