Entries by Brian Halpin

Cultural Genocide by Paperwork

  In US history, it’s called “genocide by paperwork”. An Indigenous woman becomes consort to a frontier settler or wealthy planter. She is given a “Christian” name – maybe that of a neighbor or local preacher. Her husband/partner calls her “white” in census records to protect the rights of his mixed-ethnic children. Later historians scan […]

Haiti and Hate

  Inspired in part by the success of the American Revolution, enslaved Haitians rose up against their French colonial oppressors in 1791. And won. Many Haitians had hoped and even expected that the new USA would recognise their independence – after all, many free Black Haitian “Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue” had fought alongside American militias against […]

Hi! I’m Kristi!

  Hi!  My name is Kristi Noem. You probably already know me.  I’m the governor of South Dakota, where we like living right and being free. This great ol’ state was built by decent Christians like my great-grandpa Edward Arnold, who arrived in South Dakota in 1887 with his daddy in a boxcar on the […]

History, Sex, Power, and the American Underclasses (whew)

  Humans like sex. It’s why there are over 8 billion of us on the planet now. So far, so blazingly obvious. Men, women, and folks in between have never been particularly picky or finicky in terms of “race”, ethnicity, or skin color in selecting sexual partners. This is the reason almost every population group […]

I’ve Got a Name

  Like the pine trees linin’ the windin’ road I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name Like the singin’ bird and the croakin’ toad I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name And I carry it with me like my daddy did But I’m living the dream that he kept hid… Jim Croce [1973] […]

White Intelligence, LLC.

  It’s only after various pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are in place that we can begin to see some semblance of a picture. When I first wrote about J. D. Vance a few years ago, it was out of simple anger. Anger that a man who had managed to become wealthy would take the […]

The Invention of New Hebrews

  Many people watching the news coming out of the Near East would presume that Hebrew has been the language spoken by Jewish people throughout history. But for nearly 2,000 years, Hebrew was as dead as Latin – and much like Latin, was spoken fluently by only a tiny percentage of educated people, and then […]

Protection from Harm

  “Harm” = mental or physical injury   They say the taxes spent on the US military are essential for “protecting freedoms” and keeping Americans safe from harm. The leading cause of “harm” in the USA is poverty, not the actions of foreign powers. The lowest rates of premature death in the USA are in […]

Second Amendment Redux

  I have written elsewhere about the Second Amendment of the US Constitution having its roots in two or three major aspects of USA history. On 15 Dec 1791, the second (of an initial ten amendments) was appended to the US Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary […]

Picking a Version

  Attempting to understand and decipher history – real history – is hard. We read, we question, we read some more, we check our sources for ideological bias, we read someone else’s revision of canonical sources, we sniff around for hidden motivations and contingencies… And when we think we’ve got to the deepest level of […]