On the debate over the new Arizona law, it has been assumed that the Federal Government alone should determine who is a citizen.

The Fourteenth Amendment says that a person is “A citizen OF THE STATE in which he is born or NATURALIZED.”

There is more to be learned about history by reading those words than most professional historians know about history.

It would be interesting to know when the Federal Government took primary responsibility for naturalization, but beginning in colonial times a person became a citizen of a colony and after the Revolution a person became a citizen of a state.

How can a person have been “naturalized” in a STATE? The Fourteenth Amendment’s wording makes it clear that for the three generations it had been taken for granted that states did the naturalizing.

If you are an American residing abroad you cannot vote in the American elections as a “United States citizen.” You vote for the electors of your state on and how ITS electoral votes will be cast. You vote on YOUR STATE’S senators and representatives in congress.

In case one thinks that this distinction died out after 1868, it took an amendment to the Constitution itself to get electors for the District of Columbia not that long ago.

Can a state determine that someone who has no right to be in the United States has no right to be in that state? No one in 1868 would have written that a person born or naturalized in the United States was a United States citizen. In the sense of the word as it is now used, there was no such thing as a “United States citizen.”

What the Fourteenth Amendment said was that states had to recognize people born or naturalized in them or in another STATE as citizens.

It did not occur even to the Radical Republicans jamming through the Fourteenth Amendment illegally that a state could not decide to kick somebody out who was not born or naturalized in SOME state.

As with the War of the Preambles, the Marxist worship of the Preamble to the Declaration that makes a roaring statement about “all men” and the United States Constitution which makes it abundantly clear that their document was only based on their right to legislate for “OURSELVES and OUR Posterity,” present discussions consist entirely of Temporal Provincialism.

The word “progressive” means that one has accomplished what Merlin did, but in more detail and over a longer period. The English language allows to you to “move” in any direction, but “progress,” by definition, is toward a very specific goal.

In the literal sense, to be progressive means you are accepted as a prophet who knows exactly how history is going to turn out. If you accept that Political Correctness is our national religion, you will never question this.

And the fact that this is never questioned demonstrates how totally we have accepted that religion Our idea of religion, faith in things unseen, includes prophets as routinely as a Catholic accepts Mass. That faith includes belief in prophecy.

But since it never occurs to us what our established religion is, we never call it prophecy.

But that is the essence of our established religion. It sees “religion” as something that either agrees with the True Faith or does not. But the essence of Political Correctness is that, unlike “religion,” it needs no faith.

Political Correctness does not say that it is religion. It assumes that every sane or decent person is politically correct, whose job is to chastise and, if necessary, to punish those who stray from the path.

A Politically Correct person believes that “his truth is marching on,” that it will trample out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath — Hate — are stored.

But no one mentions that it would impossible to pass a thread- let alone a camel, between that and religion.

No one simply says, as they did in the old movies, “Father, I am not of your faith.”

Or the equivalent, “I don’t believe you.”

In the case of Eastern Europe, when right and left ask routinely whether Eastern Europe “is ready for immigration yet,” absolutely no one asks WHY Eastern Europe should be “ready” for it.

Everybody takes the reasons for granted and we LET them. Eastern Europe is WHITE, therefore mass immigration and assimilation of nonwhite races is its Inevitable Future.

One does not question the prophecies of one’s established religion. In fact, one is not even AWARE of them. We could use the same words Jesus did for our unthought-of prophecies: “it is Written.”

OUR prophets do not rely on faith. Their words are in the Books and no one questions them. Who could confuse that with a mere religion, a mere opinion?

William Rusher was publisher of National Review from its beginning in 1955, for three decades. It took him twenty of those years to bring back some news from the political front the staff had not heard.

Then it appeared in the New York Times. Once he noticed that he began to see it again and again: “No one at National Review believes anything until it appears in the New York Times.”

In fact, they call the New York Times, “The Medium of Record.” It is absolutely impossible to distinguish that title from Jesus’ words, “It is written.”

But nobody mentions that. In fact, nobody but BUGS even KNOWS that.

The only way to prove that one is truly free from adultery is not to THINK of adultery. The only way to be truly clean of heresy is not to THINK of heresy.

I am smarter than the average politico. I need you to understand that because I need you to see how important my explanations on how to do things are.

There is a competitive explanation for my success: Bob is just plain a finer fellow than all the others. My ego likes that just fine, but I object to it for a reason. It comes from the way people think.

I want people to concentrate on how great the Mantra is. I want them to recognize it is the product of a unique mind and unique experience. The more you concentrate on what a goodie I am, the more you are moved to act in terms of Good Intentions rather than following what I really have to offer, which is my practical strategy and how to develop a similar practical strategy for yourself.

So when people say that the space lobbies would have lost the space telescope in 1977 because their interest was in fund raising, you are right. They, or more correctly, their contributors, were looking in the wrong place.

When I say movement people are doing wrong because they concentrate on their movement goals rather than the big picture, you are right.

A person who has a lot to learn about the human animal would draw one overwhelming conclusion from all this: Bob is a just plain better guy than all those with ulterior motives.

My ego certainly agrees with that, but it is something I don’t want to see.

Why?

Because deciding that BUGSers mission is to be NICER than everybody else is a total waste of time and effort and our limited resources.

It was very idealistic of Bob to represent real grassroots protests all over the country, but it had to end because I couldn’t raise any money for it, so I had to concentrate on PAID advising. We had to stop.

Raising money is essential to DC political activity.

Likewise, if Truck Roy is less dedicated to our cause than I am, I certainly have seen no sign of it. But he is building an audience, and the Mantra is presently too complicated and obscure for that audience, for which he has fierce competition.

When one is dedicated to a strategy hears “You are nicer, therefore righter,” he feels tired all over. It is hard enough to get a basic approach across without the person you are trying to talk to counting how many angels are standing on your particular needle point.

There is an old North Carolina expression, “You’re ugly, your feet stink, and you don’t love Jesus.” Only a person with Porch Talk will understand that expression.

What that funny statement really refers to is the human tendency to assume that a person you disagree with is evil, bad in every way, including personal hygiene. You then begin to concentrate on how BAD a person is rather than why he is WRONG.

And our SOLE interest is showing where they are WRONG.

I drove my doctor brother on some of his trips some years back. He was working a geriatrics unit in the mountains. Two terminally old women in wheelchairs were navigating down the hall straight at each other in a narrow hall.

They looked each other straight in the eye and played chicken.. Each refused to pull to the side. They collided.

Neither had backed down in life and neither was changing their style at the end. They were pre-Slave Generation country women. We laughed, but it was a laugh of admiration.

There are no more grandmas on the porch with a shotgun waiting for them to try to tear down her house. We were all proud of her, She was a part of Americana, stirring something deep in OUR roots.

Hers was the blood that took the land. Hers was the blood that defied Indian attacks and whipped the British at King’s Mountain. The Watauga settlers in East Tennessee had settled on land the King had set aside for the Indians after the British had won the land from the Mississippi to the Appalachians in the French and Indian War.

Watauga simply and officially signed a declaration of independence from His Majesty’s Government years before the Declaration signed in 1776. If it had happened in New England, everybody would know about it.

Watauga had nothing to do with the War of Independence or anything else that happened to their East. But in 1780, Colonel Ferguson decided he would take care of that bunch of rebels while he was marching into the upper part of South Carolina after the fall of Charleston.

Ferguson sent a message to the Watauga settlement that they had better not interfere with him or he would cross the mountains and destroy them. The Wataugans, like those old grandmas, met him with their guns and destroyed his army at King’s Mountain.

His threat had been his suicide note.

It says something about our “nation of immigrants” that the only person in almost four thousand men engaged in that battle who was not born in America was Ferguson himself. He was leading Tories.

That’s several historical distortions shown up in one example.

King’s Mountain is the only battle discussed in classroom history, except Yorktown, that happened south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

They can’t avoid mentioning Yorktown, since the real war ended there. But why King’s Mountain? Because it was a victory that was praised throughout America. It occurred when, as we are constantly told, “The Revolutionary cause was at its lowest point in 1780.”

I was always confused when they talked about how the American cause seemed lost in 1780. All I had been taught about history gave not the slightest indication of any special problem then.

By 1780 we had several European allies. The war had been won at Saratoga in 1778 when France came onto the American side after the British army there was destroyed. The war had begun in New England.

The entire history I had been taught in the years between 1775 and 1781 was about Washington fighting in New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey when he crossed the river against the Hessians.

The only thing accepted history said about anything that happened south of Pennsylvania was the final surrender at Yorktown, Virginia.

Valley Forge in PA was the only low time I knew about.

I had never been taught anything about WHY everybody was so depressed in 1780.

Even in South Carolina.

The worst defeat ever suffered by America in the Revolution was the loss of Charleston in 1780. Everything Americans couldn’t afford was lost there. The entire Continental Army that was there was taken.

But I had never even read that there WAS a war in the South. I certainly knew nothing of the giant Continental army and naval forces that were there.

But to discuss the Charleston defeat opens a can of worms for historians. One would have to realize that while New York and Philadelphia had fallen, Charleston had defended itself.

The idea that a shot was fired south of Philadelphia is unmentionable.

They do mention how King’s Mountain came as a relief in a period of collapse in 1780. But they don’t talk about anything else down here.

Cornwallis’s army tried for a year to get from Charleston and take over South Carolina. It is astonishing that Mel Gibson made a movie about this otherwise totally forgotten part of the Revolution. I don’t think he did that by accident.

One’s impression is that the war began and was fought entirely north of Maryland. Then all of a sudden Washington and the French flew down to Yorktown, at the southern end of Virginia and took Cornwallis’ surrender.

The army they defeated had been badly beaten up by guerrilla warfare in SC.