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Founding Fathers

disambig ?

see david barton xian BS

see story 1 slavery as job skill pgm

beware BS hijacking eg TJ madison federalist papers fuckery Inst

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mebbe FF fetish xian BS?

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an 6 24 no lnx

America is under assault by a cancerous mind virus the founders warned against

Thom Hartmann June 05, 2024

Twenty-eight states, nearly all Republican-controlled, are now spending billions of taxpayer dollars to support indoctrinating children in religion through voucher programs that can be used for mostly Christian schools. Five Republican-controlled states are in the process of letting vouchers ghettoize their entire public-school systems.

As The Washington Post noted yesterday:

“Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades.”

Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, flies an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his official congressional office that, since 2013, has been the semi-official logo of a militant arm of charismatic Christianity involved with January 6th. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito flew a similar flag outside his summer home.

READ: Buckle up for Trump's 'October Surprise'

Another man flying that flag is outspoken Catholic evangelist Leonard Leo, who now controls over a billion dollars and helped run the process that selected Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court as well as hundreds of federal bench nominees. As ProPublica pointed out in a story about “the man that remade the American judicial system”:

“Leo is a major supporter of the [Catholic Information Center], and its unabashed projection of political power aligns with the central role of religion in Leo’s political project.”

Proselytizers for evangelical Christianity believe they are on the verge of taking over our country, from our schools to our courts to Congress itself. History warns us — as did the Founders and Framers of the Constitution — that, if successful, this will be deadly to American democracy.

Religious evangelism can be a deadly thought virus. It explicitly posits that, “There is only one right way to live and we know what it is” along with, “There is only one true god and he is the one we worship — and now you must, too.”

From the Crusades of the High Middle Ages, to Hitler anointing as Reichsbischof (Reich’s Bishop) Ludwig Müller and outfitting his entire army with belt-buckles declaringGott Mit Uns (God is with us), to the persecution of women in early New England colonies, evangelical Christianity has distorted the history of western societies and often led to rivers of blood. A similarly destructive dynamic plays out today with evangelical Islam across the Middle East and parts of Southeast Asia.

Judaism, Buddhism, and most forms of Hinduism are not evangelical; only Christianity and Islam have historically called for conversion, sometimes under threat of violence, imprisonment, or even death.

In this regard, one could compare the crusade associated with the Appeal to Heaven flag — which is so far successfully using the force of law to control American women and school curriculum in multiple Republican-controlled states — to the Iranian and Saudi imposition of Sharia law on their own people.

Cancer describes a biological system where one group of cells rises up and seizes control over all the resources of the rest of the cells in a body. When evangelical religions rise up to take control of political systems — the mechanism by which people govern themselves — they act as a political cancer within the society they’re attacking.

Native American tribes learned this lesson early on during their 20,000-year occupation of the Americas, which is why thousands of different tribes and language groups, most practicing their own unique religion, viewed evangelism and coerced conversion as a cultural sin that had to be punished.

From Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics(defining “the original affluent society”) to Peter Farb’s masterpiece Man's Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America From Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial Stateto Graeber and Wengrow’s recent and brilliant The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity we find that virtually no native societies practiced what we would today call evangelism. Including the Iroquois Confederacy, which provided the Founders and Framers with the first template they used to create our Constitution.

Their religions were rooted in tribal identity and their own land, finding the spiritual present in all of nature while focusing on maintaining harmonious relationships, rather than conversion. This worldview was not conducive to aggressive proselytism; it was, in fact, the opposite.

Some, like the Mayans and Incans, demanded that everybody in their realm worship their particular gods — who were the patrons of the ruling dynasties — but they had no interest in converting nearby tribes to their religion unless they first seized control of their land and subjugated their people.

Even the Celts and the pre-Christian Romans, who sequentially conquered most of Europe three and two thousand years ago respectively, largely allowed people to continue to practice their own local religions. None said, “We have the one great truth, and the one great god, and everybody on Earth must know this truth, live by it, and worship our god.”

The ancient Celts, Greeks, and Romans knew that was a logic that would lead to that era’s equivalent of ISIS, the Taliban, or the Crusades and wanted nothing to do with the cultural cancer of evangelism.

As I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy, from time immemorial most pre-modern tribes and peoples of the Earth practiced what Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

But now America finds itself under assault by a new, zealously evangelical movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (among other names) that seeks to use the force of law and the power of billions in untaxable dollars to create a new, two-tiered society in America.

At the top of this new America are the Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Speaker Mike Johnson and his followers in Congress, and an army of televangelists who claim moral superiority by virtue of their religion. They’re backed up by a small army of fundamentalist billionaires and politicians like Donald Trump who are willing to give them power and wealth in exchange for support at the ballot box.

Under them are the rest of us Untermenschen, whose opinions are tolerated so long as we don’t take away their nonprofit tax status (ensuring we must continue subsidizing them), stop their takeover of our schools, or correctly point out that the Founders were horrified at the prospect of America ever becoming a “Christian nation.”

But that is exactly what the majority of this nation’s Founders feared. It’s why they wrote a Constitution that forbids a religious test to hold office and put into the First Amendment “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

It’s why George Washington refused to say publicly whether he was a Christian or not, and authored the Treaty of Tripoli that begins with, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…”

It’s why Ben Franklin fled Massachusetts as a teenager to avoid mandatory church attendance and wrote, “I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”

It’s why James Madison, one of the few actual Christians among that core group of Founders and the “Father of the Constitution,” made his first veto as president in 1811 against a bill that would have given government money to a Washington, DC church to run a poorhouse. It would, he said, “be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

Madison added, in a July 10, 1822 letter to his old friend Edward Livingston:

“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: that Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”

It’s why Jefferson took a razor blade to the Gospels and cut out all of the stories of miracles, producing The Jefferson Bible that presents Jesus as a wise philosopher instead of a god. The book is still in print and, to this day, a best-seller.

The cancer of evangelicalism now has its sights on literally every aspect of American society with its “Seven Mountain Mandate,” which argues that evangelical Christians must assert control over every other religion, every family in America, the US government itself, all public and private education, the arts and entertainment, all American media, and ultimately regulate all commercial business in our nation.

And they’re succeeding in every realm, even commerce. Recently, Southwest Airlines fired a flight attending for spamming their internal message boards with hostile anti-abortion messages and calling the company’s CEO “a murderer” because he supported women’s abortion rights. A Trump-appointed judge ruled in the flight attendant’s favor and required the company’s senior executives to take “religious liberty training” from an evangelical rightwing anti-abortion group.

Once today’s Christian Taliban made common cause with the 1980 Reagan campaign, the first great mission they undertook was seizing control of the rest of the Republican Party. Now that that has been accomplished, they’re coming for the rest of us.

As the tribal people who first occupied this land would tell you, this is the Great Sin. It turns religion from a spiritual exercise into a social, cultural, and political cancer that continually grows while devouring everything in its path.

Like biological cancer, it ultimately kills its host — as America’s founders knew well from the experience of Cromwell in England and seventeenth-century Salem here.

And now it’s made an unholy alliance with the billionaires behind Project 2025 and our rapist-in-chief, Donald Trump, the modern incarnations of the Roman empire and Prefect Pilate, who ordered Jesus crucified.

G-d help us all if they succeed.

NOW READ: Buckle up for Trump's 'October Surprise'

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during a recent appearance on the Christian nationalist program “FlashPoint,” religious-right activist and commentator Rick Green repeated the bogus right-wing talking point that the Constitution’s infamous “three-fifths clause” was “an anti-slavery clause.”

Green, founder of Patriot Academy, is also the co-host of the radio program “WallBuilders Live” with religious-right pseudo-historians David and Tim Barton, and he obviously shares their desire to mislead their audiences about the issue of slavery to help them portray the nation’s founding in righteous terms.

During the “FlashPoint” appearance, Green complained that millions of “illegal aliens” are being counted toward the appropriation of seats in Congress, thereby giving Democrats a larger presence in the House. Green voiced his desire to see a constitutional amendment passed to allocate seats based on “only American citizens” as counted by the Census.

“That was the intent of the Founding Fathers,” Green declared. “That’s why they had the whole debate over slavery and the three-fifths clause. They were saying, ‘If you’re not going to let them vote and you’re not going to let them be citizens, you shouldn’t get to count them in your numbers toward Congress.’ The three-fifths clause, by the way, is an anti-slavery clause, not a pro-slavery clause.”

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When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, the issue of how the proposed new government would deal with the institution of slavery was a pressing concern, as southern slave-holding states made it abundantly clear that they would not join any union that threatened the practice.

During the debate over how to allocate seat in the House of Representatives, which was to be based on population, southern delegates asserted that their slaves should be included in the count whereas northern anti-slavery delegates insisted that slaves should not be counted at all since they were legally regarded as property in slave states. Eventually, a compromise was reached in which seats in the House would be “determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

While southern states did not get to count all of their slaves as part of their population in determining representation in the House, the compromise nevertheless gave them a distinct and powerful advantage.

As author David O. Stewart explained in his book, “The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution“:

The politicians in the East Room calculated instantly the value of the three-fifths rule. If congressmen were allocated on the basis of population, an owner of 100 slaves (such as Washington or Madison) would count as 61 people-himself plus three-fifths of his slaves. This effect would be extended to presidential elections when the delegates created the electoral college to choose the president. The additional southern representation in Congress, and added sway in voting for the president, would be significant. With almost 700,000 slaves in the southern states from Maryland to Georgia, and an allocation of one congressman for every 30,000 persons, the three-fifths ratio gave the South at least a dozen additional congressmen, and a like number of additional electoral votes. To defeat the small states and achieve representation based on population, Wilson paid a high price: powerful reinforcement of the slave interest.

Predictably, southern states used their increased power in Congress to protect their interests, much to the outrage of northern states, which quickly realized the error of the “compromise.”

From “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution” by Harvard professor Michael Klarman:

Over time, the three-fifths compromise that the convention had approved became increasingly objectionable to many northerners. After the presidential election of 1800, some Federalists attributed Jefferson’s narrow victory over John Adams to the three-fifths rule, which led them to disparage Jefferson as the “Negro president.” Northerners’ dissatisfaction with the Three-Fifths Clause only grew when, in 1803, President Jefferson consummated the Louisiana Purchase, which vastly extended the geographic scope of the United States, adding territory that was ripe for the expansion of slavery. In a letter written that year, Rufus King [an anti-slavery signer of the Constitution] called the Three-Fifths Clause one of the Constitution’s “greatest blemishes,” and he urged northerners to treat the clause as inapplicable to states added to the union as a result of Jefferson’s bargain with Emperor Napoleon. King also insisted that northerners had been “injudiciously led to concede to this unreasonable provision” on the supposition that Congress “must resort to direct taxes,” in combination with “the maxim that taxation and representation are inseparable.” In 1804, the Massachusetts legislature proposed repeal of the Three-Fifths Clause, though only Connecticut and Delaware supported such a constitutional amendment.

By 1820, the Three-Fifths Clause was in effect translating into eighteen additional southern congressional representatives, and it had become a consistent target of northern criticism. That year, when Congress was consumed by heated sectional debate over the admission of Missouri to the union as a slave state, King acknowledged in the US Senate that “the disproportionate power and influence allowed to the slaveholding states was a necessary sacrifice to the establishment of the Constitution,” and that “faith and honor stand pledged not to disturb it.” Yet he insisted that “the extension of this disproportionate power to the new states would be unjust and odious”—especially since none of the Founders had “anticipated the fact that the whole of the revenue of the United States would be derived from indirect taxes which cannot be apportioned.”

Clearly, the three-fifths clause was hardly an “anti-slavery clause,” as Green asserted.

Furthermore, the Constitution contained two other explicitly pro-slavery provisions: Article I’s prohibition on Congress passing any law to ban the slave trade for at least 20 years, and Article IV’s Fugitive Slave Clause, which required that escaped slaves be returned to their owners.

As Right Wing Watch has noted before, the willingness to misrepresent history has become a common theme among Christian nationalists who time and again spread blatant falsehoods in defense of their right-wing ideology.

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aha secular saint (or godly xian pilgrim // xian nat’l theocracy

abe gets included bc he is everyone’s fav or b/c // JC martyr that got rid of sin/stain of slavery?

up good god freedom vs down dark devil tyranny

he has to go hard on freedom to counter the truth/mainstream narrative that trump tried to steal election and end democracy?

city on a hill is up and light [and freedom]; a beacon projects light, guides those that are lost, attracts to the side of good/god beacon inst koch BS shop

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john Eastman, a right-wing attorney who is in serious legal trouble for his intensive efforts to help former President Donald Trump stay in power after losing the 2020 election, continues to raise funds for his legal defense fund from Trump’s religious-right supporters. Eastman was the featured speaker at an online event hosted Monday night by the Salt and Light Council, a group that promotes “biblical citizenship.”

Eastman portrayed himself as making a heroic stand for truth and against tyranny, as he did last fall while fighting efforts by the California Bar Association to have him disbarred. Eastman used that trial to make the case that his 2020 claims about election fraud and illegality were legitimate but had never been fully considered by the courts. The judge’s decision in the disbarment trial was expected by March 1.

During his Salt and Light presentation, Eastman promoted his page on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, where people have contributed more than $630,000 to his legal defense fund so far. He said he’s “about a million in the hole beyond that right now,” adding that he thinks his total legal costs will run between $3 million and $3.5 million.

Eastman’s appearance made it clear that he remains as unrepentant about his work for Trump as he was last August, when he promoted debunked claims about the 2020 election and asserted that “the very existential threat that the country is under” justified his and Trump’s actions. On Monday’s Zoom call with Salt and Light activists, Eastman made similar claims. Citing the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln, Eastman said, “And now, in this century, this is the fight comparable to those—the defense of freedom.” He went on:

And will this great shining city on a hill that has been a beacon to the rest of the world continue to be that beacon of light? Or will we go into an age of darkness? I can’t imagine anything more important than that fight. And so here we are on the front lines, and let’s just make sure we’re as well armed for it as we can.

Eastman portrayed himself as a defiant warrior for freedom and the future of the country:

Our country is on a precipice of losing our freedoms. And for whatever reason, I’ve been cast in the forefront of this battle. I’m on the battle lines, I’m on the ramparts. And I consider it one of the greatest honors of my life to be in the front of this fight for freedom, and fighting against tyranny. And I will do, I will engage in that fight with every fiber of my being as long as I’m able.

And he seems to have no doubt that he is up to the task:

I’ve been fighting for principled positions for my whole career. I’ve got one of the best law degrees and academic careers you can have. I clerked at the Supreme Court of the United States. I was a dean. I’ve got the skill set, God has given me the skill set to be in a position to fight this probably, at least as well as anybody else in the country. And so that’s what I do. And I’ll do it, you know, I’ll do it with a law degree as long as I have it. And I’ll do it without the law degree if they try and take that away from me, because this is an important fight to have.

Eastman had harsh words for his opponents, whether he was talking about the people trying to impose “a one world order,” public school teachers who undermine parents’ authority, members of the congressional Jan. 6 committee, or officials seeking to silence people who question the official line on vaccines, critical race theory, or transgender youth:

The folks we’re dealing with are evil. They don’t consider destroying our country as collateral damage for their overall mission, they consider that icing on the cake for their overall mission. I mean, we have to understand that we are dealing with pure evil, and the way you gotta, just you got to arm yourselves in truth and light, salt and light.

He urged the Salt and Light activists to get their churches politically engaged:

Your congregations, that’s a massive force, get them engaged, sign them up to vote, get the voter guides out in their hands and let them know who the decent people are, and who the folks that are mouthing platitudes are, whether in the primary elections or the general election. Get them engaged. Get them educated. This is an army that cannot be stopped if we would just launch it.

Salt and Light Council founder and President Dran Reese portrayed the ongoing legal prosecutions over the 2020 election in spiritual terms, praying that God would “overcome the devil in this case around John Eastman and President Trump.”

Video excerpts (full video linked above):

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The Christian nationalist program “FlashPoint” has, since its inception, served as a platform for spreading wild conspiracy theories and Christian nationalist disinformation.That pattern continued when “FlashPoint” hosted an event in Oklahoma last week at which former Rep. Michele Bachmann delivered a speech overflowing with falsehoods about the supposedly Christian nature of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

While reminiscing about obtaining her law degree from Oral Roberts University, a right-wing evangelical university located in Oklahoma, Bachmann bragged that her professors required the students to learn about the founding of this nation using “primary source documents.”

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“So they had us read what is it that the founders read? Who are the philosophers they read?” Bachmann said. “The number one document they referred to when they were trying to figure out what kind of a country we should be; guess what? The Bible!”

As Right Wing Watch has explained multiple times, this claim is a deliberate misrepresentation of a 1984 study conducted by professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston that sought to identify which writers and sources of ideas were most cited in “the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805.” Lutz found that the Bible was cited most frequently solely because many of the pamphlets included in the research were sermons that had been reprinted for mass distribution. Once the sermon pamphlets were excluded, Lutz reported that quotes from the Bible appeared no more frequently in the political writings of the era than citations of the classical or common law.

More importantly, Lutz also noted that when the focus was solely on the public political writings from 1787 to 1788, when the U.S. Constitution was written and ratified, “the Bible’s prominence disappears” almost completely.

Undeterred, Bachmann continued to spread obvious falsehoods.

“[The Founders] looked at all societies throughout all history,” she claimed. “They said, ‘We’ve got a unique chance in all the world to create a society. What should it look like? What should it be based on?’ They studied all societies and those forms of government, and they decided—when they had done all that—they needed to search the word of God. And so you can take the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence [and] you can literally tie it to a Bible verse; about every three or four words, it’s based upon another area of Scripture.”

This claim is, of course, also entirely false.

Both of Bachmann’s claims are either misleading or outright false, which seems to be a common theme as time and again, Christian nationalists spread blatant falsehoods in defense of their ideology, leading one to wonder why, if their position is true, do they have to keep lying to try and “prove” it. Clearly, they simply do not care about the truth as long as these myths remain useful in convincing Americans that the Christian nationalists’ political agenda is justified by our history.

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alternet 2 24 NO LNX

Republicans don't even try to hide it anymore

February 06, 2024

Amazingly, the House managed to pass a piece of legislation Wednesday that both helps hungry kids and gives a boost to businesses that want to invest in future products. It was a compromise and neither side is ecstatic, but both Democrats and Republicans got something for their constituents.

Democrats got to lift 400,000 children and their families out of poverty, and the legislation will immediately carry an additional 3 million kids from “deep poverty” to mere poverty with an expanded child tax credit. Over the next year, reports the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the legislation will help over 16 million children growing up in low-income households.

That means those kids are more likely to grow up as healthy, well-adjusted, and productive members of society. Science tells us that reducing child poverty this way means there will be less child abuse, fewer divorces, and a healthier economy.

It could, in fact, save America as much as a trillion dollars a year or around 5.4 percent of GDP, which a groundbreaking 2018 study found was the cost to America of childhood poverty. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louise found that adults who experienced poverty during their childhood earned a total of $294 billion less in 2015 than their otherwise identical peers who did not experience poverty as kids.

Add that to the poverty-related costs associated with crime, child maltreatment, and homelessness and the researchers concluded that child poverty is costing the US an estimated $1.0298 trillion every year.

From the GOP’s viewpoint, the legislation’s corporate tax breaks would be a boon to American business. They encourage companies to invent new products with expanded research and development tax breaks, interest deductions, and tax credits for investing in new equipment.

Win-win, right? Sadly, no, according to some of the most powerful Republicans in the country.

The legislation is now heading to the US Senate, where Senator Mitt Romney, one of the richest legislators in the world, opposes it because, he suggests, helping out hungry kids will make them dependent on the government. The last thing Romney wants the government to do is take money from morbidly rich people like himself to lift poor kids out of misery.

The legislation’s help for the very poorest children in our country is, Romney says, “excessive,” and, he whines, creates “another entitlement program which is massively expensive.”

Romney, of course, should know all about entitlement programs: he’s worth hundreds of millions because, in no small part, of massive entitlement programs for morbidly rich people who run private equity operations.

They include “pass through” provisions that let them pay about half the normal income tax rate most Americans are hit with, zero-taxes on profits through Section 1202 of the tax code, and massive tax breaks through the QSBS provisions of the tax laws that billionaires’ lobbyists helped write.

“Massively expensive” doesn’t begin to quantify the largesse, the trillions of dollars, that regular taxpayers like you and me (and low income workers) shower on the morbidly rich like Romney. As the Peterson Foundation notes:

“In 2023, those breaks totaled about $1.8 trillion. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the government spends on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, or defense.”

But, still, Romney can’t stomach the idea that poor kids may make off with any of that government largess.

Neither, apparently, can the billionaires who fund Senator Chuck Grassley. As Democracy Labs pointed out yesterday, three of the wealthiest men in America fund the senator’s PAC and all benefited hugely from Trump’s tax cut for billionaires. And, as Democracy Labs noted:

“If only poor families could make big donations to Chuck Grassley, maybe he'd support the Child Tax Credit bill?”

Which perfectly captures the crisis of American capitalism and democracy we’re living through right now. After five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court took millions in gifts from billionaires and then legalized political bribery with Citizens United in 2010, most rational lawmaking has ground to a halt as special interest groups and rightwing billionaires pull the strings of Congress.

James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” warned us about this. Repeatedly.

When Alexander Hamilton finally talked him into co-writing the Federalist Papers with him (after 4 others turned Hamilton down or were ill), Madison focused his first contribution, what’s today known as Federalist 10, on how a group of rich people capturing government was the greatest threat to our republic.

“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union,” he wrote in his first sentence, “none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. …

“The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”

So, what is a faction?

“By a faction,” Madison wrote, “I understand a number of citizens…who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” (emphasis mine)

“Adversed” being the word used back at that time to describe what we would mean today if we use the word “opposed.”

Factions, in other words, were groups of people who were openly and nakedly opposed to what was best for the nation because it might interfere with them getting richer and richer. And he saw them as the greatest danger this country faced.

Madison wasn’t talking about an abstraction or some highfalutin concept. He was talking about how some rich people will inevitably try to seize political power to screw everybody else. How, as he wrote, their own personal, selfish “interests” are opposed to the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

“Property” today generally means land, but in 1788 it meant “wealth.” Madison came right out and said, in Federalist 10, that the interests of those with great wealth are typically very different from the interests of average Americans:

“But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

In fact, he said, one of the most important jobs of government is to prevent its own corruption by the very wealthy and powerful factions that today control the GOP:

“A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation....”

Madison said in a 1788 speech that there were “two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons, and the rights of property.” He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor.

“Give all power to property,” Madison said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”

In fact, Madison noted, all the former republics that he had studied in his five years of preparation for writing our Constitution had ended up corrupted by the political power of concentrated wealth.

“In all the Governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots and lawgivers,” he added, “the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich.”

Thus, wanting to establish a country where the rich didn’t end up running it as their own private kingdom or oligarchy, he proposed that the House of Representatives — the only branch elected directly by the people, and every two years at that — should solely have the power to raise taxes and spend federal funds.

And he didn’t want the ability to vote for members of Congress to be limited to those who owned property. When that had happened, in previous governments, as Madison pointed out, “the poor were sacrificed to the rich.”

“The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution,” he said in his speech. “Liberty not less than justice pleads for the policy here recommended. If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of the rich],” he warned, the American citizenry would “become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and independence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth.

“In either case liberty will be subverted; in the first by a despotism growing out of anarchy, in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”

And, indeed, the delegates assembled agreed. Only the House of Representatives, to this day, can initiate the process of raising taxes and spending money.

Madison’s mentor, Thomas Jefferson, agreed. In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Jefferson wrote:

“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson explained:

“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”

He added that if we ended up with an oligarchic government that was run, directly or indirectly, by the rich, America’s working people:

“[M]ust come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four ... and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”

So here we have the author of the Declaration of Independence and the man who supervised the writing of the Constitution warning us that rich people would try to rise up and corrupt our government just to expand their own wealth.

They explicitly cautioned us that such a wealthy faction presents the greatest of all possible risks to a democratic republic.

Are we there yet? Mitt Romney and Chuck Grassley sure hope so…

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Rep. Brandon Prichard

last month, Christian nationalist North Dakota State Rep. Brandon Prichard appeared on a local television program called “Ladies of Another View” where he attempted to defend his Christian nationalism by spreading misinformation and falsehoods.

Prichard appeared on the program to discuss the criticism he had received in the wake of posts he made on social media declaring that every member of Congress must “submit to the Gospel of Jesus Christ” and that “every conservative state should put into code that Jesus Christ is King and dedicate their state to Him.”

Prichard insisted that he had nothing for which to apologize because American history proves that his worldview is the same as the Founding Fathers.

“Here’s the deal,” Prichard boldly proclaimed, “history is on our side. History is on the side of the conservatives on this issue. The first thing that happened at the Constitutional Convention was what? It was Benjamin Franklin coming in front of everybody—he was actually one of the most agnostic of them all—and said that we need to plead to the heavens and pray for our country. And it was a Christian prayer; they had a Christian pastor come and say a prayer.”

“As early as the 1980s,” Prichard continued, “Ronald Reagan dedicated the country to Jesus and had a National Day of Prayer enshrined into our law.”

“So, I think that it’s crazy to suggest that that our country is not, at bare minimum, a Christian nation,” Prichard concluded.

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vid?]

Nearly everything Prichard cited in support of his Christian nationalism is false.

As Right Wing Watch has explained before, while Benjamin Franklin did urge the delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to pray for help in drafting the Constitution, it was certainly not the “first thing that happened” at the convention and, more importantly, Franklin’s suggestion was ignored by the rest of the delegates. So no, the Constitutional Convention did not have “a Christian pastor come and say a prayer.”

If the Constitution’s authors had wanted to require members of Congress to “submit to the gospel of Jesus Christ,” as Prichard believes they should, they had a chance to do so; instead, they banned any religious test for public office.

Furthermore, President Ronald Reagan never “dedicated the country to Jesus,” whatever that even means, and the National Day of Prayer was enshrined into law in 1952 by President Harry Truman.

If, as Prichard claimed, “history is on our side,” then why do he and so many other Christian nationalists keep spreading falsehoods in their effort to “prove” it?

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https://www.mediamatters.org/trinity-broadcasting-network/american-theocracy-trinity-broadcasting-networks-nightly-news-program

Trinity Broadcasting Network’s nightly news program Centerpoint repeatedly promoted Christian nationalism. Anchors and guests argue that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation and encourage viewers to support Donald Trump in order to fulfill God’s wishes.

TBN is an explicitly Christian broadcaster known globally for its televangelism and Christian lifestyle content. The network reaches around 95 million households via satellite, broadcasts 14 languages across 175 countries, and contains an extensive streaming portfolio. In 2022, TBN set its sights on a new type of programming ahead of the 2024 election: news. 

On March 23, 2022, TBN launched Centerpoint, a 30-minute nightly news program produced by former Newsmax CEO Michael Clemente and initially anchored by ex-Fox correspondent Doug McKelway. According to Axios, the network claimed the “programming isn't meant to be politically biased, but will lean into Christian values.” The anchor lineup has shifted multiple times featuring various Christian voices such as Pastor Allen Jackson and former politician Rob Astorino, but recently TBN successfully poached yet another Newsmax expat, Lyndsay Keith. 

Keith joinedformer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on the May 20 edition of his TBN program, Huckabee, where she said, “You know, a lot of times news comes to you through a lens, a liberal lens or a conservative lens, and we have opportunities to show through a biblical lens.” 

This line between a “biblical lens” and outright Christian nationalism — the belief that America is a fundamentally Christian nation that should be governed by right-wing Christian beliefs — is often muddy on Centerpoint. The growing trend of Christian nationalism poses a real threat to a multicultural democracy. From the think tank, the Center for American Progress:

At its core, this idea threatens the principle of the separation of church and state and undermines the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It also leads to discrimination, and at times violence, against religious minorities and the nonreligious. Christian nationalism is also a contributing ideology in the religious right’s misuse of religious liberty as a rationale for circumventing laws and regulations aimed at protecting a pluralistic democracy, such as nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQI+ people, women, and religious minorities.

Different forms of Christian nationalist rhetoric are regularly spread on TBN's supposedly apolitical evening news show by both guests and network personalities.

Christian nationalism is apparent in TBN’s nightly news show

Christian nationalism on TBN goes beyond Centerpoint

TBN has a large range of shows that blend Christian lifestyle and talk show-style programming with politics, news, and religion. Takeaways with Kirk Cameron is one such show that sometimes crosses the threshold of Christian media into Christian nationalist propaganda. 

In one episode, Cameron incorrectly claimed U.S. culture was rooted in the Bible: “We’ve got an incredible legacy and an incredible culture here, and it's rooted in the Bible. And if we turn back to thinking biblically, I think that we can again see the fruit of liberty and justice and the fruit of the spirit characterizing the country."

In another, Cameron gushed over theNational Monument to the Forefathers, a relatively unknown monument in Plymouth, Massachusetts, celebrating the Mayflower Pilgrims. Cameron praised the monument for supposedly representing that “man's laws must always line up under God's laws or they're not good laws.” (Cameron appears to have fixated on this monument, creating a full movie about it and selling replicas from his online store.

 March 13, 2023, edition of Trinity Broadcasting Network's Takeaways with Kirk Cameron

Cameron has a history of promoting Christian nationalism both on and off TBN. He is currently pushing a campaign against local libraries that involves reading conservative children’s books to “win back Story Hour and stand up for truth and Biblical values.” The books are intended to instill “pro-God, Pro-America” values, and Cameron has threatened to sue “woke libraries” if he is unable to read them.

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an 7 22 raw

fuck your feelings: [cspan book TV had several on slavery eg UVA?] free exge of idea (free mkt in the gift shop? buy it or not, or buy and burn it.

Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy lashed out on Sunday because she said she was made to feel "ashamed" and "guilty" after visiting the home of former President Thomas Jefferson and learning about how he owned slaves.

During a discussion on Fox & Friends,host Pete Hegseth complained about how the "whole tone" at Jefferson's Monticello home has changed to focus on his slave ownership.

"It's overwhelmingly negative!" Hegseth exclaimed. "You go to visit the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and you learn about what a terrible person Thomas Jefferson was."

Hegseth said that one visitor noted that "half of the comments on Jefferson were critical."

Campos-Duffy recounted her visit to Monticello.

"I visited many of these homes," she recalled. "And that is definitely what I picked up from all of this, that there is a reorienting, reconstructing of the history to basically make sure that the idea that they had slaves is on the same level as what they did for our country."

"There are slaves across human history," the Fox News host continued. "I get that. It's a terrible history we should talk about but we should not feel guilty or ashamed of our leaders when we go and visit the people who brought us the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. You leave feeling that way."

Campos-Duffy complained that "anti-racism" books could be found in the gift shop at Jefferson's home.

"These were great men as far as their ideas go but they were able to build this on the backs of slaves and we honor that," co-host Joey Jones chimed in. "And we talk about that. That's different than re-writing the importance of Jefferson, the importance of Washington or whoever it may be. And why have Monticello at all if you're only going to use it for grievance?"

Jones argued that liberal leaders are not "perfect" either.

"Socialists," Campos-Duffy quipped. "You come away thinking how terrible this country is."

"Where's all this coming from?" she asked. "The homes of these presidents are being populated -- this is avery diabolical plan on the part of the left. So what they've done is they've taken their donors on the left and they've populated the boards of these estates with leftists."

"Don't look over here at all the amazing things that Thomas Jefferson unleashed," Hegseth agreed. "It's always about inclusivity. It's the buzzword they use. And we fall into the trap! Because good, earnest historians who take care of Monticello sit there and they go, 'Oh, you're right. You know what? We haven't included enough about the fact that he was a slave owner. So let's include more of that.' And then the ideologues come in with their money and say, let's make it all about that!"

"And then you get kids coming through thinking Thomas Jefferson was a bad guy," he remarked. "We get accused of wanting to 'whitewash' or not talk about that. We will talk about that. We know that. That's a real deal. But making it about America being an evil place is when we get into the realm of a cultural revolution."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

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// pilgrim puritan thxgiving

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/pilgrims-legacy/

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see Constitution // founding fathers, also a God Term

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-mcfarland-:{satan-hates-the-constitution/}:

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https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/are-corporations-people

no lnx

number 49 • fall 2021

Are Corporations People?

Carson Holloway

Fall 2015

During the Obama years, the American left has regularly and forcefully claimed that "corporations are not people." Progressives ranging from ordinary protestors all the way up to President Obama have insisted that, because corporations are not living, breathing human beings, corporate personhood — the idea that corporations have certain legal and constitutional rights — is a fiction. As they would have it, corporate personhood was foisted upon the country by the radical conservatives of the Roberts Court and Republican officeholders with only one thing in mind: helping big business.

But contrary to what we may hear from Elizabeth Warren and ThinkProgress, corporations are, as a matter of fact, people in the eyes of the law. They have been since the beginning of the American republic, making corporate personhood deeply rooted in our legal and constitutional tradition.

When conservatives point out, as Mitt Romney notably did in his presidential campaign, that corporations are and should be considered people for certain purposes, they're pointing out what the left seems to have forgotten. They're pointing out that, though corporations may not be natural persons — that is, discrete, individual human beings whose rights somehow originate in nature — corporations nevertheless are and should be entitled to certain legal and constitutional rights.

This is not to say that corporate rights operate in the same way as do the rights of natural persons. In many cases the law justifiably treats the rights of natural persons and artificial persons differently. It is to say, however, that respect for the rights of corporations, no less than respect for the rights of individuals, is advantageous for our social order and has been essential to America's development as a prosperous, free, and good society. Accordingly, America's perpetuation as such a society requires that we understand and defend corporate personhood and corporate rights against this criticism from the left.

the long tradition of corporate rights

The idea that corporations have legal rights, and therefore a kind of personhood, is not an invention of contemporary conservatives. Its roots stretch all the way back through the history of American law and deep into the English common-law tradition. That tradition was captured most comprehensively — and communicated to the American founders most forcefully — by William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. The very table of contents of that work bears witness to the legal tradition of granting rights to corporate persons. Chapter 18, "Of Corporations," is placed in "Book the First: The Rights of Persons."

Corporations as legal forms, Blackstone explained, are "artificial persons," created by law "for the advantage of the public."The rights accorded to the corporate form, he thus suggested, were granted in order to encourage cooperation among individuals with a view to socially useful ends. Without the corporate form, an association of individuals could not make binding rules to govern its members or internal structure. Without certain rights, it could not hold property indefinitely as an association — the death of the association's members would mean the death of the association. Without granting corporations certain rights, individuals could not securely create an association that would have a life, an identity, and a mission that could continue from one generation to the next.

Blackstone's account importantly teaches us that legal recognition of corporations is not limited to the for-profit kind. The corporate form was developed, he noted, particularly for "the advancement of religion, of learning, and of commerce." Just as in Blackstone's day, when corporations would have included not only theBritish East India Companybut also Oxford and Cambridge, today's concept of the corporation embraces not only for-profit enterprises like Apple and General Electric but also non-profit institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic. Indeed, the first corporation chartered in America was not a business but an institution of higher learning — what is now Harvard University.

There is, moreover, nothing outlandish in Blackstone's view that such institutions should have rights, or that the discussion of those rights belongs in the context of a larger account of the "rights of persons." A corporation is simply a legally recognized group of people cooperating with a view to some common end. Indeed, the very purpose of that legal recognition and the rights that accompany it is to provide a framework for a group of citizens to freely associate with one another in a stable, productive, and harmonious way.

The wisdom of this traditional English legal institution found its way to America through Blackstone's Commentaries, which was assiduously studied by lawyers of the founding generation and by many of the founders themselves. Understandably, the founders chose to preserve England's legal tradition in substantial form; for all the new things they created, the founders could not invent, by themselves, an entirely new system of legal principles.

It is therefore not surprising to find that Blackstone's understanding of corporations as legal persons were echoed by the great lawyers and jurists of the founding generation. In Alexander Hamilton's Opinion as to the Constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, for instance, we find the nation's first secretary of the treasury observing that to "erect a corporation, is to substitute a legal or artificial to a natural person." In other words, when government recognizes a corporation, it effectively creates a "legal or artificial person."

In his Lectures on Law, James Wilson offered an even more complete restatement of Blackstone's account. Within states, Wilson noted, "smaller societies may be formed by a part of its members." These smaller societies, he continued, are "deemed to be moral persons" whose "actions are cognizable by the superior power of the state, and are regulated by its laws." Ordinarily, at law, such societies are called "corporations," he added. A legal corporation, then, is "described to be a person in a political capacity created by the law." Wilson also followed Blackstone in acknowledging the kinds of purposes for which the corporate form had originally been developed. These "artificial persons," he observed, "have been formed to promote and to perpetuate the interests of commerce, of learning, and of religion."

Because of this long tradition of legal understanding, it is not unusual for the word "person," when found in legal texts, to apply to corporations. In this common parlance, it simply means that corporations have certain legal rights and responsibilities. Congress acknowledged this principle explicitly in the so-called Dictionary Act of 1871, which laid down rules for construing federal laws. Contained in Section 1 of Title I of the United States Code, this provision notes that, "unless the context indicates otherwise," the "words 'person' and 'whoever' include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals."

The Constitution, moreover, is a legal text, written and ratified by men steeped in this legal tradition according to which corporations are artificial persons capable of holding certain rights under the law. Accordingly, the view that some constitutional rights attach to corporations as well as individuals is by no means a conservative manipulation of law, as the opponents of corporate personhood suggest.

To be sure, a given reference to "persons" and their rights in the Constitution may or may not be intended to refer to corporations. Frequently, as the language of the Dictionary Act indicates regarding the interpretation of statutes, it depends on the context. For example, the framers surely did not intend to refer to corporations when they provided that representation in the House of Representatives shall be determined with reference to "the whole Number of free Persons" in each state. The Census Bureau, then, quite properly does not count corporations when ascertaining each state's population. Similarly, when the Constitution holds that "no Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years," it is certainly not suggesting that a corporation could be elected to Congress.

And yet, one cannot easily dismiss the idea that some constitutional provisions do properly apply to corporations as well as individuals. But this is exactly what the left is now attempting with its flat, simple claim that "corporations are not people."

constitutional rights

Progressives are, as a matter of fact, wrong on the question of whether corporations are people under American law. But the evidence for this is not limited to the English legal tradition and the legal educations of the framers and their successors. If indeed corporations were not people, as progressives insist, strange and dangerous consequences would quickly follow.

For instance, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution provides that "no person shall be...deprived of...property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." If progressives are committed to their initial claim, they would have to say that the Fifth Amendment's protections don't and never did apply to corporations. This would mean that a corporation's property could be taken arbitrarily, with no compensation, for any reason and at any time. Surely the American founders, who were ardent advocates of the right to property, did not intend this passage to protect the property rights only of individuals and not of corporations.

If the founders did not believe government is required to guarantee the property rights of corporations, then they conceded that natural persons could make their property subject to arbitrary and uncompensated seizure by the government by placing it in a corporation. But as Hamilton observed in his Opinion as to the Constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, the very point of allowing incorporation is, in the first place, to permit "one or more natural persons" to "hold property" together as a single, legal person.

Setting aside the framers' intentions, committing ourselves to denying corporate personhood would mean stripping corporations of their property rights and making their property subject to arbitrary seizure without compensation. Private companies and businesses, which are nothing more than corporations, would have little choice but to close down. Non-profits, including traditionally left-of-center ones like the Sierra Club and the NAACP, would also be subject to property expropriation by the government....

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insurrection was done in the name of saving america, the constituton, freedumb (chanted):

aha rhet morph from civil war (proslavery) to 1776, no one says so, but builds on Tea Party tobacco koch BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/infowars-alex-jones-funded-and-fomented-mob

no vid

great banner pix saved jnzmegaphone

Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and coordinated with the White House in the organizing of a January 6 event that culminated in a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In comments made on Infowars broadcasts and during speeches delivered in Washington, D.C., in the days before January 6, Jones and his fellow Infowars host Owen Shroyer frequently used violent and revolutionary rhetoric in calling for the overturning of legitimate election results.

Five people lost their lives during the violent incursion in the Capitol that immediately followed an inciting speech given by the president on January 6. Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer as she attempted to breach the Speaker’s Lobby, which is close to the U.S. House of Representatives floor. U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by Trump supporters. Three other Trump supporters died after experiencing medical emergencies, including one who was trampled to death by the mob.

Some Trump supporters made it clear their purpose in the Capitol was to hunt down and kill lawmakers. The quick thinking of [AA] Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, who faced down the mob alone, diverted rioters away from the Senate floor, as captured in a stunning video taken by HuffPo reporter Igor Bobic.

Jones’ Infowars outlet was promoting a January 6 event as early as December 31. In a video posted to Infowars’ streaming platform Banned.video, a man ranted about the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election, saying, “These liberals think they can just do whatever the fuck they want. You know why that is? It’s because we sit there and we say we want to talk it out.” The video transitioned to promotional material for Infowars’ January 6 event and included a voiceover of Jones saying “It’s 1776 time,” a reference to the Revolutionary War. vid]

on January 2, Jones said during a broadcast that “it takes money to put my crew and security in D.C., and it takes money to organize this, and we put a lot of money -- myself -- into paying for the event Trump is going to be at and the other event.” He then encouraged viewers tobuy nutritional supplements from the Infowars Store and told them they “are funding the second American Revolution.” AHA ITS TEA PARTY DERIVATIVE]

The next day, Jones again discussed his involvement in planning and paying for the event. During his broadcast, he excoriated Trump supporters who were hesitant to travel to Washington, D.C., claiming, “I’ve seen people making a lot of excuses. ‘Oh, antifa is dangerous.’ It’s a lot more dangerous walking across the street.There’s hardly no antifa. They are a bunch of cowards.” (After mayhem unfolded at the Capitol, Jones and his outlet falsely blamed antifa supporters for the violence that took place.) He added, “It’s not about Infowars getting the credit for this, it’s about the fact that no one would step up and put the money in. ... I stepped up and put the money in for the 5th and for the 6th and then a donor came along, a great patriot, and paid $400,000-plus for the rest of it. I’m in over $130,000, and I'm not complaining about that. I had to do it when no one else was two weeks ago.”

Jones, Infowars host Owen Shroyer, and other Infowars employees then traveled to Washington, D.C. During a January 5 speech in downtown Washington, Shroyer said, “Americans are ready to fight. We’re not exactly sure what that is going to look like, perhaps, in a couple of weeks if we can’t stop this certification of the fraudulent election of Joe Biden.” He went on to “salute” Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) for their efforts to overturn the election and said of the people gathered there, “We are the new revolution.”

Meanwhile, Jones was at an event outside the Supreme Court, where he told a crowd, “We are facing Satan, and the answer to Satan’s 1984 is George Washington’s 1776.”

That evening, Jones and Shroyer regrouped to give more speeches in downtown Washington. Shroyer told a crowd, “Thomas Jefferson once said when the government fears the people, there is freedom. But for too long now the people have feared the government. … I can tell you that thecrooked politicians that occupy our Capitol are in fear right now. Do you know how I know this? Because they are scurrying around in secret tunnels to avoid ‘we the people.’ Right now as we speak they’re scurrying around like the little rats that they are to try to avoid you.”

When Jones took over the lectern, he told a cheering crowd that“we have only begun to resist the globalists” and that “they have tried to steal this election in front of everyone.” Jones also said,“I don’t know how all this is going to end, but if they want a fight, they better believe they’ve got one.”

He went on to say, “This will be their Waterloo. This will be their destruction.” (Waterloo refers to the pivotal battlefield defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte that ended the Seventh Coalition.) Jones also said that Winston Churchill “gave a famous speech where he said all I can promise you is blood, and pain, and war, and suffering. But the alternative is even worse:total slavery.” He then led the crowd in a “1776” chant.

The violent rhetoric continued the next day at Infowars’ event, which immediately preceded the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. During a January 6 speech in downtown Washington, Jones again told a crowd, “We declare 1776 against the New World Order.” Shroyer spoke from his own bullhorn while standing beside Jones, saying, “They said you lost this election in a landslide to [Joe] Biden. We said, ‘No, we don’t buy your bullshit.’ But, guess what? You want to feed us bullshit? We’re going to bring it right to your front door and you can eat it yourselves.” (Some Trump insurrectionists at the Capitol did in fact smear their own feces throughout the building’s hallways during the attack.)

At one point, Jones told the crowd to head to the Capitol “peacefully,” in contradiction to much of what he had said about what should happen on January 6. He also attempted to rile up the crowd by falsely telling them that Biden’s win in Arizona had been reversed and that “we have only begun to fight. This is 1776.” As people began to make their way to the Capitol, Shroyer yelled from a bullhorn that Democrats are “tyrants” and led the crowd in a “death to tyrants” chant. Jones then can be then heard attempting to privately confer with his crew, saying, “Let’s take it to the Capitol.” 

While Jones and Shroyer did not enter the Capitol building and instead retreated to a “secure location” during the insurrection, an Infowars cameraperson, who identified himself only as “your boy Sam with Infowars.com,” did go inside as both a mob participant and a recorder of the events. Shortly before entering the building, he said, “We have had enough,” and “I got to be honest, this is not a peaceful protest.” Once he crossed the threshold, he yelled, “Guess what? We are in the Capitol, baby!” From a video uploaded to Banned.video with the title “Patriots Storm Congress Raw Footage Includes Execution of Ashli Babbitt,” it is apparent that “Sam” was just feet away from Babbitt when she was fatally shot near the Speaker’s Lobby. Although recent Infowars videos identify him only as “Sam,” older videos posted to Banned.video reveal that he appears to go by the name Sam Montoya.

As the attempted insurrection unfolded, Infowars’ Harrison Smith, who was guest-hosting The Alex Jones Show because Jones and Shroyer were in Washington, praised the “patriots” who were storming the Capitol, at least one of whom participated in beating officer Sicknick to death. The following day, Jones again claimed to have spent “close to a half a million dollars” organizing the gathering in Washington and also said that he organized the event in coordination with the White House.

Following the 2020 presidential election, Jones called on his supporters to “surround” the Georgia governor’s mansion and “rise up” because officials in that state refused to overturn Biden’s legitimate victory. In December, Shroyer praised the efforts of Trump supporters to violently disrupt the Oregon state legislature’s consideration of a COVID-19 relief bill.

Throughout the Trump presidency, Jones has often hyped the prospect of a second American Civil War that would pit conservatives against liberals, including saying that he would personally participate in violence and help execute supposed traitors. In recent months, Jones has hosted Oath Keepers militia founder Stewart Rhodes, who said during his Infowars appearances that his followers were on alert for a command from Trump to start carrying out mass violence against Democrats in Washington, D.C., and at other locations.

For his part, Shroyer said during a November 18 broadcast that prominent Democrats and members of the mainstream media “deserve” to be the victims of mass violence if Trump is not allowed to continue to be president, despite his defeat. He added, “I know I won’t have to be the one to get my hands dirty. I can sit right here in studio and just broadcast the whole thing.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-ungodly-constitution-how-the-founding-fathers-ensured-america-would-not-be-a-christian-nation/

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https://theconversation.com/the-american-founders-made-sure-the-president-could-never-suspend-congress-122703

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