#kentucky militia

[clove-pinks]

I thought the old timey militia laundry at the River Raisin was an interesting demonstration of camp life during the War of 1812. They even found the wettest, most bedraggled-looking Kentucky militiaman impression for that authentic touch! Realistically, you should have a lot of men on fatigue duty (or mending their clothes) if you are portraying a War of 1812 military force.

The older gentleman portraying a military surgeon was a delight. He was very knowledgeable about all of the period medical technology and techniques, and he also does American War of Independence events (if he looks familiar to anyone). He explained that laudanum couldn't be used for anaesthesia prior to surgery because of the difficulty of accurate and effective dosing.

[clove-pinks]

I found what is almost certainly the source for this, although not a primary source. A 1911 scholarly article, "Kentuckians in the Battle of Lake Erie," quotes Alexander Slidell Makenzie's 1840s biography of Oliver Hazard Perry:

The whole party, officers and men included, were volunteers, led by a spirit of adventure to embark in an enterprise so different from the previous habits of their life. Few of them had ever seen a vessel before they were marched to the mouth of the Sandusky, and their astonishment and curiosity when they got on board was irrepressible. They climbed to the masthead; dove to the bottom of the hold; passed without stopping or understanding any distinction, from the sick-bay to the captain's cabin, expressing their admiration, as they went in awkward but rapturous terms. These Kentuckians were dressed in their favorite linsey-woolsey hunting shirts and drawers, and were themselves equally an object of curiosity to the officers and seamen, few of whom had ever seen any of these hardy borderers.

They were scolded for breaking Boat Rules ("The stout Kentuckians took the admonition in good part"), and were utilised like Royal Marines aboard Perry's fleet, but some Kentuckians were lake or river boatmen and received as seamen—specifically from DUNCAN MCARTHUR'S BRIGADE??

[MUFFLED SCREAMING]

@clove-pinks for imagination purposes.

[bestfuckinmusic]

Brody's Militia - The Appalachian Twelve Gauge Massacre - 2005

Fastcore from Kentucky, played the way it oughta.

[gwydionmisha]

Of course they are. Sigh.

[whencyclopedia]

Siege of Fort Meigs

The Siege of Fort Meigs (28 April to 9 May 1813) was a major engagement on the northwestern frontier of the War of 1812. It saw a US army under Major General William Henry Harrison, holed up in the hastily built Fort Meigs, withstand a siege by British and Native American forces despite heavy casualties.

Siege of Fort Meigs

D.W. Kellogg & Co. (Public Domain)

Background

On 16 August 1812, the US outpost of Fort Detroit surrendered to a British and Native American force after a brief and nearly bloodless siege. At a stroke, the British had seized control of the entire Michigan Territory, which they could now use as a staging ground for an invasion of western US states like Ohio or Kentucky. Even worse from a US perspective, the Siege of Detroit had emboldened several previously neutral Native American nations to side with the British and begin to attack US outposts and settlements. Many of these northwestern Native Americans had been driven from their lands by the US after the Battle of Fallen Timbers (20 August 1794) and were eager to reclaim what they had lost; indeed, the British promised to help the Native Americans set up their own, independent confederacy on lands west of the Ohio River. Such a confederacy would serve British interests by acting as a buffer state between Canada and the US.

The US was anxious to prevent a hostile, British-backed Native American confederacy from arising on its western frontier and knew that it had to balance the scales by retaking Detroit. Such an important task was entrusted to William Henry Harrison, the popular former governor of the Indiana Territory and the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe (7 November 1811). Harrison was given the rank of major general and placed in command of the newly formed Army of the Northwest, comprised mainly of raw volunteers from Kentucky and Ohio serving six-month enlistments. In early October, this army set out from Fort Defiance in Ohio, but bad weather and poor logistics slowed its advance to a crawl. Before long, winter was setting in, and Harrison begrudgingly concluded that he would be unable to assault Detroit before spring. He ordered the advance column of his army, under Brigadier General James Winchester, to continue marching to the Maumee Rapids (near present-day Toledo, Ohio) where they would begin setting up camp for the winter.

Winchester's men arrived at the Maumee Rapids in mid-January 1813. Having been on the march for weeks by this point, most of these men were cold, wet, and hungry; many of their enlistments were about to expire, and they longed to fight a battle before being sent home if only to make their long miles of miserable marching worth it. They would soon get an opportunity, as word reached their camp that a detachment of Canadian militia had occupied Frenchtown, a small community on the River Raisin in Michigan, and was harassing its inhabitants. The Americans begged Winchester to let them march to Frenchtown's rescue. Winchester, enticed by the prospect of an easy victory, relented and sent several companies of Kentuckians into Michigan.

The British-American War of 1812

Simeon Netchev (CC BY-NC-ND)

On 18 January, the Kentuckians easily routed the Canadians, causing an elated Winchester to move the rest of his column to Frenchtown as well. Once there, the inexperienced Americans grew complacent, neglecting to post adequate pickets or fortify their position. Therefore, the Americans were caught by surprise when a British and Native American force, under Sir Henry Procter, counterattacked just before dawn on 22 January. The Americans were defeated, and many were killed in the fighting. Of the survivors, those who could walk were taken across the Detroit River to Amherstburg as prisoners, while those too wounded to move were left behind in Frenchtown. That night, many of these wounded would be massacred by Potawatomi warriors allied with the British.

Continue reading...

[mariacallous]

“Many of us are pissed,” wrote the “commander” of a Three Percenter militia in Kentucky in a post. “We need to have a location all patriots from all states can come to when the time comes,” he continued. “Thoughts?” Other militia members replied, affirming their readiness. “It’s time the enemy paid a price for their treason and crimes against humanity,” one person responded.

These plans for militia activity in the wake of the US election are not from a private conversation on an encrypted platform. It was unfolding on a public Facebook profile.

Anti-government militia movements have been continuing to use Facebook to recruit, coordinate training, promote ballot box stake outs, and prepare for a civil war that many militants believe will break out after election day. And in some cases, the movement is attracting people who don’t appear to have any prior background in a militia. Meta is even doing the work for extremist movements by auto-generating some group pages on their behalf.

Data shared exclusively with WIRED by the Tech Transparency Project shows that these groups have only continued to grow on Facebook, despite WIRED previously flagging this lapse in Meta’s moderation.

The brazen proliferation of paramilitary activity on the social media platform days before the election highlights Meta’s lackadaisical approach to enforcing its own bans against groups it has labeled dangerous extremists. Militias require platforms like Facebook to grow: It’s a tool for the paramilitary movement to strengthen and radicalize its network. It also helps them facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county, and boost their membership.

The American paramilitary movement is much less visible than it was in 2020. Militias largely retreated from the streets after the January 6 Capitol riot exposed them to intense public and legal scrutiny, which was intensified by the prosecution of dozens of Oath Keepers. Some groups tried to distance themselves from the movement altogether by dropping any language about a “militia” from their websites, opting instead for more euphemistic names like “civilian guard” and “patriot group.” But after the dust settled following the Capitol riot, the movement began quietly rebuilding on Facebook. And they ramped up training and began coordinating, across counties and states.

The Tech Transparency Project has compiled a list of 262 Facebook public and private groups and 193 Facebook pages for militia and anti-government activists that were created since January 6, 2021. Nearly two dozen of those groups and pages have been created since May, according to the TTP. Some make minimal effort to conceal their affiliations to extremist networks: One new public group created in May is called The Michigan III%. Increasingly, the movement is also relying on individual profiles associated with leaders of local militia, the TTP says. Moderation has put a dent in the presence of American Patriots Three Percent (AP3), one of the largest active militias that Facebook explicitly banned in 2020 as a “militarized social movement” and “armed militia group.”

Meta, Facebook's parent company, says it carried out a “strategic network disruption” of AP3 in 2020 and again earlier this year in June, removing from Facebook and Instagram a total of 900 groups, pages, and accounts associated with members.

"Adversaries are constantly trying to find new ways around our policies, which is why we continually enforce against violating groups and accounts by investing heavily in people, technology, research, and partnerships,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED in an email. “We will continue to remove any groups and accounts that violate our policies.” Meta says the company is investigating some of the screenshots of groups that WIRED shared and will remove any content that violates its policies.

But WIRED reviewed posts from AP3 groups and profiles that are still on the platform, including examples where members and leaders brandish AP3 insignia and share photos from their in-person training sessions.

There have also been some recent instances where Facebook has even auto-generated pages for militias. In May, Facebook auto-generated a page for AP3’s Arizona chapter. In June, Facebook auto-generated a page for “AP3 NM [New Mexico] Training Range.” If you hover over the information widget on the page, Facebook’s explainer reads: “This unofficial page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. It’s not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.”

WIRED sent Meta two examples of auto-generated pages. In a statement, the company said: "One of the two auto-generated Pages had one follower and has been removed, and we couldn’t even verify that the second example of an auto-generated Page exists on the platform."

Meta has repeatedly come under fire in the past for auto-generating pages for extremist, white supremacist, and terrorist organizations; a whistleblower first flagged the issue in 2020 in a supplement to an earlier petition filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the capitol, Facebook remains a significant recruiting and organizing tool for militias like the AP3, despite creating policies that ban them,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “How can Meta be trusted to effectively thwart extremists that have a record of engaging in and stoking political violence when its own systems create business pages for them?”

In a video from 2022 that was recently published as part of a leak to Distributed Denial of Secrets, AP3 leader Scot Seddon stressed the importance of Facebook to his group’s operational success. “We’ve always used Facebook, Facebook has been our greatest weapon. It has gotten us where we are today,” Seddon told the camera. “We need to use the tools that are in front of us to achieve the goals of where we want to be. Our goal is to network, be as big as possible, have as many like-minded patriots in our states that we can rely upon should shit hit the fan.”

Extremist groups need access to mainstream platforms like Facebook to reach and radicalize people. When those groups are banned from larger platforms and relegated to fringe sites, their reach and recruitment opportunities are limited and their numbers can become stagnant or start dropping.

“We know the power of Facebook as an organizing platform, to pull in people who have fallen down rabbit holes and radicalize them further,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “We should be concerned that actual organized domestic extremist groups have free rein on platforms that millions of Americans use.”

Now, as the election fast approaches, the paramilitary network on Facebook has been a hive of people looking to link up, train, and prepare. A review by WIRED of recent Facebook posts in a number of these militia groups also suggests that the paramilitary movement has lately been attracting individuals who don’t have previous experience of being part of a militia.

“I’m looking for a group of people that see and understand the dire situation our country is in,” wrote one poster in the Facebook group U.S.A. Militia We The People last month. “A group of people that understand that civil war is at our doorstep if Kamala makes it into office. Am I in the right place?”

In another post earlier this month in a group for a county-level militia in Virginia, a member shared that he and his wife were interested in joining up, before asking for more information about how to do so. Also earlier this month, a new member of a militia group in Oklahoma introduced himself as a military veteran and said he was a member of a militia from 2015 to 2017 but wants to get involved again. “My battle rattle is ready to go any time,” he added.

Two county-level militias in Virginia have created Facebook pages in the past month, which they’ve used to coordinate their inaugural “musters” (militia speak for a meetup) in recent weeks. Another local Virginia militia has organized a meeting for two days after the election.

The “commander” of a Three Percenter group in Kentucky—who posed for a photograph viewed by WIRED with Representative Thomas Massie last summer while wearing full gear and insignia—has used his profile to share images from training sessions and regularly makes inflammatory statements. In a recent post, he suggested that state militias ought to rally at their chosen state parks: “Three national base camps could be state or national parks … (for example) west in NV or CO, central Missouri and east WV or VA. Then get comms established.”

In a “Patriot Group” in Barron County, Wisconsin, a recent lively discussion led by a “top contributor” urged members to “organize and monitor” ballot drop boxes. Several members of the group proposed planting small cameras in the vicinity of the boxes. Ballot drop surveillance has continued to be a hot topic of discussion among election deniers and paramilitary groups. Militias also teamed up with election deniers to conduct covert surveillance of ballot drop boxes during the midterm elections, recent leaks published by Distributed Denial of Secrets and reported by WIRED show. A recent DHS intelligence memo warned law enforcement agencies that domestic extremists could try to sabotage or attack ballot boxes.

The administrator of a New Hampshire–based group called the MAGA Continental Army claims that he recently met with the local police chief to discuss preparations in the event that a civil war breaks out. “He told me if it came to civil war that he will be directing his officers to defend the people—they will not be coming after your guns,” he wrote. He added that the chief said all members should come to the police department if conflict broke out.

In one public group called The Party of Trump, with 171,000 members, a discussion about ballot drop box monitoring prompted someone to suggest that Trump supporters come armed with their AR-15s to stand guard. In another public group called We Fight for Our Lives, someone urged others to get organized ahead of the election and suggested enlisting bikers and militia. “I’m ready to fight,” one person responded. “I’ll pull the fuckin trigger fo sho” the original poster added. In another public group called SAVE THE FLAG AMERICA, someone put the stakes of the election in bleak terms: “In a matter of days, we will ascertain our financial capacity to procure essential commodities such as groceries and fuel, or, alternatively face the prospect of engaging in armed conflict.”

“Trump 2024,” someone responded. “God is always in control.”

[todaysdocument]

Bounty Land Application File of Private William Stevenson, Captain Christopher's Company, 1st Regiment of Kentucky Mounted Volunteers

Record Group 15: Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs Series: Bounty Land Warrant Application Files

Private William Stevenson’s discharge paper.

[illustration of early American eagle with military and civilian implements] I DO hereby certify, that [handwritten] William Stephenson [/handwritten] has faithfully served a tour of [handwritten] seventy two [/handwritten] days, (including [handwritten] four [/handwritten] days allowed to return home from this place) as a [handwritten] Private [/handwritten] in Capt. [handwritten] John Christopher's [/handwritten] Company, of the 1st Regt. Kentucky Mounted Volunteer Militia-- on the expedition to Upper Canada under the command of His Excellency Governor Shelby, and that he is hereby honorably discharged. Given under my hand, at Cap, on the Ohio River, opposite Limestone, this 2d day of November, 1813 [signed] John Christopher Captain [signed] Geo. Trotter Jr. Col. Comdt. 1st Regt. Ky. M.V. Militia

[blowflyfag]

Pro Wrestling Illustrated: 1995 THE YEAR IN WRESTLING. March 1996

MANAGER OF THE YEAR: JIM CORNETTE 25,762 votes

It really wasn’t a strong year for managers this year. Many of our readers lamented that for this award, they have a very weak crop from which to choose. Nevertheless, Jim Cornette was able to distinguish himself sufficiently to capture Manager of the Year honors for the third time.

“I never could stand him or his methods,” wrote Bobby Zlada of Louisville, Kentucky, ��but once again, you can’t argue with his success.”

For Cornette, it was a year in which he pulled several surprises. It was his decision to  team Yokozuna with Owen Hart. That unlikely duo defeated The Smokin’ Gunns at WrestleMania XI and captured the WWF World tag team title. Despite the rumors that Yoko and Owen were going to split up, the “Louisville Lip” kept them together, and he even managed to get Yokozuna some World title shots after he and Owen lost the belts in October.

Cornette convinced Davey Boy Smith that it would be in Smith’s best interest to become a rulebreaker. That advice earned Cornette another helping of hatred, but it did in fact move the Englishman dramatically closer to the WWF World belt.

“Jimmy has a sense of knowing when to make the right move,” said Dennis Condrey, who was once a part of Cornette’s famed Midnight Express. “He zigs when folks think he should zag, and usually he proves everybody wrong.”

{Perhaps the biggest surprise of all came when Cornette announced, late in 1994, that he would manage his long-time enemies. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express. Somehow, some way, both parties put aside their monumental differences and formed a solid partnership, one that earned the Rock ‘n’ Rolls the Smoky Mountain tag belts.

By summer, however, Cornette was back to his rulebreaking ways in SMW again, as he led his Heavenly Bodies to both the Smoky Mountain and USWA tag team titles in a span of three days, a feat that severed to confirm his reputation as one of the greatest tag team managers ever. On the down side, he made himself look like a fool–again–when he began calling himself “General for the purpose of organizing his SMW Militia, a dastardly crew that includes Tommy Rich, Terry Gordy (the current SMW champ), and The Punisher.

He’s no military man, but he is a winner, whether you like it or not. 

RUNNERS-UP

SHERRI MARTEL: 12,910 votes

First runner-up: By leading Harlem Heat to a fourth WCW World tag team title, Martel quieted any doubts about her managerial prowess. She does tend to interfere too much, but what rule breaking manager doesn’t? But you know what? She may have had an ever greeted year had she not spent so much time fawning over fellow manager Col. Robert Parker.

COL. ROBERT PARKER: 10,974 votes

Second runner-up: For the second year in a row, the cigar-chomping braggart has captured the number-three spot in the voting. Parker’s a big talker, but he gets results: He led Bunkhouse Buck and Dick Slater to an upset World tag title victory over Harlem Heat, gave Meng new purpose for a while, and signed Japanese sensation Kurasawa.

WOMAN: 7,203 votes

Third runner-up: Woman manages only one wrestler, The Sandman, but he was champion of the tough ECW for six months after defeating Shane Douglas last March, and that is an amazing feat in itself. She is more helpful to Sandman behind the scenes than she is at ringside, where she can be just as sadistic as any male in the federation. 

VOTES FOR OTHERS (15,648)

Some of the top vote-getters who did not capture a runner-up spot include: Paul Bearer, Paul E. Dangerously, Ted DiBiase, Jimmy Hart, Kevin Sullivan, Sunny, and Harvey Wippleman.

[gormfullray]

The American nation is on the brink of a secession crisis. The Texas Republican Party platform is explicitly couched in the illegitimacy of the Biden presidency, and at this moment the Texas National Guard has illegally seized control of the Texas-Mexico border, and has forcefully prevented federal border patrol from interfering in their ethno-national project to outright kill as many migrants as they can get away with. The monopoly on violence in the United States has cracked in Texas, the Texas National Guard is engaging in nothing short of a form of cold insurrection: and this action is not unprecedented. In the leadup to southern secession in 1861, state militias, operating under the orders of their state governors, preformed insurrectionary action across the south in the leadup to the shooting starting at Fort Sumpter. The Texas National Guard has put a crack in the monopoly on violence held by the American government, there exists now a place in the country where two distinct military forces both claim to hold the authority to commit violence against the common people.

President Biden ought to have no option but to nationalise the Texas National Guard and put the officers to trial on charges of treason, including the governor, but I do not think that this will happen. The Democratic Party is an institution concerned exclusively with the political power it can leverage to the interests of its owning-class donors, and the constitutional integrity of our federation is of secondary concern to them. There can be no compromise with secession, if the Department of Justice or the President do not put down this insurrection, how long will it be before the Florida National Guard begins constructing fortifications to fight claimed movements of migrants within the state? How long will it be before the Idaho National Guard starts preparing units to respond to the threat of "antifa terrorists" entering from Oregon or Washington? How much longer could it be before the Kentucky National Guard works out the math on seizing Fort Knox? These examples may seem in excess of the circumstance of the insurrection ongoing, an overreaction, but we are blessed in this nation to be so unfamiliar with the fracturing of the monopoly on violence. These actions are cracks in the face of peace and democracy in America, and any such fracture holds the potential to spiderweb out uncontrollably.

[oklahomahistory]

The Chickasaws

The Chickasaws  The power of this tribe, too, far exceeded its small numbers. The Chickasaws included at most forty-five hundred men, women, and children during the time of their southeastern residence and interaction with Europeans and white and black Americans. Like the Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, the Chickasaws spoke a Muskhogean language. Their homeland included western Kentucky and Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and northwestern Alabama. The Chickasaws were at least as closely related to the Choctaws as the Seminoles were to the Creeks. The Chickasaws and Choctaws formed a single tribe until sometime prior to Spaniard Hernando DeSoto’s 1540 discovery of them. The tribe’s very name probably means “they left as a tribe not a very great while ago.“ But the Chickasaws possessed a much keener commitment to the art of war than the Choctaws, and they were feared by the latter (despite the Choctaws’ numerical superiority), other tribes in their region, and even eventually Europe’s most powerful nations. As Britain and France competed for control of North America-and in particular the lower Mississippi River and Valley and the Gulf ports to the south-in the early 1700s, the French cultivated the Choctaws as native allies, and the British did the same with the Chickasaws. So troublesome did the Chickasaws become to French efforts in the region, their governor of Louisiana declared in 1735 that the tribe’s “entire destruction … becomes every day more necessary to our interests and I am going to exert all diligence to accomplish it.” From 1720 to 1763 several French armies marched into Chickasaw country from southern Louisiana and Mississippi to conquer the tribe. Choctaws, white militia, and black slaves supported the armies. All these efforts failed, and the tribe remained unvanquished when France surrendered its claims on the continent to the victorious British after losing the Seven Years War-including its North American theater, the French and Indian War-to them. Horatio Cushman in his 1899 chronicle History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, noted how, contrary to the Chickasaws’ long conflict with the French European powers, “neither the Choctaws nor Chickasaws ever engaged in war against the American people, but always stood as their faithful allies.’ Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

[clove-pinks]

I used to dislike the War of 1812 frontier-style "hunting frock" garment with fringed borders (which supposedly help it dry faster). So help me, my resistance has broken down and I like it now—I can't resist the pull of the Old Northwest. I also love how it resembles fashionable civilian men's coats of this time period with multiple cape collars.

I would love to find the source of this really nice illustration. As you can see from the top two soldiers, the United States went with a very similar look, compared with Britain, for Napoleonic-era riflemen (think of Sharpe's 95th Rifles in their green uniforms), like our equally confusing artillery.

[clove-pinks]

Ahhhhh!! This is the best Christmas gift!

Get Down from There!

@clove-pinks This image has been living in my mind rent free for a while now.

[kramlabs]

Texas told the Biden administration to take a hike.

Via Brion McClanahan

But this isn’t “nullification”.

Texas insists that the Biden administration enforce the laws of the United States.

Biden has so far refused and instead retaliated by cutting off natural gas exports from Texas.

In other words, Biden has chosen economic warfare against a State, the very definition of treason in the Constitution, to appease the hard left faction in his political party.

This is the very thing the founding generation feared from the executive branch.

Some background is in order.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas National Guard to construct obstacles—barbed wire fencing and shipping containers--on land adjacent to the Rio Grande River. This is Texas property, not federal land.

The United States Border Patrol used it as a processing center for illegal aliens, and thus it became a focal point for massive numbers of “migrants” crossing into Texas across the Rio Grande River.

Invasion would be a better word.

Texas then told the Border Patrol that they were no longer allowed on State property while Texas law enforcement began arresting and deporting illegal aliens.

The Federal Government sued in federal court and demanded that the razor wire and makeshift border wall come down. Biden’s Justice Department also argued that Texas’ efforts to enforce federal immigration law violated the Constitution.

“Texas cannot run its own immigration system. It’s efforts, through SB 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations.”

Here’s the catch. Texas isn’t running its own immigration system. It’s enforcing existing federal law.

Every officer in the United States, from the local governments to the President, takes an oath to uphold constitutional federal law. Biden did so in 2021. That is the primary language of his oath of office.

Biden has not claimed that immigration laws are unconstitutional. He has not claimed that these people are crossing the border legally.

He admits that they are entering Texas illegally, meaning his only job is enforcing the laws on the books, something his administration is clearly refusing to do.

Texas has done it for him.

But this raises several larger Constitutional questions.

The Founders unequivocally considered “invasion” to be one of the important reasons States maintained control of their own militia units.

That would be the modern misnamed “National Guard.”

Biden cannot “nationalize” the Guard in this instance because federal law would not allow it.

The Texas National Guard is already enforcing federal law, meaning that if Biden nationalized the Guard and told them to stand down, he would be in violation of the Constitution.

He would also violate federal law. The Insurrection Act of 1792 allows the President to nationalize the militia (National Guard) in three instances: to suppress insurrection, stop domestic violence, or enforce federal law.

Allowing invasion is not on the list. Nor is breaking the law.

That would be a dereliction of duty, an impeachable offense.

The parallels between Biden’s actions and other stand-offs between the States and the general government are impossible to find.

Texas wants to enforce federal law.

In 1798, Virginia and Kentucky nullified the Alien and Sedition Acts because they violated the Constitution. This wasn’t a case of neglect.

In 1815, several New England States refused to enforce laws in support of the War of 1812. Again, not a case of neglect.

In 1832, South Carolina nullified the federal tariff. Jackson threatened to send in the army to collect the tariff. He wasn’t refusing to enforce a federal law.

In the 1840s and 1850s, several Northern States refused to enforce the fugitive slave laws. The Supreme Court ruled that States did not have to use their own police powers to support federal law.

But in this case, Texas is supporting federal law. The Biden Administration has vacated its Constitutional responsibility.

The Justice Department’s claim that the general government has “exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens” would also be news to the founding generation.

States could determine residency and who could and could not be within their borders. Jefferson made this contention in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. After 1808, the general government could prohibit “persons” from entering the States, but this power was not denied to the States in Article I, Section 10, meaning the States could also allow or prohibit “persons” from entering their borders.

The “supremacy clause” only applies to laws made in “pursuance of the Constitution.”

Nor does the 14th Amendment cover illegal aliens. Only citizens of the States are entitled to due process and the privileges and immunities of citizens of the other States. Foreign nationals are not citizens of any State or the United States.

This is an open and shut case of dangerous abuse of power by the executive branch. If the Republicans in Congress had any spine, they would immediately impeach Biden for his action against Texas and inaction on immigration enforcement.

In the Philadelphia Convention, James Madison listed “negligence” and betraying “his trust to a foreign power” as the chief causes of impeachment, among others.

Attempting to coerce a State though economic boycotts would satisfy Gouverneur Morris’s definition of “treachery”, what he considered to be an impeachable offense.

In either case, Biden should be easily convicted and booted from power.

That is, if we had a real Constitutional government in the federal city.

That dream died in 1789 in the First Congress.

I discuss all of this on Episode 926 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

You can watch it here.

OR

You can listen to it and download it here.

If you want a real history education, check out McClanahan Academy. I've produced several courses on secession, the Constitution, the War, decentralization, and a host of other cool topics. I think it's the antidote to our current Lincolnian nightmare. Use the coupon code Podcast at checkout and get 25% off every class.

And if you want to get my show ad free, just head over to my Patreon account. For $10 you get no ads and one additional Podcast per month that is based on your questions. It's a win/win.

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[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 12, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Exactly 100 years later, journalists, reformers, and scholars meeting in New York City deliberately chose the anniversary of his birth as the starting point for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They vowed “to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, employment according to their ability, and complete equality before the law.” The spark for the organization of the NAACP was a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, on August 14 and 15, 1908. The violence broke out after the sheriff transferred two Black prisoners, one accused of murder and another of rape, to a different town out of concern for their safety. Furious that they had been prevented from vengeance against the accused, a mob of white townspeople looted businesses and burned homes in Springfield’s Black neighborhood. They lynched two Black men and ran most of the Black population out of town. At least eight people died, more than 70 were injured, and at least $3 million of damage in today’s money was done before 3,700 state militia troops quelled the riot. When he and his wife visited Springfield days later, journalist William English Walling found white citizens outraged that their Black neighbors had forgotten “their place.” Walling claimed he had heard a dozen times: “Why, [they] came to think they were as good as we are!” “If these outrages had happened thirty years ago…, what would not have happened in the North?” wrote Walling. “Is there any doubt that the whole country would have been aflame?” Walling warned that either the North must revive the spirit of Lincoln and the abolitionists and commit to “absolute political and social equality” or the white supremacist violence of the South would spread across the whole nation. “The day these methods become general in the North every hope of political democracy will be dead, other weaker races and classes will be persecuted in the North as in the South, public education will undergo an eclipse, and American civilization will await either a rapid degeneration or another profounder and more revolutionary civil war….” He called for a “large and powerful body of citizens” to come to the aid of Black Americans. Walling was the well-educated descendant of a wealthy enslaving family from Kentucky and had become deeply involved in social welfare causes at the turn of the century. His column on the Springfield riot prompted another well-educated social reformer, Mary White Ovington, to write and offer her support. Together with Walling’s friend Henry Moskowitz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who was well connected in New York Democratic politics, Walling and Ovington met with a group of other reformers, Black and white, in the Wallings’ apartment in New York City in January 1909 to create a new civil rights organization. In a public letter, the group noted that “If Mr. Lincoln could revisit this country in the flesh he would be disheartened and discouraged.” Black Americans had lost their right to vote and were segregated from white Americans in schools, railroad cars, and public gatherings. “Added to this, the spread of lawless attacks upon the negro, North, South and West—even in the Springfield made famous by Lincoln—often accompanied by revolting brutalities, sparing neither sex, nor age nor youth, could not but shock the author of the sentiment that ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.’” The call continued, “Silence under these conditions means tacit approval,” and it warned that permitting the destruction of Black rights would destroy rights for everyone. “Hence,” it said, “we call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.” A group of sixty people, Black and white, signed the call, prominent reformers all, and the next year an interracial group of 300 men and women met to create a permanent organization. After a second meeting in May 1910, they adopted a formal name, and the NAACP was born, although they settled on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth as their actual beginning. Supporters of the project included muckraking journalists Ray Stannard Baker and Ida B. Wells, and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been a founding member of the Niagara Movement, a Black civil rights organization formed in 1905. In 1910, Du Bois would choose to leave his professorship at Atlanta University to become the NAACP’s director of publicity and research. For the next 14 years, he would edit the organization’s flagship journal The Crisis. While The Crisis was a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a cultural showcase, its key function reflected the journalistic sensibilities of those like Baker, Wells, and especially Du Bois: it constantly called attention to atrocities, discrimination, and the ways in which the United States was not living up to its stated principles. At a time when violence and suppression were mounting against Black Americans, Du Bois and his colleagues relentlessly spread knowledge of what was happening. That use of information to rally people to the cause of equality became a hallmark of the NAACP. It challenged racial inequality by calling popular attention to racial atrocities and demanding that officials treat people equally before the law. In 1918 the NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, reporting that of the 3,224 people lynched during that period, 702 were white and 2,522 Black. In 1922 it took out ads condemning lynching as “The Shame of America” in newspapers across the country. When Walter Francis White took over the direction of the NAACP in 1931, the organization began to focus on lynching and sexual assault, as well as on ending segregation in schools and transportation. In 1944 the secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery, Alabama, chapter, Rosa Parks, investigated the gang rape of 25-year-old Recy Taylor by six white men after two grand juries refused to indict the men despite their confessions. Parks pulled women’s organizations, labor unions, and Black rights groups together into a new “Committee for Equal Justice” to champion Mrs. Taylor’s rights. In 1946 it was NAACP leader White who brought the story of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard, blinded by a police officers after talking back to a bus driver, to President Harry S. Truman. Afterward, Truman convened the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, directly asking its members to find ways to use the federal government to strengthen the civil rights of racial and religious minorities in the country. Truman later said, “When a Mayor and City Marshal can take a… Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out… his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.” And that is what the NAACP had done, and would continue to do: highlight that the inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples, bearing witness until “the believers in democracy” could no longer remain silent.

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[whencyclopedia]

John Marshall

John Marshall (1755-1835) was an American lawyer and statesman, who served as the fourth chief justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1801 until his death in 1835. Considered one of the most influential chief justices in US history, Marshall participated in over 1,000 decisions, including Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review.

Early Life & Revolution

John Marshall was born on 24 September 1755 in a log cabin in the frontier community of Germantown, in Fauquier County, Virginia. He was the eldest of 15 children born to Thomas Marshall, a land surveyor who, over the course of his career, would accumulate some 200,000 acres (81,000 ha) of land spread out across Virginia and Kentucky, making him one of the largest landowners along this frontier. Thomas Marshall, who had worked alongside a young George Washington to survey the land that would become Fauquier County, eventually became one of the county's most prominent citizens, serving as its first sheriff and later as its representative to the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. In 1754, Thomas married Mary Randolph Keith, a reverend's daughter who was related to both of Virginia's leading families, the Randolphs and the Lees. She gave birth to John a year after her marriage; through her, John Marshall was a distant cousin of Thomas Jefferson, his future political rival.

Despite the pedigree of his mother's side of the family, John Marshall did not receive a gentleman's education. Instead, he was raised on the frontier, first in the wilderness of Fauquier County and later in the Blue Ridge Mountain region. He was easy-going, with simple tastes in clothing and food, and a manner that was rustic yet pleasant. His black eyes were said to have been full of intelligence and good humor, and his boisterous laugh was enough to put anyone at ease; one future colleague would later recall that Marshall's laugh was "too hearty for an intriguer" (Wood, 434). He was mostly home-schooled by his parents, although he did receive a few months of formal education at an academy where he befriended future president James Monroe. His education was cut short, however, by the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. His father had supported the Patriot cause and joined a militia regiment leaving John, dutiful to both father and homeland, to quickly follow suit.

In 1776, Marshall was incorporated into the Continental Army as a lieutenant. In the autumn of 1777, he served under General Washington in the Philadelphia Campaign, seeing action at the Battle of Brandywine and the Battle of Germantown. When the army hunkered down for a bitter winter at Valley Forge, Marshall suffered through the cold and the hunger, shivering side by side with the other men; when the winter snows thawed into springtime mud, he drilled with them as well. In 1780, having risen to the rank of captain, Marshall was furloughed from the army and went off to the College of William & Mary to study law. As he left the military behind, Marshall reflected on his wartime experiences and came away with two beliefs that would greatly impact his career. The first was a fierce admiration for George Washington, whose integrity and determination led Marshall to believe that he was "the greatest man on earth" (Wood, 434). Second was a belief that the nation, were it to survive, needed a strong central government; Marshall's experience at Valley Forge, where Congress had struggled to keep the army supplied with adequate food and clothing, had been enough to convince him of that. Armed with these convictions, Marshall set out to embark on a legal career, one that would shape the destiny of the infant United States.

Continue reading...

[mariacallous]

“Join Your Local Militia or III% Patriot Group,” a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: “Now more than ever. Support the American militia page.”

Other content and messaging in the group is similar. And despite the fact that Facebook bans paramilitary organizing and deemed the Three Percenters an “armed militia group" on its 2021 Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List, the post and group remained up until WIRED contacted Meta for comment about its existence.

Free American Army is just one of around 200 similar Facebook groups and profiles, most of which are still live, that anti-government and far-right extremists are using to coordinate local militia activity around the country.

After lying low for several years in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric on Facebook—with apparently little concern that Meta will enforce its ban against them, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, shared exclusively with WIRED.

Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit “active patriots” and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They’re also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be “prepared” for whatever lies ahead. These groups are trying to facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county. Their goals are vague, but many of their posts convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for “war” or to “stand up” against many supposed enemies, including drag queens, immigrants, pro-Palestine college students, communists—and the US government.

These groups are also rebuilding at a moment when anti-government rhetoric has continued to surge in mainstream political discourse ahead of a contentious, high-stakes presidential election. And by doing all of this on Facebook, they’re hoping to reach a broader pool of prospective recruits than they would on a comparatively fringe platform like Telegram.

“Many of these groups are no longer fractured sets of localized militia but coalitions formed between multiple militia groups, many with Three Percenters at the helm,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “Facebook remains the largest gathering place for extremists and militia movements to cast a wide net and funnel users to more private chats, including on the platform, where they can plan and coordinate with impunity.”

Paul told WIRED that she’s been monitoring “hundreds” of militia-related groups and profiles since 2021 and has observed them growing “increasingly emboldened with more serious and coordinated organizing” in the past year.

One particularly influential account in this Facebook ecosystem belongs to Rodney Huffman, leader of the Confederate States III%, an Arkansas-based militia that, in 2020, sought to rally extremists at Georgia’s Stone Mountain, a popular site for Confederate and white supremacist groups. Huffman has created a network of Facebook groups and spreads the word about local meetups. His partner, Dabbi Demere, is equally active and on a mission to recruit “active” patriots into the groups. Huffman and Demere are also key players in the pro-Confederate movement known as “Heritage, not Hate.”

Before Meta shut it down, the pair ran Free American Army, which drew in individuals from several militias, including the Kentucky 3 Percenters, the Virginia Liberty Guard, and the Florida-based Guardians of Freedom, a group that was mentioned in the final January 6 report and whose members were among those arrested in connection with the Capitol attack. Free American Army also included a known activist in the far-right extremist Boogaloo movement. At least one user in the group claimed in their profile to be active-duty military; another claimed to work for the Bureau of Prisons.

“We have (and still do) traveled across our country standing up for our constitution, and have met most of you face to face. There's no time like the present to come together and organize our states, to build them stronger with true patriots (not people pretending to be Patriots and using groups for dating sites),” Demere wrote in a post last year. “We are relying on each and every one of you to keep us informed about what's going on in your state by bringing the information to us.” Demere and Huffman are also admins for a larger, public group called Freedom Across America, which has more than 2,000 members and is more focused on current-event commentary than militia building. But public groups play a key role in drawing in prospective recruits whom administrators can then funnel into smaller, more extreme private channels. Huffman and Demere did not respond to multiple requests from WIRED for comment.

The groups haven’t faced a lot of pushback from social media platforms: Though some of them have now been taken down, this network is just the latest example of a “banned” extremist coalition operating on Facebook, exposing Meta’s inconsistent approach to content moderation. Other reports in the past year have flagged that anti-immigrant border militias and the anti-government Boogaloo movement had rebuilt on the platform, despite being banned. In 2021, The Intercept obtained and published a reproduction of an internal Facebook document containing a blacklist of all 986 “dangerous individuals and organizations” the platform had banned. The majority of entities banned were “militarized social movements,” including the Three Percenters.

“We are removing the groups and accounts that violate our policies,” said a Meta spokesperson in an email to WIRED. “This is an adversarial space, where actors constantly try to find new ways around our policies, which is why we keep investing heavily in people, technology, research, and partnerships to keep our platforms safe.”

But Meta’s critics say the company is failing to allocate the necessary resources to address the problem.

Meta “has not improved its moderation efforts,” says Paul. “The company’s failure to effectively address these issues despite its billions in revenue, technological advances, and engineering talent proves that the policies it regularly touts are no more than a public relations ruse rather than actual efforts to combat harm.”

Last year, Meta conducted massive layoffs that reportedly led to the company ending more than 200 content moderators’ contracts. Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that there may soon be layoffs at the Oversight Board, a Meta-funded organization that oversees the company’s content moderation.

“There is the reality that neither social media platforms nor domestic law enforcement understand how they should respond to the online spaces that incubate domestic violent extremism,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “This issue has become even more glaring as these movements intersect with the mainstream, especially as it relates to election disinformation and conspiracies.”

These networks of public and private Facebook pages may also indicate that the militia movement—which had retreated from the public sphere and, in some cases, distanced itself from the term militia altogether—is considering a comeback.

At a recent conference for constitutional sheriffs in Las Vegas, conspiracy theorist and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne called for citizens to form militia cells and to “build alliances with the militias” in response to migrants at the US-Mexico border. In Michigan, which has long been a hotbed for paramilitary activity, a township established a militia in response to the state’s new “red flag law,” which allows the temporary confiscation of firearms from individuals believed to be at risk of harming themselves or other people. And earlier this year, in the most significant mobilization of the far right since January 6, rhetoric about an immigrant “invasion” galvanized a convoy to the border and rallied extremists, including individuals with militia ties. Since last spring, the Justice Department has charged several individuals linked to the North Carolina Patriot Party and the 2nd American Militia with violent plots to allegedly travel to the border, target migrants, and start a war. Politicians know militias are a problem: Earlier this year, Democrats introduced federal legislation in the form of the Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act, but the bill has yet to advance.

“What January 6 showed, despite the incompetence of the Oath Keepers, was that the threat was—and is still—the network, not a single organization,” says Lewis.

Many of the Facebook groups in this growing network are focused on local militia organizing, such as the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia.

“In light of the violence and uncertainty in the world, Covid 19 shortages, civil unrest, and potential for terrorist attacks and natural calamity, we exist to equip our members,” the administrator for the Pennsylvania Light Foot group, which has more than 1,000 members, wrote last month. “Our aim is to equip them with the ability to defend themselves, whether it be a mugger on the street or foreign soldier on our lawn.” The group has linked itself more firmly to the word militia recently—until March, they had called themselves the Guns of Pennsylvania.

The Arizonans State Civilian Guard is another recently formed group on Facebook. It’s run by Bryan Masche, a reality TV personality from the show Raising Sextuplets and a failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate who has spread election conspiracies and, more than a decade ago, pleaded guilty to domestic violence misdemeanor charges. The goal of the guard, according to its bio, is “advocating and organizing as the People in order to activate the Unorganized Militia.” In February, Masche shared a link to a Wikipedia page for the 1946 Battle of Athens, when civilians led an armed revolt against their local government. “Learn your History Folks,” Masche wrote. “The Battle of Athens, Georgia was the last successful Armed Rebellion in the United States since the Revolutionary War.” (The battle actually occurred in Tennessee, not Georgia. Masche did not respond to multiple requests from WIRED for comment.)

Matthew Robinson, who was affiliated with the Florida militia Guardians of Freedom, has recently been recruiting on Facebook for the Florida chapter of another network called the American Patriot III%—also referred to as APIII or AP3. He’s also touting “warrior survival training.”

“Are you prepared for what's coming? You think they're going to hand this back over, they have NO intention,” Robinson wrote in a recent Facebook post, along with the URL for the American Patriot III% website. “In our world today, the word ‘militia’ has many negative connotations including white supremacy,” the group says on its website, despite claiming not to be a militia itself. “Any militia is painted by the media today as a hate group.” (APIII is also explicitly blacklisted by Facebook as a “dangerous organization.”) Robinson did not respond to requests from WIRED for comment.

Facebook has long been a go-to hub for militia organizing. In 2020, social upheaval from the Covid-19 pandemic and racial justice protests created the ideal conditions for militias to act out their survivalist, vigilante, and anti-government fantasies.

In August, amid growing concerns about paramilitary and extremist activity in the US, Meta (then Facebook) announced updates to its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. It took sweeping action against pages, groups, and profiles associated with an array of extremist networks, including militias and their memeified cousins, the Boogaloo Bois. For a while, those extremists decamped to fringe sites such as MeWe, Parler, and MyMilitia.

But by the end of 2020, it was evident that the long-simmering militia movement still posed a clear and present threat. After January 6, 2021, when dozens of militia members joined forces with hordes of Trump supporters to storm the US Capitol in an attempt to block Joe Biden from becoming president, Facebook was widely blamed for allowing election conspiracies to flourish on the platform unchecked.

With the militia movement under intense scrutiny and even more paranoid than usual following January 6, it retreated from the streets. Some Oath Keeper chapters disbanded entirely; others scrambled to distance themselves from the optics of the Capitol riot by rebranding. Arizona’s Oath Keeper chapter, for example, rebranded and became the Yavapai County Preparedness Team. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of Oath Keeper chapters went from 70 in 2020 to five in 2022. For a moment, it was almost as if militia had become a dirty word, even among people in the movement.

But experts have cautioned that although militias have been less visible recently, that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. Periods of intense scrutiny—following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, for example—have resulted in lulls in public activity for as long as the modern paramilitary movement has been around. If anything, this time their anti-government rhetoric has only tightened its grasp on the mainstream.

“You don't need to be a card-carrying member of a militia group to go down the anti-government rabbit hole. For the most part, the anti-government extremist ideology has become intertwined with the mainstream on the right,” says Lewis. “The same umbrella movement that attacked the Capitol on January 6 has happily absorbed any conspiracies that further their goals, and has increasingly gained followers from across the right-wing ecosystem.”

The potential reemergence of the militia movement coincides with an increased romanticization of January 6, as well as deepening hostilities toward the federal government due to the prosecution of Capitol rioters and former president Donald Trump.

Polling conducted earlier this year of more than 1,000 Americans found that one in five Americans “strongly agree” that violence is the only viable solution to get the country back on track. Although the societal conditions heading into this year’s election are not the same as those in 2020, a newly emboldened militia movement could add a dangerous dimension to potentially fraught future events, such as a judge handing down a prison sentence for Trump or Trump losing another close presidential election.

“Nothing brings the freaks out of the woodwork like a presidential election,” says Lewis. “You've already seen the election denialism and threats to public officials ramping up, and the narratives and grievances—from the border to college campuses and somehow, inevitably, Soros and the ‘globalists’—are in place.”

And some of this is already taking place on Facebook.

In the Free America Army Facebook group, Huffman recently posted an Instagram reel made by an account called packingpatriot.2 that has 140,000 followers. The video includes dialog from the 1993 Western film Tombstone, played over footage of Trump's rally preceding the January 6 riot. Text appears: “When the government tries to steal the election again and they think we’ll just sit and take it … It won’t be like the last time … Just remember, they started it … We just wanted to be left alone … We prefer ballots over bullets … But …”

The video then cuts to a graphic of the preamble to the Constitution and an American flag, surrounded by flames.