The Forgotten Ones

Free Persons of Color [Virginia, 1790]

Free Persons of Color [Virginia, 1790]

And so another day flies away on Photoshop.

This is an unusually short piece, because creating the map to go with it was not the 2 hour job I had envisaged.

I prepared this map as a handy visual aid for showing how much of the population of post-Revolutionary War Virginia was considered “non-white”.

Note that these percentages DO NOT include people enslaved at the time.

Many Americans will trip over themselves trying to prove they are descended from a Mayflower passenger, or descended from some 17-year-old German immigrant kid who got swept up in a war caused by wealthy elites (250 years on, this once hungry, hapless kid is now commemorated as a “Patriot”).

Yet in our brave new “anti-woke”, anti-DEI Christo-Fascist Conservative Nationalist Technocracy, the thousands upon thousands of brown, mixed-ethnic people who fled racist laws in Virginia and headed for the mountains of Appalachia to attempt to build a better life (often at the cost of Indigenous peoples) will be rarely mentioned, and very rarely claimed with the same pride by their modern “white” MAGA descendants.

Mainly because this history has been buried.

Southern Appalachians are now almost ALL the descendants of the “Scots-Irish”, apparently.

Except that many, many are not, however often they repeat it.

The conservative Protestant Loyalists of Northern Ireland LOVE to claim various powerful American figures as their kindred.

And after J. D. Vance fairly shouted it from the rooftops that he was a “Scots-Irish hillbilly”, of course the DUP and others in Ulster set furiously to work on J. D.’s family tree.

They went hard at it for a year.

And guess what?  As written by your humble author over 5 years ago, J. D. Vance is indeed about as “Scots-Irish” as an enchilada.

Mr. Vance needs to lay-off his fevered White Supremacist imaginings, and look at some real history.

He’ll find more ancestors among the mixed-ethnic brown underclasses seen on this map than among the Sons of Ulster.

Heads of Families, Virginia [1790] showing percent of FPC

Heads of Families, Virginia [1790] showing percent of FPC

Canaan, Palestine, and Zionism

Palestinians fleeing Jaffa [1948]

Palestinians fleeing Jaffa [1948]

It borders on the insane that the modern Jewish Zionist identity began with a group of Iron Age people telling stories of their erstwhile war and weather god Yahweh commanding a hostile takeover of land belonging to various Canaanites.

And here we are, 2,700 some-odd years later, with Jewish Zionists still believing it is their “destiny” to displace various Canaanites.

Palestinians are the direct descendants of the very Canaanites who, over centuries, over millennia, were forced to live at various times under the rulership of the Egyptian pharoahs, various short-lived Kingdoms of Israel-Judah, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the Persian Empire.

Neo-Assyrian Empire [maximum territorial extent]

Neo-Assyrian Empire [maximum territorial extent]

The conquests of Canaan/Palestine didn’t end there.

The Canaanites/Palestinians would fall under the yoke of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, and suffer the ravages of war as various Greek successors to Alexander (and local Jewish leaders) jockeyed for control of the region.

The Roman Empire would displace the Greeks, with Pompey installing a puppet regime under the “sort-of Jewish” Antipater the Idumaean, father of the better-known Herod the Great of Biblical fame.

Canaanites/Palestinians would watch the seizure of Jerusalem by Parthian forces, and endure the outfall of revolts and wars between Parthia, Rome, and various Jewish factions.

Palestinians would see Rome’s final crushing of Jewish attempts to reinstate Jewish rule in the region in the year 74 CE.

Palestinians would witness Queen Zenobia of Syria’s short-lived conquest of Palestine in 270 CE, and its recapture by Rome two years later.

Palestinians would endure plagues, the introduction of Christianity by a Roman emperor, Samaritan revolts, new Persian incursions, and Persian defeat by Eastern Roman Byzantium.

Palestinians would watch the Byzantines defeated by Rashidun Caliphate forces at the Battle of Dathin, right beside Gaza.

From their fishing boats, and from the hills where they tended their flocks and olive orchards, Palestinians saw the later Muslim Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid Arab dynasties fighting among themselves for control of the Palestinians’ “Canaanite” homeland.

Palestine would look, astonished, as Western European Crusaders arrived in a storm of steel and blood, establishing their own Crusader states, and Palestine would endure droughts and famine as they watched their land repeatedly change hands between Ayyubid Arabs and Crusaders, until a new people- the Mamluk Turks – entered the scene.

These Mamluks would remain in control for over two centuries, until Palestine’s final conquest and takeover by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.

Except for minor Egyptian incursions, the relative stability and peace in Ottoman Palestine would last almost 400 years.

*****

In the year 1700, Ottoman Palestine was home to a mixed Muslim, Christian, and Jewish population of around 232,000 – not surprising considering its complex history.

Of this number, 219,000 were Muslims, 11,000 were Christians, and only 2,000 were Jewish.

Jews thus represented less than 1% of the Palestinian population.

In the year 1800, things had changed but little.

A mixed population of around 275,000, of which 246,000 were Muslim, 22,000 were Christian, and 7,000 were Jewish.

So in 1800, Jews represented around 2.5% of the population of Palestine.

But something was afoot in Europe.  The age of nationalism and ethnic ideology was taking hold, with people beginning to believe their national borders should reflect distinct ethnic groups.

Very few regions on earth are home to a single, undiluted ethnic group, though.

When we draw lines on a map hoping to enclose a bunch of “Germans” within those lines, we will in fact be including multiple distinct ethnic groups – Swabians and Bavarians and Prussians and Franconians and Saxons and Romani and Slavs, and of course, Jews.

But the exact same drive toward ethnicity-based nationalism seen in Italy, Slavic lands, and Germanic states – with “blood and soil” seen as inextricably linked – took hold of the imagination of many among the Jewish diaspora.

It has become de rigeur for many on the left to compare the current Israeli state’s actions to that of Nazi Germany – without realizing the very real and profound shared roots and genesis of an ideology driving both groups to justify their dehumanization of “the other”.

The similarity doesn’t lie only in the actions of both.  It also rests in the motivations.

There is no place in Israel today where one will not notice the “Israeli” rendering of the name Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky (Ze’ev Jabotinsky) on street signs, buildings, and place names.

This native of Odessa – then part of the Russian Empire – was the main force behind the Zionist Revisionists who were obsessed with the establishment of a Jewish nation state on both sides of the River Jordan.  Jabotinsky worked with the British Empire in furtherance of Zionist goals, and when the British became a hindrance, he was happy to work with fascists like Mussolini.

Jabotinsky would go on to found Irgun, a violent and terroristic offshoot of the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah.  Zionist terrorist groups like Irgun and Lehi were responsible for some of the worst violence committed against the British in Mandatory Palestine, and they were behind many of the worst atrocities committed against Palestinians during the 1930s and 1940s.

Read that last bit carefully.  Zionists were killing Palestinians in the Levant BEFORE Nazis began killing Jews in Germany.

The linkage between culture, “blood and race”, and physical territory made by Germany’s National Socialists had ugly repercussions for Jews in Europe.

And the same linkage between culture, “blood and race”, and physical territory by made by Revisonist Zionists is having ugly repercussions for Palestinians of the Levant today.

*****

Here is not the place to explain at length the birth and development of the Zionist movement in various European countries.

Instead of history, I’ll leave you with a little bit of science in the form of population genetics.

Modern Palestinian DNA shows an 80-90% match with Bronze Age DNA samples from the Levant, including Palestine.

Modern Palestinians also show small percentages of Iranian, East African, Bedouin, and Bronze Age European admixture – all explainable by the various conquest and invasion events outlined above.

Of course many Jewish people also carry these ancient Levantine genes, but…

After 2,000 years of living in Europe, and 2,000 years of greater or lesser integration into various European populations, Ashkenazi Jews – the main drivers of the Zionist movement – also show around 41% European DNA admixture.

What this means in simple terms, is that most Palestinians today – but not European Jews/Israelis – are the descendants of people who have been continuously in this region since long before any Jewish polity came into being.

And this means long, long before even the small Hebrew kingdoms of the Iron Age.

They are essentially the descendants of the Canaanites of antiquity.  They have adapted over the centuries and millennia, practicing whichever religion was imposed on them by their conquerors.

The people of Palestine are not enduring the first attempt by powerful outsiders to conquer, control, or displace them.

In fact, they’re not even enduring the first Jewish attempt to conquer, control, or displace them.

I said at the beginning of this short screed that it seems insane that the Jewish identity alive today actually began over 2,500 years ago with a folk myth of their god Yahweh “promising” them a land already belonging to various Canaanites.

Even the very founder of Judaism (and by extension the founder of Christianity and Islam), was not from Palestine.

No, Abraham the Patriarch is thought to have been from either Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), or perhaps Assyria (modern Turkey).

It is hard to know from the archeological record whether the ancient Hebrews were just one small Semitic-speaking Canaanite tribe among many who happened to cobble together a couple of minor kingdoms in the Levant during the Iron Age, or if they were non-Canaanite incomers who really did conquer Canaanite territories.

What is certain is that the descendants of Israel and Judah had no more “right” to the Levant than the descendants of other peoples like the Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, Arameans, Phoenicians, Philistines, and many others also living in “the land of Canaan”.

And the vast majority of modern Israeli Jews are the descendants of an ethno-religious diaspora which hadn’t lived on the soil of Canaan/Palestine for untold centuries, indeed, millennia.

A modern European-descended Israeli Jew is not a “child of the land of milk and honey promised to the Hebrews”, and the “right of return” to Palestine offered by the Israeli state to Jews worldwide is outrageous and ridiculous.

Palestinians being used as human shields bt the IDF, Gaza City [2024]

Palestinians being used as human shields bt the IDF, Gaza City [2024]

An American Jew from Chicago – perhaps descended from German Jews who fled the Holocaust – now choosing to claim a “right of return” to Palestine/Israel, is playing games with history and reality itself.

An American Jew from Chicago has as much of a relationship to Roman-era Palestine as an Irish-American from Boston has to the Early Christian Gaelic kingdom of Cenél nEogain (Tyrone).

To a Palestinian, ancient Jews were just one in a long line of conquerors intent on hegemony in the ancient land of Canaan.

To a Palestinian, modern Jews or “Neo-Hebrews” are just another in a long line of conquerors intent on hegemony in the ancient land of Canaan.

Whichever polity has attempted to impose its will on “Canaan”, the Canaanites have remained.

If anyone has earned a right to dwell in Canaan/Palestine, it is the stunningly resilient Palestinians, who have stubbornly remained on their ground for 3,000 years, only leaving <part> of their homeland when pushed by Zionist bombs or at the end of a Zionist rifle barrel in 1948.

Free Palestine.

Gaza 2025 [Beit Lahia]

Gaza 2025 [Beit Lahia]

Microbes, Christopher Columbus, and Blackbeard

Smallpox virus

Smallpox virus

 

“The Columbian Exchange” is a term used by academics to describe the sudden, extensive, and often catastrophic coming-together of the “old” and “new” worlds post-1492, with plants and animals, foods, goods, technologies and diseases making an almost overnight appearance in places where they were previously unknown.

Imagine a modern world culture without the treasures of the Americas….

Italy without spaghetti sauce.  Unthinkable.  And yet, the tomato was unheard of in Italy until long after the death of Leonardo da Vinci.

No courgettes for “French” ratatouille.  No sunflowers for van Gogh to paint in the south of France.

Imagine a world without chocolate, or a cinema without popcorn.

A world without vanilla.

No blueberry muffins, and no cranberry sauce to go with turkey.  And no turkey, for that matter…

No chilis, no peanuts, no maple syrup and no pecans.  Forget cashews and avocados.

No papayas.  No pineapple for ruining a perfectly good pizza.

No potatoes.  Neither mashed, fried, crisped, baked, roasted, nor boiled.

No kayaking or canoeing.  No hammocks in the back garden.

The list of things Europeans and Asians and Africans introduced to the Americas is even longer, but one of those things – above all others – changed the course of world history in an incalculable way.

Disease.

*****

Ask any person on the street, and they will probably believe that the European overthrow of indigenous American societies was inevitable, a case of technologically advanced people arriving on a primitive shore with superior military tactics and superior weaponry – including horses, steel and gunpowder.

But consider this.

When Columbus landed in the Americas sailing under the flag of the Crowns of Spain, the Iberian peninsula (583,254 km2) was home to just under 8 million people.

At the same time, Mexico (1,972,550 km2), Central America (523,780 km2), and the ten largest Caribbean islands (217,009 km2) were probably home to around 26 million souls.

Hernán Cortés should not have been able to bring down the mighty Aztec Empire, even with his advantages in terms of armor and weaponry.

In 1519, the first Spanish attempt to take the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in fact failed, after its inhabitants rose up in anger at the Spanish capture and house arrest of their leader Moctezuma.

Moctezuma

Moctezuma

 

Cortés had hoped to rule this part of Mexico by using Moctezuma as his puppet, but his men were forced to flee after the death of Moctezuma – in circumstances which remain unclear to this day.

Hernán Cortés returned in 1521 with more Spanish soldiers and thousands of reinforcements from Tlaxcala, which was the main regional rival to the Aztec Empire.

Cortés had also taken as his consort a Nahua-speaking woman called Malintzin (or “la Malinche“), who bore him a son, and acted as an indispensable advisor and interpreter.

"La Malinche"

“La Malinche”

 

The Spanish and their new Tlaxcalan allies laid siege to Tenochtitlan for months, cutting-off its supplies of food and water.

The largest city in Spain at the time was Granada, with around 70,000 inhabitants.  Tenochtitlan is estimated to have been home to between 200,000 and 400,000 people.

But something far worse than siege warfare had overtaken this magnificent city.

Disease.

The city was being eaten from within by smallpox and measles introduced during the first Spanish attempt to take it.

The “history of the victors” which was told for centuries portrayed the Aztecs as a bloodthirsty and treacherous people “deserving” of being laid low by Christian conquerors.

And during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, victory in battle was usually attributed to a combination of warrior heroics and the blessings of God.

Not the failure of the human immune system in the face of novel pathogens…

*****

The indigenous population of North America at the time of the fall of the Aztec Empire has been estimated to have been anywhere between 5 million and 12 million.

The Vikings, some of the fiercest warriors ever produced in Europe, had got their butts thoroughly kicked every time they attempted to settle or colonize anywhere along the eastern seaboard of the Americas, pre-1492.

Every attempt by the Spanish to gain a foothold in North America in places like Florida, the Carolinas, and Southern Appalachia during the 1500s saw them defeated and sent packing by indigenous fighters.

In 1620, a century after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the population of England (132,932 km2) was still less than 3 million.

But sometime between the Viking Age, the age of conquistadors, and the arrival of the “Pilgrims” in Massachusetts in 1620, something had changed.

Smallpox.  And tuberculosis.

After Columbus, regular Spanish and Portuguese exploration parties (and increasing visits by Basque fishermen) in North America had introduced diseases for which Native American immune systems had no answer.

Anywhere between 70% and 90% of the pre-contact Native American population of the southern and eastern part of the North American continent was dead by 1620.

This would be like New York City shrinking to the size of Nashville, Tennessee in just 100 years.

The “Pilgrim fathers”, a group best characterized as religious extremists, did not arrive on a wild shore with innumerable “savages” lurking in a boundless woodland wilderness.

They arrived in the deserted shopping mall of a zombie apocalypse.

Empty villages.  Fields cleared from woods but devoid of workers.  Fragmented groups of survivors eager to make peace with the strangers new on their shore.

Things did not turn out well for the Indigenous peoples who walked the path of amity and peace.

Just ask the people in dusty Oklahoma trailer parks today, whose Lenape ancestors once called the leafy environs of present-day Harvard College and Boston their home.

*****

The echoes of “The Columbian Exchange” continued to ripple-out in strange ways, though.

Consider the life of the notorious pirate Blackbeard.

Edward Thatch, privateer turned pirate among pirates, was born in about 1680 in Bristol, a slave port in western England, and a port second only to London at the time.

Born to an educated, middle-class family.

Blackbeard might have retired with any one of his fourteen purported wives/consorts in blissful, wealthy, “legitimate” anonymity (thanks to sweet deals with local eminences), but no.

Edward Thatch, aka Blackbeard

Edward Thatch, aka Blackbeard

 

Like a formulaic plot out of Hollywood, he came out of early retirement for the proverbial “one last job”.

His “one last job” was interrupted by a small problem.  Many of his crew were suffering from syphilis.

Syphilis. One of the few diseases apparently gifted back to the “Old World” from the “New” post-Columbian Exchange.

In 1718, Blackbeard blockaded the port of Charles Town (later Charleston) in South Carolina, in order to procure medical supplies for his syphilitic crew.

These medical supplies included mercury, and medical syringes for injecting mercury directly into the urethra of the penis.

Mercury syringes

Mercury syringes

 

Yes, this was the best medical advice at the time for treating one of the nastiest of STDs.

Western medicine has moved on, but Edward Thatch did not.

His blockade of Charles Town was the final straw which set him in direct opposition to the Royal Navy, and he died in hand-to-hand combat off Okracoke Island the same year.

Who decides the fate of nations?

Men, women, or microbes?

Palestine’s Apocalypse Now

Jerusalem, circa 1897

The photo above was taken in Jerusalem, Ottoman Palestine, in 1897.

When this photo was taken, the population of Palestine was at most 8% Jewish.

Even this 8% misrepresents the centuries-old demographic makeup of Palestine.

Since 1881, Zionists (mostly from Europe, with a few from Yemen) had already begun an attempt to launch a “return” to a region they had not inhabited for almost 2,000 years.

This “cult of return” to God’s “Promised Land” is known as the “First Aliyah” among many Jewish Zionists.

Before the “First Aliyah”, i.e. in about 1880, the Jewish population of Palestine was probably around 3%.

In the late 19th century, 99.7% of the world’s Jews lived somewhere other than Palestine.

Not as exiles, not as war refugees, but as a religious minority incorporated into communities, nations and polities almost everywhere in the world.

Jews spoke a myriad of languages, and integrated many of the foodways, folkways, and musical traditions of the places they came to inhabit.

Whether Ashkenazi from Russia or Sephardic Paradesi of India,  a couple of things can be said with certainty about the vast majority of Jews throughout the world by the late 19th century:

1)  Jews were extremely dispersed and culturally diverse

2)  Jews were centuries-removed from the Eastern Mediterranean place and culture of their religious texts

One might as well expect a modern Samoan to claim a “right of return” to Taiwan!

Zionism is primarily a European settler-colonialist land grab, underpinned with religious ideology by Jewish supremacists.

Yet this issue has been so heavily propagandized, for so long, that to even question the right of Israel to exist is seen by many as extremist.

The only difference between ethnic-cleansing, land theft, barbarous genocide and a legitimate nation state is TIME and the CURATION OF PUBLIC MEMORY.

By all measures of natural justice, the USA itself has no “right” to exist.

Like Israel, the USA only exists as a de facto entity due to ethnic-cleansing, land theft, and yes, barbarous genocide.

But the USA completed most of its internal colonialist violence shortly before WWI, so public memory has been carefully curated for over a century now.

The expression “Manifest Destiny” carries the weight of untold, almost unspeakable violence and trans-generational suffering within its short six syllables.

But now, “Manifest Destiny” has become just a couple of words to place in a library, or lip service dropped casually into a high school history textbook.

No need for Americans to mention or learn about the screams of Pequot children being burned alive by Puritan zealots in Massachusetts, or Lakota women being blasted with US Army field artillery as they crouched weeping with fear in a ravine in South Dakota.

That was AGES* ago.

Pure “woke” nonsense to mention it.

Thank you for your service!

The Zionist project in Palestine only began to gather real momentum after WWI, switching gears into its most vicious phase shortly after WWII.

100 Years of Foreign Jewish Immigration to Palestine

100 Years of Foreign Jewish Immigration to Palestine

 

In the decades when other colonial powers were beginning to disengage from various regions worldwide, Israel stands almost alone as the last blatantly ethno-supremacist settler-colonialist project in the western world.

Western powers have encouraged and supported this particular project for a number of reasons, none of which are moral or just.

If the consequences were not so brutal, the claims of being “indigenous to Palestine” made by Jewish supporters of Israel living in The West would be simply laughable.

The English Puritan Oliver Cromwell cruelly transported many Irish from their homeland to colonies in the Americas during the 1600s.

After 375 years in America, do the descendants of those Irish people – living for centuries as Americans, from Boston to Los Angeles – do these modern Americans have a “right of return” to Ireland?

Of course not.  They are no longer Gaelic in any meaningful sense.  And the predominantly Gaelic world their ancestors left no longer exists.  Ireland moved on in their absence, and became something else.

The same is true – perhaps even more so – for Jewish people scattered all over the world for over 2,000 years.

They are no longer Judeans in any meaningful sense.  And the world their ancestors left no longer exists.  Palestine moved on in their absence, and became something else.

Israel and Zionism is trying to reconstitute something long dead with the blood of the living.

It’s racist, Jewish ethno-supremacy, based in the exact same thinking which gave rise to “white” supremacy in America, and to “Aryan” supremacy in Germany.

And to those who say that the world’s Jews need a safe home?  You’ve already had a couple of safe homes for centuries.  They’re called the UK and USA.  And neither place requires the murder of 18,000 children in the same number of months to keep Jews safe.

It would be interesting to know how many among the hundreds of thousands of Jewish supporters of Israel currently living in New York City would be willing to remove themselves to a blockaded and fenced enclave on Staten Island, to allow for the return of the Iroquois and Lenape diaspora to their rightful homelands in eastern New York State?

Let’s see what happens when the “First Lenape Aliyah” to Manahatta begins…

 

*The Massacre at Wounded Knee took place during the lifetime of this writer’s great-grandparents.  An equivalent massacre has taken place EVERY DAY for over 600 days now in Palestine.

 

The Imaginary Sons of Sweyn Forkbeard

10th century portayal of Viking raid by Abbo of Fleury

10th century portayal of Viking raid by Abbo of Fleury

 

With a name like “Before We Were White”, it is to be expected that this blog and podcast gets noticed by “white” supremacists and “white” Christian nationalist ideologues.

Once they discern the true nature of the project (perhaps feeling they have been sneakily lured into some progressive honeytrap) they tend to offer some parting shots before they swiftly exit.

I often find myself conflicted when trying to decide whether the people commenting from this ideological position should be ignored, muted, or simply blocked.

Ignoring no longer seems to be an option, when so many of the MAGA persuasion are now open apologists for “White Christian Nationalism”.

From Project 2025, to the quasi-fascist, Opus Dei inflected conservative Catholicism of J. D. Vance and two-thirds of the US Supreme Court, we are becoming encircled by a cultural movement which perceives Christianity not as a set of moral principles, but as a symbol for a fetishized and largely imaginary past which can be used to indoctrinate the present.

The childish or undeveloped mind tends to view the world through a Manichean lens, in which all is light or dark, good or evil, truth or lies, man or woman, strength or weakness, win or lose, black or white…

People who frame the world in such terms are attracted to historical narratives and epic tales of cataclysmic conflicts ending in dominance and submission.

Every aspect of the self-identity of such people is coded to align with dominance or superiority.

“Christianity” must equal “God’s dominion”. “His” trampling of non-believers under “His” feet.

“Nation” must equal “earthly dominion”.  The richest country.  The most powerful military.

“White” must equal “racial” superiority.  “Whites” must be seen as civilizationally more advanced and innately more intelligent than other “races”.

This is a mindset which loves clear hierarchies in terms of social position and gender roles.

The European Middle Ages represent a Golden Era in the minds of such people.

The “white”, northern European Christian warlord crusader stands thus as the ultimate symbol of empowered masculinity.

The right gender.

The right “race”.

The right religion.

The right social structure.

Hierarchical, authoritarian, “white” male dominance.

*****

Look closely at many members of the police and armed forces in the USA.

Look at various militia and “patriot” groups.

Look at “politicians” like Pete Hegseth.

Nordic runes and other Nordic/Germanic/Crusader symbols are everywhere.

Of course many will deny that such iconography and symbolism automatically relates to “white” supremacy or any other sketchy ideology.

Maybe people who use physical force on other human beings as part of their job description simply like to identify with what they perceive as the ultimate “warrior cultures”?

Even if this were true in the majority of cases (which this writer doubts based on his own time in the army), it is still clearly associated with an equally creepy need to assert “white pride”.

At this point, I can imagine one of these men asking “And what’s wrong with ‘white pride’?  Aren’t Black people always talking-up ‘Black pride’?”.

That question has been put to me so many times over the past decades, that I probably have scar tissue on the brain from replying.

White is not an ethnicity.

Black is not an ethnicity.

Those are skin colors, and extremely broad indicators of vast population groups spanning continents.

Black people have felt the need to assert pride in their skin color (not their ethnicity!) because for centuries, people of light skin have told them their blackness was a mark of inferiority.

No one of broadly European ancestry was ever systematically enslaved, belittled, or degraded due to their “whiteness”.

“White” people were sometimes enslaved as war captives.

“White” people were sometimes enslaved as “infidel Christians” by Muslim Arabs.

“White” people were transported to colonies as involuntary indentured servants.  Not for being “white”, but for being Scottish or Irish.

So putting it bluntly, to claim “white pride” is a bit ridiculous.

You may as well get tattoos proclaiming your deep pride in having a long nose.

“White” isn’t an ethnicity.  Red hair and freckles isn’t an ethnicity.

Even the terms “German”, “Saxon”, or “Viking” do not denote actual ethnic groups.

*****

It is beyond laughable that anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America would use iconography associated with medieval Germanic Europe as part of their “identity” or cultural inheritance.

Scandinavian runes, Viking imagery, tattoos of St. George crosses or pathetic muscle-bound weightlifter-inflected fantasy artwork depicting Frankish crusaders, Saxon warlords, and Norman knights have precisely nothing to do with the centuries-long intermixing of hundreds of ethnicities in America.

Unless of course the intent is to equivalate Manifest Destiny with Crusader violence?

The National Socialists (Nazis) of 1920s and 1930s Germany loved this sort of thing, with composers like Richard Wagner being much admired for offering an artistic pseudo-history of ancient Germania and Scandinavia peopled by “pure”, but utterly imaginary ancient folk heroes.

Explaining the difference between the fake concept of “race”, and population groups, nationality, ethnicity, tribalism, and culture is so complicated that I started a blog and podcast.

In order to claim an “ethnicity”, surely a person should be able to demonstrate one or more things:

immersion within a specific ethnic community’s culture, or (at the very least),

a majority of ancestors from that claimed ethnic group

THIS WILL ALMOST NEVER BE POSSIBLE FOR LONG-TIME AMERICANS, BECAUSE THEY ARE A PROFOUNDLY MIXED PEOPLE.

I’ve shared a table below showing the number of ancestors all of us have, as we travel back through the generations.

Number of ancestors potentially affecting our inherited DNA

Number of ancestors potentially affecting our inherited DNA

 

Can any American seriously claim that half, or even a quarter, of their 8,192 eleventh great-grandparents came from one single culture or ethnic community?

“Before We Were White” offers this public challenge to any self-identified American “White Christian Nationalist” who believes they are ethnically or “racially” pure:

If at least half of your family has been in America since colonial times (pre-Revolution), prove that none of those ancestors were people of color.

You will not be able to do it.

You’re not who you wish you were.

And you’re certainly not primarily – or even a meaningful fraction – Norse or Norman or Saxon by descent.

You’re an American with serious masculinity, educational and cultural issues.

 

*****

Even if a person could demonstrate that ALL of their ancestors came from Central or Northern Europe, this still would not mean that they are in any sense “racially pure”.

Since so many “white pride” Americans seem quite taken with Frankish and Norman imagery, let’s take a brief look at the French people to explain why these particular Americans are, well, so ill-informed…

What is a French person?

The largest “ethnic group” in the modern state of France is the group of people who speak the Central/Northern dialect of a language which only came into being over the course of many centuries – through migration, invasion, and immigration.

The oldest attested ethnic group in France were the Gauls, who spoke a Celtic language. The conquering of Gaul by the Romans under Julius Caesar in 50 BCE saw the development of a Gallo-Roman society over the subsequent four centuries.

In other words, the Romans settled their new frontier with people from all over the Roman Empire, which stretched from the Middle East to NW Europe to North Africa at the time.

It is worth mentioning here that Iraqi soldiers in the Roman army were scribbling graffiti on walls in Scotland nearly 2,000 years ago, and the Mediterranean city of Marseille (Massalia) had been founded by Greek traders 600 years before the time of Julius Caesar.

In what would only be called “France” many centuries later, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century CE saw a massive inward migration of Germanic tribes from the east such as the Burgundians, Franks, Suebi, and Visigoths – with a late influx of Vikings during the Middle Ages.

Before the age of the printing press began to unify it linguistically, France was a patchwork of ethnic groups speaking innumerable languages, dialects, and mixed sub-dialects. Evidence of this can be seen in the many languages and regional dialects still spoken today:

Alsatian (Alemannic) [Germanic]

Auvergnat (Occitan) [Romance]

Basque (Palaeo-European) [no known linguistic relatives]

Breton (Brittonic) [insular P-Celtic]

Catalan [Western Romance]

Corsican (Italo-Dalmatian) [Romance]

Franco-Provencal [Romance]

French Flemish (Dutch dialect) [Germanic]

French (official langues d’oïl) [Romance]

Gascon (Occitan) [Romance]

Lorraine Franconian (West Central German) [Germanic]

Norman (langues d’oïl) [Romance]

Occitan (langues d’oc) [Romance]

Picard (langues d’oïl) [Romance]

Poitevin-Saintongeais (langues d’oïl) [Romance] one of the main groups ancestral to Acadians/Louisiana Cajuns

Because the majority of the “French” Huguenots (French Protestants) who ended-up in North America were from the south and southwestern parts of France, this means many of them almost certainly spoke a language other than “Standard French”.

All of this perfectly encapsulates why ethnic or “racial” purity was an illusion long, long before the concept began to take root in places like Anglo-America.

A “French Huguenot” arriving in Virginia colony during the 1600s might be lighter-skinned than most Africans, but nonetheless might be a mixture of genes from anywhere across the Northern European, Eastern European, and Mediterranean world – including the Roman Middle East and North Africa.

Medieval French peasant family

Medieval French peasant family

 

When people used the words “England” or “France” during the 1600s and 1700s, they were describing a POLITICAL identity which was only PARTLY related to the ethnic or cultural identities on the ground at the time.

 

*****

Those who still insist on romanticizing the Vikings would do well to read books like “The Viking Way” by Professor Neil Price.

The nature of Scandinavian magic and religious practice during the Middle Ages is far too gruesome and depraved to include here in detail.

Widow and child sacrifice, ritual gang rape of slaves, infanticide of mostly females (leading to a male-skewed population and all the problems which come with that)…

To those inclined to say we should not measure past societies by today’s standards?

Fair enough.

But when even contemporary Arab travellers among the Vikings were utterly horrified by the things they saw in a society undergoing Christianization at the time, it might be worth wondering why…

White Christian Islamophobes who believe themselves the inheritors of a “white” Northern European medieval “bloodline” (and pathetically fetishize it) would do well to remember that during a time of savagery and yes, depravity, in the far north of Europe, the caliphates in Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) were the main center of science and learning in wider Europe at the time.

And “White” Christian nationalists who see themselves as the inheritors of the slightly later Frankish Christian crusader class and culture – a culture which would later give its name to France?

“White” Christian US nationalists are living in cuckoo land.

Frankish warlords who formed the basis of later central European royalty are almost never the class of people whose descendants ended-up on ships to America.

The origins of far, far many more Americans are to be found among various peasants, religious extremists, indentured servants, kidnapped street urchins, mixed-ethnic coastal and river smugglers and pirates, ruthless speculators, and transported criminals (including beggars, vagrants, and prostitutes).

And almost all of these mostly underclass people intermixed at some stage with African and Indigenous American peoples, not to mention Jews, Romani Gypsies, South Asians, and a hundred other ethnic groups never mentioned under America’s racial caste categories…

The USA could have done what every other place in the world has done at one time or another.

It could have truly embraced its own special mix of people who have come together to form a brand new “ethnicity in the making”.

But no. The artificial constructs of “race” and “racial castes” are so powerful that instead of accepting who they truly are, many Americans choose to continue constructing fake identities, harking back to fake ancestry and fake history.

White supremacy is not only wicked.

It’s downright ill-informed and stupid.

Concentration Camp Gaza

Concentration Camp Gaza

Concentration Camp Gaza

 

If the entire Gaza Strip was divided into parcels the size of a football field, picture “A” shows how many people would be crowded onto each field.

And this was BEFORE the current phase of a 75+ year COLONIZING and ETHNIC-CLEANSING project taking place throughout the former British Mandate of Palestine (the earlier Ottoman Palestine).

The end of the Arab-Israeli War in 1949 – precipitated by Israel’s unilateral declaration of a state on Palestinian Arab lands – saw the Gaza Strip fall under Arab control and the creation of a state called the All-Palestine Protectorate.

Until 1967, the Gaza Strip was effectively under either Egyptian or United Arab Republic control (pending the creation of a Palestinian state which had been promised by the UK during its time there between the end of WWI and 1948).

The population of Gaza swelled between 1948 and 1967, with many refugees arriving there after fleeing Israeli violence directed against Palestinians elsewhere.

Israel captured Gaza during its war with Egypt in 1967, and has continued to occupy and blockade it by land and sea since then, in clear breach of international law.

Hamas was formed in the 1980s, and modelled on the Islamist Pan-Arab Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt.  Islamist attitudes had seen an upsurge in the wake of the Six Days War in 1967, and began to move in a more militant direction as the illegal Israeli occupation of Arab lands continued.

It is worth noting, that much like the IRA in Ireland and Great Britain during the late 20th century, Hamas maintains separate political and military wings.

Beginning in the 1990s, various Islamist militant groups, including the military wing of Hamas, began to engage in suicide bombings against civilian targets in Israel.

Hamas ceased these immoral and indiscriminate actions in 2008.

While this type of violence should be strongly condemned, it must also be acknowledged that Zionist groups such as Irgun used the exact same tactics against Arabs and the British during the 1930s and 1940s.

Not every Zionist agreed with Irgun, and not every Palestinian agrees with Hamas.

Once the cycle of violence starts in any conflict, it escalates and attracts some of the most thuggish elements in society to it.

 

*****

 

Money and supplies were tacitly allowed to reach Hamas over the past two decades, as Israel hoped to “divide and rule” by favoring the Hamas leadership in Gaza over the PLO and Fatah leadership in the (also illegally occupied) West Bank.

Israel’s occupation and “buffer zones” since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack have reduced living space in Gaza itself by at least half, and possibly three-quarters.

Picture “B” is how Palestians are now expected to live.

It is an open air concentration camp.

No hyperbole, no false equivalence.

No supplies have entered Gaza for over 60 days.  No food.  No medicine.

It is collective punishment.

It is illegal.

It is depraved and morally abhorrent.

The silence of USA and UK politicians is deafening.

*****

Imagine if during the so-called “Troubles” in 1970s Northern Ireland, the entire might of the British Armed Forces had been brought to bear in an effort to “destroy the IRA”.  British Army.  Royal Navy.  Royal Marines.  Royal Air Force.

Imagine if the British Armed Forces accused IRA members living in houses and flats in places like Derry, West Belfast, or County Armagh of using their community as “human shields”.

Imagine if the British Armed Forces had issued an ultimatum demanding that IRA members come out into the open to fight.

And imagine if the IRA had refused to commit suicide in this way, and the British Armed Forces proceeded to systematically bomb into dust every single building in every single Irish Nationalist or Irish Republican city, town, or neighborhood.

Imagine the British Armed Forces targeting schools.

Imagine the British Armed Forces destroying hospitals.

Imagine the British Armed Forces targeting ambulances – and then tying the hands of paramedics before shooting them in the head and burying them with bulldozers.

Imagine the British Armed Forces torching Red Cross aid convoys.

Imagine the British Armed Forces shooting over 176 journalists – for being Irish journalists.

Imagine the British Armed Forces flattening dozens of media offices.

Imagine the British Armed Forces bombing and destroying Catholic churches.

Imagine the British Armed Forces intentionally destroying sewage pumping stations and wastewater treatment facilities.

Imagine the British Armed Forces had fired missiles into emergency shelters and refugee camps on open farmland, including many being run by UN aid agencies?

Imagine the British Armed Forces had murdered at least 18,000 CHILDREN in just 18 months.

That’s another dead child or baby every 30 or 40 minutes. Non-stop. 24/7. For a year and a half.

Imagine that a British Armed Forces blockade left 290,000 CHILDREN STARVING TO DEATH.

*****

The British Armed Forces did a lot of bad things in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.

But they didn’t do any of the things which Israel is currently doing to the people of Gaza.

Why?

Because such actions would have constituted clear and shocking war crimes under international law.

THE ACTIONS IN GAZA TODAY CONSTITUTE ETHNIC-CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE, and it is being enabled and facilitated by the USA and UK governments.

And it is why pro-Palestinian voices are being grabbed off the streets in America.

We MUST speak when others are silenced.

 

Al-Zawayda, central Gaza

Al-Zawayda, central Gaza

 

Gaza: 141 sq mi (2,141,643 people)

N. Ireland: 5,231 sq mi (1,910,543 people)

 

 

 

 

 

Things we never learned in school…

WV coal miner strike, 1921

West Virginia coal miner strike, 1921

 

We all rely on experience to understand the world and to make good decisions.

History is just experience written down and passed on.

If your coal miner great-grandfather tells you about how the mining companies once made virtual slaves of entire communities, and that the miners went out on strike, he is sharing his experiences.

When he tells you how the mining companies ganged up with law enforcement, private agencies, and the federal government to break strikes with violence, intimidation, and outright murder, he is sharing his experiences.

When you decide to write down his exact words, those words become “history” – or at the very least, an important historical record.

If your great-grandfather’s personal history receives the attention of academics and professional historians, who then use it to help tell the story of America in books and academic papers, then your grandfather’s stories become part of “official history”.

If someone deems this official history to be important, your grandfather’s stories might even end up in school history textbooks.

Or not.

After all of the aforementioned steps have been taken, there is still the not-so-small matter of WHO DECIDES WHAT SHOULD BE IN SCHOOL HISTORY BOOKS, AND WHICH BOOKS TO BUY.

In some USA states, a book review panel might be comprised of educators selected by the state board of education – people who are then appointed by the state governor to examine potential history textbook candidates.

This review panel then makes its recommendations.

All eminently sensible, yes?

But wait.

Some state boards of education do not select their book review panels only from teachers and educators.

Their book review panels often include parents, business representatives, politicians, and Christian religious leaders.

In other words, some states leave the content of their history books to people who have studied and taught history.

“Experts”, God forbid.

But many other states believe Christian church pastors or affluent business persons (for example) should have an equal say in what constitutes “history” in their state.

I don’t want to underestimate the intelligence of my readers by being a bit too on the nose here, but I’m going to say it anyway.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that a school history textbook review panel is appointed in a state with Big Mining interests, and the board decides to “invite” the head of the biggest local employer to make recommendations.

Let’s say the biggest local employer is Burn More Coal, Inc.

What are the chances that your coal mining great-grandfather’s personal recollections – his lived experience of violence and rank exploitation – made it from your keyboard into an academic paper?

What are the chances that one or two academic papers mentioning your great-grandfather’s experiences came to inform and influence the content of “serious” history books?

What are the chances that any serious history books mentioning your great-grandfather’s life and experiences might actually end-up as secondary source material for a school history book?

And finally, what are the chances (if your great-grandfather’s life and experiences DID end up being included as part of the American story in a school history textbook), what are the chances of this version of history making it past the CEO of Burn More Coal, Inc.?

All of this doesn’t even mention that book publishing companies are in the business of selling books.

Does anyone truly believe that a company publishing school history textbooks will include chapters on land theft, broken treaties, resource wars, ethnic cleansing, and brutal racial injustice in their texts?

Especially when they are submitting texts for review in states where many politicians and officials are openly hostile to any history which portrays the USA as anything less than “a shining city on a hill”?

*****

It would be easy at this point to become disheartened, and ask “What’s the point?”.

It would be understandable if we simply said “There are too many odds stacked against us.  There are too many opposing forces arrayed in the field”.

But truth is like the tiniest seed which forces its way up through cracks in the concrete and asphalt.

This is precisely why rich people, authoritarians, and creepy, dangerous ideologues are EXTREMELY interested in controlling the historical narrative in a death vise-grip – through the mass media, through data mining and control of social media, and yes, through school textbooks.

This is precisely why rich people and authoritarians are currently attempting to bring colleges, universities, and museums to heel.

A huge part of resistance is saying and writing what is true in our own life, in our own space.

When we tell our stories, everyday, everywhere – to the girl in the coffee shop, to the mailman, to the hairdresser, to the garage mechanic, to our social media friends – we are adding to the historical narrative.

And history is nothing more, nothing less, than our lived experience being written down and passed on.

As the estimable James Baldwin once wrote, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it”.

It is our job, our duty, to keep telling our stories, and to say all of the things unsaid.

When we give up our right to tell the truth openly, we become little more than slaves – tiny, silent cogs in a vast whirring machine constructed to manufacture wealth for masters and overlords.

Writing and learning real history is sand in the gears of the machine.

“Popery”

Gravestone, Southwell Minster

Gravestone, Southwell Minster

From ancient Sumer, through to Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Rome, religion and state power have been intertwined for nearly 6,000 years.

In the year 590 CE, a wealthy Roman senator’s son named Gregorius Anicius became pope, and just over a decade later he sent a Roman missionary named Paulinus to Britain, in an effort to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.

The arranged marriages and political machinations involved in spreading the influence of the Roman Christian church would require volumes to explain, so we won’t attempt it here.

At the time of Paulinus‘ arrival the place now called England was a patchwork of kingdoms and smaller client chiefdoms including Kent, West Seaxa (Wessex), and East Anglia.

Further north lay the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira – both would soon amalgamate into the powerful kingdom of Northumbria.

In between lay the various small kingdoms which would eventually become Mercia.

Squeezed in among various major and minor chieftains was a leader named “Snot“, who would give his name to “Snotengaham” – “the home of Snot‘s people”.

By the High Middle Ages, and the time of Robin Hood balladry, this settlement had become known as “Nottingham”.

Around the year 627 CE, Paulinus founded a small church in a village near “Snotengaham” now called Southwell Minster.

The Saxon peasantry around Southwell Minster would have seen the wealth of the church and its officers increase over the centuries.

The Saxon peasantry would have witnessed the brutal takeover of their local lands and church by the Normans during the 11th century.

The Saxon peasantry would have watched the local priests and bishops installed by their new Norman overlords become fat from a rich living made off tithes and the sale of indulgences.

The English peasantry would eventually see Henry VIII dissolve and ransack the English Catholic monasteries, making himself head of the church.

By 1620, many of the more hyper-religious Protestant English were so disgruntled with the new Anglican church created by Henry VIII that they had formed separatist congregations, with many heading to places like the Netherlands and North America, in hopes of setting-up theocratically governed communities.

I will leave it to your own judgment whether the time since Pope Gregory sent Paulinus among the Saxons (and up to the funeral of Pope Francis this week) has been a time of moral and ethical progress created by religion.

My own feelings on the matter are best summed-up by this weathered and lichen covered headstone in the grounds of Southwell Minster.

Genealogy as a Weapon in the Fight for Truth

Family Tree icon

 

Genealogy is often treated like the red-headed stepchild of historical research.

Stated as simply as possible, genealogists tend to sift through data at a more granular level than historians.

An historian is mostly concerned with whether a source is primary or secondary – that is to say, “Was a written document written by a direct witness to events?”, or “Was this document written by someone repeating something already said or written elsewhere?”.

A good historian usually places more value on primary sources, while taking context, bias, etc. into account.

After a few years involved in amateur genealogy, I began to notice certain discrepancies between the narratives written by many professional historians, and the details of various individual lives as revealed through genealogical investigations.

I’ll offer one example:

Most historians of the colonial and frontier eras have, at some stage, made fairly broad statements about the ethnic make-up of the settler/colonizers of the Indigenous lands which would eventually become the USA.

It is important to remember that most of the books containing these statements were researched and written before the astonishing increase in the digitalization of records this century.

And most of the books containing these statements were also researched and written before the equally astonishing growth in personal DNA analysis and genetic genealogy.

Determining the ethnicity of various individuals, families, groups, and communities – without access to such an array of information – was often little more than an educated guess.

Historians had to examine records in multiple repositories in places often geographically distant from one another, and then attempt to collate them into a coherent story, like imagining how a finished jigsaw puzzle would look if 90% of the pieces weren’t missing .

An historian might have noted the number of ships departing Ireland during the 1700s.  They will have read documents (letters, ships’ manifests, land transfers, marriage records, etc.) and identified areas where the people off these ships often settled – places like Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

Historians might have pored over census and tax records, assigning a provisional ethnicity to a community based on a prevalence of Irish or Scottish sounding surnames in their particular area.

Yet it is often very hard to prove that a person bearing a “classic” Scottish or Ulster Scots surname like “Davidson” (for example), is actually descended from Scottish or Ulster immigrants when this surname pops-up in mid-1800s Southern Appalachia.

Not everyone left a will.  Many marriages were “common law” in nature.  “Illegitimacy”, infidelity, bigamy, rape, incest and straight-up “fornication” were not uncommon.  Longhunters and mountain men often had multiple partners, wives, or consorts from different ethnic groups.

Literacy was uncommon among the underclasses, and good Bible records recording births and deaths were the exception in these frontier communities.

In other words, a clear paper trail from “Mary Davidson” born in 1850, leading back via wills, Bible records, land transfers, marriage bonds, etc. to someone boarding a ship in Belfast in 1710 is an extremely rare occurrence.

This is also how we find a “John Davidson” as head of a household of free persons of color in Burke County, North Carolina in 1790.  Almost all of his descendants would eventually pass over into “whiteness”.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the ethnicity of various “Davidsons” and their communities, many historians have put 2 and 2 together, and come up with 5.

Non-scholars – especially those with an “agenda” – put 2 and 2 together and arrive at 10.

*****

If a ship arrived in a city like Philadelphia from a port in Ulster (the northernmost province in Ireland), the tendency has been to lump such arrivals together under the term “Scots-Irish”, without going into granular detail.

Granular detail means asking complex questions:

Were they actually Scottish people who took a ferry from Scotland to Belfast in order to catch a ship to America?  Stranraer to Belfast is a mere 59 miles, or a journey of less than a day in good sailing weather (today it takes just two hours).

Were they actually indigenous Irish (Gaels) from Ulster or other Irish provinces?

Were they Scottish Protestants who had been in Northern Ireland since the 1600s Plantation of Ulster, or were they recent Scottish Catholic laborers arrived in Ulster to escape war and famine?

How many were Welsh speakers, French Huguenots or Palatine Germans who Anglicized their surnames, translated their surnames, or simply “borrowed” an English, Scottish or Irish surname from their neighbors?

How many “Powells”, for example, are Welsh families who Anglicized their “ap Hywel” surname?

What about the strange transformation of the German surname “Meckendorf” into “McInturff“?

As settler/colonizers moved into the backcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas and began to push into Appalachia and beyond, another situation arose.

At the exact same time that the backcountry and Appalachia proper were being settled and fought over, places like Virginia (with large populations of free people of color) were passing ever more stringent and punitive “race laws”.

This meant that up to 1 in 5 people from Virginia and the Carolinas – free people of color – also began to head into Appalachia to escape this legislation.

These FPC were drawn from disparate ethnic groups, often intermixed with one another.

Black Angolans.  Malagasy people.  Displaced Tuscarora, Catawba, Saponi (to name only a few Indigenous tribes).  Transported Romani.  South American and Caribbean Jews and their mixed-ethnic families.  French Acadian refugees who were often Métis.  Arabs and Turks.  South Asian Lascars.  “Portuguese” Lançados.

Only rarely did such people hang onto a surname reflecting their true ancestry.

And we haven’t even mentioned various “Maroon” families and communities – Indigenous, Black, and mixed-ethnic escapees from slavery.

In the face of constant racism, violence, warfare, and disease, with fragmented communities and tribal structures breaking down, many were forced to assimilate into “white Christian” culture just to survive.

In order to even begin their assimilation, they almost always had to take a “white” name.

In US history, some scholars call this “genocide by paperwork”.

Another example:

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 records, see the surname “Campbell“, and note the entire household enumerated as “white”.

And just like that, another piece of Cherokee, Pamunkey, Catawba, Tuscarora, Choctaw, or Shawnee history is “disappeared”, tallied as yet another “white Scots-Irish pioneer woman” of the American frontier.

Most Americans today have no comprehension of the society-induced shame and self-loathing which led generations of people to destroy photos attesting to their “non-white” family’s past.

Unambiguous, testifying photos are treasures, scarce as hen’s teeth.

Jeanette Campbell - no Scots-Irishwoman

Jeanette Campbell – no Scots-Irishwoman

 

Loss of language and customs, changing of name and religion, inaccurate census descriptions, destruction of photographs, and non-inclusion in the official story of “white” settlers.

Genocide by paperwork is real.

This is where the granular detail of genealogy and genetic genealogy can tell us far more about the ethnic background of certain families and communities than conventional historical research.

In doing so, we can also begin to unpick a truer history of the American people.

Always, always remember – SURNAMES IN AMERICA ARE UNRELIABLE NARRATORS OF ETHNIC HISTORY.

*****

“White” as the dominant social caste is deeply, deeply ingrained in the American consciousness.

So much so that the ethnically-mixed nature of the USA – especially in rural or “heartland” regions – is rarely considered, let alone openly acknowledged.

Too many Americans – especially Appalachians – still insist they are primarily “Scots-Irish” by descent, even when this is demonstrably not the case.

Heritage centers and museums and internet search engines will likewise insist on throwing a “Scots-Irish” cultural blanket over Southern Appalachia.

Yet after 20 years of intense research, this writer has never found a single county in Appalachia, during any time period, in which the so-called “Scots-Irish” formed a majority of the population.

Whereas German settlers were just as numerous as so-called “Scots-Irish” and tended to marry among one another for two or three generations after moving to frontier regions, people with roots in Ulster were among the quickest to “marry-out” into other communities along these same frontiers.

This includes intermarrying with people from the mixed-ethnic communities which included “free people of color”.

But vanishingly few people self-identifying as “white” (or just as “American”) today ever mention this.

This is why the current vice president, who is deeply allied with a creepy and resurgent “white nationalism” movement, has claimed a “Scots-Irish” hillbilly identity for himself – an identity to which he is not even remotely entitled.

The common ancestor he shares with Barack Obama – a shared Black ancestor – remains conspicuously “unclaimed”.

Vance Obama relationship, V 2

 

I’ll repeat that in case those at the back of the room missed it.

Leaving aside the possibility of “non-paternal events” or undocumented adoption, J. D. Vance HAS NO PROVEN SCOTS-IRISH ANCESTRY.

None.

What J. D. Vance DOES have is documented Black ancestry.

Vance is either ignorant, or a liar.  One suspects both.

Vance was plucked from obscurity by a spooky Tech Bro named Peter Thiel, then groomed and financed to be the “living story” which he and Thiel then sold to gullible Americans only too happy to buy their particular brand of snake oil.

Trump and Vance‘s voter base needs to believe that poor “white people” can all become multi-millionaires – if they could just put their back into the effort to lift those bootstraps.

For the Trump/Vance/Thiel “story” to work its magic, Vance must be “white” and “Christian”.

No one should know or be told that Vance‘s current wealth was generated from Thiel‘s seed capital – the story arc requires a “hard working white hillbilly” going from rags-to-riches all by himself.

*****

But Vance is a fraud in other ways, too.

He “wrote” a product endorsement and called it a “memoir”, claiming to be a hillbilly.  He is not a hillbilly.

He was raised in a suburban environment.

Nor is he “Scots-Irish”.  Not by ancestry, not by culture.

He got taxpayer-funded grants to attend an Ivy League college, but is attempting to tear down public education.

He got tapped-up while at Yale (or even before) to perform a role for a Silicon Valley multi-billionaire with an agenda.

Vance, like all Americans with deep roots in the colonial and frontier eras of ethnic cleansing and Manifest Destiny, is profoundly interrelated with “Brown People” from many ethnic backgrounds, whether he (and the white nationalist base he cultivates) likes it or not.

There are no “racially pure” humans, least of all in America.

Of course nothing in the current administration’s campaign demonizing Brown and Black people in the USA is new.

White supremacy has always been at the heart of US policy, whether dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands, or annexing nearly half of New Spain/Mexico in a blatantly orchestrated imperialist war during the mid-1800s.

The largest group of “unauthorized” Brown people in the USA are Mexicans – people with a far greater ancestral claim to California, Nevada, Colorado, parts of Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas than most “white” Americans.

Mexicans are made to feel like criminal interlopers in the land their ancestors still occupied and governed only 175 years ago, while the USA spends billions every year to support the “right of return” of European, American, and Russian Jews to a land they lost to the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago…

The bulk of other unauthorized immigration numbers to the USA comes from various dysfunctional Latin American countries, whose “dysfunction” stems in large part from US colonialist interference.

The internet and digitized records, along with expert genealogical investigation and genetic genealogy, allow truthseekers to counter the lies of people like Vance – a man who would bring down US democracy by peddling a fake autobiography and fake history to an already shockingly propagandized base of voters.

The sooner the bigots and racists are called to account for their racialist fabrications, and the more all of us work to expose the lies at the heart of “racialism”, the sooner these morally bereft opportunists might finally be forced to let go of the tattered security blanket of “whiteness” and “white superiority”.

And let the rest of us get on with getting on with one another.

Harry Truman and Barack Obama common ancestor

 

 

The Deep State Isn’t Deep

The Not So Deep State, schematic

Just scratch the surface, and it is right there, in living Technicolor

 

There is far too much headscratching going on among liberals, progressives, and academics trying to explain what is happening to US democracy right now.

It is simple.

A small cabal of men are attempting to concentrate the maximum amount of wealth and power in their own hands, until they can bring down democracy.

There is no point in arguing whether this represents authoritarianism, incipient totalitarianism, technocracy, gangsterism, or fascism.

There is no perfect analogue.  History does not repeat itself.  Historical patterns fade and re-emerge, but this is a moment particular to the USA, right now.

Rights only exist under laws.  Laws have no value if they are not interpreted and enforced.

This administration breaks laws.  Daily.

A hand-picked Supreme Court has closed the circle.  The current president cannot be prosecuted for breaking the law while in office.

US citizens, legal US residents, and various other people are thus being made unfree, right now, in real time.

Every action being taken by the Trump administration is a direct quid pro quo to people and groups who can deliver him one or more of three things:

(1) Money
(2) Votes
(3) Power

The circles in the schematic shared here are the people or groups who have delivered one or more of those three things to Trump over the last three election cycles.

The colored balls inside the colored circles represent overlapping interests and ideologies between the various groups pumping cash into Trump‘s grift machine.

Trump has no ideological core or moral center.  He does not care about other peoples’ belief systems or motivations.

Everything is transactional.  Anyone who delivers money, votes, or power to Trump is “rewarded” with executive orders, policies, or legislation.

This isn’t anything new in USA politics.  It’s just never been concentrated to the center in such a blatant way.

*****

The rubber stamp icons represent the traditional public face of US democracy.

I have used a rubber stamp icon because the current regime is seeking to force the traditional pillars of democratic society to act as “rubber stamps” on Trump‘s agenda.

Trump‘s agenda, again, is simple.  Deliver money, votes, or more power to Trump, and your agenda gets included in Trump‘s agenda.

Three of these “rubber stampers” are still useful for giving voters (mostly Trump‘s “base”) the impression that the republic still stands, with its historical system of checks and balances.

Trump is willing to leave these in place for appearance’s sake, while actively hollowing-out their ability to actually function as a check on his own executive power.

(A) The legislative branch = politicians
(B) The judiciary = jurists and lawyers
(C) The executive = including the military and police forces

He has already bent the Republican Party (A) utterly to his will.

This is why he has turned to attacking law firms and judges (B).

He has removed any senior members of the military (C) who he perceives as placing the Constitution ahead of loyalty to himself.

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The other three rubber stamps are groups able to affect public opinion and discourse without necessarily contributing vast amounts of money to Trump or the Republican Party.

(D) Broadcast and social media
(E) Universities and academics (including historians, social sciences, economists, et al)
(F) Celebrities and influencers (including social activists, charities, non-profits, and NGOs)

Trump spent his first term neutering the independent press and media, by referring to legitimate journalism as “fake news”, while introducing “alternative facts” and spraying a firehose of lies in order to “flood the zone”.

In 2025, the independent media isn’t even allowed in the White House.

This administration is now going after universities and academics (E), social activists and influencers (F).

Some of the Trump administration’s most egregious actions manage to kill multiple birds with one stone.

Consider this example, how the “disappearing” of a pro-Palestinian rights activist plays to multiple Trump benefactors:

1) Israel (well, obviously)
2) US Zionists (obvious again)
3) Christo-fascists (Islamophobic to their core, but very pro-Israel due to their “end times” beliefs)
4) Conservative nationalists
5) Technocrats (who, incidentally, sell AI targeting tech to Israel)
6) White supremacists (less brown people, yay!)

In addition to making multiple groups of Trump supporters happy, such actions allow Trump to test the limits of executive power, while instigating fights with “non-obedient” universities, independent law firms, and free speech advocates and activists.

As already stated, Trump has no ideological core or moral center. It’s all about money and power.

Vance is far more dangerous, because he has an ideology to go with his desire for money and power.

From Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, it is the ideologues we should fear the most.

Vance is the pig in the poke, a Trojan Horse.

He is not who he says he is, from his fake “Scots-Irish” hillbilly identity to his political motivations.

I will be laying the receipts on the table in my upcoming podcast episode.

Keep this schematic to hand for future reference…