Vlad Tepes of Wallachia
I’m going to start with a little story pulled from my own life.
Like so many kids from my background, I joined the US military without finishing high school – on my 17th birthday, in fact.
I spent three years stationed with an artillery unit situated along what was then called “The Iron Curtain”, a border dividing the “Free West” from the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe.
The Warsaw Pact countries were essentially all of the nations which, at the end of WWII, had ended-up as satellites or outright puppet states of what was then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
All of the Warsaw Pact countries behind the Iron Curtain (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania) had governments/regimes situated politically on a spectrum between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Put simply, the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism rests on how many of the following aspects of governance are out of the hands of the wider “demos” or people, and controlled by the few.
It doesn’t matter if these “few” are communist party officials, monarchs, dictators, corporations and oligarchs, or elected officials who flout the laws and norms of democracy.
If any government, administration, or regime includes more than one of the following indicators, they are authoritarian at the very least:
1) an elaborate ideology (Project 2025/White Christian Nationalism/MAGA)
2) a single mass party (some would say that a two-party system is little better)
3) terror (ICE patrols and raids, anti-immigrant and LGBT hate speech)
4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication (the Broligarchy of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al)
5) a monopoly of weapons
6) a centrally controlled economy (hybrid system coming into being now via DOGE and privately-owned AI)
I had a German girlfriend when I got out of the army in the mid-80s, so I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey to out-process, and flew back to Germany to be with her.
One of the many jobs I held down at the time included working as a framemaker for a small town art gallery in Upper Franconia, a very provincial and conservative part of the state of Bavaria.
After a few months at this gallery, the owner (who will remain unnamed), approached me and asked if I would consider doing an extra “job” for her and her partner.
Over the course of a couple of hours, “T” tried to explain to me the history of the Siebenbürger people, a German-speaking minority who lived in the mountains of Transylvania, in central Romania.
The Siebenbürger are descendants of medieval Saxon mercenaries invited by King Andrew II of Hungary to take up land grants and fortify the eastern borders of what was the Kingdom of Hungary at the time.
The region in Romania known as Wallachia is where Vlad Tepes – Vlad the Impaler or “Dracula” – played the Hungarians off against the Ottoman Turks to build his own kingdom. Most of the enemies he viciously impaled on stakes were in fact Siebenbürger soldiers.
Between 1965-1989, Romania was ruled by the brutal Nicolae Ceaușescu, who is widely considered to have run the most repressive regime among all the Warsaw Pact nations.
As part of his “make Romania great again” program, he embraced isolationism and shunned international trade, seeking to make Romania self-sufficient in every respect – food, energy, manufactured goods, everything.
By the time Ceaușescu came to power, Romania’s effective overlord, the Soviet Union, had already transported at least 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania to labor camps in the Ukrainian Donbas region between 1944-1965. Many of these and their children are the people referred-to as “Nazis” by Putin today.
Ceaușescu‘s cultural program involved the attempted elimination of all ethnic minority groups.
Initially, this ethnic-cleansing took the form of shutting-down all newspapers, publishing houses, schools, and theaters in which anything other than the Romanian language was spoken.
Roma (Gypsy) communities were dismantled wholesale. It is not common knowledge in the west that the Roma (who are a separate ethnic group to “Romanians”) were held as slaves for centuries in the kingdoms which would eventually become Romania. Speaking their own languages, the enslaved Roma of regions like Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bessarabia were only emancipated during the 1850s and 1860s.
During the 1970s and 1980s, many members of both the Roma and Siebenbürger communities began to be “disappeared” by Ceaușescu‘s much-feared secret police, the Securitate.
*****
It is against this background that “T”, who had actor and painter friends among the Siebenbürger behind the Iron Curtain, asked me if I would would drive her into Romania.
A Romanian theater troupe had been touring what was called “West Germany” at the time. Three of its number were Siebenbürger who had defected and were claiming asylum in Germany.
There was one small problem, however.
None of them had been allowed to travel while holding their own identity documents. Those were being held by a member of the Securitate who travelled with all such touring companies.
Without some form of ID, any claim for asylum was likely to be rejected. Any defector handed-back over to the Romanian embassy and secret police was a dead man walking.
“T” was going to Romania to retrieve some form of ID for these people. She also hoped to smuggle out a couple of paintings which could be auctioned in the west, with the cash being funnelled back in order to help the desperate families left behind. They could use western cash on the Romanian black market to survive, and maybe even use it to bribe a border official to look the other way if they attempted to cross into the west to join their loved ones.
“Why on earth do you want ME to drive?” I asked.
“Because you hold a US passport”, she replied. “The border police and Securitate are unlikely to risk an international incident by detaining or harming an American.”
This all sounded extremely risky, and to my eternal shame, instead of a simple “yes” or “no”, I found myself asking “Am I going to get paid for this?”
I was still only 20 years old, but fully deserved her reaction.
“What the hell is the matter with you? Have you never done anything solely for others? Just for the damn sake of GOODNESS?”
Long story short, I agreed to go.
We went shopping for cartons of Kent cigarettes (prime currency in Romania at the time), as well as tiny luxuries like condoms, pantyhose, and music cassette tapes – contraception and the trappings of “decadent” Western culture were outlawed by Ceaușescu in his twisted dream of an ethnically and culturally pure “Motherland”.
Driving in stages, our first stop was in Vienna, where I was advised to eat well, as we wouldn’t be eating well again for a few days.
From there, it was on to our first stop behind the Iron Curtain – Budapest – where we took a brief rest before pushing on.
We drove across the Hungarian plains in white-out blizzard conditions on unplowed, unilluminated highways, giant Soviet-era sculptures of proletariat workers looming suddenly out of the snow-blasted darkness along the roadsides like silent titan gods.
Austro-Hungary, pre-WWI
The actual crossing of the border from Hungary into Romania was terrifying.
I had never had a gun pointed directly at me; never mind a dozen or so Kalashnikovs. The casual laughter and staring eyes of mostly unshaven soldiers – all with only one hand on their weapon as the other held a cigarette – had placed a heavy stone in the pit of my stomach.
Hands gripping the steering wheel, I turned and said to “T” “Geez, I hope they don’t search the car and take all the stuff meant for your friends”.
She slapped me as hard as I’ve ever been slapped. Leaning near, she whispered angrily through clenched teeth “Shut up you idiot! There are bugs everywhere. They can hear every word you say.”
When one of the soldiers made clear his intention to search the car, “T” handed me a carton of cigarettes and my passport, and told me to play the dumb American.
It wasn’t hard.
Getting out of the car, I turned warily toward the soldier who seemed to be in charge, holding out my passport while keeping the carton of cigarettes tucked under my arm. He put a hand on my shoulder and gestured toward the checkpoint booth.
I made a “You first, I’ll follow” sort of gesture, but he nudged me with his rifle barrel, indicating that I was to walk ahead. That 20 yards with a rifle at my back was the longest 20 yards of my life.
Once inside his booth/office, he took the carton of cigarettes from under my arm and laid it on a small table, before taking a pack of state manufactured cigarettes – “Carpațis” – from his own pocket and offering me one.
My cigarette lit, he began pointing at the carton of Kents, and pointing back at the old BMW. It became obvious that he wanted to know what else was on the menu, but wished the bribe to remain between the two of us, out of sight of his underlings.
I went back to the car and gathered a small selection of items, tucking them inside my coat and hurrying back to the checkpoint.
Nothing I offered seemed to satisfy him, and my increasing anxiety and fear must have been obvious. Finally, a smile, an exclamation, and a slap on my back.
A Michael Jackson cassette had done it. The soldier smiled and pointed to a small photo pinned to the wall beside the table. A gift for his wife or girlfriend.
He put the cassette into a drawer under the table, and walked me back to the car, waving the others aside.
I got back into the car and crossed into Romania, looking neither left nor right in case someone might try to get my attention and stop us again.
*****
We arrived in Sibiu under cover of darkness on the second night after a journey of around 900 miles, the shadowy black mass of the Transylvanian Mountains hulking in the mid-distance.
Even in a small city like Sibiu (about the size of Reno, Nevada), electricity was only available a couple of hours every day, and it was strictly rationed.
We were met at the end of a long, wide boulevard by a dark-complexioned man standing outside a heavy, ancient oak door set back along a row of large sooty terraced townhouses which betrayed hints of former glory from the century before.
He led us down some stairs and pushed open another door, where a family sat huddled around a simple table under a single bare lightbulb in the kitchen of a freezing basement apartment, all rising with cries and smiles and hugs and warm handshakes to greet us.
The generosity of these people upon our arrival has stayed with me to this day.
They had almost nothing. Nothing in the way of decent clothing, and nothing in the way of wholesome, nourishing food.
Most of their winter sustenance was comprised of hard, stale bread and homemade sauerkraut fermented in barrels in the cellar.
Yet within the hour they had triumphantly produced a small cut of bacon wrapped in a piece of newspaper, which they cooked in a skillet before insisting that we, and we alone, should eat.
They later pulled a bottle of vodka from a hiding place behind a cupboard, and filled our glasses again and again.
I later learned they had hoarded these things for months in anticipation of our arrival.
The next morning, as “T” discussed business with our hosts, I went to the door, turning to ask if anyone would like me to fetch them something from the center of town.
I had hoped to get a brief glimpse of the city once known as “Hermannstadt” when it was still part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WWI.
Everyone burst out laughing.
“And what will you bring us back from town?” they asked in the most curious German accent I had ever heard.
“I don’t know. A bar of chocolate, maybe?”
This reply led to near pandemonium, with hoots and guffaws and more gales of laughter.
Another bottle of vodka was taken from the secret place behind the cupboard, and placed in the center of the kitchen table.
Thomas pointed to the bottle.
“Bring us back a bar of chocolate, and the bottle is yours.”
After many hours wandering the streets, I returned.
Empty-handed.
I will save for another time the story of our exit from Romania, which made our entry seem like the red carpet treatment.
Things very nearly turned very, very bad indeed.
But I’m here now, aged 60, writing of a world which, until last month, seemed many lifetimes distant.
Nicolae Ceaușescu was not a totalitarian dictator on his first day in office. He wasn’t even an authoritarian, really.
Power without checks and balances makes a monster of most humans, though…
After a quarter century of his hellish tyranny, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed on Romanian national television on Christmas Day in 1989, five years after my unlikely escapade there.
*****
I have travelled, and I have seen the workings of many people in many places.
I will say it here and now. The Republic is momentarily lost.
Dictatorship has crept up softly on the American people, and struck.
I sit here as an ex-pat US citizen with a son born in Ireland, and realize I will probably never see the place of my birth again. I have no family there anymore.
I have pondered long and hard about the rightness of criticizing events in the USA from a distance.
Yet the sociopath currently in office owns golf courses and much more here in Ireland. The Irish economy is symbiotically entwined with American Big Tech companies.
The abandonment of NATO, the embrace of Putin, the betrayal of Ukraine, and interference in European elections makes USA politics very much European politics.
The world has suddenly grown much smaller and more dangerous.
Besides, I am beginning to think that having my writing on a European server might not be a bad situation in the days to come. Freedom of speech and a free press have never seemed in as much danger in the USA.
Modern Americans have had too much, for too long, and most have never wondered how or why this could or should be.
They foolishly believed that consumerist affluence and cheap gasoline were somehow a measure of American “greatness”.
Others, of course, believe in “God’s blessings”.
Most Americans never thought to ask why gasoline in the USA has always cost a quarter or a tenth the amount it costs in other developed countries.
I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans know that the US, in cahoots with the UK, overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran during the 1950s in order to maintain control of petroleum reserves.
Hell, I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans could point to Iran on a map.
Modern Americans treated comfort as a birthright, wilfully turning a blind eye to, or remaining entirely ignorant of, the suffering and cheap labor furnished by the “white” underclasses and the downtrodden Black and Hispanic communities.
In recent days, some of my readers have suggested that there is a case for optimism, because only 1 in 3 voters actually voted for a fascist.
Nonsense. The current president enjoys a 45-55% approval rating, while his minions continue to tear down the very last structures upholding democracy – right this minute, while you read this essay.
The American populace is as thoroughly propagandized as any of those who ever lived in any authoritarian state.
*****
This week I shared a very short post on various media calling for boycotts, civil disobedience, and strikes as a possible way to head-off a full-blown techno-fascist autocracy.
The list was primarily interested in those who have either made public declarations of support for Trump or Project 2025, or given direct financial aid to Trump, the GOP, or Project 2025 through endorsements, individual donations, and various PACS.
I now find myself writing in anger. If what I’m about to say causes some of my readers to bale-out, so be it.
Old people, unlike “influencers”, don’t need to give a shit.
The current president, with the help of his technocrats, has taken over the levers of government and dismantled almost all oversight bodies.
Big Tech is this very minute illegally harvesting every single shred of data concerning you and your loved ones.
AI and autocracy have never in history been combined. This is going to make the old surveillance states of the Warsaw Pact look bumbling and amateurish.
Everyone from George Orwell to Frank Zappa warned this was coming, but neither could have imagined the power of AI.
Half of Congress is acquiescent. Half of the courts are acquiescent. FAR MORE THAN HALF OF US ARE ACQUIESCENT.
Brownshirt thugs roam the streets of our towns and cities, waiting for their master to release them from their leashes.
YET MANY READERS SPENT TIME THIS WEEK POINTING-OUT MINOR DISCREPANCIES IN A LIST INTENDED ONLY AS A GENERAL GUIDE TO KNOWING WHO IS AIDING AND ABETTING A FASCIST.
This is like bickering over whose turn it is to cook while a tornado approaches.
If one or two of the names gathered by various organizations over the past few years are out of date, or under new ownership, fine.
Let others know, and move on to the next.
Truth is, there is almost never such a thing as a “moral” corporation, anyway. Where shareholders are getting rich, someone, somewhere, is invariably being hurt.
For a so-called majority Christian nation, it is astonishing how few Americans pause to consider the reported words of the man who gave rise to a world religious movement:
“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
Moving swiftly on…
Complete strangers demanding footnotes, citations, annotations and sources is fine when a piece is based on my own research, or when I share something utterly new, contentious, or difficult to verify.
In such cases I am happy to supply sources and further reading lists, even to non-paying subscribers, when it is a matter of proper public interest.
But there are not enough hours in the day to be a full-time private, unpaid investigative reporter and verification service for those things which can be easily checked by readers themselves.
The internet is still open as of today. Use it.
*****
If anyone has doubts about any of the non-original information shared here, or if they feel there is a question mark about a boycott list supplied in good faith, feel free to do some of your own digging.
And please, absolutely do come back with your new or better information, and share it.
I’m not a social activism guru. I’m just a writer with something resembling a social conscience.
I also find it unfathomable hearing people say things like “Oh, I couldn’t boycott that place, my friend works there”.
IF WE ARE ONLY WILLING TO FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM WHEN IT DOESN’T HURT, WE DO NOT DESERVE DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM.
Go look up The Battle of Blair Mountain. Go watch the film “Matewan“.
When our boycotts and strikes must hurt our own, we take them to our bosom and look after them.
It’s called solidarity.
It’s what good people do.
It’s why I shared the Cold War story of trying to help people who might have been killed without the help of others.
I’m no hero. I just got put in a spot where I was given the chance to make a decision.
I’m glad I made the right one.
And if loads of us don’t make some hard choices, right here, right now, people are going to die.
Genealogy as a Weapon in the Fight for Truth
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinGenealogy 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
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”.
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.
The Deep State Isn’t Deep
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinJust 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.
*****
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…
The Ultimate DEI Hire (and that’s a good thing)
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinJoan Ganz, circa 1985
The photo above is a picture of woman born in 1929, taken in 1985.
Odds are, 99 out of 100 people have never heard her name, nor would the public-at-large recognise her face.
A native of Phoenix, Arizona, with Jewish and Catholic parents, she would team-up in New York City with a man born to Oklahoma Dust Bowl refugees, and together they would start the “Children’s Television Workshop”, a non-profit organization which would go on to create the acclaimed children’s television series “Sesame Street”.
If a category existed for public education television under UNESCO World Heritage designations, there has never been a TV show more worthy of earning such an accolade.
The woman in the photo is Joan Ganz, and her collaborator was a man named Lloyd Morrisett, also born in 1929.
At the very height of some of the worst civil strife ever seen in the USA since the Civil War, Ganz and Morrisett decided to channel their activism into education.
Three years after the JFK assassination, in the middle of Vietnam protests and attacks on the Civil Rights Movement (including the further assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy), Ganz and Morrisett kept trying to raise money to further develop their “Sesame Street” project.
Ms. Ganz freely admits to having been greatly influenced by certain high school teachers in 1940s Arizona, who spoke powerfully about poverty in America, and the importance of the nascent Civil Rights Movement. One of her teachers would later be investigated during the McCarthy era communist witch hunts.
Airing for the first time in 1969, “Sesame Street” made Joan Ganz one of the first female executive directors in the history of television, winning multiple Emmys and other awards for her achievements.
An unapologetic idealist, Ms. Ganz once said “I could do a thousand documentaries on poverty and poor people that would be watched by a handful of the convinced, but I was never really going to have an influence on my times”.
And so it was that generations of children (including many children from very difficult backgrounds) learned about spelling, fairness, mathematics, reading, tolerance, civic duty, honesty, and kindness from the likes of Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, and The Cookie Monster.
Cookie Monster
Mr. Morrisett passed away in 2023 aged 93, but Ms. Ganz is still with us today, aged 95.
Perhaps innate decency is the secret to a long life…
Needless to say, such programming, rooted in idealism rather than profit, eventually found its home on the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service).
*****
The PBS evolved from a collaboration between National Educational Television (NET, which was owned by the Ford Foundation), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (cpb) – the latter coming into being after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law in 1967.
The PBS effectively absorbed both the cpb and NET under its new “brand name”, mostly due to conservative objections to public funds being allocated to NET. National Educational Television had committed the “sin” of producing unblinking documentaries exploring poverty and racism in the USA.
With Mister Roger’s Neighborhood going on air in 1968, and Sesame Street debuting the year after, producers of both shows remained undeterred in their vision of using children’s television as a way to eliminate the scourge of racism, while educating and entertaining.
Sesame Street in particular, with its urban setting and multi-ethnic cast (not to mention the ethnically ambiguous Muppets), was utterly groundbreaking.
So much so that the show was even banned for a short time in the state of Mississippi.
Sounding eerily like the “Newspeak” being used by certain groups today, a retired local politician from Jackson, Mississippi named Allen Cavett Thompson formed a group called “FOCUS” which claimed to be a “protector” of “choice”.
FOCUS was mightily vexed that taxpayer dollars should be spent on programming which was “forcing” liberal values on conservative Mississippians’ children, who were “not ready for it [integration] yet”.
A state commission was convened, and voted to back-up FOCUS’s demand for a statewide ban on the broadcast of Sesame Street.
When news of the ban reached the national press, however, the furor led to state legislators backing-down, and overturning the prohibition.
If only public shame still existed…
*****
Without doubt, one of the high points in the history of Sesame Street has to be the April 1973 episode including a 22-year-old Stevie Wonder as featured guest.
Mr. Wonder had just recently got out from under the thumb of Berry Gordy at Motown Records, and was enjoying his first real spell of artistic freedom.
His album “Talking Book” had just been released to critical acclaim in late 1972, with its pioneering use of new keyboard and synth sounds.
Stevie Wonder didn’t really need to go on Sesame Street to plug his latest album.
It seems to have been a genuine act of generosity, and wow.
I defy anyone to watch this segment, and not come away with an ear to ear smile on their face (check out a young Ray Parker, Jr. funking-out in the background, long before “Ghostbusters“).
Check out the kid on the fire escape headbanging with delight.
Of course, America was in a bad place back then. But then again, before so many of us had been propagandized by corporate and social media, society was in many ways more intellectually and spiritually advanced half a century ago.
Most of us knew our country had work to do, progress to make.
Hell, even Tricky Dick Nixon did some things right, like creating the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sesame Street could have never been made today.
Too diverse.
Too equitable.
Too inclusive.
The musical genius which is Stevie Wonder would be called a “DEI hire” – “He’s only on public broadcast TV because he’s Black and disabled”.
Even worse, DOGE and the Project 2025 goons are gunning for public television and radio altogether.
I hope we still have fighters ready to step into the shoes of people like Joan Ganz and Lloyd Morrisett.
Patrick
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinSt Dominic, St Patrick and St Francis on cathedral carving in Clonmacnoise, County Offaly [circa 1460]
A “saint” who was never made a saint by the church which claims him.
Culturally he was almost certainly a Briton or Welshman. Or more specifically, he was “Romano-Welsh”, born in about 386 CE to wealthy parents who lived and prospered at the outer British fringe of the Roman Empire.
In 386 CE, Wales encompassed lands now lying in Wales, Cornwall, and southern Scotland.
Many scholars believe he was from a part of ancient Wales now lying in SW Scotland.
His real name will probably never be known for certain – some believe his native Welsh name was “Maewyn Succat“, but it is not impossible that his ethnic roots lay elsewhere within the Roman Empire, and his parents just happened to be living in Wales at the time of his birth.
History has remembered him as “Patrick“, from the Latin name “Patricius” – meaning “noble one”.
“Padraic” or “Padrig” to his Gaelic-speaking contemporaries.
“Paddy” to many of his friends in modern Ireland.
Not “Patty“, as often seen in the USA…
*****
At the time of Patrick‘s birth in about 386 CE, Roman-ruled sections of Britain had only recently been introduced to Christianity, following upon Roman Emperor Constantine‘s own conversion to that faith a generation or two earlier.
In Roman Britain, Christians were seen as just one religious cult among many. Patrick‘s parents, and one of his grandfathers, adhered to the new cult of Christianity – but not Patrick.
Patrick also happened to be born about three years after the armies of Rome were withdrawn from Great Britain, following over three and a half centuries of indigenous British-Roman cultural integration.
Do not confuse the ancient Britons or “British” peoples like the Iceni or Trinovantes with later Germanic “proto-English” immigrants such as the Angles, Saxons, or Jutes.
These latter northern European peoples (who had never fallen under complete Roman control) were not slow in spotting the now poorly defended island – raids for booty and land settlement began in earnest.
Germanic peoples from what is now Northern Germany and Denmark arrived in boats from coasts lying to the southeast of Britain.
“Picts” swept down from Caledonia (later Scotland) in the north, and the Irish or Gaels raided from Hibernia, across the Irish Sea to the west.
It was during one such Irish raid on the west coast of Wales that Maewyn Succat was taken prisoner (according to his own account), and sold as a slave to an Irish buyer, who set him to work as a herdsman for many years – most likely somewhere in or around present-day County Antrim in northern Ireland, among the “Scoti” who would go on to colonise parts of Scotland, giving that nation its modern name.
It was only during his six years of slavery that Maewyn began to cling to the faith of his fathers.
Maewyn eventually escaped back home to Wales, spent some time travelling, and acquired an education.
Around the 450s CE, something compelled him to return to Ireland – this time operating out of what is present-day County Mayo.
Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, where Patrick is said to have fasted for 40 days
His own account tells of a need to share his growing sense of religious fervour with the pagan Irish.
Patrick was not the first Christian missionary in Ireland. That distinction belongs to Palladius, who was sent in 431 CE to act as a bishop to the few Irish who had already accepted the Christian message – probably through trade contacts with Christianised Romano-Britons.
The Roman Catholic Church claims that their own Pope Celestine sent Maewyn/Patrick to Ireland as a missionary, but there is simply no documentary evidence for this claim.
In fact, the monastic and apostolic style of Christianity practiced in Ireland during the Early Middle Ages was decidedly non-Roman in many respects.
“Patrick” is the only known Romano-Welsh or Romano-British Christian to have written of his own life and thoughts, and he says nothing of being sent by the Roman Church to Ireland, nor does the contemporary or near-contemporary Roman Catholic Church mention him.
It would seem that Patrick was simply part of a wider Christian grassroots cult which was popular at the time.
British, Welsh, Gaelic, and Gallic Christians might have venerated or respected certain Roman Christians, but they were most certainly not “Roman Catholics” in the modern sense of the term.
*****
Ireland is the only “pagan” nation believed to have become almost wholly Christianised without widespread bloodshed.
It is worth pondering whether this was due not so much to the power of the Christian message, as to the introduction of LITERACY which arrived with missionaries for the new religion.
During Patrick‘s travels to places like Mayo, Irish chieftains in these remoter parts of the island would have been quick to recognize the potential for taxation management and trade expansion which came with literacy and Roman-style bureaucratic models.
The ability of these Romanised, non-Druid emissaries to store ancestral memory, poetry, legal and religious tracts, and FINANCIAL ACCOUNTS on parchments, rather than within physical human memory, must have been a societal game-changer.
This extra-somatic literacy eliminated much of the raison d’etre for the entire Druidic stratum/class of society – a class which had hitherto been extremely powerful – and replaced that class with literate Christian monks.
Literacy is an awesome power in a pre-literate society…
What is more, Christian missionaries did not bring just literacy and the gospel to Ireland. They brought a whole new worldview, with their access to a much wider international network.
In short, a chieftain or minor regional king could become much more connected with faraway centres of commerce and power by linking into the only pan-European organisation left standing after the break-up of the Western Roman Empire.
Patrick‘s own “Confessio” hints at these struggles and intrigues – and this history is far more interesting than later folk tales and legends fabricated by the medieval Catholic church concerning snake banishing and numerous other outlandish “miracles”.
It is worth reiterating that the early medieval Christian church and its monasteries in Ireland were patronised and overseen by Irish chieftains – NOT the Catholic church or its pope in Rome.
Only the invasion of Ireland by Anglo-Normans under Henry II of England (in 1169 CE) would force Ireland into the clutches of papal authority.
Thus began the slow decline of high Gaelic culture under the twin colonising forces of England and Rome.
So there you have it – Patrick was not Catholic.
And technically, Patrick isn’t even a saint!
His life and works took place in a time before the Catholic church rules for canonisation had even been devised and laid-down.
Whatever about technicalities, he was being venerated as the patron saint of Ireland within the Irish Christian church by the 7th century, and his day was traditionally marked by sombre reflection and prayer.
Until 19th and 20th century Irish-Americans changed gears…
Keep Your MAGA Hands Off My Music
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinTom T. Hall, country music legend
After reading some of the less savoury comments under a recent post, it became clear to me just how many MAGA cultists seem to believe that country music “belongs” to them, and them alone.
This old lefty ain’t conceding the music I was raised-on to any Christo-fascists.
They’re welcome to their Toby Keiths and Jason Aldeans, young pups whose public personas are just cosplay in search of the dickweed dollar.
American folk, Old Time, country, country blues, western swing – you name it – has always been performed by folks from across the political spectrum.
Country music spoke to the trials, pain, and troubles of decent working people who were still smart enough to recognize and call-out hypocrites (who were often preachers and politicians).
The stock in trade of most country music was empathy for the heartbroken and downtrodden, and it was still widely understood that corporations and rich people are almost always the enemy of simple folks.
Back in the day, even when a performer DID hold conservative political views, 9 times out of 10 that meant conservative with a small “c” – not the rabid, spittle-flecked hatred seen everywhere today.
The propagandizing of the American poor and working classes took-off under Reagan in 1980, and received a rocket boost from the Australian-born, utterly reptilian Rupert Murdoch with his founding of Fox “News” in the 90’s.
I’m going to start regularly sharing the words of some old legends of country music, to put some of the MAGA lies and propaganda to bed.
*****
Tom T. Hall
Born 1936 in Tick Ridge, Carter County, Kentucky to a guitar-playing preacher, Hall tragically committed suicide in 2021 aged 85.
Wrote songs for Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, and Waylon Jennings, among many others.
Nicknamed “The Storyteller”, Hall recorded a slew of hits during a long career including “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine” and “The Year Clayton Delaney Died”.
Like most rural people of his generation, Hall believed that patriotism demanded support for US wars, including Vietnam.
After Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, Hall’s views evolved, becoming much more liberal in tone.
In an interview with Jason Gross, Hall looked back on his life and times:
“Well, I’m obviously kind of a liberal. Most of the folks around here are Republican. I’ve always been a liberal. My father never preached against jewelry. He never preached against tobacco. He never preached against short skirts or haircuts. None of that stuff is in the Bible.
“He never preached against polish on nails or nothing. They just think it makes them look better. With that attitude, he was a real rebel because about 90% of all the sermons you heard back then were about haircuts, smoking tobacco, wearing short skirts. That’s what they spent half the time preaching about. I just grew up with that.
“Politics with me is sort of like football. In the beginning, it’s a dangerous and vicious and mean game. Not for cowards.”
“…everybody is on such a great mission to be sane. Sanity is over-rated. You don’t want to be too sane, you know what I mean? I have always thought the best life would be a manageable mad thing. If you could somehow, you know, be weird and wonderful and strange and still kind of not get in anybody’s way, hurt anybody’s feelings, or cause anybody any economic disadvantage. But if you could get through life like that, that’s your best shot. Don’t try to be too sane. And if you could get there, then you could be honest. That’s the first virtue. Humility is a good virtue.”
An ability to evolve and change one’s moral compass seems to have run in the family.
Tom T. Hall‘s third great-grandfather on his father’s side, the aptly named John Justice, was a large slaveholder in the mountains of Western Virginia.
In his last will and testament written in 1850, John Justice freed all of the slaves he had held, and divided his land among them in an attempt to ensure they had at least some chance at a livelihood.
Many lines of Tom T. Hall‘s family appear to belong the mixed-ethnic mountain people sometimes called “Melungeons” which I have come to call “Old Mix Americans“.
Taking Stock: A Reminder of the BWWW Mission
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinSouthern Appalachian mountain family
4 years, 20 episodes, and 163 essays
In which we reintroduce ourselves…
In such challenging, and yes, scary times, all of us look for voices of sanity.
Not ranting, not polemics, just good old-fashioned sober analysis of what is going down.
Investigative journalism is being gutted by the takeover of mainstream media by a coterie of billionaires.
The people behind Project 2025 would like to push an agenda in which our children are only allowed to learn and read things aligning with a White Christian Nationalist outlook.
People interested in learning the truth about anything – current affairs, history, science, corruption – are now forced to fight through a daily firehose of bots, misinformation, disinformation, lies, and AI-generated slop and propaganda.
Who can we trust?
For a start, we should deal with verifiably real people who are up front about their education and the source of their claimed expertise.
Here is a mini-bio so you know a bit about the person behind Before We Were White – Podcast.
My name is Brian Halpin. I was born 60+ years ago in Kansas City, Missouri.
I left home and school at 15 but managed to work my way through college, eventually picking-up a degree in archeology (specializing in the prehistory of the British Isles and underwater archeology).
Completing a degree meant less to me than the effort it took to become a competent ironworker/blacksmith somewhat later.
Far more than my work or education, I am most proud of managing to raise (along with my partner) a good kid who understands right and wrong.
My personal passions have always been nature, music, history, art, science, writing, and handmade things – both artistic and practical – which speak of human creativity reaching for something more than mere profit.
A couple of decades ago, a restless mind (probably sprinkled with the dust of obsessiveness) caused me to wonder why my deceased grandfather had looked so…brown.
Genealogical investigations soon morphed into general historical investigations, and within a few years, I had compiled a database with well over a million records.
This database very possibly represents one of the most comprehensive examinations and collations of information about the ethnic background of frontier-era Americans in existence.
This database is the foundation of my “expertise”, and the basis upon which I feel qualified to offer certain opinions.
So when I write an essay saying that the earliest settling and colonizing of the American frontier was done by mixed-ethnic people, it is because I have viewed the 1820 census form showing that Daniel Boone‘s daughter married into a family including free people of color from Maryland, for example.
When I critique religion in the USA, I can draw on innumerable papers and historical records showing the high levels of illiteracy among frontier era preachers, or the numbers of preachers who came from a partly non-European background.
When my opinions run counter to received wisdom – such as the widespread belief that only wealthy southern planters were slaveholders – I can point to thousands upon thousands of historical records telling a different story.
This sort of in-depth research and investigation soon leads one to the realization that the average American’s perception of American history is deeply flawed and often downright wrong.
This is often not through any fault of their own, but is due to centuries of historical teaching being curated by people with an agenda.
*****
I eventually felt compelled to share this information in the face of ever-increasing right-wing ideological attacks on people teaching real history – that is to say, people who prize truth over mythology and propaganda.
And so was born the Before We Were White podcast during the Covid-19 lockdown days of 2020.
My primary goal was the deconstruction of the American belief in, and obsession with “race”, and in particular, the concept of “racial superiority”.
Why “race”?
Because the USA is founded on a combination of myths concerning “race” and “American exceptionalism”.
Without the myth of “racial differences” and “racial superiority” being invented by the greedy in order to justify the enslavement of others, our entire history and present would look completely different.
There would have been no Andrew Jackson, no Andrew Johnson. No Civil War. There would have been no KKK. No “Mississippi Goddamn“, no Rosa Parks, no Central Park Five, no George Floyd, no BLM.
There would be no Donald Trump, no Elon Musk, no Peter Thiel, no J. D. Vance.
Why? Because all of the above coup instigators are themselves racists of one stripe or another, and the sooner we say it constantly and out loud, the better.
They were only able to give their long-planned power grab an air of legitimacy by directing the outcome of an election with shocking amounts of money and laser-focussed propaganda emanating from the newspapers, TV channels, and social media platforms owned by these selfsame billionaires and unscrupulous technocrats.
Most of the propaganda involved not-so-subtle forms of racist messaging directed at the post-Reagan, Fox News-viewing GOP base of “White Christian Evangelicals”.
Remember those dog and cat-eating Haitians? Mexican rapists? Venezuelan gangs taking-over entire towns?
And while quite literally weaponizing hatred in order to gain office, these same people endlessly claim that the USA is more virtuous, fair, moral, and democratic than other countries.
This tactic is as old as civilization itself. People will always vote for the person confirming their “specialness”.
After 400 years of living under tyrannical emperors (after Julius Caesar trashed the Roman Republic), most Roman citizens still lived in a virtuous republic in their heads, where just being born Roman was enough to satisfy their need to feel “special”.
Roman emperors and senators and patricians understood that for the mob, “freedom” is a state of mind, disconnected from reality.
J. D. Vance has already stated as much, explicitly. He has said that it is time for the USA to move into a “post-Republic” era.
All hail the new, improved, all-American Caesars!
The Romans could be cruel, chauvinistic and prejudiced. But at least they weren’t so stupid as to be racists.
Now do your best Roman/Nazi salute…
*****
If a nation is to remain cohesive primarily through a belief in its own exceptional virtue, then anything suggesting otherwise must be suppressed, stamped-out.
“White” America, like Pontius Pilate, wants to wash its hands of all responsibility for the trans-generational social, emotional, mental, and economic damage caused by 300+ years of “white” supremacy and rapacious capitalism.
“White” America and corporate America do want to hear or talk about the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the theft of indigenous homes and lands, slavery, slave rape, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, school segregation, red-lining – or how the current president of the USA and his father made a fortune in real estate through racist rental practices.
Even worse, “white” America wants to cast all worthy American achievements as “white achievements”, even though everything which is both good and quintessentially “American” ALWAYS has people of all ethnic backgrounds at its root.
Before We Were White decided to go straight for the jugular in this respect.
The history of colonial America and the early USA is not an exclusively “white story”, however hard Hollywood, TV, and politicians haved tried for decades to make it appear so.
When we say that the history of colonial America and the early USA is not just a “white story”, do not take this to mean we simply replace the “white story” with a “tri-racial” story shared between “white”, “Black”, and “indigenous” peoples.
We are going much further, and saying that in an American context, the very concept of “white people” in a profoundly mixed-ethnic population is a ridiculous and arbitrary construction.
Humans are not able to be categorized into three or four distinct “colors” or “races”. Especially not in the USA.
AMERICANS WITH DEEP ROOTS IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY TIMES ARE ALL RELATED, WHATEVER THEIR PERCEIVED “RACE”.
Don’t get me wrong. If a person is SEEN as being a certain “race”, TREATED as being a certain “race”, IDENTIFIES as a certain “race”, then “race” is all too real in a certain respect.
It would be just the same if there were no such thing as God, but millions of people still acted as if God existed.
This would mean that religion, just like racism, would affect how everyone experiences life – especially non-believers.
Before We Were White digs at the foundations of the deep-seated American belief in “whiteness”, and the belief in certain quarters that this “whiteness” is under attack, and in need of protection.
MOST OF THE UNDERCLASSES WHO SETTLED THE AMERICAN FRONTIER(S) WERE OF MIXED-ETHNICITY. EVEN THE ONES CALLING THEMSELVES “WHITE”.
And the historical record – census records, slave records, marriage records, wills, land transfers, letters – backs-up this contention.
To be a racist in America, more often than not, means to despise many of one’s own ancestors.
Fact.
*****
As I said at the beginning of this screed, current events – an ongoing fascist coup – have caused decent people everywhere to seek out reliable sources of information.
It is no coincidence that the current triumvirate tearing-down US democracy – Trump, Musk, Vance – are racists and white supremacists.
This is not a thing I say flippantly. The evidence is overwhelming.
Before We Were White finds itself in a place where its subject matter meets the current moment.
This has led to an embarrassing backlog of emails on my website as I write.
Good people. Worried people. Generous people who have donated money to the Before We Were White project.
Everything has come so fast this year that I find myself caught between two stools, as the saying goes.
With thousands of “legacy” readers and listeners on other platforms, and new readers and listeners now arriving via Substack, a demand for more blogs and podcasts clearly exists, but there is more work and more correspondence than can be managed by one person still needing to do other work to keep food on the table.
A small number of deeply generous and loyal subscribers and patrons have kept this boat afloat up to now, but we’ll definitely need to grow this subscriber and patron list in order to kick-on and hire more crew to make this boat sail more quickly and smoothly.
Which is a long-winded way to say “sorry” for the correspondence backlog, but until we can afford to take on the extra hands which would allow us to answer all emails in a timely fashion while also writing and producing regular blogs and podcasts, “we are where we are”.
Meanwhile, away from the writing desk, life’s other realities eat up the hours.
Photo: Working outdoors this week, still clearing storm damage from January with helper named Layla. We are definitely not an AI-generated presence.
Thank you to everyone who supports this project in any way. I’ve no doubt we’ll get there eventually.
And yes, the truth WILL set us free.
Before We Were White is a reader-supported publication.
Please consider becoming a donor or paid subscriber.
Schuldgefühl
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinAmerican authorities insisted in the aftermath of the Second World War that Japanese and German schoolchildren be forced to face into the facts of what their governments had done in their name.
A people who do not accept the wrong of their actions cannot move forward and beyond their crimes.
Germans still debate to this day whether it is right and proper that later generations should also carry a “National Schuldgefühl” – a sense of collective shame.
Perhaps trans-generational shame is a bridge too far, but at least these nations have some sort of trans-generational awareness of historical truth.
In a classic case of “Do as I say, not as I do”, the USA made post-war moral demands on Japan and Germany, while indoctrinating its own children back home with “patriotic”, hyper-selective, jingoistic, theocratic, wilfully blind, self-righteous, white-washed, self-aggrandising, historical bullshit.
Consider just one aspect of USA history.
What were the ten longest wars fought by the USA?
The list below does not include the ceaseless wars against indigenous peoples between 1609 and 1890, such as the ten-year-long Northwest Indian War (a US war against an indigenous confederation in Ohio and Illinois territories).
1) War in Afghanistan – 19 years, 10 months
2) Vietnam War – 19 years, 5 months
3) US Occupation of Haiti – 19 years
4) Somali Civil War (USA intervention) – 18 years, 1 month, still ongoing
5) Yemen Intervention – 15 years, 1 month, still ongoing
6) Philippine or Moro War – 14 years
7) War in Northwest Pakistan (USA intervention) – 13 years
8) Jihadist Insurgency in Niger (USA intervention) – 11 years, 6 months
9) War Against Islamic State [ISIL] – 10 years, 8 months , still ongoing (Iraq, Syria, Libya)
10) Iraq War – 8 years, 9 months
How many of these military interventions were really about “protecting our freedoms and liberty”?
How many enemies of the US would have never existed in the first place but for USA and European colonialism and resource theft?
How many readers here have heard of the Les Cayes Massacre of 1929 in Haiti?
Be honest.
You haven’t heard of US Marines murdering peasants in order to protect US business interests?
Of course not. In 1929 the stock market crashed. “Show Boat” was a massive hit in US movie theaters. Al Capone was murdering rivals in Chicago. The US Supreme Court had decided that pacifists could legally be denied US citizenship.
What are a few thousand dead Black farmers in Haiti?
What about the Moro War which had ended 16 years earlier? Not heard of the Bud Dajo Massacre of 1906?
Of course you’ll have never heard about the 900 Tausug villagers – men, women, and children – who were mowed down and butchered by machine gun fire as they cowered in a crater with nothing but swords and knives to defend themselves.
President Theodore Roosevelt sent his congratulations to these “brave” Marines…
All that’s left in American culture of these times and atrocities are phrases like “down in the boondocks” – a phrase used by many, with no idea whatsoever of its source.
We could share a new essay every day detailing similar events, and remain busy writing for years.
*****
Is it any wonder that our society is so dysfunctional, in a nation where history and much self-identity (“whiteness”, “Scots-Irishness”, “military greatness”, etc.) is often based on an utterly fabricated, conjured reality?
Where reality itself has always been twisted to suit a preferred narrative, making everything and nothing real or true?
A nation where, if our collective conjuring of a fake reality fails, we simply choose amnesia?
Donald Trump is simply the final destination, the ultimate expression of a centuries-long denial of facts, truth, and reality.
Only in the USA was it possible for people to live a life of light entertainment and consumerism for decades, able to say words like “I’m not really interested in politics”.
Because most of the consequences of US politics happened to “other people”. Black people. Indigenous people. Southern Appalachians. Mexicans. Filipinos. Arabs.
Only in such an environment can someone like former presidential candidate Mitt Romney appear to be a “voice of reason” when placed as a counterpoint to the current incumbent.-
Mitt Romney, a recently retired Republican senator who made a dubious fortune in management consultancy and private equity investment.
A lifelong buddy of the criminal and murderous thug Benjamin Netanyahu.
A multi-millionaire who follows a religious cult invented by a man in the 1800s claiming to have received “golden plates” from “the angel Moroni”, and believed the Garden of Eden mentioned in ancient Hebrew texts was actually located in Daviess County, Missouri.
And these are the “sane and sober” voices in American politics…
*****
They say laws are for people who need laws.
And humans need very little legislation, if some basic things within the heart of every human child are encouraged and respected:
Truth. Knowledge. Fairness. Love.
Yet how can we raise our children to recognize truth, real knowledge, fairness, and love, when half or more of the adult population of the USA are unable to recognize such things?
When sociopathic billionaires control social media, communications companies, arms companies, satellite networks, data farming systems, streaming and broadcast networks, search engines, and news outlets?
These same sociopathic billionaires are now gutting the education system, and dictating what constitutes history in our schools.
They are waging a war on “wokeness” precisely because “woke”, in its original sense, meant being aware of the real story, the real dangers to our very humanity which emanate from corrupt power systems.
The current fascist regime, while oafish and vulgar and stupid in many ways, are backed and supported by billionaires smart enough to understand one thing:
The population they exploit will never rise up, if they are too ill-informed to even realize that something better is possible.
This is the origin of the wonderful aphorism “You never know you’re in a prison until you try the door”.
This is why J. D. Vance, Musk, and others are abandoning NATO, Europe, and Ukraine – hoping to collapse the EU in the process.
Having between 450 and 750 million people still living in relative freedom would be a shining beacon to beleaguered Russians and Americans, and a constant reproach to authoritarians.
*****
Anyone who begins to study and understand real history will invariably become less tribalistic, and more thoughtful and empathetic – unless they are a sociopath.
Sociopaths land regularly on my social media pages and website, claiming that my writing is attempting to make “white people” ashamed of themselves.
Deep down they know this is not true. As a lover of history, I do not believe that anyone should be punished for the sins of their fathers and mothers.
History is for helping us understand how we got here, and how we can plot a better course forward.
The truth is, many MAGA sociopaths do not want to hear real history, because it would force them to confront the truth, which is this:
White Christian Americans are not inherently “smarter” or “better” than any other people in the world.
The USA is not wealthy or “great” because of White Christian American values.
The USA empire had a Golden Age, in which land and labor theft created a long economic boom making it possible for even uneducated “white” people to do very well for themselves.
The end of slavery, and the gradual accumulation and concentration of land, resources, and wealth in the hands of the few, spelled the end of the “white” working class Golden Age.
There is no longer any free land to buy the loyalty of “white” male citizens, and highly-paid, skilled manufacturing jobs have been moved abroad.
On the other hand, “non-white” minorities have made great strides in access to education and employment.
The “white” working class is now being treated just like everyone else in US history, and indeed, being treated like most underclasses throughout much of world history – as serfs for feudal lords, the corporatocracy, and now, the new Broligarchy.
Most of the current MAGA types will never read real history, so they will never have to confront “Schuldgefühl“.
The authoritarian state unfolding before our eyes will be a nasty hybrid called White-Christo-Fascist-Technocracy.
And MAGA cult followers, however put upon, abused, and impoverished by this system, will still support it.
Because they aspire to its ethos of greed and power.
So they’ll settle for some low level participation in violence and subjugation.
They will supply law enforcement. They will supply soldiers. They will join militias.
They will create a God and a Jesus in their own image, and they will gleefully force its odious theology on others.
They will settle for “owning the libs”, or abusing minority groups. No shame, no guilt.
Admitting they are just the same as other exploited underclasses would be simply too much to bear.
Feminine Daintiness
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinEarly Lysol ads
Ah, go on.
Admit it. Wouldn’t you love to go back to the time when America was great?
The post-war golden age?
Sunday School. Davy Crockett hats. Coleslaw and “Gee whiz!”.
When men were men, and women were women?
And the men in charge were so generous with their advice and “firm guidance”?
There was once a perfect and magical duopoly of patriarchy and capitalism.
Where wives fretted, and their husbands – with the help of the chemical and marketing industries – made everything better.
Before 1952, a toxic and carcinogenic petroleum industry chemical similar to carbolic acid known as “cresol” (3-methyl phenol) was sold in liquid solution and aggressively marketed to women under the brand name “Lysol” as a way to cleanse supposedly “unpleasant” vaginal smells.
In a time before The Pill and other safer or more reliable contraceptives, many women in fact turned to such aggressive and dangerous chemical douches as spermicides or abortifacients, even though the efficacy of such “treatments” was poor.
It’s all coming back, you know.
J. D. Vance and Project 2025 know what’s good for society.
They especially know what’s good for women.
If Fighting Authoritarianism Doesn’t Hurt, You’re Probably Doing It Wrong
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinVlad Tepes of Wallachia
I’m going to start with a little story pulled from my own life.
Like so many kids from my background, I joined the US military without finishing high school – on my 17th birthday, in fact.
I spent three years stationed with an artillery unit situated along what was then called “The Iron Curtain”, a border dividing the “Free West” from the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe.
The Warsaw Pact countries were essentially all of the nations which, at the end of WWII, had ended-up as satellites or outright puppet states of what was then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
All of the Warsaw Pact countries behind the Iron Curtain (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania) had governments/regimes situated politically on a spectrum between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Put simply, the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism rests on how many of the following aspects of governance are out of the hands of the wider “demos” or people, and controlled by the few.
It doesn’t matter if these “few” are communist party officials, monarchs, dictators, corporations and oligarchs, or elected officials who flout the laws and norms of democracy.
If any government, administration, or regime includes more than one of the following indicators, they are authoritarian at the very least:
1) an elaborate ideology (Project 2025/White Christian Nationalism/MAGA)
2) a single mass party (some would say that a two-party system is little better)
3) terror (ICE patrols and raids, anti-immigrant and LGBT hate speech)
4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication (the Broligarchy of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al)
5) a monopoly of weapons
6) a centrally controlled economy (hybrid system coming into being now via DOGE and privately-owned AI)
I had a German girlfriend when I got out of the army in the mid-80s, so I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey to out-process, and flew back to Germany to be with her.
One of the many jobs I held down at the time included working as a framemaker for a small town art gallery in Upper Franconia, a very provincial and conservative part of the state of Bavaria.
After a few months at this gallery, the owner (who will remain unnamed), approached me and asked if I would consider doing an extra “job” for her and her partner.
Over the course of a couple of hours, “T” tried to explain to me the history of the Siebenbürger people, a German-speaking minority who lived in the mountains of Transylvania, in central Romania.
The Siebenbürger are descendants of medieval Saxon mercenaries invited by King Andrew II of Hungary to take up land grants and fortify the eastern borders of what was the Kingdom of Hungary at the time.
The region in Romania known as Wallachia is where Vlad Tepes – Vlad the Impaler or “Dracula” – played the Hungarians off against the Ottoman Turks to build his own kingdom. Most of the enemies he viciously impaled on stakes were in fact Siebenbürger soldiers.
Between 1965-1989, Romania was ruled by the brutal Nicolae Ceaușescu, who is widely considered to have run the most repressive regime among all the Warsaw Pact nations.
As part of his “make Romania great again” program, he embraced isolationism and shunned international trade, seeking to make Romania self-sufficient in every respect – food, energy, manufactured goods, everything.
By the time Ceaușescu came to power, Romania’s effective overlord, the Soviet Union, had already transported at least 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania to labor camps in the Ukrainian Donbas region between 1944-1965. Many of these and their children are the people referred-to as “Nazis” by Putin today.
Ceaușescu‘s cultural program involved the attempted elimination of all ethnic minority groups.
Initially, this ethnic-cleansing took the form of shutting-down all newspapers, publishing houses, schools, and theaters in which anything other than the Romanian language was spoken.
Roma (Gypsy) communities were dismantled wholesale. It is not common knowledge in the west that the Roma (who are a separate ethnic group to “Romanians”) were held as slaves for centuries in the kingdoms which would eventually become Romania. Speaking their own languages, the enslaved Roma of regions like Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bessarabia were only emancipated during the 1850s and 1860s.
During the 1970s and 1980s, many members of both the Roma and Siebenbürger communities began to be “disappeared” by Ceaușescu‘s much-feared secret police, the Securitate.
*****
It is against this background that “T”, who had actor and painter friends among the Siebenbürger behind the Iron Curtain, asked me if I would would drive her into Romania.
A Romanian theater troupe had been touring what was called “West Germany” at the time. Three of its number were Siebenbürger who had defected and were claiming asylum in Germany.
There was one small problem, however.
None of them had been allowed to travel while holding their own identity documents. Those were being held by a member of the Securitate who travelled with all such touring companies.
Without some form of ID, any claim for asylum was likely to be rejected. Any defector handed-back over to the Romanian embassy and secret police was a dead man walking.
“T” was going to Romania to retrieve some form of ID for these people. She also hoped to smuggle out a couple of paintings which could be auctioned in the west, with the cash being funnelled back in order to help the desperate families left behind. They could use western cash on the Romanian black market to survive, and maybe even use it to bribe a border official to look the other way if they attempted to cross into the west to join their loved ones.
“Why on earth do you want ME to drive?” I asked.
“Because you hold a US passport”, she replied. “The border police and Securitate are unlikely to risk an international incident by detaining or harming an American.”
This all sounded extremely risky, and to my eternal shame, instead of a simple “yes” or “no”, I found myself asking “Am I going to get paid for this?”
I was still only 20 years old, but fully deserved her reaction.
“What the hell is the matter with you? Have you never done anything solely for others? Just for the damn sake of GOODNESS?”
Long story short, I agreed to go.
We went shopping for cartons of Kent cigarettes (prime currency in Romania at the time), as well as tiny luxuries like condoms, pantyhose, and music cassette tapes – contraception and the trappings of “decadent” Western culture were outlawed by Ceaușescu in his twisted dream of an ethnically and culturally pure “Motherland”.
Driving in stages, our first stop was in Vienna, where I was advised to eat well, as we wouldn’t be eating well again for a few days.
From there, it was on to our first stop behind the Iron Curtain – Budapest – where we took a brief rest before pushing on.
We drove across the Hungarian plains in white-out blizzard conditions on unplowed, unilluminated highways, giant Soviet-era sculptures of proletariat workers looming suddenly out of the snow-blasted darkness along the roadsides like silent titan gods.
Austro-Hungary, pre-WWI
The actual crossing of the border from Hungary into Romania was terrifying.
I had never had a gun pointed directly at me; never mind a dozen or so Kalashnikovs. The casual laughter and staring eyes of mostly unshaven soldiers – all with only one hand on their weapon as the other held a cigarette – had placed a heavy stone in the pit of my stomach.
Hands gripping the steering wheel, I turned and said to “T” “Geez, I hope they don’t search the car and take all the stuff meant for your friends”.
She slapped me as hard as I’ve ever been slapped. Leaning near, she whispered angrily through clenched teeth “Shut up you idiot! There are bugs everywhere. They can hear every word you say.”
When one of the soldiers made clear his intention to search the car, “T” handed me a carton of cigarettes and my passport, and told me to play the dumb American.
It wasn’t hard.
Getting out of the car, I turned warily toward the soldier who seemed to be in charge, holding out my passport while keeping the carton of cigarettes tucked under my arm. He put a hand on my shoulder and gestured toward the checkpoint booth.
I made a “You first, I’ll follow” sort of gesture, but he nudged me with his rifle barrel, indicating that I was to walk ahead. That 20 yards with a rifle at my back was the longest 20 yards of my life.
Once inside his booth/office, he took the carton of cigarettes from under my arm and laid it on a small table, before taking a pack of state manufactured cigarettes – “Carpațis” – from his own pocket and offering me one.
My cigarette lit, he began pointing at the carton of Kents, and pointing back at the old BMW. It became obvious that he wanted to know what else was on the menu, but wished the bribe to remain between the two of us, out of sight of his underlings.
I went back to the car and gathered a small selection of items, tucking them inside my coat and hurrying back to the checkpoint.
Nothing I offered seemed to satisfy him, and my increasing anxiety and fear must have been obvious. Finally, a smile, an exclamation, and a slap on my back.
A Michael Jackson cassette had done it. The soldier smiled and pointed to a small photo pinned to the wall beside the table. A gift for his wife or girlfriend.
He put the cassette into a drawer under the table, and walked me back to the car, waving the others aside.
I got back into the car and crossed into Romania, looking neither left nor right in case someone might try to get my attention and stop us again.
*****
We arrived in Sibiu under cover of darkness on the second night after a journey of around 900 miles, the shadowy black mass of the Transylvanian Mountains hulking in the mid-distance.
Even in a small city like Sibiu (about the size of Reno, Nevada), electricity was only available a couple of hours every day, and it was strictly rationed.
We were met at the end of a long, wide boulevard by a dark-complexioned man standing outside a heavy, ancient oak door set back along a row of large sooty terraced townhouses which betrayed hints of former glory from the century before.
He led us down some stairs and pushed open another door, where a family sat huddled around a simple table under a single bare lightbulb in the kitchen of a freezing basement apartment, all rising with cries and smiles and hugs and warm handshakes to greet us.
The generosity of these people upon our arrival has stayed with me to this day.
They had almost nothing. Nothing in the way of decent clothing, and nothing in the way of wholesome, nourishing food.
Most of their winter sustenance was comprised of hard, stale bread and homemade sauerkraut fermented in barrels in the cellar.
Yet within the hour they had triumphantly produced a small cut of bacon wrapped in a piece of newspaper, which they cooked in a skillet before insisting that we, and we alone, should eat.
They later pulled a bottle of vodka from a hiding place behind a cupboard, and filled our glasses again and again.
I later learned they had hoarded these things for months in anticipation of our arrival.
The next morning, as “T” discussed business with our hosts, I went to the door, turning to ask if anyone would like me to fetch them something from the center of town.
I had hoped to get a brief glimpse of the city once known as “Hermannstadt” when it was still part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WWI.
Everyone burst out laughing.
“And what will you bring us back from town?” they asked in the most curious German accent I had ever heard.
“I don’t know. A bar of chocolate, maybe?”
This reply led to near pandemonium, with hoots and guffaws and more gales of laughter.
Another bottle of vodka was taken from the secret place behind the cupboard, and placed in the center of the kitchen table.
Thomas pointed to the bottle.
“Bring us back a bar of chocolate, and the bottle is yours.”
After many hours wandering the streets, I returned.
Empty-handed.
I will save for another time the story of our exit from Romania, which made our entry seem like the red carpet treatment.
Things very nearly turned very, very bad indeed.
But I’m here now, aged 60, writing of a world which, until last month, seemed many lifetimes distant.
Nicolae Ceaușescu was not a totalitarian dictator on his first day in office. He wasn’t even an authoritarian, really.
Power without checks and balances makes a monster of most humans, though…
After a quarter century of his hellish tyranny, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed on Romanian national television on Christmas Day in 1989, five years after my unlikely escapade there.
*****
I have travelled, and I have seen the workings of many people in many places.
I will say it here and now. The Republic is momentarily lost.
Dictatorship has crept up softly on the American people, and struck.
I sit here as an ex-pat US citizen with a son born in Ireland, and realize I will probably never see the place of my birth again. I have no family there anymore.
I have pondered long and hard about the rightness of criticizing events in the USA from a distance.
Yet the sociopath currently in office owns golf courses and much more here in Ireland. The Irish economy is symbiotically entwined with American Big Tech companies.
The abandonment of NATO, the embrace of Putin, the betrayal of Ukraine, and interference in European elections makes USA politics very much European politics.
The world has suddenly grown much smaller and more dangerous.
Besides, I am beginning to think that having my writing on a European server might not be a bad situation in the days to come. Freedom of speech and a free press have never seemed in as much danger in the USA.
Modern Americans have had too much, for too long, and most have never wondered how or why this could or should be.
They foolishly believed that consumerist affluence and cheap gasoline were somehow a measure of American “greatness”.
Others, of course, believe in “God’s blessings”.
Most Americans never thought to ask why gasoline in the USA has always cost a quarter or a tenth the amount it costs in other developed countries.
I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans know that the US, in cahoots with the UK, overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran during the 1950s in order to maintain control of petroleum reserves.
Hell, I seriously doubt that 1 in 100 Americans could point to Iran on a map.
Modern Americans treated comfort as a birthright, wilfully turning a blind eye to, or remaining entirely ignorant of, the suffering and cheap labor furnished by the “white” underclasses and the downtrodden Black and Hispanic communities.
In recent days, some of my readers have suggested that there is a case for optimism, because only 1 in 3 voters actually voted for a fascist.
Nonsense. The current president enjoys a 45-55% approval rating, while his minions continue to tear down the very last structures upholding democracy – right this minute, while you read this essay.
The American populace is as thoroughly propagandized as any of those who ever lived in any authoritarian state.
*****
This week I shared a very short post on various media calling for boycotts, civil disobedience, and strikes as a possible way to head-off a full-blown techno-fascist autocracy.
The list was primarily interested in those who have either made public declarations of support for Trump or Project 2025, or given direct financial aid to Trump, the GOP, or Project 2025 through endorsements, individual donations, and various PACS.
I now find myself writing in anger. If what I’m about to say causes some of my readers to bale-out, so be it.
Old people, unlike “influencers”, don’t need to give a shit.
The current president, with the help of his technocrats, has taken over the levers of government and dismantled almost all oversight bodies.
Big Tech is this very minute illegally harvesting every single shred of data concerning you and your loved ones.
AI and autocracy have never in history been combined. This is going to make the old surveillance states of the Warsaw Pact look bumbling and amateurish.
Everyone from George Orwell to Frank Zappa warned this was coming, but neither could have imagined the power of AI.
Half of Congress is acquiescent. Half of the courts are acquiescent. FAR MORE THAN HALF OF US ARE ACQUIESCENT.
Brownshirt thugs roam the streets of our towns and cities, waiting for their master to release them from their leashes.
YET MANY READERS SPENT TIME THIS WEEK POINTING-OUT MINOR DISCREPANCIES IN A LIST INTENDED ONLY AS A GENERAL GUIDE TO KNOWING WHO IS AIDING AND ABETTING A FASCIST.
This is like bickering over whose turn it is to cook while a tornado approaches.
If one or two of the names gathered by various organizations over the past few years are out of date, or under new ownership, fine.
Let others know, and move on to the next.
Truth is, there is almost never such a thing as a “moral” corporation, anyway. Where shareholders are getting rich, someone, somewhere, is invariably being hurt.
For a so-called majority Christian nation, it is astonishing how few Americans pause to consider the reported words of the man who gave rise to a world religious movement:
“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
Moving swiftly on…
Complete strangers demanding footnotes, citations, annotations and sources is fine when a piece is based on my own research, or when I share something utterly new, contentious, or difficult to verify.
In such cases I am happy to supply sources and further reading lists, even to non-paying subscribers, when it is a matter of proper public interest.
But there are not enough hours in the day to be a full-time private, unpaid investigative reporter and verification service for those things which can be easily checked by readers themselves.
The internet is still open as of today. Use it.
*****
If anyone has doubts about any of the non-original information shared here, or if they feel there is a question mark about a boycott list supplied in good faith, feel free to do some of your own digging.
And please, absolutely do come back with your new or better information, and share it.
I’m not a social activism guru. I’m just a writer with something resembling a social conscience.
I also find it unfathomable hearing people say things like “Oh, I couldn’t boycott that place, my friend works there”.
IF WE ARE ONLY WILLING TO FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM WHEN IT DOESN’T HURT, WE DO NOT DESERVE DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM.
Go look up The Battle of Blair Mountain. Go watch the film “Matewan“.
When our boycotts and strikes must hurt our own, we take them to our bosom and look after them.
It’s called solidarity.
It’s what good people do.
It’s why I shared the Cold War story of trying to help people who might have been killed without the help of others.
I’m no hero. I just got put in a spot where I was given the chance to make a decision.
I’m glad I made the right one.
And if loads of us don’t make some hard choices, right here, right now, people are going to die.
Crazy
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinRyan Wesley Routh and some of his forebears
I hope a time comes before my own death, in which people come to understand that the “crazies” in USA society are not just sick or “evil” aberrations – nor do they spring out of nothingness.
So-called “crazies” are the entirely expected human outfall from centuries of:
interpersonal and institutional violence,
duplicity,
religious extremism,
racism,
misogyny,
homophobia,
environmental pillage,
greed and consumerism as national ideology, and
the incessant lies, lies, lies used to cover-up, justify, and obfuscate the almost ceaseless hypocrisy of The American Myth.
*****
Take Ryan Wesley Routh, an American “weirdo”, who wanted to dispose of another American “weirdo”.
The only difference between the two? One comes from the American underclasses, the other from the world of inherited wealth built upon underclass exploitation.
One wanted to commit violence out of a misguided(?) sense of social justice.
The other is a catalyst for violence internationally, vandalizes constitutional law, and evades justice in order to preserve and extend his wealth, power, and privilege.
Two crazies.
The rich one spews hatred against immigrants, even though his own mother was an immigrant and his father’s father was also an immigrant. Of course, being Johnny-Come-Latelys in terms of American history doesn’t matter – the main thing is that they were such very “white” Scottish and German immigrants, and they got their hands on some money through unscrupulous and immoral business dealings.
Money and whiteness have always been at the core of “The American Dream”.
*****
Don’t be fooled by Ryan Wesley Routh‘s gaunt, Northern European-looking hangdog appearance and sandy hair.
Routh is in fact part of a confusing mish-mash of people who have been ethnically intermixing in the eastern part of the USA for generations – long, long before the USA even existed.
Without comprehensive DNA testing, these peoples from the Carolina Piedmont and Southern Appalachia proper are often impossible to tease into clear familial threads.
Some come from families of large slaveholders, while others come from relatively poor farmers and tradespeople who held only one or two slaves.
Many in fact descend from the PROGENY of these slaveholders – whether big and small – children of the women abused, raped, or kept on the side as “consorts”, separate from their “official families”.
Subsistence farmers too poor to keep slaves were often those most likely to marry the “mulatto” women born within this deep and wide cauldron of wickedness.
This “not quite white” American underclass has existed literally for centuries – long before certain Drumpfs and MacLeods arrived in the USA, shiny and white on the outside, ruthless, dark and bigoted on the inside…
It has never been easy for members of this mixed-ethnic American laborer underclass to get ahead.
And before they could even imagine “social mobility”, they had to achieve “racial mobility”.
The minute some of them managed to achieve “racial mobility”, they were often still too poor to resist the onslaught of the land barons, railway barons, coal barons…
This is one of the greatest untold secrets in US history – how a “brown” underclass spent generations on the outside peering-in at “The American Dream”.
Trying to be “white” enough to be part of “White Christianity”.
“White” enough to serve as actual soldiers in the military, rather than as cooks, janitors, or supply workers.
“White” enough to gain access to a good apprenticeship or a decent education.
“White” enough to eventually gain access to middle-class jobs.
Such an intergenerational struggle is not easy to keep on a steel-rail track leading to eventual success…
Many fall by the wayside.
Self-loathing can often lead to profound social sicknesses like domestic violence and substance abuse.
Even those who did manage to reach the “white” side of the color bar – but without becoming skilled or educated – were often left clinging to little more than their “whiteness”, their Christianity, and birthright “American-ness” as markers of their self-worth.
This underclass represents much of the cannon fodder sent to places like Vietnam or Iraq – while proudly proclaiming “I come from a military family” and telling themselves that they are “protecting our freedoms”.
Many of these people forgot, or were never told about their socio-ethnic roots.
Unaware of the original reasons their family had been locked-out of social advancement, they eventually came to resent nebulous groups like “Welfare Queens“, “Non-Christians“, “Experts” or “Elites” or “The Deep State“.
And they are also the ones most easily fooled by fascist propaganda and rhetoric which plays upon their various insecurities and resentments.
Too proud to see themselves as victims, they would rather align themselves with the rich and powerful, however unlikely it is that they will ever sit at the same table.
But some, a very particular subset of the disempowered, don’t want to sit at the table of the rich and powerful.
They just want to have some goddamn AGENCY in this life. Any kind of agency. Like the agency to take-out some of the rich, corrupt, and powerful.
Most of the currently enraged members of these underclasses are perfectly sane, if misguided, in where they choose to apportion blame. A few are batshit crazy.
Many of the rich and powerful are also perfectly sane, just selfish and greedy. Many are utter sociopaths.
Ryan Wesley Routh. Donald John Trump.
A couple of crazies in this crazy story called “America”.
I know which one I’d sooner offer a spare bed in my house if either knocked on my door in the middle of a stormy night…